Left egalreiei exh
I agree with Kathryn Paige Harden and her hereditarian left movement (as mentioned here)
In particular I support reconciling the findings of her field with commitments to social justice. Harden says that genetic research on human individual differences is compatible with progressive and egalitarian social goals
"The first thing that social-science genomics can do is help researchers control for confounding genetic variables that are almost universally overlooked. As Harden puts it in her book, “Genetic data gets one source of human differences out of the way, so that the environment is easier to see.”
"For example, beginning in 2002, the federal government spent almost a billion dollars on something called the Healthy Marriage Initiative, which sought to reduce marital conflict as a way of combatting poverty and juvenile crime. Harden was not surprised to hear that the policy had no discernible effect.
Her own research showed that, when identical-twin sisters have marriages with different levels of conflict, their children have equal risk for delinquency. The point was not to estimate the effects of DNA per se, but to provide an additional counterfactual for analysis: would an observed result continue to hold up if the people involved had different genes?
Harden can identify studies on a vast array of topics—Will coaching underresourced parents to speak more to their children reduce educational gaps? Does having dinner earlier improve familial relationships?—whose conclusions she considers dubious because the researchers controlled for everything except the fact that parents pass along to their children both a home environment and a genome."
"In my conversations with her colleagues, Harden’s overarching idea was almost universally described as both beautiful and hopelessly quixotic. As one philosopher put it,"
I particularly agree with her quote here and this my view as well: “Yes, the genetic differences between any two people are tiny when compared to the long stretches of DNA coiled in every human cell. But these differences loom large when trying to understand why, for example, one child has autism and another doesn’t; why one is deaf and another hearing; and—as I will describe in this book—why one child will struggle with school and another will not. Genetic differences between us matter for our lives. They cause differences in things we care about. Building a commitment to egalitarianism on our genetic uniformity is building a house on sand.”
Here is why she is at her point and why we are hereditarian left
"Harden understands herself to be waging a two-front campaign. On her left are those inclined to insist that genes don’t really matter; on her right are those who suspect that genes are, in fact, the only things that matter. The history of behavior genetics is the story of each generation’s attempt to chart a middle course. When the discipline first began to coalesce, in the early nineteen-sixties, the memory of Nazi atrocities rendered the eugenics threat distinctly untheoretical.
The reigning model of human development, which seemed to accord with postwar liberal principles, was behaviorism, with its hope that environmental manipulation could produce any desired outcome. It did not take much, however, to notice that there is considerable variance in the distribution of human abilities. The early behavior geneticists started with the premise that our nature is neither perfectly fixed nor perfectly plastic, and that this was a good thing.
They conscripted as their intellectual patriarch the Russian émigré Theodosius Dobzhansky, an evolutionary biologist who was committed to anti-racism and to the conviction that “genetic diversity is mankind’s most precious resource, not a regrettable deviation from an ideal state of monotonous sameness.”"
"In 1997, Turkheimer, perhaps the preëminent behavior geneticist of his generation, published a short political meditation called “The Search for a Psychometric Left,” in which he called upon his fellow-liberals to accept that they had nothing to fear from genes.
He proposed that “a psychometric left would recognize that human ability, individual differences in human ability, measures of human ability, and genetic influences on human ability are all real but profoundly complex, too complex for the imposition of biogenetic or political schemata.
It would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago. Opposition to determinism, reductionism and racism, in their extreme or moderate forms, need not depend on blanket rejection of undeniable if easily misinterpreted facts like heritability.” He concluded, “Indeed it had better not, because if it does the eventual victory of the psychometric right is assured.”
"Harden described her book to me as “fundamentally defensive in a lot of ways,” and before she makes any claims for what we can learn from gwas results she goes into great detail about their limitations. gwas simply provides a picture of how genes are correlated with success, or mental health, or criminality, for particular populations in a particular society at a particular time: it wouldn’t make sense to compare findings for educational attainment for women in America today with women who came of age before sex-based discrimination was outlawed in higher education.
And gwas results are not “portable”: a study conducted on white Britons tells you little about people in Estonia or Nigeria. Polygenic scores remain poor predictors of individual outcomes—there are plenty of people on the low end of the spectrum for educational attainment who go on to graduate studies, and plenty of people on the high end who never secure a high-school diploma.
gwas results can accidentally reveal as much about culture or geography as they do about genes. A study of chopstick use in San Francisco would find that proficiency is genetically correlated with East Asian ancestry, which is a far cry from the discovery of an inborn dexterity with a particular utensil. One way to sidestep this pitfall is by comparing gwas results within families, where they have been shown to reliably account for differences in life outcomes among siblings.
But even this measure does not solve Christopher Jencks’s redhead problem. “A person might go far in education because they are smart and curious and hard-working, or because they are conforming and risk-averse and obsessive, or because they have features (pretty, tall, skinny, light-colored) that privilege them in an intractably biased society,” Harden writes. “
A study of what is correlated with succeeding in an education system doesn’t tell you whether that system is good, or fair, or just.”"
"gwas results can accidentally reveal as much about culture or geography as they do about genes. A study of chopstick use in San Francisco would find that proficiency is genetically correlated with East Asian ancestry, which is a far cry from the discovery of an inborn dexterity with a particular utensil.
One way to sidestep this pitfall is by comparing gwas results within families, where they have been shown to reliably account for differences in life outcomes among siblings.
But even this measure does not solve Christopher Jencks’s redhead problem. “A person might go far in education because they are smart and curious and hard-working, or because they are conforming and risk-averse and obsessive, or because they have features (pretty, tall, skinny, light-colored) that privilege them in an intractably biased society,”
Harden writes. “A study of what is correlated with succeeding in an education system doesn’t tell you whether that system is good, or fair, or just.”"
Like combine that with the fact that with this: It is believed that if bipoc students were taught using the outside the box teaching and learning methods like mentioned here, there would be almost no differences in educational outcomes (including all types of test results), or socioeconomic outcomes between bipoc people and whites since according to that link, bipoc students tend to learn, process and express information differently than whites based on many factors.
However, Dr Harden has some point similar to that here "Some of Harden’s most recent research has looked at curricular tracking for mathematics, an intuitive instance of how gene-environment interactions can create feedback loops. Poor schools, Harden has found, tend to let down all their students: those with innate math ability are rarely encouraged to pursue advanced classes, and those who struggle are allowed to drop the subject entirely—a situation that often forecloses the possibility of college.
Now to build on the above link, Dr Kathryn Paige Harden expressed support for standardized testing—which she argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help increase low-income and minority representation
"years back, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation." (though most of the time, I lean closer to Nathan J Robinson than to Fredrik deBoer on the Cult of Smart stuff)
from:
"Harden is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a “psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation.
Views associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added, “There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these things.”
Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its explanation of the science.”"
The most well-off schools are able to initiate virtuous cycles in the most gifted math students, and break vicious cycles in the less gifted, raising the ceiling and the floor for achievement."
If such factors were removed, then maybe the whole ancestral genetics =intelligence or ancestral genetics=outcomes would finally be put to bed so to speak
"At some point, Harden has to set aside her caveats and assert that sheer genetic luck plays a causal role in outcomes that matter: “If people are born with different genes, if the genetic Powerball lands on a different polygenic combination, then they differ not just in their height but also in their wealth.” For her, accepting this is the necessary prelude to any conversation about what to do about it. “If you want to help people, you have to know what’s most effective, so you need the science,” she told me.
Harden thinks that the conversation about behavior genetics will continue to go in circles as long as we preserve the facile distinction between immutable genetic causes and malleable environmental ones.
We would be better off if we accepted that everything is woven of long causal chains from genes through culture to personhood, and that the more we understand about them the more effective our interventions might be."
"She acknowledged that gwas techniques are too new, and the anxieties about behavior genetics too deeply entrenched, to have produced many immediately instrumental examples so far.
But she pointed to a study from last year as proof of concept. A team of researchers led by Jasmin Wertz, at Duke, used gwas results to examine four different “aspects of parenting that have previously been shown to predict children’s educational attainment: cognitive stimulation; warmth and sensitivity; household chaos (reverse-coded to indicate low household chaos); and the safety and tidiness of the family home.”
They found that one of them—cognitive stimulation—was linked to children’s academic achievement and their mothers’ genes, even when the children did not inherit the relevant variants. Parental choices to read books, do puzzles, and visit museums might be conditioned by their own genes, but they nevertheless produced significant environmental effects."
"Even the discovery that a particular outcome is largely genetic doesn’t mean that its effects will invariably persist. In 1972, the U.K. government raised the age at which students could leave school, from fifteen to sixteen.
In 2018, a research group studied the effects of the extra year on the students as adults, and found that their health outcomes for measures like body-mass index, for whatever reason, improved slightly on average. But those with a high genetic propensity for obesity benefitted dramatically—a differential impact that might easily have gone unnoticed."
"Sam Harris seemed less interested in Murray as a scholar or pundit than as a culture-war trope. Soon after the events at Middlebury, the Web magazine Vox had published a piece that rejected even Murray’s basic points about intelligence tout court.
Harris’s podcast seemed designed to reveal that the left’s repudiation of Murray was motivated by politics rather than by science. After it was released, Vox asked Turkheimer to contribute a rebuttal, and he proposed that Harden collaborate.
Harden felt a responsibility to accept the assignment. “People are very tempted by Murray’s ideas, and there’s a certain kind of person who almost certainly hasn’t read ‘The Bell Curve’ but listens to Sam Harris, who has a huge audience,” she told me.
She believed that the left’s standard-issue response was unhelpful. “This is a very Christian thing I’m about to say, but it reminds me of the episode where Jesus is tempted by Satan in the desert,” she told me, in Bozeman. “There’s just enough truth in Murray that if you say, ‘This is all wrong,’ you paint yourself into a corner where you say intellectually dishonest things. Jesus has to say, ‘This part is true, and this part is false.’ ” She stopped herself. “Don’t write that I’m comparing Murray to Satan,” she said, and then continued, “I know we all want to say it’s not true that ‘intelligence tests predict things,’ but that’s not the lie.”
To say that sort of thing ran the risk of furthering the martyrology of Murray, and of lending lustre to the notion that his ideas were indeed “forbidden knowledge.” The scholar and critic Fredrik deBoer, who has drawn heavily on Harden’s work, has been even more pointed in his criticism.
In a 2017 essay, he wrote, “Liberals have flattered themselves, since the election, as the party of facts, truth tellers who are laboring against those who have rejected reason itself. And, on certain issues, I suspect they are right. But let’s be clear: the denial of the impact of genetics on human academic outcomes is fake news.”"
"The Vox piece, which Harden and Turkheimer wrote with the social psychologist Richard Nisbett, was headlined “Charles Murray is once again peddling junk science about race and IQ.” There is a lot of good evidence, they wrote, to support the ideas that “intelligence, as measured by IQ tests, is a meaningful construct” and that “individual differences in intelligence are moderately heritable.”
They even conceded, with many qualifications, that “racial groups differ in their mean scores on IQ tests.” But there was simply no good scientific reason to conclude that observed racial gaps were anything but the fallout from the effects of racism.
They pointed out that in the one instance when Harris used James Flynn’s work to push back against Murray’s ideas, Murray responded with some hand-waving about a research paper that he admitted was too complicated for him to understand."
Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s speculation was dangerously out in front of the science.
At the moment, technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as ‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it very important to listen to people when they say,
‘I’m worried about how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this piece.) As she once put it in an essay,
“There is a middle ground between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their Twitter bios.’ ” (well they won't get away with putting such things in their Twitter bios with Elon Musk running the show just ask Kanye West)
"The nomenclature has given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,” which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of “left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”).
The political sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists, psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of academia.
As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me, “Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists.
But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”
"Harden has been merciless in her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right.
In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” (Plomin told me that Harden misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and arguing with them.”)"
"With the first review of Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity” movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly thinks the honorific was misplaced.
“Alas, if you do not come to this work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from expressing immediate disgust.
Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks. It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity on the other.”"
"The ultimate claim of “The Genetic Lottery” is an extraordinarily ambitious act of moral entrepreneurialism. Harden argues that an appreciation of the role of simple genetic luck—alongside all the other arbitrary lotteries of birth—will make us, as a society, more inclined to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy lives of dignity and comfort.
She writes, “I think we must dismantle the false distinction between ‘inequalities that society is responsible for addressing’ and ‘inequalities that are caused by differences in biology.’ ” She cites research showing that most people are much more willing to support redistributive policies if differences in opportunity are seen as arbitrarily unfair—and deeply pervasive."
"As she put it to me in an e-mail, “Even if we eliminated all inequalities in educational outcomes between sexes, all inequalities by family socioeconomic status, all inequalities between different schools (which as you know are very confounded with inequalities by race), we’ve only eliminated a bit more than a quarter of the inequalities in educational outcomes.”
She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic groups rather than between them. “Common intuitions about the scale of inequality in our society, and our imaginations about how much progress we would make if we eliminated the visible inequalities by race and class, are profoundly wrong,” she wrote. “The science confronts us with a form of inequality that would otherwise be easy to ignore.”"
"The perspective of “gene blindness,” she believes, “perpetuates the myth that those of us who have ‘succeeded’ in twenty-first century capitalism have done so primarily because of our own hard work and effort, and not because we happened to be the beneficiaries of accidents of birth—both environmental and genetic.”
She invokes the writing of the philosophers John Rawls and Elizabeth Anderson to argue that we need to reject “the idea that America is or could ever be the sort of ‘meritocracy’ where social goods are divided up according to what people deserve.” Her rhetoric is grand, though the practical implications, insofar as she discusses them, are not far removed from the mid-century social-democratic consensus—the priorities of, say, Hubert Humphrey. If genes play a significant role in educational attainment, then perhaps we ought to design our society such that you don’t need a college degree to secure health care."
I do take into consideration the feedback below that Kathryn has gotten about her above views , in particular:
From this site
"What I love about Paige, and also what I find so incredibly moving and courageous and reckless about her, is that she thinks she can change the whole apparatus—this large-scale framework for moral responsibility—on the basis of our understanding of our genes.
I’m not sure genetics has the capacity to shift our intuitions, at least on the left—because of course the right already cares about genes. In principle, the left could try to take genes as a starting point, too, but in practice it’s probably a different story. It’s really awful to think about, but I think the fact that she’s an attractive and charismatic Southern woman seems not irrelevant to her desirability as a culture-war ally for the right.” "
"” James Tabery, a philosopher at the University of Utah, believes that underscoring genetic difference is just as likely to increase inequality as to reduce it.
“It’s truly noble for Paige to make the case for why we might think of biological differences as similar to socially constructed differences, but you’re bumping into a great deal of historical, economic, political, and philosophical momentum—and it’s dangerous, no matter how noble her intentions are, because once the ideas are out there they’re going to get digested the way they’re going to get digested,” he said. “The playing board has been set for some time.”"
"In Bozeman, Harden seemed anxious that she had not heard from Turkheimer about her book. It took him a long time to get around to reading it, he told me, in part because of the ways their ideas have diverged in recent years, but when he finally did he wrote her an e-mail that said, “I really do think the book is great—in fact I think it will be instantly recognized as the most important book about behavior genetics that has ever been written. You should get ready to be very famous.”
He told me, “I’m really proud of Paige. She’s amazing. And it’s, well, an interesting experience to have a student that gets this successful based in part on disagreeing with you.”
He still looked askance at gwas. “I think that Paige’s dilemma—and I don’t mean this in a bad way, because she takes the problem very seriously—is in that balance that everyone has to seek. If you’re me, who thinks that it’s all just correlation, then you’re the ‘gloomy prospect’ guy and everybody thinks you’re a wet blanket. And if you think, ‘Wow, the whole world turned out to be genetic,’ then you’re Charles Murray, and in between you have to walk this very careful path. You have to believe in a certain amount of genetic causation or you don’t have a science, and you can’t believe in too much genetic causation or you believe that poor people are poor because they have poor genes—and that’s a very, very delicate walk."
I also agree with stupidpol's response to Kathryn Paige Harden as seen here. In particular these points below:
"Progressives' worldview is dependent on the idea of innate human equality at a biological level
I thought this was a metaphor for the longest time because nobody could be that highly regarded, right? Then I saw some of the reasoning behind ever-popular "progressive" crusades against curricula for gifted students in public school, and the fact that their entire approach to criminal justice reform appears to be predicated on the total lack of responsibility for one's actions (unless one has insufficient oppressed class checkmarks).
I actually agree with and greatly respect the push to give lawbreakers plenty of opportunity for self-development, I think it's good for everyone, but it needs to be tempered with the understanding that some people can't (or won't) respond to sufficient hugs by becoming good people, or even people with a modicum of self-control."
"I saw the point but I came to the conclusion that if you must withhold information to support your argument, you have doubts about your argument and maybe it’s not so sound.
I used to think this way, but I began to realize that the world is run on "if you can't blind 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit".
To a certain extent, demands for rigor just benefit the ruling class, who have the resources to exhaust competitors and proponents of heterodox views, along with audiences who ultimately go with "what they know". Anyone who's brushed up with the wrong side of a peer review, where the issue isn't what's being written but rather who's writing it, knows this intuitively."
"I think that progressives have their politics precisely because they think genetics matters, but have had a very explosive allergic reaction to that knowledge.
I mean, its not like they were particularly wrlcoming of Charles Murray when The Bell Curve came ou5
Right, I think the reason they can be counted on to react the most to books like that is because they're actually un/sub-consciously hyper aware of and fixated on it.
Telling any other group besides modern progressives about genetic differences in human ability yields far less of a reaction.
Progressives' worldview is dependent on the idea of innate human equality at a biological level and then on throughout all the social configurations we find among them. They make only a few concessions to this element, usually involving an agreement never to speak about difference in what they deem a cavalier way to begin with."
"First of all, here's an archive link because I hit the NY paywall when I clicked through to read the article.
Secondly, I don't want to obsessively Fredpost, but this article seems to meander towards exactly the conclusion that Freddie came to in his essay Education Doesn't Work-2.0 IF genetics does have an influence on general intelligence and the ability to pick up instruction from schooling, then this is a massive argument for Marxist solutions and against Liberal "Meritocracy".
Even with a mythically perfectly even playing field, our current ruthlessly competitive society will condemn a certain segment of its population to poverty simply due to their circumstances of birth and there is no way to argue that they are deserving of this outcome, so the only moral and justifiable outcome is to reconstruct society so that it provides a decent standard of living for all.
Providing a comprehensive education system so that people can be educated to the best of their ability and so that society can make use of their best talents is still desirable, And the whole history of the 20th century bears this out, as working class people all over the world achieved great things once they were no longer held out of schooling by poverty. The "Path of Talent" still needs to be there for anyone to take advantage of it, but we need to make sure we're providing decency for all, something that only Socialism can achieve."
"ChatGPT:
This article discusses the reluctance of some progressive individuals to accept the role that genetics plays in shaping human traits and characteristics. It discusses the history of the eugenics movement and how it has been used to justify oppressive policies, and argues that this has contributed to the discomfort that some progressives feel towards the field of genetics.
The article also mentions that some proponents of social justice have rejected the idea that genetics plays a significant role in shaping human traits, instead attributing differences to societal and environmental factors. However, the article suggests that a more nuanced understanding of genetics and its interaction with the environment is necessary in order to effectively address issues of inequality."
"More social-creationist nonsense. The Venn diagram for "contempt for evolution" by the woke and the religious-right is a circle."
"I've always thought that progressives have a completely irrational, deep-seated fear of inherent things about a person that can't be changed. It's probably why they're so hyperfixated and dogmatically focused on That Topic Which Shall Not Be Named (trains)"
Of course, most rightoids have the opposite problem..."
"Progressives dont necessarily discredit the genetic / intelligence factor. They just also acknowledge that environment and privilege also plays a significant role in academic/ professional performance, and likelihood of success. For instance, a student with low iq bit paired with an environment which sets them up for success will likely perform better than an intelligent student who's hungry and paired with a shitty environment at home."
"This doesn't seem like a very marxist train of thought: "From each according to his ability" wouldn't mean much if everyone's ability was identical.
"It's funny because the whole "45 minute" article rephrases dialectical materialism in a million different ways, yet has zero mentions of that term or its roots. Fine, it's the New Yorker.
But I was even more disappointed to see zero mentions of the extensive works of Robert Sapolsky and his magnum opus, "Behave"
Sapolsky is excellent. The idea that people don't have as much control as one might assume is behind most of my own politics (and behind some of my politics too). You don't use that knowledge to create further social divisions, you use it to create policies and institutions that account for everyone in a compassionate way while mitigating harms as intelligibly as possible."
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maybe like this⸮ /s) and will become less true over time. 
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