I used the word “personality” as a synonym for “values” or “preferences”, so things like “liking math” count as personality while things like “bravery” don’t.
Oh. (I’m not sure I totally believe you; e.g. you wrote ”… create a generation of impressionable children ready for brainwashing, or unempathic psychopaths for military use”, which sounds like it’s about personality. But the lines are blurry.)
Then I think I agree with you more, though IDK if we fully agree. Like, at a simple level, yeah; I agree parents shouldn’t be micromanaging their future child’s preferences. I probably agree that we should not be doing research in order to enable that specifically.
Note that this is probably even harder in most cases than vectoring personality traits. Something is probably vectorable if and only if
It’s fairly well-defined / a coherent thing (rather than a random grab bag of different things).
You can measure it pretty cheaply and sorta accurately, so you can collect data at scale.
You actually do collect the data (phenotype/genotype pairs).
It is significantly determined by many genetic variants.
A lot of preferences will fail some of these criteria. Some might meet the criteria. E.g.:
Some preferences will correlate at least a little with vectorable traits. E.g. probably smarter people are, at least on average / in aggregate, more likely to get really really into math. So parents could, if they wanted to, nudge preferences.
Some preferences are interesting enough to people that they get measured en masse. E.g. religious or political affiliation.
I think these will tend to be border cases, where the line between personality trait vs. narrow preference is unclear, and the effect on narrow preferences might be mostly mediated by effects on general personality traits. So, the remarks in my previous comment still apply.
Oh. (I’m not sure I totally believe you; e.g. you wrote ”… create a generation of impressionable children ready for brainwashing, or unempathic psychopaths for military use”, which sounds like it’s about personality. But the lines are blurry.)
Then I think I agree with you more, though IDK if we fully agree. Like, at a simple level, yeah; I agree parents shouldn’t be micromanaging their future child’s preferences. I probably agree that we should not be doing research in order to enable that specifically.
Note that this is probably even harder in most cases than vectoring personality traits. Something is probably vectorable if and only if
It’s fairly well-defined / a coherent thing (rather than a random grab bag of different things).
You can measure it pretty cheaply and sorta accurately, so you can collect data at scale.
You actually do collect the data (phenotype/genotype pairs).
It is significantly determined by many genetic variants.
A lot of preferences will fail some of these criteria. Some might meet the criteria. E.g.:
Some preferences will correlate at least a little with vectorable traits. E.g. probably smarter people are, at least on average / in aggregate, more likely to get really really into math. So parents could, if they wanted to, nudge preferences.
Some preferences are interesting enough to people that they get measured en masse. E.g. religious or political affiliation.
I think these will tend to be border cases, where the line between personality trait vs. narrow preference is unclear, and the effect on narrow preferences might be mostly mediated by effects on general personality traits. So, the remarks in my previous comment still apply.