[extropy-chat] it's all understandable, except

[Lee Corbin]

MB writes


> Eliezer wrote:
> 
>> I think the school system came within inches of wrecking me permanently,
>> and if I'd actually been forced through high school, especially a
>> non-Gunn-class high school, that might have been it.
>>
>> Selection bias, Lee.  You don't see the wrecked ones.  They don't look
>> like the "very brightest" any more.
> 
> I fear this is true. Instead they often look like the worst. Drugs, drinking, other
> maladaptive behaviours - anything to kill the frustration and boredom and
> pointlessness of their daily lives.

You guys have to remember the twin studies.  If twins had turned out 
radically, radically different as you're suggesting, we'd have heard about
it.  Now I'll grant that it *can* happen, but I claim it's unusual.

Judith Rich Harris has looked into all this in "The Nurture Assumption", and
even has a new book out about it: "No Two Alike".  I haven't read that,
but I can't really take the title entirely seriously.  In The Nurture Assumption,
it's related---and Pinker endorses this---that your adult personality is 
determined half by genes and half by your peer group (as you're growing
up).

So I retort that the "wrecked ones" MB speaks of---having succumbed 
to drugs, drinking, and other maladaptive behaviors---are a small
minority.  Almost everyone turns out (as in the twin studies) pretty much 
the same as if they'd been raised hundreds of miles apart by
entirely different families.

Lee