Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by program_whiz | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry to nitpick this, but there is a subtle flaw in this thinking. The main argument of the article is that our experiences in the world (e.g. having a good teacher, getting bullied, parenting, etc) don't account for much difference in our personalities and genetically determined proclivities in the long term. Although the article says only half of personality / psych traits are genetically determined, which is still substantial imo, so the argument isn't strong enough to say "parents don't matter" even by the arguments in the article.

>> Research shows that inherited DNA differences account for about half of the differences for all psychological traits — including personality.

>> The notion that parents have much to do with how kids turn out is a myth

This is a much broader claim that the evidence does not support. Nourishment, physical activity, mental development, emotional support, getting a good education, avoiding the wrong paths, these are things that parents facilitate that absolutely affect "how a kid turns out". Sure, you can't force your kid to be enthusiastic about sports if they aren't, but having good parents that foster interests and development is a huge difference in "how a kid turns out".

Are you asserting low-income and neglected children have equal outcomes to those with stable households, access to resources, and good parenting? I would say your statement is a broad generalization unsupported by the flimsy article you reference, and contradicted by all available evidence. Just one small one:

https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html

Have you found any studies that show that shared environment makes a "huge difference" on broadly how a kid turns out? I haven't seen any.

And that cdc site isn't evidence. If you look through any of those studies it's all correlational. So they have literally 0 power to differentiate outcomes driven by genetics vs shared environment.

The other half is mostly unshared environment (peers, etc.) Of course the parents affect both indirectly. But parenting style matters very little compared to genetics and who your kids are around.

wikipedia quotes a study claiming the opposite:

parents differ in their patterns of parenting and that these patterns can have a significant impact on their children's development and well-being

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parenting_styles

and from my own experience i would concur. parenting styles define the relationship parents have with their kids, and that relationship absolutely matters.

i find it worth considering however that when discussing parenting styles it gives the impression that the chosen style is a deliberate choice that parents can switch around at will, when in reality i believe most parenting styles are defined by circumstances and by the experience of the parents themselves.

when people make this argument I think they mean "assuming the person has an approximately normal parenting style". Its a bit like saying the infra doesn't matter, only the app does (assuming the infra is built with best practices for availability and scale). When in reality, its missing the forest for the trees. You're essentially claiming that a parent who neglects feeding a child, drops them repeatedly, and lives in the drug-infested dangerous area of town, abusing drugs and alcohol while pregant "matters very little", when its obviously _the_ defining factor in how this child will grow up.

Your point holds when we assume most parenting styles are roughly equal (but this would also hold for environmental factors and genes, since most of those won't be too drastically different for most people).

Put another way: perhaps the most important factor is the one furthest from the mean. If your genes are basically average but your parents are horrible (abusive, neglectful), you may not live to 12. If parents and genes are average, but your environment is war-torn 3rd world, you may not make it to 12. If your parents and environment are average but your genes are horrible, you may not make it to 12. But its clear all the factors can be extremely important, and the claim of the GP only applies "all else being roughly equal".

Back to the app example: assuming sane infra, yes the app might be "more important" to the business. But if you have an average app, but your infra is terrible (long load times, constant outages, losing data, payment system failures), well, you aren't going to succeed.

I'm surprised that you are so ready to abandon your common sense in the face of a psychology book (Judith Rich Harris's book specifically, which asserts that how a parent treats a child has almost no influence on how the child turns out). Psychology papers and psychology books misuse and misapply statistics all the time. Surely someone as well educated as you knows this? (Maybe your wife is a psychologist, so you are overly accepting of psychology results?) The basic mistake being made here is to ignore the possibility that a parent has treated different children differently: one kid is shy: a good parent will nudge him into making friends, but avoid forcing him into unstructured situations with many children because that will tend to overwhelm him. I.e., a good parent is part of the so-called "unshared environment": the shy kid's non-shy sister is not treated the way I just described. (There is for example no need to nudge her into making friends.)

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