Hacker News Reader

Comment by slipjack | Hacker News Reader

> Being swayed by superficial cues is not irrational if they correlate to the underlying qualities you are trying to judge.

I'd be pretty careful about this line of argument. What we think of as a clue to underlying qualities is cultural... for example, one of the biggest superficial differences in people is the color of their skin. What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to?

In the US and Europe, we have a long history of trying to find the ties between visible and non-visible qualities. Phrenology, eugenics, Blacks as having "inferior intelligence", the belief that women are prone to hysteria - all were attempts to find that link.

View on HN

>What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to?

Depends on the context. Also, I bet that's the topic of at least several dissertations in the last few decades.

> What underlying qualities does skin color clue us in to

What underlying qualities does height clue us in to? Are you sure that, even though traits regularly correlate with other traits, skin color is the one trait that has no correlation with absolutely anything else? I don't find that very likely, personally.

Er... my point was that most superficial qualities don't have a 1-to-1 mapping on internal qualities. Height is another great example.

The GP isn't talking about 1-to-1 mapping, they're talking about correlation, though.

>What underlying qualities does height clue us in to?

Possibly more than you think.

http://content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1820836,0...

That's my point.

The question is what relevant correlations there are. You won't do well to hire a taller programmer just because taller people are healthier.

See also adverse section paradox.

Sure, but there's a widespread way to reliably detect correlations. Besides, my point is more that we shouldn't plug our ears and go "racism lalala" whenever the reasonable, scientific fact that, like everything else, race may be correlated with some traits pops up.

The history of seeking correlations between visible and invisible qualities has been largely successful. For instance, it's fairly well known that border collies can be successfully trained to herd sheep, but wolves cannot.

Experiments have provided significant evidence that these behavioral traits are genetic: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/dogs-b...

Further, in the US and Europe, we also have a long history of trying to find substances which kill infections. These failed until we found penicillin. Citing a few false claims (not all the ones you've cited are even known to be false) and using this as evidence that all such claims must be false is a logical fallacy.

Do you have any studies about humans? Because I'm not aware of many that are clear-cut (of course, there's environment-gene interplay, but that is way more murky than anything talked about in the article or in the OP's comment).

I'm not saying that those claims were false and therefore all such claims are false. I'm saying that in the West we've spent a lot of time trying to prove that non-white men are inferior in different ways. Arguments like "unconscious bias comes from evolution" ignore that long history of non-white-male qualities being judged inferior.

There are quite a few studies about humans, fruit flies also make an appearance (since you can rapidly breed them). All in all, there is quite a bit of evidence that genetics can influence animal behavior both across and within species.

Based on my reading, I'm quite confident in my belief that genetics explain at least 25% of behavioral differences. I haven't been convinced that it explains 50-90% (as some folks claim). I've appended below a dump of papers which I've either read or are in my queue.

Most results in this space find that white (particularly if you exclude Ashkenazi Jews) people are not the superior race, at least in popular metrics like intelligence, criminality, drug use and divorce. Those westerners trying to "prove that non-white men are inferior" probably should have realized that isn't how evidence works: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ii/conservation_of_expected_evidence...

http://ussc.edu.au/ussc/assets/media/docs/publications/44_Ha...

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v47/n7/full/ng.3285.html

https://infotomb.com/g99o4.pdf

https://infotomb.com/sy7jn.pdf

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/57897#files-area

https://helda.helsinki.fi/bitstream/handle/10138/38881/HECER...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1758921

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/neu.10160/pdf

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/opinion/45_Hatemi_...

http://unamusementpark.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/boucha...

http://www.matthewckeller.com/16.Hatemi.et.al.2010.Nuc.fam.a...

https://infotomb.com/evkop.pdf

https://infotomb.com/cwnp1.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2923822/#!po=50....

Interesting - I'll check these out.

But again, I'm not arguing that genetics don't have any impact on behavior - I'm arguing that getting from someone else's experience of appearance to genetics to the 20% of behavior that's affected is a pretty long jump to make.

See my link to a college math study (in a separate comment thread); you can improve predictions of math skill significantly above random (50% -> 55%) chance simply based on appearance.

I was totally shocked when I saw this, but there is at least some evidence that appearance predicts more than I would otherwise expect.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com