zevon

No, I said one is "close to flirting with Eugenics" wich is rather not the same than accusing anybody of being an Eugenicist and I stand by that point. However, you and the other person insisting on (mis-)interpreting my original one-liner now seem to do the "retreating" and to say that the post I was replying to somehow "clearly" was about the generalized notion of kids being like their parents instead of being very specifically about genetics.

The study you linked is interesting but its results are far from "clear" (see its discussion section but that's probably also just bias and hedging or whatever) and it does have fuck all to do with your proposed thought experiment of a Kaspar-Hauser-like child. Even less so with your confident prediction of how a Kasper-Hauser-like child would turn out. I think you probably know this yourself but these kinds of predictions are something scientists would very, very rarely do - because they know the limitations of their work.

I'm kind of weirded out by this exchange, people here rather confidently express quite a bit of stuff that goes against years and decades of training I received when I became a scientist and I think I'll stop replying now. That was the recommendation of a colleague - who actually is a geneticist - I showed this thread to over coffee as well.

Again, the person I was originally replying to called intelligence "highly heritable". That does mean a genetic argument and I replied to that and not a generic assertion that there are mechanisms in play that have influence on the expression over generations.

My original answer was a condensed and far from comprehensive one-sentence reply to another condensed one-sentence-reply (that included the phrase "highly heritable" which is how the whole genetics argument started). Why is what you apparently perceive this original one-liner to mean so important to you? I've expanded on the points I was trying to make quite a bit. And again: The researchers who look at those things seem to be the ones telling us that the relationship between intelligence and genetics is complicated and many, many non-genetic factors are in play, no? Did I miss some big new movement on deterministic genetics in education or some such since I've sat my basic biology, psychology and sociology courses? Do you know stuff that's not on Wikipedia? Help me out here, please - and I'd politely ask you to refrain from insulting my good faith.

I'd also be - again, genuinely - interested in how you come up with that clear of a statement about smart parents and their non-externally-influenced child, how one would approach that as a research question/design and how - practically - useful this piece of data in and of itself would be when most of us are not Kaspar Hauser or any other conceptual model of a human being that exists without external interdependences.

Why do you insist on saying that I "don't believe" in genetic components when I've literally said the opposite? The people who wrote the stuff on the Wikipedia site I was provided with and their (researcher-)sources seem to try to tell you and me both "hey, this is an interesting field of study but it's very complicated, many genes are involved, we are far from understanding them or being able to model them, be very careful with interpreting correlations and for (m)any practical purposes (such as thinking about how to structure educational environments), you really should consider quite a lot of things not directly related to genetics." What's so controversial about that and what overwhelming evidence does that go against?

edit: Sorry, to clarify, you are saying that "Two parents of higher IQ are much more likely to produce an offspring of higher IQ than median" because of genetics as the main determining factor?

Maybe what I actually meant to express becomes more clear if I re-phrase and expand the the sentence a bit:

Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems does not mean that you can determine genetics as a relevant factor when thinking about how to structure education and if one is interested in the relationship between success (on whatever metric) in education and family trees.

I'm neither a geneticist nor is English my first language but I've always understood "heritability" to be a term that very much has to do with genetics and the Wikipedia link you provided implies the same. If we are talking about other factors/mechanisms that impact success in educational systems and that express themselves over generations and in family structures - sure, that's basically what I'm saying.

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(Long) edit after a cup of tea and a sandwich spent over the Wikipedia-Link you provided:

I must say, I think that's pretty readable even for me as a non-geneticist. In the context of this thread, there is a lot of interesting info about "Heritability and caveats", "Influences" and "Environmental effects". I've highlighted these quotes for myself while reading:

"Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis."

"Heritability measures the proportion of variation in a trait that can be attributed to genes, and not the proportion of a trait caused by genes."

"Contrary to popular belief, two parents of higher IQ will not necessarily produce offspring of equal or higher intelligence. Polygenic traits often appear less heritable at the extremes."

The whole section on "Implications":

"Some researchers, especially those that work in fields like developmental systems theory, have criticized the concept of heritability as misleading or meaningless. Douglas Wahlsten and Gilbert Gottlieb argue that the prevailing models of behavioral genetics are too simplistic by not accounting for gene-environment interactions. Stephen Ceci also highlights the issues with this assumption, noting that they were raised by Jane Loevinger in 1943. They assert that the idea of partitioning variance makes no sense when environments and genes interact and argue that such interaction is ubiquitous in human development. They highlight their belief that heritability analysis requires a hidden assumption they call the "separation of causes", which isn't borne out by biological reality or experimental research. Such researchers argue that the notion of heritability gives the false impression that "genes have some direct and isolated influence on traits", rather than another developmental resource that a complex system uses over the course of ontogeny."

Since this is a US-centered forum, this also seems relevant:

"In the US, individuals identifying themselves as Asian generally tend to score higher on IQ tests than Caucasians, who tend to score higher than Hispanics, who tend to score higher than African Americans. Yet, although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that between-group differences in average IQ have a genetic basis. In fact, greater variation in IQ scores exists within each ethnic group than between them. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups. Growing evidence indicates that environmental factors, not genetic ones, explain the racial IQ gap."

I did not say nor mean to imply that genetics do not have anything to do with IQ or intelligence. Also, context matters - this is a thread about how to structure educational environments and about certain specifics of the military. Genetics are a factor that is going to be of limited practical use in this domain, at least as far as I can fantasize OTOH.

I think all your concerns are valid but they are not necessarily insurmountable. The FSF or whatever other entity could do just what you suggest and seek certification within the current legal frameworks. They could also talk to the carriers and negotiate individually which is probably going to be quite annoying and slow but it's not impossible and it's not like that's not done in the commercial space. The could build mechanisms into the hard-/firmware that takes your device off whatever regulated spectrum/provider if you modify anything that is in regulated territory (as watched over by some form of maintainer-quorum-signing-negotiation-structure). I'm sure there are many mechanisms and processes one could come up with that could keep with regulatory or other control aspects while still keeping things open.

All that patent and legal business is probably a more important/existential concern and a go/nogo-factor if you want to be a commercial player in a market-driven environment and less so for an entity like the FSF.

Correlations between socioeconomic status and success of one's offspring in educational systems don't mean that intelligence is inherited in the genetic sense. If you're seriously arguing this, you're very close to flirting with eugenics and the like.

Well, you kind said that literally. And I did not say that one should needlessly move processes to different infrastructure without a good reason. Anyway, I don't think our opinions are very dissimilar.

btw: I think I have a reasonably solid idea of a range of fabrication environments, the oldest piece of machinery I'm responsible for in my professional life is about 70 years old (its basic design is decades older) and some of my personal stuff (sewing machines, mostly) is more than 100 years old. I'm really not against using what works at all.

What do all these machine shops without any need for modern machinery and processes actually do?

Seriously though, of course you can make a living with old tools - however, even the village metal workshop around here has at least one big-ass laser cutter and a CNC mill next to all their old(er) lathes, mills, brakes, presses and other toys. Many oldschool fabricators I spoke to over the last few years are quite interested in what laser welding brings/will bring to the table. Basically all smaller fabrication companies I've seen (the long tail of the car industry and other bigger industries, mostly) are continually upgrading their infrastructure with all sorts of robots and other automation widgets. And so on.

If you don't have a very good marketing department, I'll still kick you out of business if I can double or triple the amount of widgets I can make because I started with the same machines you did - but I upgraded them with better controls, attached a few robot arms and now run a lights-out widget factory tended by a fraction of the workforce you employ while you reminisce about the good old times...

Sure - I guess this is generally true for most work domains, not just machine shops and serious software shops. However, the argument I was responding to was that there is no mucking about in the "real world" and that there is this difference between mucky software people and the serious creators of real stuff. Which I don't agree with.

btw: If we understand "machine shop" as a mass production environment with modern, integrated production lines, it is my anecdotal experience that there is a massive amount of muckery and fuckery involved in getting such an environment to run (usually called "integration" or some such which probably looks better on business cards). There's also a good chance that over the years - or decades - different people will engage in further iterations of the muck-pile to modify the system for new requirements from high on up or weird edge cases, to replace components that are no longer available with other stuff or to do whatever else the day might call for.

That sounds catchy but I think it doesn't survive further inspection. People mucking around with machines and processes were rather instrumental in creating lathes, steam power, rockets, computers, looms, software, CNC-machines and all those other puzzle pieces we have available to make stuff. They are also instrumental in developing those things further.

I'm also kind of curious as to know what kind of machine shops you base this on. Most production companies, labs and even small fabricators I've seen have continued to develop and to optimize their infrastructure and processes. To take the numbers discussed here: 50 years ago, (C)NC machines, CAD and CAM were in their infancy. And that stuff certainly has changed some things in the world of fabrication.

May I ask what you do that requires doing it on the phone?

If "necessity" means work-related: On my work-issued iPhone, I call and (briefly) text with people, triage some e-mail, have a look at calendars, take some in-situ photo/video, refer to a few notes, and so on. I don't have the screen time feature turned on but I guess I'm also below 30 minutes on that phone on most days. The exception being traditional voice calls which occasionally can go on for (much) longer than those 30 minutes, depending on what's happening. However, most of my more regular, scheduled conversations happen in real-life or in Zoom, Webex or other such platforms and not on a mobile phone.

The only work-related thing that I can think of OTOH which really required me to use a mobile device is hardware that requires an app to work (which is fortunately still rare).