r/science Professor | Medicine 20d ago

Neuroscience Twin study suggests rationality and intelligence share the same genetic roots - the study suggests that being irrational, or making illogical choices, might simply be another way of measuring lower intelligence.

https://www.psypost.org/twin-study-suggests-rationality-and-intelligence-share-the-same-genetic-roots/
9.6k Upvotes

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u/Sinai 20d ago

It doesn't take much reading between the lines to see that the author thought the very suggestion of general intelligence and rationality being anything but highly correlated was absurd, and did this study because of that.

“1) We found that irrationality, far from being what IQ tests miss, is one of the best IQ tests available. 2) We found that irrationality, far from being unrelated to genetics and more of a mindset, is among the most heritable of psychological traits. 3) Irrationality is making mistakes which are unnecessary: wrong decisions when we have all the information we need, and some simple logic means there is no reason for the error. We found that realizing what information is available, and applying some simple logic, is almost all of the cause of cognitive irrationality. 4) Cognitive ability explained nearly all of cognitive irrationality, and much of the overlap was genetic.”

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u/Xolver 20d ago

Isn't doing a study because you have some (maybe strong) hypothesis and want to test it one of the best reasons of doing a study? What's the problem with that? It certainly beats doing a study only because you know you need funding and you have to shoehorn a proposal. 

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u/neobeguine 20d ago

The concern is that if you are too married to your hypothesis, you will find reasons to ignore any results that might contradict it and chose measures or tests that are most likely to give you the result you want.  It's like trying to do a push poll on the universe

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u/SoldnerDoppel 19d ago

That's why replication is so important, though there's little interest in it since it's so "unglamorous".

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u/tufftricks 19d ago

That's why replication is so important

Are we still not neck deep in the "replication crisis"

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u/shoutsfrombothsides 19d ago

We are, yes.

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u/Cyllid 19d ago

Pretty sure that's what the part of your quote that you deleted, implied.

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u/froznovr 19d ago

That, and I heard it's difficult to get funding from grants to do anything that isn't novel.

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u/BonJovicus 19d ago

This is the central issue. Because grants are incredibly competitive, there is no reason to give money to someone who is going to do something that has already been done. You can make arguments for doing the same experiment with a different methodology because of advancements in technology or something, but you can't propose to do a true replication experiment.

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u/Mylaur 18d ago

You could then be inspired by a paper, replicate the previous study as a process for your new study, thus hiding replication inside a novel-aimed grant.

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u/gurgelblaster 19d ago

Replication doesn't help if the experiment design is built to give a certain result and omit alternative hypotheses from the start.

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u/pimpmastahanhduece 19d ago

Also falsifiable. As the proposer, you must set terms which you accept will disprove yourself.

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u/BonJovicus 19d ago

It isn't even considered unglamorous. It just gets branded as derivative and boring. No major journal is going to publish a replication experiment that has the same results. And even if your results are different, you will then have to jump through hoops to have a good reason for why your results are different assuming the original result wasn't fraudulent. At that point you are years of funding down the drain on something that might not pan out.

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u/Mylaur 18d ago

Giving money to replicate the study, absolutely unflattering, busy work that's unfunded and uninteresting, from the founder's perspective. Plus what's the outlook of the scientific community? Novel work or the scientific police guy trying to replicate your experiment to fact check your paper.

I wish we didn't have this mentality.

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u/chokokhan 20d ago

Hilariously enough being too married to your hypothesis and cherry picking data to support it is a prime example of irrationality

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u/mortgagepants 19d ago

call the burn unit

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u/onwee 19d ago

That is certainly concerning for one author of one study, but that is why the scientific enterprise emphasizes peer-reviews before publication and replications after

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u/neobeguine 19d ago

We theoretically emphasize replication.  Sadly, those studies don't get you grant money or big publications so there's way less than there should be

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u/Xolver 20d ago

I tentatively get that, but it would be irrational to assume that purely based on some reading between the lines. ;-)

The solution is less about being suspect of the motives and more about critiquing the data, methodology, or independently verifying results. 

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u/lasagnaman 19d ago

That's not what they (the study) mean by irrational

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u/Sawses 19d ago

It also means that, if somebody was initially strongly opposed to the conclusion they ultimately reached, then it adds to both the credibility of the result as well as that of the researcher.

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u/manimal28 19d ago

Yes, but you have to have some hypothesis that is your basis to even do the study. Studies are not performed in a vacuum of intent.

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u/MakingTriangles 19d ago

For humans, motivated reasoning is reasoning. By and large it is the way we reason.

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u/SimoneNonvelodico 19d ago

Sure, but that's where actually being rigorous is important. You still can't possibly expect researchers to just pick hypotheses to test out of the aether without any investment or expectation.

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u/neobeguine 19d ago

There's a difference between favoring one hypothesis and having real bias.  This sounds like bias

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u/irafiki 19d ago

The best science stress tests a hypothesis, to prove it wrong almost. Bad science is when you design experiments to get the data that supports the hypothesis and it's suprisingly easy to end doing the latter. Also, the language used in this paper is just so casual and blalantly biased, the author says a whole lot of nothin'.

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u/Cypher1388 19d ago

Exactly design the test to prove the null.

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u/Tattycakes 19d ago

Wasn't there a story of a mathematician who had spent his whole career trying to prove a theorem and then one of his students firmly disproved it, and the guy shook his hand and thanked him because it was finally laid to rest, even though it wasn't in the direction that he had originally been hoping for

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u/AidosKynee 20d ago

I'm always skeptical of solo authors, particularly when the study is inflammatory. Apparently this author is on the editorial board of the journal, which is also a concern.

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u/Sinai 20d ago

This is about as far from inflammatory a study as you can get. This is a orthodox scientist with thousands of citations in the field arriving at the orthodox conclusion.

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u/Luk0sch 19d ago

Thing is, the way I understand the methods he used as presented in the article he didn‘t really test whether these people tend to make rational choices but whether they are able to do so in an environment that requires them to make rational choices. It‘s no surprise less intelligent people tend to fall for logical fallacies more often than those with a lot more cognitive potential. The question that‘s more important to me is, whether they actually use those skills in stressful or emotional situations.

Maybe I‘m wrong, not a native speaker and no scientific background, that‘s just the impression I got.

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u/Overbaron 19d ago

It’s inflammatory to people who refuse to accept that intelligence could be hereditary.

It goes too much against some peoples firmly rooted idea that all people are intellectually identical and the only difference is upbringing.

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u/loidelhistoire 19d ago

This field is an ideological minefield though, isn't it?

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u/RudeHero 19d ago

For sure. Compare it to nuclear research.

Nuclear research is important, but depending on ideology the people in charge could use the results to provide energy, or they could use them to kill a bazillion people

I suppose that applies to a lot of research

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u/randylush 19d ago

The problem is with physics, things are pretty concrete. You can be right or wrong, and it’s fairly easy to get a consensus on how things work.

With psychology, unfortunately people will push their ideology all the way down to the science. People are very wary to admit that there is a genetic component of intelligence or even just mental health, for fear of being labeled a eugenist.

This would be like being afraid to admit that uranium-235 is fissile because of the implications.

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u/lil_kleintje 19d ago

This kind of approach is already delivering some insane results in tech industry environment: rationalists, zizians, yarvinists, Musk/Thiel&Co... who knows what else is brewing.

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u/AidosKynee 19d ago

"Genetics causes bad behavior" is definitely treading a dangerous line, which Intelligence has been known to step over.

That's why I'm wary when it's a solo author doing the study, and one who's got a strong "in" with the journal. It's far too easy for one person's preconceptions to taint their research, and you pointed out that they were unable to even appear unbiased.

I'm not a psychologist, so I won't comment on the merits of the study itself. I'll leave it up to their field to replicate these findings or not.

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u/[deleted] 19d ago edited 19d ago

People like to pretend we are the one animal not behaviorally influenced by our genetics but we are, we know behavior traits can be selected for in various species the problem is a matter of a choice and we as a people need to choose not to engage in legally enforced Eugenics in people while still acknowledging reality that we don't know what we don't know and allowing research to proceed so we can perhaps still find treatments for problematic behaviors that may have a genetic or epigenetic component.

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u/Daan776 19d ago

The problem is in defining “rational”

While I personally agree that nearly all stupid people act irrationally, not all people who act rational are intelligent.

People who make poor decisions often have a thought process behind those decisions. It might be a suboptimal process, but not irrational.

And since rational has no clear defnition, it usually ends up being “when I agree with somebody they’re rational, when I disagree they’re irrational”

I personally think intelligence is related to genetics. But rationality is almost entirely the result of education.

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u/Dangerous_Funny_3401 19d ago

Similarly, I’m not sure that all intelligent people act rationally. Different people have different levels of control of their emotions. A person capable of rational thought might not act on it because they have an emotional reaction to the problem.

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u/Xolver 19d ago

Whenever I see words like "all" pop up in these kinds of science threads I perhaps irrationally get annoyed. Of course not all intelligent people act rationally. That's why it's said rationality and intelligence are correlated, they aren't one and the same. The best correlations still obviously have outliers not fitting with the pattern. 

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u/Sinai 19d ago

Just because the word is ambiguous in layman use doesn't mean it is in the study.

He used the precise definition of rational that the camp that disagrees with him arrived at. This definition is a quantifiable test they specifically devised.

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u/TurboGranny 19d ago

People like to pretend we are the one animal not behaviorally influenced by our genetics

Yup. People like to think we are aren't herd animals. They'll call it a "riot" instead of a "stampede". Those same people will think any talk of inherited traits is "eugenics" instead of it's actual definition. Traits are inherited in the same way see them inherited in other organisms. The problem with "eugenics" or any other selective breeding program is that you can't control for other traits you bring over leading to congenital issues combined with developing a homogenous genome which tends to lead to the collapse of the species. But these irrational people don't know the difference. They just attack anything and everything because thinking is hard.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Ok, how we categorize "Problematic" behavior? Is "Autism" problematic behavior? Is "Schizoid" a problematic behavior? Is "Narcissicsm" a problematic behavior?

To even entertain behavioral genetic engineering to cure "problematic" behavior is more problematic than those "problematic" behavior themselves.

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u/RudeHero 19d ago

I feel like "problematic" might be the wrong word. I might suggest "distressing" instead.

Some conditions in the DSM (I'm sorry, I won't look up examples, but I know for sure it is applied to addictions) say "in order to have this condition, patient must have X of Y symptoms/behaviors from this list... and it makes them unhappy and/or interferes with their life. Distressing

So some rubric like that

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

I agree. If they dislike their own behaviour, then they should be able to get help to change themselves.

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u/Nymanator 19d ago

I don't think that's sufficient, given that a symptom of dementia (for example) is anosognosia, the inability to recognize when you're ill and something is wrong (including lacking insight into one's own pathogical mental state or capacity despite obvious evidence - "Grandpa, we found you on the road 10 miles from home in a blizzard, and you were wearing nothing but your pyjamas" "So what? I was just going for a walk! You're making a big deal out of nothing!")

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u/RudeHero 19d ago

I don't think that's sufficient, given that a symptom of dementia (for example) is anosognosia

One, I would say that dementia interferes with someone's life. I also haven't yet personally met someone with advanced dementia that was happy about it

Two, we do have a process for stuff like psychosis and dementia. The burden of proof is VERY HIGH to trap/commit/treat someone against their will. Incredibly high. As it should be. Like, it needs to be really, really bad. But we do have a process for that and I don't think it should be changed

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u/vimdiesel 19d ago

Many times the distress is caused by friction with general society, or simply the fact that society is built for a certain type of mentality and certain implicit agreements, and fitting into that will cause extra energy and attention. That's without even taking into account other people's treatment.

If you are asexual in in a society that desperately needs more children you might be really pressured. In a society with overpopulation, maybe you wouldn't experience that distress.

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u/[deleted] 19d ago edited 19d ago

Generally that goes through medical boards and studies but yes people would like to be able to treat various mental disorders. Autism non functioning low function would be nice if it could be cured and allow people to live a normal full life not dependent on others for everything instead of being able to make their own choices. High level obviously doesn't matter they have autonomy friends in the spectrum. It would have been great if there was a better treatment for schizophrenia so an old friend of mine wouldn't have lost it and murdered his mother. That line you speak of is and always will exist but isn't a reason not to do the research. Is a reason for robust regulation of application of said knowledge. What do we allow testing for prior to birth and what are parents allowed to do with that information is a valid conversation, are we allowed to gain that understanding of knowledge and restricting even finding out is not a useful discussion in my opinion and only delays putting in proper safe guards.

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u/Arashmickey 19d ago

proper safe guards.

What are the political and social and political safeguards? How do we know if they're effective?

Given how the idea of genetic intelligence has fed slavery and war, I should to find expect slippery slope arguments and resistance in the comment section here.

The need for safeguard should have been apparent before this study, and it should be apparent now.

And although I'd like to be a vocal proponent for research in this matter, I'm given pause by the absence of discussion of effective safeguards here, where it's relevant.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Autism would be nice if it could be cured and allow people to live a normal full life not dependent on others for everything instead of being able to make their own choices.

Autism doesn't mean that you are dependent on others for everything. Only low-functioning autistics are dependent on others.

Unless you are nuanced enough to differentiate between different severities of autism when talking about Autism, I don't think should be talk about curing Autism.

People with High-functioning autism doesn't need to be cured.

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u/RudeHero 19d ago edited 19d ago

Sure. But I think we can agree it would be nice to "cure" type 3

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u/[deleted] 19d ago

It does for some not others it is a spectrum for my family there is someone who will always be in care that is unfortunate for my coworker he's fine he's fully functional.

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u/mud074 19d ago

People with High-functioning autism doesn't need to be cured.

Dear god I wish I could be cured of high functioning autism. I would take that pill in an instant.

I hate this "actually autism is a blessing" thing that is becoming common. It's a curse and I'm tired of people who don't have it insisting that it isn't. Social skills and connections are the most important things for well-being, and a disorder that destroys both of those things is debilitating even if I am able to function perfectly well in nearly every other way.

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u/Dracus_ 19d ago edited 19d ago

People with High-functioning autism doesn't need to be cured.

I think it's a valid opinion when mandatory taking into account the specific value system it stems from, but the only ones who should get to decide are parents to be. A thought experiment, but somehow I think that many if not most future parents when being present a guarantee in the form of genetic "drug" that their future baby will belong to the majority on the behavioral landscape (i.e. not on the spectrum, not LGBT, and obviously not with any congenital mental disorders) will strive to take that guarantee. They would understand it will make life for their child much simpler. If that becomes possible, this will likely lead to backsliding on human rights for and treatment of the remaining "others", but is it enough to straight up prohibit such interventions on principle?

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u/asshat123 19d ago

I think that many if not most future parents when being present a guarantee in the form of genetic "drug" that their future baby will belong to the majority on the behavioral landscape (i.e. not on the spectrum, not LGBT, and obviously not with any congenital mental disorders) will strive to take that guarantee.

I guess the other question we have to ask is do we as a society actually want this? Is it really beneficial in the long term to homogenize behavior? For more extreme cases, I think you can make that argument. But how much art, how much innovation has historically been driven by people with "abnormal" behaviors? Are diverse ways of thinking and diverse experiences not important to our development as a society?

As an example, Edvard Munch, who suffered from panic attacks and hallucinations, painted The Scream largely as an interpretation of that internal turmoil. He said that his mental illness was an important motivator for his art. I think that historically, a lot of art and innovation has been driven by people who are able/willing to think "outside the box", and being outside the box makes that easier. I'd be interested to see hard data, but in the modern age of actual diagnosis, it seems that things like ADHD are pretty common in "artsy" circles.

This is always the issue with this type of discussion, but you also have to look at what's considered "normal". Is normal sitting in front of a computer for 8 hours straight? Do we want docile and pliable masses? The world is constructed in a very particular way, if we were to genetically enforce the current order of things, that may not reflect what's best for humanity long term.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Pre-Natal genetic engineering probably will be inevitable. Because it will become parental right to conceive a child according to their desire.

However, majoritarian preference are short-sighted. Traits like Autism, ADHD and Gay have evolutionary function that helped humanity to survive to this day.

Majoritarian preference will decrease human genetic diversity and make human less genetically resillient.

If every human have same/similar genetics make up, then they all share same/similiar weakness. This will create a population that can be wiped out by a single threat.

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u/GaBeRockKing 19d ago edited 19d ago

Unless you are nuanced enough to differentiate between different severities of autism when talking about Autism, I don't think should be talk about curing Autism.

There's no point trying to suppress the conversation. You might avoid people calling for genetic treatments on autistic adults, but in terms for children, we can already use polygenic scoring to enable parents to do embryo selection for or against genes correlated with autism. The "eugenics" ship has sailed-- we already have designer babies.

Elsewhere, you ask the question:

Do "Autism" really need to be solved? Cured? Eradicated?

Well, talking about "need" is completely missing the point. If autism confers some sort of advantage such that parents want autistic children, it'll persist. But if no one willing to have children consents to having autistic children it won't. We've already moved past the realm of moral philosophers and into the realm of Darwin. Preventing further scientific advances won't change that.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Autism can still give evolutionary advantage in some circumstance but can still have negative stigma attached to it that make parent want to avoid it.

Just because the parent think it as negative, that doesn't mean it is actually negative. Anti-Vax parent prove to us how stupid parents can be to reject something beneficial just because negative and false stigma.

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u/Zero_Gravvity 19d ago

I would say even “high-functioning” autism is something that needs to be cured. Just because they don’t need help wiping their ass and can pay their taxes like a good productive citizen, it doesnt mean they’re high-functioning. I believe they would still be missing social cues, speaking with awkward communication habits, and generally failing to make connections - which is about as low-functioning as a person in modern society can be in my opinion (outside of being put under supervision).

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u/DrSitson 19d ago

It's a slippery slope for sure. There is nothing inherent bad about just gathering the knowledge though. It's always what people do with it that's dangerous.

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u/Secret_Cow_5053 19d ago

Narcissism is definitely problematic behavior. Anyone who has dealt with a narcissist directly would know what I mean.

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u/pirofreak 19d ago

Each condition you list causes untold human suffering and anguish over the courses of entire lifetimes, yes they are all problematic and should be eliminated if possible.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Narcissism? Maybe.

Low-Functioning Autism? Maybe.

High-Functioning Autism? Most of them don't think their condition as something bad and something needed to be cured.

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u/mud074 19d ago

Most of them don't think their condition as something bad and something needed to be cured.

Do you have a source for this? Because I sure wish I could be cured.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Then you are not most of them. Exception exist.

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u/SoldnerDoppel 19d ago

If it's diagnosable, it probably isn't good.
They aren't license to discriminate but something to treat and, where possible, mitigate.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Everything can be diagnosable as long as you categorize it as distinct condition.

Left-Handedness is something diagnosable, but there is nothing to treat or mitigate about that condition.

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u/SoldnerDoppel 19d ago

"Diagnosable" as in "described in the DSM-5".
Also, "probably" as in most of the diseases and disorders therein.
No, we don't need to sterilize psychopaths, but it's fair to recognize that they're not healthy.

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u/Irresponsible4games 19d ago

Disagree. Those conditions can all be life ruining. If something like that came to market the company would have a block buster

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u/mikethespike056 19d ago

that is the longest sentence ive ever read

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u/RudeHero 19d ago edited 19d ago

Right. Technically there's no such thing as free will, but it's impossibly complicated and for the sake of society we should generally behave and set rules as if we do have free will for the most part

Certain genetic stuff falls into that bucket, in my opinion. It's just too complicated and too easy to jump to oversimplified conclusions with to start going down the road of genetic predeterminism for anything but the most clear cut medical conditions. And I certainly don't want health insurance companies to have access to my genetic code

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u/LateMiddleAge 19d ago

It's at least potentially problematic because it combined poorly defined terms -- intelligence, rationality -- with hypocognitive value judgement -- lower, higher.

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u/LongbottomLeafblower 19d ago

The only way, if there was one, would be to practice eugenics on a case by case basis by finding a way to identify when a gene has been produced in a baby that leads to these supposed wrong behaviors,( if that's how it works in this theory.) The most perfect family seems to very often produce the most horrible people from time to time, but you can't say it's genetics because it's too random. Like autism or something is a mental handicap, maybe one day we'll be able to identify genetic handicaps as well, like a root cause. Imperfections essentially that arise during the forming of the new person could be traced back to a misaligned DNA strand or something.

But I'm just throwing ideas around I really don't think I understand it well enough to really give a good answer.

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u/Foolishium 19d ago

Do "Autism" really need to be solved? Cured? Eradicated?

Make them to have high function and gain independence? Sure.

Make them into neurotypical? That sound like mind control.

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u/finance_controller 19d ago

Science is a tool it's neutral, there's no morality.
You're shifting the "ability to cure" with "need to be cured".

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u/dtalb18981 19d ago

Or just cure the disease at the core.

Acting like autism is different than schizophrenia because some of the people with it can achieve basic things is wild.

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u/LongbottomLeafblower 19d ago

Would you want to be autistic if someone offered you the choice?

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u/dtalb18981 19d ago edited 19d ago

No.

I would not give myself a disability.

I literally said we should cure it.

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u/korphd 19d ago

Single genes don't do jackshit to define behaviors. the word you're looking for is 'disabled', not handicap, its not a bad word

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u/PragmaticPrimate 19d ago

That kinda makes it more weird: Did he as a professor really do all the work on this twin study by himself? If not, why aren't other people listed?

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u/Sinai 19d ago edited 19d ago

The paper specifically thanks those that helped collect the data, but they are not authors

We also thank the Genetic Epidemiology team at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute and in particular Richard Parker and Nicholas G. Martin for their support and persistence in making the complex collection process feasible.

But authorship isn't given to people just for doing data collection needed for a study.

Since this is his own field and is very basic correlation testing between two existing tests, he's perfectly capable of doing all his own methodology, analysis, and authorship, and since he runs his own lab, he's doing the administrative and funding work as well.

True, he could have assigned it to a grad student, but it's frankly boring as a study.

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u/manimal28 19d ago

particularly when the study is inflammatory

Its inflammatory that irrationality is a trait shared with intelligence?

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u/FlallenGaming 19d ago

I think the reason people find this topic sensitive is because of the historical manner in which ideas like this have been used to justify things like slavery and eugenics. 

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u/manimal28 19d ago

Saying people are unintelligent because of their skin color seems very different to saying that people who are irrational are unintelligent. If people were to attempt to define the concept of intelligence they would probably even use words like rational or logical. It just seems like the concepts are linked by default where a study claiming to verify this should in no way be inflammatory.

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u/MerijnZ1 19d ago

Saying people are unintelligent because of their skin color seems very different to saying that people who are irrational are unintelligent.

Yes, but we also immediately see people in the comments saying all autism should be 'cured', so I do see where some of the connotations are coming from

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u/FlallenGaming 19d ago

I think you are latching on to a secondary critique, which is not the one I was referring to. It's not a far leap to see an argument like this and worry about someone trying to revive eugenics because eugenicists based their claims on arguments from genetics.

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u/M116Fullbore 19d ago

Is a study that essentially says "people who make stupid decisions all the time are probably stupid" inflammatory?

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u/youareabathrobe 19d ago

Yes like Einstein 1905

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u/Minute_Chair_2582 19d ago

Not gonna lie, I would've had the same bias as the author. Which is why I would've been very careful about my own research on the matter.

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u/KristiiNicole 19d ago

So people who have mental illnesses that affect rationality are automatically less intelligent than those without mental illness?

OCD for example, can cause a lot of irrational thoughts and behavior, but I’ve also met some incredibly intelligent people who have it.

Or this another one of those exceptions to the rule kinda thing?

(To be clear, I am genuinely asking with curiosity, I’m not trying to start a disagreement!)

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u/snailbully 19d ago

Distorted and disorganized thought processes absolutely affect someone's cognitive abilities. During episodes of poor mental health, someone's mental functioning could be significantly reduced. I'm sure you could find a of studies on the subject as it seems fairly easy to test.

The big difference between mental illness and intellectual disability is that the former is transient, while the other is permanent.

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u/lasagnaman 19d ago

That's not what they meant by irrational

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u/Sinai 19d ago

"Automatically" dismisses the point of using populations in trials, but that being said, people with OCD have measurably lower IQ.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28864868/

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is associated with a moderate degree of underperformance on cognitive tests, including deficient processing speed.

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u/Tricky_Condition_279 19d ago

I think there are many other studies that back this claim. I won’t say they are universally unbiased, yet previous work has linked intelligence scores to tendency to engage in superstition, conspiracy-thinking, and entertaining supernatural beliefs.

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u/wilczek24 19d ago

Irrationality and lack of intelligence are very much not correlated. You do not get to claim to know the entire thought process that goes on behind a seemingly "irrational" decision.

Just reading the title of the post made me pretty sure that the author is exactly this type of person...

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u/ToWriteAMystery 19d ago

I mean, this study seems to show that it is

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u/wilczek24 19d ago

Sometimes, study results are biased because of the preconcieved notions of their authors. I suspect it might be one of those studies.

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u/ToWriteAMystery 19d ago

That’s a fair hypothesis; do we have any data to suggest this author has published biased research in the past?

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u/wilczek24 19d ago

Nope, it's just my personal opinion about the study, nothing more.