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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

> where can't you discuss it?

Publicly, in academia, generally anywhere?

> What do you want to discuss

The topic at hand? The 'cycles of abuse' thing I mentioned earlier? GWAS with behavioral predictions and their usage in increasing the power of non-genetic behavioral studies? All sorts of things about genetic basis for behavior?

Even the way I'm getting responded to here indicates that people are searching for a 'gotcha' - it would be much worse in actual academia.

I don't really understand the motivation for denying this taboo exists.

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If it’s such a taboo, why not just go to the essential point and state clearly what you’re talking about since this is an Internet forum.

The coy “I’m not allowed to talk about this, ooh” act is tiresome.

I feel like I have… multiple times now across many different comments.

Stuff like hm, maybe the children of child abusers are likely to abuse children not only because they were raised that way but because of genetic behavioral factors. Or maybe the correlation between test scores and affluence doesn’t mean that test scores are bunk or only measure affluence, but are partially due to heritable confounders and the “affluence bias” isn’t as strong as we think.

The essential point is that there is strong evidence for genetic heritability of behavior.

But regardless, the point of my original comment was to discuss the interesting difference between academic/societal taboos and commonly held intuitions - not to enumerate all the possible taboo things related to this line of research.

If "children of child abusers are more likely to abuse children" were to be found undeniably true, how should we use this knowledge? Are you proposing some kind of public policy?

> how should we use this knowledge?

One example: in future studies of interventions at reducing child abuse, if we can use genetic factors to explain away some of the variance, then we can better identify interventions that are effective at reducing child abuse that we wouldn't be able to identify otherwise.

> Are you proposing some kind of public policy?

Not in that case that immediately comes to mind, but if we discover some interventions as mentioned above ^ it could be useful. In the case of the test scores affluence one, it might take some (although not all) strength away from some of the arguments for dropping standardized testing.

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