Nurture extremists are extremists on behalf of the nurture position because it's the only position that humans (they) have the capacity to influence other than behaving in eugenicist practices (which is basically Darwinian). The funny thing is that observing ppls behavior, they tend to select for eugenicist like mating habits but conceal it in euphemistic labyrinths as to not trigger a social cost for doing so. The luxury of liberal dialectics is that this labyrinth becomes discourse best practices in order to avoid putting a target on one's back for being too overtly selfish among peers whose social gospel is to appear/present oneself as unselfish.
Don't ask why I bother, but on my Facebook I posted this quick plug for this fine column:
Lots of interesting, smart and unnecessarily controversial stuff about nature, nurture, race, IQ, murder rates and NFL cornerbacks from the very smart Steve Sailer.
The idiot machines at Facebook decided:
"We removed your post
Why this happened
It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way."
Facebook further wrote:
This goes against our Community Standards on spam.
Then if you want to read a lot of crap about what spam is, you can go to a link.
I'll be nice and say no humans were involved in this decision, but one of Mark Z's people set this stupid policy up in the first place.
Late Breaking news: About five minutes after I challenged Facebook's de-posting, the item reappeared -- or maybe it was never actually disappeared and I merely got a knee-jerk reaction from a computer.
As I said, I don't know why I bother trying to spread interesting stuff around.
One should also mention to the writer the legacy athletes in professional sports. From Christian McCaffery in pro football to Emmitt Smith IV in college football, the mix of nature and nurture is obvious.
Also, a good analogy to explain statistics is to say that just because males are taller, on average, than females does not mean that every male is taller than every female.
Explaining by analogy is fine. Arguing by analogy isn't, because your opponent will always argue about the aptness/confusion in the analogy rather than what you're trying to explain.
E.g. Jesus would explain his teachers to the crowds/Disciples using parables, similes, and metaphors, because they were open to listening to the explanation and wanted to learn. In contrast, when the Pharisees, scribes, and Sadduccees came arguing, he dropped all metaphoric language and went right after them directly, because he knew they didn't come to understand but to trap him.
This guy wasn't seeking to have Steve's argument explained to him, he wanted to argue it down. No analogy would have sufficed because the reporter was actively trying to not understand or credit Steve's argument.
Steve Jobs's widow deploying her smear forces against you by dangling the "you can post the full interview" promise when they won't link to your articles/websites carrying it. Thus assuring that their readers will never read the full interview.
Also, did I mention that Steve Jobs's widow owns The Atlantic and is bff with underage sex trafficker Ghislane "how am I still alive" Maxwell? Or that the Widow Jobs employs Jeffrey Goldberg as the editor The Atlantic, and he is a war mongering war criminal and traitor to this nation?
Such underhanded behavior from such people? Perish the thought! (/sarcasm)
If progressives truly believed nature is irrelevant, then they need to explain statements made by early progressives (e.g. Margaret Sanger) that abortion is necessary to cull the number of so-called “inferior” classes and races who with high fertility rates. Sanger is celebrated to this day.
Actually, it's more complicated. Down syndrome itself is a trisomy of the 21s chromosome. It's cause is (probably in most cases) the non-genetic failure of the 21st chromosome pair to separate in the process of forming the maternal egg. Age (nurture) is a key parameter since mothers under 25 have a probability of less than 1:1000 for offspring trisomy 21 and mothers of over 45 something like 1:20 or less.
Well, you are kind of given a choice if you have 3 kids at 20-25 or 3 kids at 40-45. With the former, you may forgo most of your college and early career. So there is a quality of investment aspect in it.
There seems to be a male zygote deterioration with age too, but it seems more reflected in neurodevelopmental abnormalities (ASD) and susceptibility to schizophrenia.
Anyway, I will try to explain my thinking. I would classify "genetic", or "nature" as synonyms for upstream heredity. So some chromosomal abnormalities like Down are non-hereditary because the parents of a Down's child are usually not Down's themselves. Unless of course they have a balanced translocation - which is rare. Obviously, once someone is Down's, he or she can pass it on to offspring. But it is rare.
Then there is a second, neutral category which is chance. There is a certain element of chance that a certain neural connection is made or not made, even with predisposing genetics. Obviously, the presence of a random variable will reduce hereditary correlation. But it won't be "nurture" either.
Finally, there is "nurture". This can be anything apart from heredity and random chance. Maternal age, or paternal age for that matter, are neither heredity nor random chance, so they contribute to "nurture" in the broader sense...
Even though her wikipedia page still maintains that she was not overtly racist, lol
I would posit that PP dropped the name of their founder - a spiritual patricide - is a good illustration of how malicious wokeness and intersectionalism work. In a similar vein, Bulgakov wrote about how in early twenties the Soviet literary circles considered dropping Pushkin. Once Stalin took over power, the idea of dropping Pushkin was unceremoniously dropped.
I'm not popular with either side in abortion debates. I tell them we are removing bad parents and defective children from the gene pool and rape is genetic theft. There is no moral obligation to save the children of your enemies.
I wonder if the author would be shocked to learn that the overwhelming majority of medical practice is based on far weaker statistical associations. Among the strongest such associations is breast cancer and female sex. Men manage to get about 1% of all breast cancers. Steve's stat about 100 m dash finalists is about as strong.
The other argument is one does not need many resources to identify the best sprinters compared to who will be the best swimmers, or distance runners, etc.
you mean in that you can't coach speed? I agree, running fast is one of the basic very singlular abilities and you should be able to identify the fastest runners by the end of adolescence. Only wildcard is...response to anabolic steroids!
Bottom line on thoughts and intellect: BOTH EXIST IN A SPIRITUAL REALM, NOT PHYSICAL.
No method of man-made science has ever, or will ever, capture one single loving thought of a mother's love for her infant child, isolate that thought on a slide, and display that single living, loving thought as a discrete living entity. Anybody can wise up, get smarter and do better if they ask God for help. The evil of pride (one of many evils) tempts the unwary into the mistaken conclusion of believing God's Spirit is a take it or leave it option existing apart from Life Itself. That's impossible. God's Life IS life. God's Spirit is Life. Without the Life of God's Spirit there is no life. The germ of God's Life and God's Intelligence is in the life of all human intelligence. To genuinely improve the quality and quantity of one's intelligence, one must petition the Source:
Luke 11:13 [Christ speaking] If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
Steve Sailer is obsessed with race but Robin DiAngelo and Ibrahim X. Kendi are not????!!!!???
Those two and the Atlantic article author are the race obsessives. They believe we must racially discriminate to force equal outcomes. Surely that is race obsession.
Steve Sailer, you're obviously much more comfortable discussing traits like height and sprinting ability--easily defined, amenable to a single linear measure, and also easily determined to have a high component of heritability-- than you are at discussing more subtle and multifactorially influenced complex abilities, such as those comprising human intelligence and cognitive skill sets.
Substacker Sasha Gusev--a statistical geneticist at Johns Hopkins--could clean your clock in a debate. Don't think so? Go on, challenge him. https://substack.com/@sashagusev
Education is strikingly (I would say absurdly) g-hollow and no woman goes to the sperm bank and says any old sperm will do. Your hero is fighting a rearguard action.
In his response to almost every question, Steve rejects the Atlantic's premise or framing and goes on to answer a better question. So many people particularly on the right, fall for gotcha framing or when did you stop beating your wife type questions. JD Vance is a notable exception on the stage now. Tucker Carlson is good at this too. I have years of screaming at the TV before turning it off after seeing "republican" midwits get destroyed on mainstream media because they accept flawed premises rather than rejecting them, and going on to make principled arguments for sensible policies.
Nurture extremists are extremists on behalf of the nurture position because it's the only position that humans (they) have the capacity to influence other than behaving in eugenicist practices (which is basically Darwinian). The funny thing is that observing ppls behavior, they tend to select for eugenicist like mating habits but conceal it in euphemistic labyrinths as to not trigger a social cost for doing so. The luxury of liberal dialectics is that this labyrinth becomes discourse best practices in order to avoid putting a target on one's back for being too overtly selfish among peers whose social gospel is to appear/present oneself as unselfish.
...also known as h-y-p-o-c-r-i-s-y
It’s disheartening to see so much ego involved motivation to ignore reality when lives are at stake.
great 🙃🙃🙃🤗🤗🤗😘😘😘😍😍😍🥰🥰🥰
Don't ask why I bother, but on my Facebook I posted this quick plug for this fine column:
Lots of interesting, smart and unnecessarily controversial stuff about nature, nurture, race, IQ, murder rates and NFL cornerbacks from the very smart Steve Sailer.
The idiot machines at Facebook decided:
"We removed your post
Why this happened
It looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way."
Facebook further wrote:
This goes against our Community Standards on spam.
Then if you want to read a lot of crap about what spam is, you can go to a link.
I'll be nice and say no humans were involved in this decision, but one of Mark Z's people set this stupid policy up in the first place.
Late Breaking news: About five minutes after I challenged Facebook's de-posting, the item reappeared -- or maybe it was never actually disappeared and I merely got a knee-jerk reaction from a computer.
As I said, I don't know why I bother trying to spread interesting stuff around.
Steve,
One should also mention to the writer the legacy athletes in professional sports. From Christian McCaffery in pro football to Emmitt Smith IV in college football, the mix of nature and nurture is obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._J._Smith_(American_football)
Also, a good analogy to explain statistics is to say that just because males are taller, on average, than females does not mean that every male is taller than every female.
Explaining by analogy is fine. Arguing by analogy isn't, because your opponent will always argue about the aptness/confusion in the analogy rather than what you're trying to explain.
E.g. Jesus would explain his teachers to the crowds/Disciples using parables, similes, and metaphors, because they were open to listening to the explanation and wanted to learn. In contrast, when the Pharisees, scribes, and Sadduccees came arguing, he dropped all metaphoric language and went right after them directly, because he knew they didn't come to understand but to trap him.
This guy wasn't seeking to have Steve's argument explained to him, he wanted to argue it down. No analogy would have sufficed because the reporter was actively trying to not understand or credit Steve's argument.
Weaponized, deliberate obtuseness.
What would America be like if more people read and understood Sailer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uG3uea-Hvy4
Steve Jobs's widow deploying her smear forces against you by dangling the "you can post the full interview" promise when they won't link to your articles/websites carrying it. Thus assuring that their readers will never read the full interview.
Also, did I mention that Steve Jobs's widow owns The Atlantic and is bff with underage sex trafficker Ghislane "how am I still alive" Maxwell? Or that the Widow Jobs employs Jeffrey Goldberg as the editor The Atlantic, and he is a war mongering war criminal and traitor to this nation?
Such underhanded behavior from such people? Perish the thought! (/sarcasm)
If progressives truly believed nature is irrelevant, then they need to explain statements made by early progressives (e.g. Margaret Sanger) that abortion is necessary to cull the number of so-called “inferior” classes and races who with high fertility rates. Sanger is celebrated to this day.
No progressive is arguing that Down's syndrome is due to nurture.
Actually, it's more complicated. Down syndrome itself is a trisomy of the 21s chromosome. It's cause is (probably in most cases) the non-genetic failure of the 21st chromosome pair to separate in the process of forming the maternal egg. Age (nurture) is a key parameter since mothers under 25 have a probability of less than 1:1000 for offspring trisomy 21 and mothers of over 45 something like 1:20 or less.
But one again, not nurture.
Come on, maternal age is nurture
Nurture refers to upbringing of the child. Maternal age is a physical trait (admittedly not genetic).
Well, you are kind of given a choice if you have 3 kids at 20-25 or 3 kids at 40-45. With the former, you may forgo most of your college and early career. So there is a quality of investment aspect in it.
There seems to be a male zygote deterioration with age too, but it seems more reflected in neurodevelopmental abnormalities (ASD) and susceptibility to schizophrenia.
Anyway, I will try to explain my thinking. I would classify "genetic", or "nature" as synonyms for upstream heredity. So some chromosomal abnormalities like Down are non-hereditary because the parents of a Down's child are usually not Down's themselves. Unless of course they have a balanced translocation - which is rare. Obviously, once someone is Down's, he or she can pass it on to offspring. But it is rare.
Then there is a second, neutral category which is chance. There is a certain element of chance that a certain neural connection is made or not made, even with predisposing genetics. Obviously, the presence of a random variable will reduce hereditary correlation. But it won't be "nurture" either.
Finally, there is "nurture". This can be anything apart from heredity and random chance. Maternal age, or paternal age for that matter, are neither heredity nor random chance, so they contribute to "nurture" in the broader sense...
But the age is correlated with DNA damage and that is genetic, not nurture.
Early 20th century progressives were race eugenecists, early 21st century progressives believe there is no such thing as race.
Sanger has been demoted as a eugenicist. Her name has been removed from this building:
https://time.com/5869743/planned-parenthood-margaret-sanger/
Even though her wikipedia page still maintains that she was not overtly racist, lol
I would posit that PP dropped the name of their founder - a spiritual patricide - is a good illustration of how malicious wokeness and intersectionalism work. In a similar vein, Bulgakov wrote about how in early twenties the Soviet literary circles considered dropping Pushkin. Once Stalin took over power, the idea of dropping Pushkin was unceremoniously dropped.
I'm not popular with either side in abortion debates. I tell them we are removing bad parents and defective children from the gene pool and rape is genetic theft. There is no moral obligation to save the children of your enemies.
"It may be the conventional wisdom among superficial journalists"
Ouch! You caught on quickly that he hadn't done his homework.
I wonder if the author would be shocked to learn that the overwhelming majority of medical practice is based on far weaker statistical associations. Among the strongest such associations is breast cancer and female sex. Men manage to get about 1% of all breast cancers. Steve's stat about 100 m dash finalists is about as strong.
The other argument is one does not need many resources to identify the best sprinters compared to who will be the best swimmers, or distance runners, etc.
you mean in that you can't coach speed? I agree, running fast is one of the basic very singlular abilities and you should be able to identify the fastest runners by the end of adolescence. Only wildcard is...response to anabolic steroids!
Bottom line on thoughts and intellect: BOTH EXIST IN A SPIRITUAL REALM, NOT PHYSICAL.
No method of man-made science has ever, or will ever, capture one single loving thought of a mother's love for her infant child, isolate that thought on a slide, and display that single living, loving thought as a discrete living entity. Anybody can wise up, get smarter and do better if they ask God for help. The evil of pride (one of many evils) tempts the unwary into the mistaken conclusion of believing God's Spirit is a take it or leave it option existing apart from Life Itself. That's impossible. God's Life IS life. God's Spirit is Life. Without the Life of God's Spirit there is no life. The germ of God's Life and God's Intelligence is in the life of all human intelligence. To genuinely improve the quality and quantity of one's intelligence, one must petition the Source:
Luke 11:13 [Christ speaking] If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
Steve Sailer is obsessed with race but Robin DiAngelo and Ibrahim X. Kendi are not????!!!!???
Those two and the Atlantic article author are the race obsessives. They believe we must racially discriminate to force equal outcomes. Surely that is race obsession.
Steve Sailer, you're obviously much more comfortable discussing traits like height and sprinting ability--easily defined, amenable to a single linear measure, and also easily determined to have a high component of heritability-- than you are at discussing more subtle and multifactorially influenced complex abilities, such as those comprising human intelligence and cognitive skill sets.
Substacker Sasha Gusev--a statistical geneticist at Johns Hopkins--could clean your clock in a debate. Don't think so? Go on, challenge him. https://substack.com/@sashagusev
Education is strikingly (I would say absurdly) g-hollow and no woman goes to the sperm bank and says any old sperm will do. Your hero is fighting a rearguard action.
Definitely two standard deviation.
In his response to almost every question, Steve rejects the Atlantic's premise or framing and goes on to answer a better question. So many people particularly on the right, fall for gotcha framing or when did you stop beating your wife type questions. JD Vance is a notable exception on the stage now. Tucker Carlson is good at this too. I have years of screaming at the TV before turning it off after seeing "republican" midwits get destroyed on mainstream media because they accept flawed premises rather than rejecting them, and going on to make principled arguments for sensible policies.
Thanks for sharing this with us Steve.
In professional sports merit is rewarded. In the rest of life (where most of us live) merit isn’t allowed to be rewarded. Yeah, makes no sense.