The US? My 2nd grader has one piece of homework per week, which takes about 10 minutes. If there was more I would tell the teacher to shove it. Instead I talk to my child. If he's interested we talk more about that, otherwise we switch to a topic that interests him. We've covered a lot of science, astronomy and math. Lately I've been telling him about primes, factorization and cryptography. I think our conversations lead to a love of learning and curiosity that is 100x more beneficial than a 50cm stack of homework...
These parents (who believe there is one path to future success) will be in for a rude awakening in the coming 10-20 years when all the traditional high-status career paths have dried up. Can they not see the writing on the wall? Not that I would ever be such a parent, but even if I was, there's no point in pressuring and forcing your kids into this lifestyle given the unpredictability of the future. My goal is just supporting and letting my kid do the things that interest them.
I trust my own observations and my conclusion is that heritability is very strong. This is not a view that was imparted on me, quite the opposite. Growing up in a western country I was led to believe we are all blank slates, and I truly believed it. Once I started spending more time around the opposite sex some doubts started to emerge. Once I became a parent it became very apparent that this ideology had no basis in reality. Kids come with a personality, batteries included, and it's very easy to point out even individual behaviors that originate with either parent. Boys and girls are also very different on average. It's insane that we have somehow convinced ourselves that this is not the case, and I will surely be attacked by just pointing this out. I don't need twin studies to understand this basic fact, a fact that's been apparent to everyone throughout history, except for the past ~40 years in the west.
My father was told all his life that he had the same character than his mother, and until I was 10, I was told I showed the same character as my grandfather (I still have his walking cadence and posture).
The belief system opposing "very strong heritability of intelligence" isn't "blank-slatism". Plenty of researchers who believe there are only weak connections between genes and intelligence also reject the strong-form blank slate hypothesis, to the point where, when I see people bring "blank slate" into a conversation, I immediately have to convince myself that they're not just trying to stop the conversation.
The comment you wrote really isn't a response to anything this article said.
> The question never was about whether or not genetic differences contribute to the spread of intellectual talent—they obviously do. The question always was about the “interesting place” Paul Graham talked about, the meaningful space between genetic potential and actual achievement, and whether or not it really existed. And, at 30% or 50%, this place surely exists.
"Heritability", strictly construed (as is the case in every study establishing heritability numbers) isn't necessarily a description of a "genetic lottery" at all. Plenty of things are highly heritable and not at all genetically determined, and the converse is also true!
That heritability doesn't cover all genetic factors. E.g. out of 100% of IQ variation 50% might be inherited, but that doesn't say that the rest is nurture, right? It can still have a huge factor of genetic lottery. E.g. isn't heritability the mean of the genetic effects, but there's also the rest of the distribution (std. dev)?
Why would you decide to hold a position strongly based on a minuscule and extremely biased sample set and reject even considering data and studies outside of your immediate experience?
Unless you’re afraid your conclusion might be challenged? Wouldn’t it be interesting either way? Either to find out that your children are typical or to find out that you and they are special in some way?
I understand many people are not interested in or curious about science, but don’t understand people who are both disinterested but also strongly hold particular positions on scientific questions.
It's also just common sense. Everyone agrees that traits like height is heritable, but somehow whatever goes on inside the brain is not? The null hypothesis here is that it is heritable, and I see no proof whatsoever against that hypothesis. My personal experience raising my own kids and observing countless others confirms common sense. Your own child is not one data point, it's a million small data points, things you notice in what they're like as a baby, and how they develop over time. Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point". I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite? It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination. To deny heritability of personality and intelligence is to deny evolution itself.
No-one is denying heritability here. The only question is where the heritability figure lies, and how reliable are the estimates that have been put forward in the past.
I don't see how anyone's "personal experience" could be a valid methodology for deciding whether the heritability of IQ is 30% or 80%.
As for the "extreme ideological indoctrination" slander, it'd be great if you could just withdraw it.
I agree. A child is a million small datapoints. My son established a strong personality early on that defied our attempts to modify it. Meanwhile he was raised in a relaxed environment that certainly provided no environmental explanation for his fixations.
I was raised with five siblings, yet only I got into fights at school, and made my mother cry on a regular basis. Each of my sibs is similar and each of us is strikingly different, too.
Centuries of success with empirical based science is a direct rejection of the approach of trusting "just common sense".
> Only someone without kids would boil this down to a "single data point".
Why are you personalizing this? I have a family and have observed children grow from emergence from the womb and I grew in a much larger family. I'm not sure what the relevance is to the points being discussed. This seems like argument by anecdotal fallacy.
> I also deny that I have do anything to prove heritability, how about you prove the opposite?
I didn't ask you to prove anything. I asked you why you have no interest in looking at a scientific question beyond "I trust my own observations and my conclusion"?
And this question seemingly misses the point - it not a binary question about whether traits are inherited or not but about the degree of the role of inheritance. The author of the piece emphasizes this point extensively.
The salient point of the too-long article was about flaws in a seminal paper on this subject where the author Bouchard presented carefully collected data for identical twins - showing remarkably low variance suggesting a high degree of inheritance. But he hid the data he had collected for non-identical twins, which would have provided us with a basis for judging the significance of the findings regarding identical twins.
> It's a conclusion that is so obvious to the impartial mind that to be confused about it is a sign of extreme ideological indoctrination.
Can we just discuss the science and statistics here?
I don't understand why you are challenging me here?
Isn't your question exactly that addressed by the (admittedly too long) article? That the graph Paul Graham presented proving the dominance of inheritance wasn't based on any science or data?
There are many studies of twins that try to determine if genes influence intelligence.
Some look at twins who are raised together. One [1] concludes that "MZ (identical) twins differ on average by 6 IQ points, while DZ (fraternal) twins differ on average by 10 IQ points".
Yes? I mentioned them because the article was about a bunch of studies? I was asking the poster why you would not be interested in the validity of such studies and just decide that "common sense" was enough to make a decision?
The question was asked with genuine curiosity as this forum is mostly filled with people who appreciate science and empiricism. And I was hoping there could be a reasonable discussion.
But I'm out. An interesting discussion should be possible here purely based on data and statistics but clearly - from the downvotes - that I've stepped into some toxic American identity politic minefield.
I learned quite a time ago that it's risky to raise certain scientific subjects with USAians including my US relatives: biological evolution, the science of climate change, renewable energy or justifications for gun control - without the conversation getting emotional and heated. But I still find it weird.
It’s just Bayesian thinking. Too much open mindedness to scientific papers can have you frequently changing your beliefs based on some recent scientific paper that came out, or even worse based on a recent college graduate journalist’s summary of a recent scientific paper from some random university..
As opposed to holding on to a belief that has been reinforced via personal experience countless times until very strong evidence proves otherwise. You end up with a set of beliefs that have a much higher chance of being true this way.
There is rarely proof this or that way. It’s usually evidence, sometimes strong, sometimes weak, and you use your experience and intelligence to decide what is true. Though honestly, if you end up with a process where you change your mind whenever a new scientific paper comes out opposite of what you used to believe, well, I guess you would either have not thought about it much or your thinking is deeply flawed.
The article only asks the question of scientists have data to conclude that IQ is inherited. The author is only saying that there are so many problems with the little data we have, that he cannot rule out correlation without causation.
People in general don't like being told they're wrong. This means that arguments that challenge status quo get suppressed. Science isn't magically immune to this just because you add a label "it's scientifically proven, bro!". Therefore, a lot of research on controversial topics can be safely discarded simply because people doing the research have lots of reasons to be biased. This is especially relevant in social sciences, because it's a bottomless pit of controversial topics, and has almost zero possibilities of repeating an experiment. Sure, we have 50 years of research proving that children are blank states, but it's important to remember that eugenics were deeply rooted in science too. It's just that different societal attitudes expected scientists to come up with different scientific results, so they did. Think of a society-wide version of corporate-sponsored research centers that are expected to massage the results until they match the desired outcome.
Another thing is that sometimes it might be beneficial to believe something that isn't true. If you knew for a fact that tomorrow 99% of population will suffer extremely painful death then from the point of view of an individual the correct move would be to commit painless suicide, but the survival of humanity relies on everyone believing they'll be all fine. This is obviously a caricatural example, but there are lots of such lies that keep the society going, and "we're all equal" is just one of them.
Personally, I find it extremely difficult to believe that we'd be born equal, because evolution works only if some individuals are better than others, and I strongly believe that evolution is a thing.
This seems like a bad criteria for many reasons. What about people who delay procreation till their late 30s or 40s? Or people whose children have died?
Then there's a category of people who resent their children and younger generations generally.And another category of childless idealists who feel protective of humankind and the planet as a whole. Would you approve the resentful and deny the idealists?
That seems backwards. People with kids tend to prefer the way forward that is best for their kids even if it makes things worse for many more other people (adults and kids).
I've just reached lean FIRE, will try to go indie soon. Like you the ideas I have are pretty niche and not things that neatly fit into a B2B SaaS. But I'm hoping I can build at least some income to supplement my investments, doesn't have to be much.
Unfortunately a lesson I had to learn for myself. Hopefully I can pass it on to the next generation, but I fear they'll have to learn it for themselves too. Don't pick individual stocks people, buy broad index funds at most.
I would have said this, but someone responded with a comment that stuck with me:
We’re on a forum of an incubator whose goal is investing in high risk startups to find the next unicorn. So there are probably people here who feel the same way about investing.
While the average outcome of indexes is probably better, the best case outcome of an individual stock is probably better.
It’s lower likelihood and not as repeatable, but for some people, that’s the strategy they want.
> While the average outcome of indexes is probably better, the best case outcome of an individual stock is probably better.
Most stocks suck:
> We study long-run shareholder outcomes for over 64,000 global common stocks during the January 1990 to December 2020 period. We document that the majority, 55.2% of U.S. stocks and 57.4% of non-U.S. stocks, underperform one-month U.S. Treasury bills in terms of compound returns over the full sample. Focusing on aggregate shareholder outcomes, we find that the top-performing 2.4% of firms account for all of the $US 75.7 trillion in net global stock market wealth creation from 1990 to December 2020. Outside the US, 1.41% of firms account for the $US 30.7 trillion in net wealth creation.
> Four out of every seven common stocks that have appeared in the CRSP database since 1926 have lifetime buy-and-hold returns less than one-month Treasuries. When stated in terms of lifetime dollar wealth creation, the best-performing four percent of listed companies explain the net gain for the entire U.S. stock market since 1926, as other stocks collectively matched Treasury bills. These results highlight the important role of positive skewness in the distribution of individual stock returns, attributable both to skewness in monthly returns and to the effects of compounding. The results help to explain why poorly-diversified active strategies most often underperform market averages.
And it's not always the same 2-4% of stocks: a stock may shoot up in value, and if you're holding it at that time to can capture that, but once it has already gone up it may perform average-to-poor going forward. At that point, if you're still holding on it, it will be a drag on your (average) returns.
I don’t disagree at all (I have no individual stocks, only indexes). The average retail investor doesn’t beat the market.
However, the top 10% of retail traders actually can generate consistent returns.[1]
Consider that MSFT has gone up 10x over the last ten years while the S&P has risen 4x. Ethereum has risen 2500x in that period. TSLA has risen 270x.
Not saying these returns are typical, but I can imagine that a highly aggressive retail investor could, with a few good trades and a lot of confidence, do incredibly well and end up with a life-altering amount of money. Obviously, the chances of both entering AND exiting the trades to capture all of that is low.
Again, not my style, but I respect those who want to place their bets.
> Not saying these returns are typical, but I can imagine that a highly aggressive retail investor could, with a few good trades and a lot of confidence, do incredibly well and end up with a life-altering amount of money. Obviously, the chances of both entering AND exiting the trades to capture all of that is low.
The problem is the existential question of knowing whether you are good (in absolute and relative terms) or not:
> For example, any competent basketball coach could tell you whether someone was skilled at shooting within the course of 10 minutes. Yes, it’s possible to get lucky and make a bunch of shots early on, but eventually they will trend toward their actual shooting percentage. The same is true in a technical field like computer programming. Within a short period of time, a good programmer would be able to tell if someone doesn’t know what they are talking about.
> But, what about stock picking? How long would it take to determine if someone is a good stock picker?
> An hour? A week? A year?
> Try multiple years, and even then you still may not know for sure. The issue is that causality is harder to determine with stock picking than with other domains. When you shoot a basketball or write a computer program, the result comes immediately after the action. The ball goes in the hoop or it doesn’t. The program runs correctly or it doesn’t. But, with stock picking, you make a decision now and have to wait for it to pay off. The feedback loop can take years.
> And the payoff you do eventually get has to be compared to the payoff of buying an index fund like the S&P 500. So, even if you make money on absolute terms, you can still lose money on relative terms.
And certainly don't buy individual stocks because of FOMO or day trading or some wishful thinking.
I pretty much only invest in indices except for rare small fun picks where I'm ok with losing. But over the years there were certainly times where this was a too conservative stance. My small bets have outperformed my conservative portion - by a lot. That said, those times were I am confident in those bets are rare, like a few times a decade.
Having nice gains early on fools you into thinking you're smarter than the market. That just makes your inevitable fall that much harder. Nobody made a lot of money on a stock and then thought to themself "I bet I was just lucky, I should probably stop now". Like everyone you will keep going until you lose out big.
> That gives slightly better than the inflation rate ( Canada ).
What do you mean? Over the last year any one of the index funds I'm in has beat inflation by a factor of five, some beat inflation by an order of magnitude. My worst performer is an iShares world fund, which generally has more temperate gains, clocking in at 10% YoY.
Looking at Canadian indices such as $VCN, it's the same story.
If you're in Canada you almost certainly want to diversify from Canadian indices. US markets have tended to outperform.
Indices can return >20% one year and -10% other years. I think OP is talking recently, not over 30 years. Over the long term indices like the S&P 500 tend to have a real return of 6-7% ...
That's the biggest problem I have with the recommendation to buy indices as if indices grow at >8% annually is an natural law.
Many (most) indices of countries in the world performed way less than 8%. US performed exceptionally well over almost a century so people are starting to take it as a natural law. If I buy US index, I'm still putting a directional bet on US stock market performing at an exceptional rate.
One can buy "all-in-one" index-of-index funds that have all US equities, all EU, etc. In Canada (which sub-thread stated with), see VEQT or XEQT (100% equities), VGRO/XGRO (80/20), VBAL/XBAL (60/40), VCNS/XCNS (40/60).
You can probably find an 'asset allocation' fund in most countries; e.g., in the US:
It's a potential commodity in that there is potentially no network effect stopping people from using any competitor that offers a cheaper ride, unlike how when you're an iPhone user you get locked into Apple's ecosystem. But then there's the thing where despite having had 18 years to catch up, nobody makes phones (including software) better than Apple.
One potential moat is just the amount of data from real drivers that Tesla use to train their models via imitation learning. If this turns out the be important and needed for a general solution (which I believe it will), then only companies that manufacture cars at scale can hope to compete. And at this point, only Chinese companies are forward looking enough to put the right hardware for self driving (and the ability to collect training data) into their cars by default. Tesla has the vertical integration that makes this whole thing much easier: they make the cars, the inference compute, the software AND the training clusters. Can you imagine GM or Ford building a GPU cluster for a couple of billion?
No, they will not leave the EU because the EU is not reading the room right now. You think Trump will do nothing to protect FAANG? To be honest, despite being European, I'm surprised the US has let itself be pushed around for so long. I don't say I agree with it, it's just realpolitik.
If Trump makes Google not pay the fine you think that will have no negative side-effects? His actions have been incredibly positive for European tech companies, 5 years ago the only ones that even considered not going for the US options were a few companies in Germany. Demand has skyrocketed and making Google not pay this would give it a huge boost.
It is hard to understand in a country where big corp corruption for political parties is considered normal, and even gets prime time with gift ceremonies, and dinners.
Laws that the EU passed in order to fine big tech one could argue. Just saying, you think Trump (and later Vance) will stand idly by? EU is a shell of its former self economically, there's not much we can do besides cozying up to an actual dictatorship (China) who literally shot thousands of students, turned them into pulp using tanks and flushed them down the drain. I know we all hate Trump, but the US is the better ally here still.
It is hard to understand what Trump will do… it is hard to talk about this without going on some US politics tangent, which I think is not appreciated on this site. But he isn’t particularly affiliated with FAANG really. He has some startup guys in his orbit, but they aren’t FAANG.
And he’s, uh… very motivated by what others have to offer him… so FAANG clearly has some leverage there, but I don’t think it is necessarily a sure thing they’ll work something out.
Odds aren't terrible that Trump will have a fatal stroke before his term is up, the EU will outlive him, and can't and shouldn't tie its sovereign domestic policy and enforcement to cross-Atlantic chain-yanking that changes direction from week to week.
No matter what anyone does, he just moves the goal posts. Let him keep his ball.
Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years? Easier to tell yourself you actually love it. I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.
Dismissing anyone who isn't already aligned with your world view as "just cope" seems an unproductive strategy to having a discussion.
If I won 100M, I wouldn't work the exact same job - I'd probably move into an adjacent role that was more ambitious and took on a lot more risk, because I would be a lot less concerned if the company I was working for crashed and burned. The outlines of my role would stay the same.
I feel I've been clear-headed about my feelings about work. It took a lot of thinking to get to a place I enjoy. I haven't always enjoyed my work; I've worked at places that I hated and places that were just meh. But yeah, my current work is awesome, I happily do it nights and weekends just for fun (much to the chagrin of my girlfriend). Most people I work with, and most friends I have outside of work, feel similarly. I'm sorry you don't feel the same, but I encourage you to think before telling other people they feel a different way than they actually do.
I couldn't bear to pour all my energy in something that, ultimately, is not mine. But I could feel your enthusiasm through your post, which made me a bit jealouse.
I guess there is a type of personality that don't need autonomy and are totally fine being a small cog in a giant machine, and only get a sliver of the benefit. I knew day one I started working that I'm not like that, and it's difficult for me to comprehend that people truly enjoy it.
> Whenever someone claims to enjoy or love their job, I'm extremely suspicious. Usually it's some form of cope, because without it how could you stand having to work 8+ hours a day for 40 years?
But you are not doing the exact same thing for 40 years. Since I started my career, there have been so many new projects, new ideas, new things to create and so many new ways to do it. But underneath it all is the common denominator of enjoyment and love of programming.
I'm not sure why that is so unfathomable. Sure, I have plenty of not-so-great days when nothing works or the project I'm working on is uninspiring. But that is just the nature of life. I would wager that your beloved partner isn't an enjoyable company 100% of the time. But you enjoy being with them most of the time because they make you feel great - that's sort of an important requirement. Programming makes me feel great most of the time I'm doing it.
> I'm sure you enjoy aspects of your work. But I would guess if you won $100m you wouldn't keep going. If you truly enjoyed it, you would do it for free.
I'll be able to set the balance of when I want to program and when I want to go watch a movie - we are not one dimensional creatures after all. Of course all of us need to eat but I don't see what getting paid for it has to do with my love for it. Plenty of people love stuff that doesn't pay at all.
Programming makes me feel good too, but there are very few programming jobs I would do for no pay, if any. I would work on my own projects though. But that's what I'm saying, I'm sure you can enjoy or even love some aspects of a job, but the totality of it? That's probably very rare, and most who say they love their job are doing it as a form of cope or because it's provides some sort of social status to love your job.
I've been heavily saving for retirement from the day I started working, and approaching FIRE before 40 (living in the Nordics). I've been telling some close friends that even if they don't aim for early retirement, they need to at least have a backup option for regular retirement, but they can't seem to sympathize enough with their 70 year old self who is forced to keep working. And who is going to hire a 70 year old human in 30 years? What economic value could they possibly provide in 2055?
Everyone here needs to make money and save everything they can right now. If you're not saving 50%+ of your income you AGMI
I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.
It doesn't come up often, but I have seen a decent amount of 70+ people doing what they can, as cashiers, kiosks, hospitals, doctor offices, bus drivers,...or in general any job where youth isn't into applying for learning on the job, or even so where demand isn't getting fulfilled.
> I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.
No, they will do what they have done in the last 20 years which is import people from the middle-east or northern Africa to do the jobs and pay them the lowest wage possible.
My wife works in healthcare in Sweden and more than 50% of the people who work on the hospital wards/in age care these days are either newly arrived migrants or descendants of recent migrants.
Unfortunately most of these people are under-qualified, barely speak Swedish but they are cheap.
That puts a lot of pressure to keep the wages of everyone down because they keep bringing more and more people from abroad. This isn't even a fix because as soon as they get their permanent residencies or citizenship (for the ones who do not have it), these people move on to something else because the jobs are just awful with long hours on your feet and being treated like a servant by the patients/residents.
Unfortunately that is why many European countries are going back to a reality I thought it was gone, back when I was a kid, being the first generation being born after carnation revolution.
This is not going to work forever. Eventually conditions can get bad enough that upper middle class MENA people won't prefer a lower class European position.
>I can tell from Germany, maybe some will hire, because unless they can replace workers with robots, like it is happening in some supermarkets, they will get whatever they can.
What's more likely going forward is that they'll downscale their operations in a contracting economy, than hire 70 years olds or needing robots for the same jobs. And if it needs be, they'll get immigrants for most jobs.
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