As discussed in my post, studies of heritability range between slightly-helpful and extremely-helpful if you’re interested in any of the following topics (among others):
guessing someone’s likely adult traits (disease risk, personality, etc.) based on their family history and childhood environment
assessing whether it’s plausible that some parenting or societal “intervention” (hugs and encouragement, getting divorced, imparting sage advice, parochial school, etc.) will systematically change what kind of adult the kid will grow into.
calculating, using, and understanding polygenic scores
trying to understand some outcome (schizophrenia, extroversion, intelligence, or whatever) by studying the genes that correlate with it
I think that those are enough to make heritability “relevant towards nurture/nature debates”, although I guess I don’t know exactly what you mean by that.
I was mostly focusing on interventions, so the second and third points in your linked post are most important.
And you mention that if you want to change yourself, heritability is essentially worthless, and parenting/social intervention where heritability matters, but with big caveats that mean you need to be careful on applying insights from heritability.
So I successfully predicted 1 outcome, and failed to predict another outcome, which means that I have to weaken my thesis.
Related, I think: I just posted the post Heritability, Behaviorism, and Within-Lifetime RL
Update: also Heritability: Five Battles. :)
IMO, I personally think heritability is basically not relevant towards nurture/nature debates, and agree with this:
And this:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YpsGjsfT93aCkRHPh/what-does-knowing-the-heritability-of-a-trait-tell-me-in#answers
As discussed in my post, studies of heritability range between slightly-helpful and extremely-helpful if you’re interested in any of the following topics (among others):
guessing someone’s likely adult traits (disease risk, personality, etc.) based on their family history and childhood environment
assessing whether it’s plausible that some parenting or societal “intervention” (hugs and encouragement, getting divorced, imparting sage advice, parochial school, etc.) will systematically change what kind of adult the kid will grow into.
calculating, using, and understanding polygenic scores
trying to understand some outcome (schizophrenia, extroversion, intelligence, or whatever) by studying the genes that correlate with it
I think that those are enough to make heritability “relevant towards nurture/nature debates”, although I guess I don’t know exactly what you mean by that.
I was mostly focusing on interventions, so the second and third points in your linked post are most important.
And you mention that if you want to change yourself, heritability is essentially worthless, and parenting/social intervention where heritability matters, but with big caveats that mean you need to be careful on applying insights from heritability.
So I successfully predicted 1 outcome, and failed to predict another outcome, which means that I have to weaken my thesis.