Scan barcode
A review by lpm100
The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden
2.0
Book Review
"The Genetic Lottery"
KP Harden
2/5 stars
"Yet another step along the Road to Perdition aided and abetted by a silly academic"
*******
$22.96 for this book, and I would have to say that I WAY overpaid.
It might have been worth $2 or $3 Plus shipping, AT MOST.
It's like Harden starts out with the assumption that everybody needs to be equal, and any deviation from perfect equality is an aberration that somebody just needs to fix.
The only difference between her gimmick and any other in this bizarre line of reasoning is that the author is willing to concede that there is a genetic basis.
But, have no fear: good genes are just a matter of luck and so therefore good genes are not fair.
Other Reasons/Problems:
1. This book is a repetition of a lot of things that we should already know if interested in this topic. (Such as recombination / correlation coefficients / polygenicity.)
2. Harden spends a lot of time trying to talk away the theoretical underpinning of the reasons why [any given ethnic groups vary along some axis consistently], and that because we cannot reproduce that as an ab initio calculation.... then it must not exist.
In this world, if you have a good steak or sexual encounter, then it didn't really exist because you can't exhaustively define it.
Or, if the difference does exist then it is something that some benevolent philosopher-king / bureaucrat/intellectual/ needs to rectify BECAUSE IT ONLY HAPPENED DUE TO LUCK.
And yet: anybody who trains dogs knows that there is a reason that you don't use Rottweilers as seeing eye dogs and you don't use Chihuahuas as pitfighters.
Yes, if you used the concepts that Dr Hardin is trying to use to reverse engineer the personality of these various breeds of dog... you would likely fail. ("Doggie temperament is polygenic and the effect of each gene is so small that it's impossible to say anything with certainty.")
But that does not mean that the differences don't exist and have genetic reasons. (In spite of the fact that the author spends A LOT of time trying to tell us that differences must not exist if you cannot easily identify genetic causes.)
3. WHAT and HOW/WHY are two very different things. So, (hypothetically) if you wanted to open a private high school that gave rigorous STEM coursework (let's imagine that this is a business where you have to turn a profit in order to keep you grounded in reality), does it matter WHY you won't be able to operate that school in [any heavily black area] (think Detroit or Baltimore) vs. [any heavily Asian area] (think someplace like California or Hawaii) or is it more important to just know that as a matter of fact?
4. Many graphs and fancy phrases, but honestly this is Redux Road to Perdition: Some Society exists somewhere in *this* natural state and some academic / government official decides that it needs to exist in *that* state. They go about the business of trying to engineer a New Reality, and nothing but catastrophic disaster results.
5. Not really any acknowledgment of the fact that cognitive testing just might actually be a workable tool. (You don't think that somebody with an IQ of 85 is going to complete a PhD in a pure mathematics, do you really?) Also, a lot of obscurantism in trying to turn quantitation into a moral issue and not a technical one.
6. I'm just not sure what Harden's training is. Clinical Psychology is what is said, but we all know that Psychologists just stop believing in things (I'm looking at you here, Freudian psychologists.)
Sometimes because of new/actual evidence, sometimes because the fad just wears itself out and diagnoses vanish. (I can't wait for the anti-racism movement to vanish
7. The Identity Politics Banalities just keep rolling along (p.220): systemic racism / environmental racism /emancipatory social science. A couple of Deaf lesbians ("Deaf" with an uppercase "d," because now that is part of their identity the same way that being black might be a part of someone else's) decided that they needed a sperm donor whose family had been deaf for five generations because they wanted to purposely conceive a Deaf child. Some deaf parents might consider terminating a pregnancy if they know that the baby will be Hearing (p.224). Selecting for Hearing embryos is a form of genocide against Deaf people.
Many other predictable buzz words/ weasel wortd: Equality. Equity. Socially constructed. Eugenics. White nationalists. Systemic racism. Environmental racism. Social change. Anti-racism. Hierarchical ideology. Access. Oppressive policies.
*******
The author presents herself as someone trying to stake out some type of Middle Ground between genetic deniers (nearly all progressives) and genetic determinists (whom the author sees as eugenicists and White Nationalists).
We haven't even gotten past the first chapter (p.25, to be precise) when the author gives us the double-edged sword about her " left leaning sympathies." (Coincidentally, the book is bookended by Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
And the question immediately comes: "Is all of the information suspect because she has a political agenda/ is shadowboxing, OR is she trying to be an honest broker who tells us what she is at the outset?"
A reading of the book convinces me that Harden is emphatically the former.
Chapters
1. Gives us an idea of what she's trying to show in this book.
2. A recap of things that people who are reading this book are actually are already likely to know. Gaussian distribution. Polygenicity. Recombination.
3. Discussion of how single nucleotide polymorphisms are too small in their effects to explain differences in educational attainment.
4. Multiple attempts to intellectualize/talk away the reality of race as an artifact of the eurocentrism of genetic research. (p.85)
Other howlers: (p.78) "Were geneticists reinventing race as a biological reality rather than as a social construction?"
(p.79) "And the process of racial categorization serves to restrict who has access to power, wealth, and physical space."
5. Beating on the correlation ≠ causation drum.
6. Conceived that genes are responsible for educational attainment, bmi, fertility outcomes and psychological outcomes.
7. Finally admits (after about 150 pages out of a 250 page book) that there is a genetic basis to intelligence.
8. Discussion on the difference between equality and equity.
9. Surprisingly frank discussion, including the fact that educational interventions have extremely weak effects. (Scores increase by 0.06 standard deviations.)
10. Genetics is a matter of luck, and therefore the case can be made to redistribute resources to achieve greater equality.
11. A lot of distracted speculation about the origins of psychometric testing. ("Bad People invented it, and therefore it must be bad because their motives were less than pure.")
12. (p.250): "We might also conceptualize a good Society is one that does not have gaping economic inequalities and that does not allow the members of one racial group to dominate all elite institutions." Hypothetical answers of EUGENIC / GENOME BLIND/ANTI-EUGENIC questions.
Second order questions/thoughts:
1. Do you tell a man who appreciates Asian /Armenian/Jewish/Italian women that he must be schizophrenic, because these phenotypes don't have a clear genotypic explanation? Or, do you say the same thing to a man whose stomach is turned by black women? (If you look at the price for sex workers all over the world, price levels for black women are way on the bottom. The aggregate preferences of millions of men may not be exhaustively genetically definable, but they do have mass.)
Does it mean that every single person who shows his preferences by spending his money is wrong?
2. For anybody who reads broad strokes of History (or even a local newspaper): By conservative estimate, it has happened at least a thousand times that there's a country/city/school district that functions *just fine* in every way until black people decide to participate.
-South Africa is on the way to dropping out of developed country status and it only took about 25 years after the end of apartheid.
-Detroit was a functioning city for several centuries and it took<10 years of Coleman Young to make it look like Haiti.
-Haiti proper started out poor and they have stayed poor in the centuries since independence. (And they bring lots of crime and social disease with them to Miami / other places.)
Do you really mean to tell me that you're going to talk away all of that evidence just because you cannot make it work with the models that you have as you have them? (I don't know where this author lives, but I'm willing to bet next month's house note that it is not Detroit or Baltimore.)
What happens when you have some ethnic group of people go someplace with a clean slate and they just spontaneously regenerate the stupidity from whence they come? (The Great Migration North saw black people come from the poorest areas of the country, and they just brought their mentality with them.)
3. The author talks to us about "equality versus equity."
But, the questions is: what do the logistics even look like for some government somewhere to produce these outcomes? (Getting a driver's license is something that has been the same thing for at least a half a century, and they still can't get that right. And that is a slingshot type task. The government trying to engineer/direct equal outcomes with massive/scattered/ nongranular/incomplete information is the equivalent to a wino trying to engineer a space shuttle.)
Of course, the government (that almost destroys the economy with the covid policy / can't even figure out how to balance a budget) is going to "structure society for their benefit" (p.254)
4. Author draws an analogy between giving a person glasses to correct his vision and this or that government directive / social program in order to reduce "inequity": neither of them would change the genetics of the recipient, but they would solve the problem.
5. Where is your logical stopping point for this? Being Deaf is now an identity and therefore it's wrong to try to select against it? If you have some ethnic group of people whose average IQ is 85, does that mean that they should think of themselves as a low IQ community and try to select for low IQ children and abort high IQ ones? And whom does that benefit?
POOR ANALOGY.
6. I don't know what is the author's stopping point and trying to push "equity." The nicest looking women will be able to take the richest most desirable man, and men with more money will automatically choose the best that they can get from the sample set that they have. How do you stop freedom of choice that leads to unequal outcomes in that case? (Has anybody ever noticed how many black guys who are interested in white ladies have to take baby elephants? I don't think that it's an accident.)
Verdict: Not recommended if you want a book with some type of intellectual value. Recommended in the event that you want to see just how far how many silly ideas and academic can attempt to legitimize through mental masturbation/General lack of contact with reality.
"The Genetic Lottery"
KP Harden
2/5 stars
"Yet another step along the Road to Perdition aided and abetted by a silly academic"
*******
$22.96 for this book, and I would have to say that I WAY overpaid.
It might have been worth $2 or $3 Plus shipping, AT MOST.
It's like Harden starts out with the assumption that everybody needs to be equal, and any deviation from perfect equality is an aberration that somebody just needs to fix.
The only difference between her gimmick and any other in this bizarre line of reasoning is that the author is willing to concede that there is a genetic basis.
But, have no fear: good genes are just a matter of luck and so therefore good genes are not fair.
Other Reasons/Problems:
1. This book is a repetition of a lot of things that we should already know if interested in this topic. (Such as recombination / correlation coefficients / polygenicity.)
2. Harden spends a lot of time trying to talk away the theoretical underpinning of the reasons why [any given ethnic groups vary along some axis consistently], and that because we cannot reproduce that as an ab initio calculation.... then it must not exist.
In this world, if you have a good steak or sexual encounter, then it didn't really exist because you can't exhaustively define it.
Or, if the difference does exist then it is something that some benevolent philosopher-king / bureaucrat/intellectual/ needs to rectify BECAUSE IT ONLY HAPPENED DUE TO LUCK.
And yet: anybody who trains dogs knows that there is a reason that you don't use Rottweilers as seeing eye dogs and you don't use Chihuahuas as pitfighters.
Yes, if you used the concepts that Dr Hardin is trying to use to reverse engineer the personality of these various breeds of dog... you would likely fail. ("Doggie temperament is polygenic and the effect of each gene is so small that it's impossible to say anything with certainty.")
But that does not mean that the differences don't exist and have genetic reasons. (In spite of the fact that the author spends A LOT of time trying to tell us that differences must not exist if you cannot easily identify genetic causes.)
3. WHAT and HOW/WHY are two very different things. So, (hypothetically) if you wanted to open a private high school that gave rigorous STEM coursework (let's imagine that this is a business where you have to turn a profit in order to keep you grounded in reality), does it matter WHY you won't be able to operate that school in [any heavily black area] (think Detroit or Baltimore) vs. [any heavily Asian area] (think someplace like California or Hawaii) or is it more important to just know that as a matter of fact?
4. Many graphs and fancy phrases, but honestly this is Redux Road to Perdition: Some Society exists somewhere in *this* natural state and some academic / government official decides that it needs to exist in *that* state. They go about the business of trying to engineer a New Reality, and nothing but catastrophic disaster results.
5. Not really any acknowledgment of the fact that cognitive testing just might actually be a workable tool. (You don't think that somebody with an IQ of 85 is going to complete a PhD in a pure mathematics, do you really?) Also, a lot of obscurantism in trying to turn quantitation into a moral issue and not a technical one.
6. I'm just not sure what Harden's training is. Clinical Psychology is what is said, but we all know that Psychologists just stop believing in things (I'm looking at you here, Freudian psychologists.)
Sometimes because of new/actual evidence, sometimes because the fad just wears itself out and diagnoses vanish. (I can't wait for the anti-racism movement to vanish
7. The Identity Politics Banalities just keep rolling along (p.220): systemic racism / environmental racism /emancipatory social science. A couple of Deaf lesbians ("Deaf" with an uppercase "d," because now that is part of their identity the same way that being black might be a part of someone else's) decided that they needed a sperm donor whose family had been deaf for five generations because they wanted to purposely conceive a Deaf child. Some deaf parents might consider terminating a pregnancy if they know that the baby will be Hearing (p.224). Selecting for Hearing embryos is a form of genocide against Deaf people.
Many other predictable buzz words/ weasel wortd: Equality. Equity. Socially constructed. Eugenics. White nationalists. Systemic racism. Environmental racism. Social change. Anti-racism. Hierarchical ideology. Access. Oppressive policies.
*******
The author presents herself as someone trying to stake out some type of Middle Ground between genetic deniers (nearly all progressives) and genetic determinists (whom the author sees as eugenicists and White Nationalists).
We haven't even gotten past the first chapter (p.25, to be precise) when the author gives us the double-edged sword about her " left leaning sympathies." (Coincidentally, the book is bookended by Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates.)
And the question immediately comes: "Is all of the information suspect because she has a political agenda/ is shadowboxing, OR is she trying to be an honest broker who tells us what she is at the outset?"
A reading of the book convinces me that Harden is emphatically the former.
Chapters
1. Gives us an idea of what she's trying to show in this book.
2. A recap of things that people who are reading this book are actually are already likely to know. Gaussian distribution. Polygenicity. Recombination.
3. Discussion of how single nucleotide polymorphisms are too small in their effects to explain differences in educational attainment.
4. Multiple attempts to intellectualize/talk away the reality of race as an artifact of the eurocentrism of genetic research. (p.85)
Other howlers: (p.78) "Were geneticists reinventing race as a biological reality rather than as a social construction?"
(p.79) "And the process of racial categorization serves to restrict who has access to power, wealth, and physical space."
5. Beating on the correlation ≠ causation drum.
6. Conceived that genes are responsible for educational attainment, bmi, fertility outcomes and psychological outcomes.
7. Finally admits (after about 150 pages out of a 250 page book) that there is a genetic basis to intelligence.
8. Discussion on the difference between equality and equity.
9. Surprisingly frank discussion, including the fact that educational interventions have extremely weak effects. (Scores increase by 0.06 standard deviations.)
10. Genetics is a matter of luck, and therefore the case can be made to redistribute resources to achieve greater equality.
11. A lot of distracted speculation about the origins of psychometric testing. ("Bad People invented it, and therefore it must be bad because their motives were less than pure.")
12. (p.250): "We might also conceptualize a good Society is one that does not have gaping economic inequalities and that does not allow the members of one racial group to dominate all elite institutions." Hypothetical answers of EUGENIC / GENOME BLIND/ANTI-EUGENIC questions.
Second order questions/thoughts:
1. Do you tell a man who appreciates Asian /Armenian/Jewish/Italian women that he must be schizophrenic, because these phenotypes don't have a clear genotypic explanation? Or, do you say the same thing to a man whose stomach is turned by black women? (If you look at the price for sex workers all over the world, price levels for black women are way on the bottom. The aggregate preferences of millions of men may not be exhaustively genetically definable, but they do have mass.)
Does it mean that every single person who shows his preferences by spending his money is wrong?
2. For anybody who reads broad strokes of History (or even a local newspaper): By conservative estimate, it has happened at least a thousand times that there's a country/city/school district that functions *just fine* in every way until black people decide to participate.
-South Africa is on the way to dropping out of developed country status and it only took about 25 years after the end of apartheid.
-Detroit was a functioning city for several centuries and it took<10 years of Coleman Young to make it look like Haiti.
-Haiti proper started out poor and they have stayed poor in the centuries since independence. (And they bring lots of crime and social disease with them to Miami / other places.)
Do you really mean to tell me that you're going to talk away all of that evidence just because you cannot make it work with the models that you have as you have them? (I don't know where this author lives, but I'm willing to bet next month's house note that it is not Detroit or Baltimore.)
What happens when you have some ethnic group of people go someplace with a clean slate and they just spontaneously regenerate the stupidity from whence they come? (The Great Migration North saw black people come from the poorest areas of the country, and they just brought their mentality with them.)
3. The author talks to us about "equality versus equity."
But, the questions is: what do the logistics even look like for some government somewhere to produce these outcomes? (Getting a driver's license is something that has been the same thing for at least a half a century, and they still can't get that right. And that is a slingshot type task. The government trying to engineer/direct equal outcomes with massive/scattered/ nongranular/incomplete information is the equivalent to a wino trying to engineer a space shuttle.)
Of course, the government (that almost destroys the economy with the covid policy / can't even figure out how to balance a budget) is going to "structure society for their benefit" (p.254)
4. Author draws an analogy between giving a person glasses to correct his vision and this or that government directive / social program in order to reduce "inequity": neither of them would change the genetics of the recipient, but they would solve the problem.
5. Where is your logical stopping point for this? Being Deaf is now an identity and therefore it's wrong to try to select against it? If you have some ethnic group of people whose average IQ is 85, does that mean that they should think of themselves as a low IQ community and try to select for low IQ children and abort high IQ ones? And whom does that benefit?
POOR ANALOGY.
6. I don't know what is the author's stopping point and trying to push "equity." The nicest looking women will be able to take the richest most desirable man, and men with more money will automatically choose the best that they can get from the sample set that they have. How do you stop freedom of choice that leads to unequal outcomes in that case? (Has anybody ever noticed how many black guys who are interested in white ladies have to take baby elephants? I don't think that it's an accident.)
Verdict: Not recommended if you want a book with some type of intellectual value. Recommended in the event that you want to see just how far how many silly ideas and academic can attempt to legitimize through mental masturbation/General lack of contact with reality.