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Comment by goatlover | Hacker News Reader

Seems like it. Professor Paige Harden, who is a progressive herself, has gotten into all sorts of controversy by arguing that genetics do play a role in outcomes and society would be better off recognizing where genes matter for student outcomes and what not instead of pretending they don't. Then you can tailor your approach accordingly. The thing is she isn't arguing for genetic supremacy over environment, only that they play some percentage of a role. Which seems entirely reasonable. It's an interplay with genes and environment.

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I think the pushback is more about adopting a passive predictive approach than an interventionist approach, and about the stigma that genetic-based approaches create when they don't predict beyond past behavior very well.

It's unclear what using genes to predict educational outcomes adds beyond just trying to provide the best possible opportunities over and over again. It doesn't really matter if it's genes or some fixed environmental history.

Well, once you know which genes are causal for which adverse social outcomes, you could use CRISPR to address the problem. Unfortunately, genome-wide association studies are famous for yielding poor results wrt. these things. So a good default guess is that the effect of various social, institutional, cultural etc. factors is being misidentified as primarily genetic.

Pretty sure that's called Eugenics my guy. Let's not do that.

It's probably as inevitable as every other technological advance that some warned us to avoid. Even if banned in some Western countries, I don't see every advanced nation willingly cooperating.

How about fixing stuff like hemophilia or sickle cell?

"Eugenics" or nah?

Unless you provide genetic modification services 110% free to everyone and anyone regardless of literally anything, gene modification inevitably will result in an underclass that can't afford it.

You've heard of "Medicaid"? Also, that didn't actually answer my question.

Is using CRISPR (or similar) to fix hemophilia "eugenics" or not?

Almost everyone on the planet supports eugenics: "You're probably a eugenicist"

https://dissentient.substack.com/p/eugenicist

Ironically, the same crowd that insists that it's racist and absolutely off limits to suggest genetics play a role in student outcomes, no matter what the studies say, do a complete 180 if you start talking about obesity. The lack of logical consistency says it all - you can't have it both ways! Unfortunately, these people view everything through the distorted lens of "race" (an arbitrary, ill-defined social construct), which necessarily results in having a distorted view of objective reality.

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