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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello, everyone.
1:39
It's Jim O'Shaughnessy, and today I have my colleague, Vatsal with me and a wonderful guest.
1:44
I'm very excited about this because this is something that I have been studying for quite some time, and we have the expert here, Mr.
1:55
, Professor, excuse me, Robert Plomin, author of Blueprint, How DNA Makes Us Who We Are, who's was also a professor of behavioral genetics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King's College London. Wow. Welcome, Robert.
2:13
Robert Plomin: Well, thank you very much.
2:13
I look forward to talking to you, Jim.
2:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So this has been a fascinating topic for me. So I'm 61.
2:17
And when I was going to college in the seventies, late seventies, there were behavioral study after behavioral study, after behavioral study in the psychology department, where they were looking for volunteers, and I volunteered for a few.
2:39
I had fun doing that, but even then I was like, "I get this, but don't genes matter at all?"
2:46
And one of the things that that happened that just came along, I ended up at the university of Minnesota, where they had done a study of identical twins separated at birth.
2:56
And that book blew me away because of the way it opens, comparing the two girls, and their environments could not be more starkly different.
3:03
One, a working class family on Long Island.
3:09
The other, a very wealthy on the Upper West Side, I believe, of New York City.
3:16
And that got the ball rolling.
3:16
As I studied, though, I saw that I didn't think that, "Ooh, I wonder if this is controversial."
3:20
And I saw the furor that Charles Murray generated with his book, The Bell Curve, in 1994.
3:27
And of course, I went and bought it because everyone was saying all these horrible things.
3:32
And I just thought, "Well, I need to decide for myself."
3:39
Well, that led me to Francis Galton, who I had more study in the work he had done, like in The Wisdom of Crowds area, for example.
3:50
And I mean, the man, talk about a polymath.
3:50
I mean, meteorology, weather maps, criminology, fingerprints, and then he gets to genetics. So here's my question.
3:56
And I think you are the man to answer this.
4:02
How are you able to speak truthfully about the field without kicking up a lot of furor?
4:13
Robert Plomin: Wow, great question and great introduction.
4:15
I mean, there's so many points that I'd like to underline and maybe we'll come back to some of them.
4:19
It's interesting you went to Minnesota, though. I went to Texas.
4:24
I started graduate school in 1970 at the Department of Psychology.
4:29
And that was the only place in the world that had a program in behavioral genetics.
4:34
And I went there not knowing about behavioral genetics because like you, no one was taught about genetics.
4:39
You could hardly find the word genetics in any psychology books at all.
4:43
But Minnesota was the second place that started up with a genetic program.
4:43
But it's interesting to think back then, there was just no genetics in psychology.
4:50
And despite the furor of The Bell Curve and Jensen and other things, I do think that there's been remarkable progress in terms of psychology accepting a more balanced view that recognizes the importance of genetics, as well as environment.
5:10
So I always took a long view on it.
5:10
Rather, you asked how I managed to avoid these conflicts.
5:16
Partly it's I'm a bit of a chicken really.
5:23
Early on in my career, I was asked to write this book by this famous publisher, Max Brockman, who was, John Brockman, the father of Max, who was sort of like a movie mogul.
5:28
You expect him smoking a cigar with his feet up on the desk, just trying to pitch something to you like that.
5:38
But back then in the 1980s, I was too chicken to write a book.
5:38
I was keeping my head down, and I thought...
5:44
If you take a long view on it, and you say psychology's an empirical science, my belief was, and I think it's been vindicated, that if enough research piles up, people will gradually come around to the notion.
6:00
And then the DNA revolution came along, which changed everything.
6:00
You can hardly pick up a newspaper these days and not read something about DNA.
6:05
So the contrast of that is people were saying I'm too soft.
6:11
You should hit people over the head with a two-by-four and say, "Look, genetics is important. Live with it.
6:16
But I do think it's a question of which strategy works best.
6:22
And it fits my personality better to say, "I'm going to keep my nose down, get to the grindstone, get the work out, and hope that eventually as the data pile up, which they have, there's a mountain of evidence now from many different methods showing the importance of genetics.
6:37
And I just hope that psychology would be convinced by that."
6:37
And I do think they have been.
6:41
There are very few behavioral geneticists relative to the rest of psychology.
6:46
There's a couple of hundred, maybe, whereas there's what 10,000 research psychologists in the US, I guess.
6:49
But we have most of the high-impact papers, I think, and we have much more than our share of grant money to do this sort of research.
7:02
So by all these indicators, I think it's safe to say that the battle's been won, that people now, not just psychologists, but people in general...
7:07
I think people in general were more reasonable about these things than a lot of academics about the importance of nature, as well as nurture.
7:17
But I think things have really come around, and now with the DNA revolution in, it's like a second stage of this rocket ship.
7:22
So we'll talk about that later, too, I expect.
7:27
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, very interesting.
7:30
And I stumbled across a quote from John Watson saying, who is a very well-known behaviorist nurture where he says, "Give me a dozen healthy infants well-formed and my own specified world in which to bring them up.
7:42
And I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to be any type of specialist I might select doctor, lawyer, artist, merchant, chief," and then he goes on to say, "Even a beggar or a thief, regardless of talents."
8:01
So, number one, I had read that quote when he gave it, I just shook my head.
8:09
And I couldn't believe that someone could have that much hubris to say that they can change somebody whose programs are loaded.
8:15
I often say and refer to Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate.
8:25
Robert Plomin: A brilliant book. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
8:29
And then, of course, all of the gene data comes out.
8:29
The question I have though, is I went back and researched and researched, and there seems to be a pendulum.
8:36
And it seems to be maybe controlled by the Overton window, why did behaviorism become so popular and seemingly, it's adherence, so filled with a very feverish desire to see that these ideas be in the majority? Robert Plomin: Yeah.
9:03
Well, I think the reason for it was that psychology in the 19th century was basically philosophical. It wasn't empirical. It was navel gazing.
9:07
And you want to understand processes, you just think real hard about them. Introspection.
9:13
Whereas when psychology wanted to become more scientific in the early 1900s, like with William James, who wrote Principles of Psychology in what 1890 or something like that, which really set the agenda for most of, especially American, psychology, but by the way, didn't mention the word genetics, because the word hadn't even been invented yet.
9:34
It hadn't been coined by that time.
9:34
But when psychology became more scientific, they wanted to get away from introspection, philosophy, and become empirical.
9:45
And that's where behaviorism came up.
9:45
Don't think about these processes. Look at the behaviors.
9:52
And then you can modify the behaviors.
9:52
You can do that quite substantially in animals, as farmers and...
9:56
If you own a dog, you know that you can train these dogs, and you use reinforcement techniques.
10:01
So it was good to focus on the behavior. It's objective.
10:05
And you can say with this reinforcement schedule, you'll get this sort of behavior.
10:10
And you can look at extinction of the behavior.
10:10
So it was a cool way of approaching behavior, but it wasn't all a psychology, by any means.
10:15
And it became environmentalist. This is the major point.
10:23
If you're only focusing on behavior and the extrinsic contingencies that change those behaviors, you can easily make that an environmentalism.
10:28
The idea that all that matters is the environment.
10:34
And that's how behaviorism hooked up with environmentalism in the twenties.
10:39
Now, genetics was getting really hot in biology at that time, but then along came Nazi Germany, and any talk about genetics was verboten for many decades, really until the '60s and '70s.
10:53
So psychology then, in the '50s, especially after the world was completely dominated by learning theory, which is great, but there's so much more to psychology than reinforcement schedules and these learning contingencies.
11:09
So I think all the way into the '60s, really, psychology was dominated by environmentalism, the view that we are what we learn, and it comes from Freud.
11:14
Some people say Freud was sort of biologic, but he really wasn't.
11:19
I mean, he would put the blame for all the psychopathology, say, on what happened to you early in life.
11:25
More specifically, it's a mother-blaming thing.
11:31
It's what your mother did to you in the first few years of life.
11:31
And when I was in graduate school, the psychopathology textbooks actually said that schizophrenia is caused by what your mother did to you in the first few years of life.
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And God, if people think genetics is wicked, try environmentalism.
11:44
I mean, imagine, 1% of the population is diagnosed with schizophrenia at some point in their life.
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And imagine, you don't see anything until their late teens, early 20s. So here's your kid.
11:53
Seems to be perfectly okay.
11:53
Maybe he gets a little withdrawn and weird in adolescence, but many adolescents are weird and withdrawn.
12:04
And then suddenly in the 20s or so, they have a psychotic episode, and they lose touch with reality, and they're diagnosed with schizophrenia.
12:10
And can you imagine then being told, "Well, it's what you did to the child in the first few years of life."
12:16
I mean, how wicked is that because you can't change that now anyway.
12:20
So parents of schizophrenics and other psychosis are the biggest supporters of genetic research.
12:27
And I've heard people say, "Well, sure it gets them off the hook."
12:32
And that pisses me off so much because they don't belong on a hook.
12:37
It's not their fault in that sense of refrigerator moms was one of the ideas, that they were cold and aloof with their child and didn't give their child love.
12:48
It's just so bad, really, what was done with environmentalism.
12:48
And I just emphasize that because, for some reason, genetics has the black hat on and the environment has the white hat on.
12:59
And man, I don't see that at all.
12:59
I think more evil has been done in support of environmental.
13:06
You think about Stalinism and Mao.
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These are all environmental approaches.
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They think there are no individual differences between people.
13:13
The state can make people, mold them to be what they want them to be. And it's a huge mistake.
13:17
Well, sorry to go off on that rant, but...
13:22
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, I 100% agree on that part. Certainly the Nazis.
13:25
Boy, those guys really screwed up a lot of research, not just into genetics, but into nutritional research.
13:32
There had been a growing body of evidence that people who said.
13:40
"Get fat out of your diet," were wrong.
13:47
Unfortunately, all of that research was being done by Germans.
13:47
By the way, I might add, most of whom were German Jews.
13:53
But we painted Germans with a broad brush.
13:53
And so literally, that type of research in nutrition was basically abandoned in the United States after World War II.
14:08
Robert Plomin: I didn't know about that, Jim. That's interesting.
14:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: But does your research find a link between high IQ and the incidence of schizophrenia?
14:17
Robert Plomin: Yeah, that's been debated a lot.
14:17
There is a relationship even at a genetic level, but it's a weak one and really...
14:21
You're not really supposed to say "schizophrenic people" anymore.
14:26
You're supposed to say, "people with schizophrenia".
14:30
The point is they're people.
14:30
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Correct.
14:31
Robert Plomin: They differ in all the ways we differ, in personality and in intelligence.
14:32
So there may be a weak link there, but it's debatable.
14:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Interesting.
14:40
So the whole nature versus nurture.
14:40
And my question around this is twofold because I found something interesting in what you've written or said.
14:47
I watch a lot of your podcasts.
14:51
And that is, how is it that environmental factors are not 100% environmental.
14:51
You make an excellent point about people who score well and have a high G will go off in search of books, if they grow up in a family that doesn't have books.
15:05
But you also made another observation that I'd like to ask you about.
15:11
And that is that IQ has the highest match when you look at who marry one another.
15:17
And I have to presume that they're not trading their Stanford-Binet IQ tests.
15:23
So this is a inherent, almost like evolution designed us to seek out evolutionarily fit partners to procreate with.
15:32
Is there some sort of intuitive way...
15:41
You mentioned vocabulary.
15:41
Are there others that we don't even know about, but are being driven by maybe a genetic component?
15:47
Robert Plomin: Do you mean other traits other than intelligence?
15:51
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, no.
15:54
Specifically to the man or the woman sizing one another up.
15:54
And so they've gone through all of the symmetry of the face and the width of the hips, in terms of the female.
16:05
And they've gone through all of the parts for the male.
16:05
Looks like he's going to be a good provider, isn't going to run away on me.
16:10
One thing that always amuses me is the reason most babies look like their father for the first five weeks is because way, way back when, fathers could get rather violent if they thought that child wasn't his.
16:22
But are there other, I guess we could call them tells, that people are unconscious of, but making use of when evaluating someone's fitness, I guess, as a partner?
16:41
Robert Plomin: Well, your examples were mostly evolutionary ones.
16:44
And my friend David Buss has a new book.
16:44
He's written for 20 years about this topic of, for example, males tend to go for beauty and youth, as an index of reproduction in women, and women tend to go for men with more resources.
16:57
That's at this very not, I would say, gross level of on average, the human species does this.
17:04
But in genetics, we're talking about individual differences.
17:10
And when you say that spouses are similar, say for intelligence, what we're talking about there is a positive assortment that is brighter women tend to choose brighter men.
17:21
And that also means that the lower end, people who are say, less verbal, tend to choose spouses who are similar to them.
17:27
And it's always like birds of a feather flock together.
17:33
There's no examples, really, of opposites attracting other than for gender.
17:38
Now this is important to me because a lot of people still say, "Ah, you can't measure intelligence. What's intelligence?"
17:43
And that old quote from E. B.
17:49
Boring, that intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.
17:49
It's completely circular. It's really not true.
17:54
And this is a good example of that, because if you're single and you go to a singles' bar or something, within a few minutes, a few seconds, really, you get some sense of how intelligent this person is.
18:03
And sex is one thing, but what are you going to talk about when you wake up in the morning?
18:09
So I think you are able to pick up, especially on verbal ability, which has higher assortative mating, then say spatial ability.
18:21
At the bar, you're not really checking out how good they are at spatial ability or even their memory for that matter, but vocabulary and verbal ability within a few minutes, I'd almost like to do a study on that.
18:30
How many seconds does it take you to, in talking to somebody, to get a sense of how high they are in verbal ability.
18:35
And it matches you because if you're of low verbal ability, you're not going to know what this person's talking about if they're a high verbal ability. So it goes both ways.
18:45
But I do find that a fascinating example of how, in the real world intelligence, is there.
18:49
And for people who say, "Oh, you can't measure intelligence," I think, just if you're with some of your friends, just say, "Well, I sort of mean this abstract reasoning.
18:58
I don't mean learn skills," which is what people mean by intelligence, learning ability in new situations.
19:03
I bet you, you and your friends can come up with some items that measure intelligence that correlate maybe 0.
19:08
8 with standard measures of intelligence.
19:15
It isn't that hard because G, general cognitive ability, which we call G, is so pervasive in life.
19:20
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Very, and that's another thing that fascinates me.
19:25
As I was preparing for this interview, I had the thought, "Is there another single factor that correlates," and I will use the normal phrase, correlation does not prove causation, "but it is there another single variable that has such high correlates with so many aspects of life."
19:52
Robert Plomin: It's a great question.
19:52
And I'm quite sure the answer to that is no.
19:54
And we've been talking about physical characteristics and medical traits, as well.
19:58
G is just so pervasive in life.
19:58
And if you start thinking about what it is, it's not so surprising that it has such widespread effects on mortality even, and on health in later life.
20:10
So it is a very important variable, and I've been interested in education.
20:16
And in education, there's really antipathy towards intelligence.
20:16
Yet, no teacher can stand in front of a classroom of kids and not know what intelligence is.
20:25
Some kids just pick things up very quickly and others, it takes a long time for them to get it.
20:29
So it's kind of Alice in Wonderland thing, about people denigrating intelligence.
20:36
I just don't get it, and I'm less patient with it now than I used to be.
20:45
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, that was very...
20:45
I have a funny story for you.
20:48
I went to Catholic grade school, although I'm a agnostic these days.
20:48
And I was literally punished for being smart.
20:53
We had this little SRA program, which was a reading program. This is in the '60s.
21:01
And the objective was you read the card, you wrote out the answer to the questions about what the card told you about, and you're given a certain amount of time. Well, I loved reading.
21:13
And so I just plowed through, and without...
21:13
I guess this is one of those ask for forgiveness rather than permission.
21:20
And so I completed, I completed the entire series.
21:26
Well, the teacher who was teaching me was not at all happy about that.
21:33
And when the other kids were working on their SRA, I was made to sit making a Christmas tree with my hands on the desk and literally sit there.
21:40
So one of the many reasons I fell away from that particular branch of religion, but also the times very different.
21:50
I just thought, even at the time, I think, although memory is an unreliable narrator, that why don't you send me to the library?
22:02
I mean, how hard is that? Robert Plomin: Yeah.
22:06
Well, I had a very different experience growing up in the Catholic school system of Chicago.
22:08
I think intelligence testing is what really saved me in a way.
22:14
We did a lot of testing, and as a result, in elementary school, I got to go to an expensive, private Catholic high school and academy.
22:20
And then I had no plans to go to university because no one in my family ever went to university.
22:27
And yet, because of this testing, they got me a scholarship to go to DePaul University, where not only did I get everything free, they paid me to go.
22:38
And so being a good inner city, Chicago kid, I worked full time.
22:44
I got all this extra money.
22:44
It was a real scam for me.
22:48
Vatsal Kaushik: Speaking of schools and education, one thing which you've written about in Blueprint is how expensive fancy schools don't really add much value to the cognitive abilities of students.
22:58
What they are instead doing is they are selecting smart and hardworking students in the first place.
23:03
So it's a self-selection thing.
23:03
And somewhere in there, you write that students from selective secondary schools are much more likely to be accepted by the best universities, but this benefit largely disappears after controlling for selection factors.
23:19
So can you help us understand this and what selection factors are these which when removed, give us the opposite result.
23:28
Robert Plomin: Yeah, right.
23:28
Well, I'm glad you brought that up.
23:30
I think that is an important finding, especially here in the UK, where we have much more selection at the secondary school level, at the high school level, which isn't as common in the United States.
23:40
So people make a big deal about it.
23:40
Parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to send their kids to better schools, even at the kindergarten level and then the primary school level and the secondary school level, so that they get them into the best universities.
23:55
Well, it works in the sense that the kid, we have these national tests, standardized tests in England at the end of compulsory schooling at age 16, called GCSE tests.
24:07
And the kids in the private schools get a whole grade higher on average than the kids in the state schools.
24:13
So big difference people.
24:13
That's a correlation though, between private schooling and how well you do on these tests.
24:17
And as Jim mentioned, correlation does not imply causation, but if you correlate something environmentally like going to an expensive school with some outcome, like doing better on achievement tests, people always interpreted causally.
24:32
It's not crazy to say, well, yeah, they did better because they went to a better school.
24:38
But when you have a genetic perspective, you always say, well, what about genetics?
24:42
And, it turns out in this case, you can show that it's just, as you said, the reason the kids do so much better is they selected kids who are better at school.
24:52
Their achievement test scores are better and they're more intelligent too.
24:57
They actually administer tests that are like intelligence tests and they interview the kids as well.
25:02
So not surprisingly those kids who have been selected because they do well at school.
25:07
They do well at school, in the private school too, but there's no added value of these schools.
25:12
It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
25:12
You think about it this way? It's a no brainer deal.
25:18
You select the best kids, kids who do really well at school and then, oh, lo and behold, they do well at school.
25:22
But it is a big deal in England, because parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, getting their kids into the right schools and if they're doing it because they want their kids to get higher scores, forget it, it doesn't work.
25:37
And I think they'll tell you if they're being honest about it, it's for other things.
25:41
They want their kids to be with the right sort of people, those sorts of snobbish reasons.
25:45
And maybe it makes sense.
25:45
Like in the UK, judges are what two thirds are from these private schools.
25:52
Even the only 7% of the kids go to these private schools.
25:58
So maybe contacts and those sorts of things are important, but they're anti-meritocratic though, in a way aren't they?
26:05
They're advantaged rather than ability based.
26:10
So anyway, you got me going on this topic. It's a good question.
26:10
And basically I want to say that whenever people...
26:17
my blood pressure always goes up reading newspapers, because whenever there's a correlation between an environmental measure and an outcome, like parents who do this, who have lots of books in their home, have kids who do better at school.
26:29
You can tell them over and over again, as Jim says, correlation does not imply causation yet, they will inevitably interpret that correlation causally.
26:35
The parents are causing their kids to be better.
26:42
So I just would like people to just try a simple trick, just to always say, what about genetics?
26:47
So with the case of books, books in the home is a single best predictor of how well kids are going to do at school.
26:51
And you say, sure, because if there's books in the home, the kid reads more, the parents read more to the kid, but what about genetics?
26:59
The books don't get on the shelves by themselves.
27:05
Some parents who have more books have kids who do better at school.
27:05
So really it's like parents who do better at school, who are more educated, have kids who do better at school.
27:15
And once you phrase it that way, the genetic hypothesis looms large I think.
27:15
So this actually goes back to just the previous question.
27:21
Jim asked two questions in a row and the first one was about genetic influence on environmental measures.
27:27
And I do think that's one of the more paradoxical findings that come out of this research.
27:27
Most of the environmental measures we use in psychology show genetic influence.
27:33
And it's like books in the home.
27:40
You think, well, books don't have DNA.
27:40
How can they show genetic influence?
27:45
But it can show genetics because it's a function of the parents and their education.
27:45
And so parents who are more educated, have more books, and we know that parental education is genetically influenced, like most traits are.
27:59
But it's true, almost all our environmental measures, even like life events are used in what about 10,000 studies.
28:04
And what are life events?
28:09
Well, they're things like getting into financial difficulty, losing your job, having difficult relationships with people.
28:15
And it's important to recognize that these psychological environments are not the environment out there independent of us.
28:25
It goes back to the environmentalism.
28:25
The idea, that we're like rats in a cage and someone out there shocks us, but that's not the way the environment works for us.
28:30
Our environments are experiences.
28:35
We actually create these environments.
28:35
Just as Jim was saying, bright kids they use their environments more intelligently.
28:42
They extract more information from that.
28:42
And teachers see this, they give the same lecture to their kids, but some of them are picking it up.
28:53
They're answering questions.
28:53
They're looking up more information.
28:53
They're getting so much more out of that same information than some of the other kids.
28:58
So the idea of genetic influence on environment, we call it the nature of nurture, is I think a very important finding and it suggests really how genetics works.
29:10
This goes back to what Jim was asking about.
29:17
Really, if you take vocabulary, people are often surprised to find that the most heritable cognitive trait is vocabulary, because the first thing people say as well.
29:27
But how can vocabulary be inherited?
29:27
We don't have DNA coded for words, but if you understand genetics, you understand that we're just talking about genetic influences that makes some kids pick up.
29:39
They tune into the verbal channel to a greater extent.
29:45
So they pick up words, they use them.
29:45
Like I have one granddaughter, I have six grandchildren.
29:50
And one of them is just amazing and how interested she is in the nuances of words.
29:55
She always wants to know, why did you use that word rather than this word?
29:59
What does this word mean?
29:59
And then my five other grandchildren, it's the typical, whatever, you know what I mean, they don't care, and who's going to develop the better vocabulary.
30:09
So it's not that this one grandchild is sitting around reading dictionaries.
30:15
She's using words, she's interested in words.
30:15
It's the same thing as like with musical ability or math ability.
30:20
If you see these gifted mathematical kids, which I've seen, they live math.
30:25
They joke with their friends about math.
30:25
And so I've come to think that genetic influence is more a matter of appetites.
30:32
It's what you like to do.
30:38
It's how you spend your mental energy more than aptitudes.
30:38
People think of genetics as hard wiring in the brain.
30:44
But I don't think that's the way it works.
30:44
I think it just gives you these nudges in certain directions.
30:50
And that's also important to recognize because the other problem people have with their genetics, they think of it as fatalistic.
30:56
If it's genetic, it's determined, you can't do anything about it. And that's also wrong.
31:03
There are thousands of single gene disorders and those are hardwired.
31:09
If you have this gene for Huntington's disease, you will die from Huntington's disease.
31:09
No matter what your exercise regime is, or your nutrition, nothing else will matter.
31:14
You'll die from Huntington's unless something else kills you first.
31:19
And the problem is that's the way people learned about genetics.
31:23
That's what Mendel studied.
31:23
A single gene characteristics in pea plants.
31:28
We say necessary and sufficient in the hard wired sense.
31:28
But the difference though, with these complex disorders like heart disease or diabetes, Type 2 diabetes and complex traits like all the things we study in psychology, personality, psychopathology, cognitive abilities, all of these things show substantial genetic influence, but it's not a single gene.
31:54
It's thousands of little genetic effects.
31:54
And the reason that's important is it makes it probabilistic rather than deterministic.
32:00
So well, another long rant, I'm sorry.
32:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, please. They are perfect.
32:03
But that leads me to the question.
32:04
It's- So I'm sort of baffled by the idea that people readily accept height as a genetic determined factor, right?
32:11
I don't think I could ever run into anyone who had very tall or very short children who wouldn't accept.
32:18
Well, of course that's because of genes, you make the point, actually that weight actually has a much higher genetic component to it, which I find interesting.
32:30
Robert Plomin: Jim, that's higher than what people expect.
32:32
It's less than for height. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
32:36
Thank you for the clarification. That's correct.
32:38
Higher than people expect.
32:38
They readily are willing to accept all of these things over here and the physical makeup of humanity.
32:43
But when we get over to intelligence general G, many reject that and your earlier answer really informed part of it, which is it is probabilistic. It is not deterministic.
33:00
And I think that's like one of my go-to quotes always is, we are deterministic thinkers living in a probabilistic world, hilarity or tragedy often in suit.
33:12
Robert Plomin: It's really good, you know?
33:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Thank you.
33:16
How do you get people who aren't going to read your book?
33:16
For example, they might listen to this podcast, but they're not going to read your book.
33:22
They're not terribly interested in it.
33:27
And a takeaway I've been chatting with some people, in anticipation of having the pleasure of talking with you and what they immediately...
33:32
It's kind of like you mentioned earlier, where people will see the correlation immediately, books in house means smarter kid.
33:44
I'm going to load my house full of books and it doesn't work that way.
33:49
How do you deal with the people who are basically, you know what, it's my genes, I'm not going to make any effort here because any effort I make is going to be futile, and I'm just going to go along and let my genes determine my fate?
34:07
Robert Plomin: Have you run into anyone like that?
34:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Not personally, online I have.
34:13
Robert Plomin: Well, that is a worry always.
34:13
I hear that expressed, it's a concern, but I don't run into that either.
34:17
And, now that we can actually use DNA to predict behavior, we can actually predict school achievement better with DNA, from birth than we can from say, measures of the quality of schools that kids go to.
34:36
So really DNA in the last few years has been making great strides, using the DNA alone just from a cheek swab to predict educational achievement, and 27 million people have paid about a 100 or 200 bucks to have their DNA tested mostly for ancestry.
34:48
But also you get this information about complex traits.
34:54
So you can find, for example, your genetic propensity for height, not surprisingly mine is very high because I'm 6'4.
35:00
5 or something like that.
35:07
And it's highly heritable.
35:07
So you'd expect my DNA to be a pretty good predictor of it.
35:13
Height isn't a 100% heritable, maybe 80% heritable, 90%.
35:13
And DNA only predicts about a half of that.
35:20
So, it's not a perfect prediction.
35:20
But what's interesting for me is that my highest polygenic scores for weight and along the lines of what you said, does that mean that I just give up and say, well, I'm a genetic fatty.
35:31
I can't do anything about it.
35:31
And I've never seen anyone do that.
35:35
Instead for me, it's been very motivating because you put on these few pounds every year, but you never lose those pounds.
35:41
And, I always thought it's easier for me to put on weight and it's harder to lose it.
35:47
I have to work harder to keep my weight down.
35:50
Then some other friends who, can just eat anything and they don't seem to gain weight.
35:54
So I find it's helpful in the battle of the bowls, to know that it's a lifelong battle and I've got to engineer my environment to make it easier for me to resist that.
36:05
I just can't have junk food in the house.
36:05
If I have a bag of potato chips and people say, oh, just get a grip, just get some control, self control, but it's easy for skinny people to say, but for people with this sort of genetic propensity to put on weight, it's hard.
36:21
Like at night, when you're tired or whatever, you say, oh, I'll just plunk in front of the TV and eat a few potato chips.
36:26
The bag's gone inevitably.
36:32
And you could say, well, I just don't have enough willpower, but that's the way genetics works.
36:36
It's in these whispers really.
36:36
It's not like I have a gene for potato chips that makes me go to the cupboard and pick out my chips and eat the whole bag of chips. It's not like that.
36:47
Satiety, it is another important genetic mechanism, which means feeling full.
36:53
Now, normal people when you feel full, you wouldn't want to eat anything else because it might make you sick.
36:58
But, I go out to a restaurant with friends I'm full, don't want any more food? No, thanks.
37:03
I've had enough, but there's food left on the table.
37:07
And before you know it, the food's all gone. I'm eating it.
37:12
Even though I say I'm full and it's just, I don't have as much of a sense of satiety, and a lot of this comes probably evolutionarily.
37:18
In the stone age, when you didn't know, when you were going to get a next meal, you do well to eat as much as you can.
37:23
And in fact, to put on as much weight as you can, because fat is energy and storage.
37:29
So my genes are probably good if we were still back in the stone age, but unfortunately we're not.
37:35
And in the fast food nation, where you're bombarded by food cues all the time, it works against you.
37:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I used to say that in the battle between the dieter and the brownie, the brownie always wins.
37:53
And, I looked at that more as a temporal phenomenon, than anything else because people often have very high recency bias.
38:01
Over-weighting anything that has happened recently or that they had read about or whatever.
38:08
Well, the same is true with that brownie.
38:08
Because, they can have the brownie and tell themselves, well, they're having the brownie.
38:13
I won't have brownies in the future.
38:18
A future me is going to be really good here, but this'll maybe even be my last brownie, and it's not your last brownie.
38:24
And, I think that the idea of will or external motivation also needs to be examined because, not to pick on anyone in particular, but there are a lot of these self-help seminars that actually do charge people up.
38:43
And if you look at the psychology that they use, the persuasive techniques that have been cataloged from the book influence on, they get them charged up for a day or two.
38:53
And, then that external will dissipates and it goes away.
39:00
So I always try to get people to understand that if they can come up with a process in, my field is investing.
39:06
And so I write a lot about behavioral texts.
39:06
Lucky for me, the arbitrage in human nature is the last sustainable edge, because you can tell them, your biases and everyone thinks that is true of everyone else, except for me, which is really great.
39:28
But what you were just saying also had me think about a minority report.
39:32
I don't know whether you've seen that. [crosstalk] Okay.
39:38
So, what happens when the research becomes more common in society?
39:38
People say, yeah, that makes sense.
39:48
Especially when you talk about the swab in the cheek, being the best indicator of educational achievement.
39:53
It's very easy for me to see a politician saying, well, look this is the highest indicator over here.
40:00
I bet we can find highest indications for criminal behavior.
40:07
And wouldn't it be great if we just locked them up ahead of the crime? What do you think?
40:12
What do you think about that?
40:13
Robert Plomin: Well, first of all, the genetics of criminal behavior is not straightforward.
40:17
You could talk about psychopathy, for example, which shows more genetic influence, but the legal system is such, and it's influenced a lot by socioeconomic considerations.
40:29
It's all kind of tricky, but everything shows genetic influence.
40:35
So undoubtedly criminal behavior will also show some genetic influence as well.
40:41
So theoretically, you could get DNA to predict criminal behavior.
40:41
So far the DNA predictions are pretty weak for criminal behavior, but I think where this is going to happen, it's happening already.
40:53
In China, their goal for 2050 is to not just test DNA, but actually sequence all 3 billion bases of DNA for each child, each child born in China.
41:01
They are actually supposedly doing 50% now.
41:09
And by 2050 they expect to do all newborns.
41:09
Now, do you know, we already do DNA testing in almost all developed countries at birth, but we only do it for a handful of genes, but it is genetic testing.
41:25
And it's important like Phenylketonuria, is one thing that all countries do. It's untreated.
41:31
This single gene disorder causes severe mental retardation.
41:31
But if you knew about it early, you can avoid most of the problem by giving kids a special diet that's low in phenylalanine.
41:44
It's a metabolic disorder so that you can't metabolize phenylalanine.
41:44
And that comes from breast milk, especially colostrum.
41:49
The first breast milk is very rich in this.
41:49
So if you don't intervene early, most of the damage is done.
41:54
And so this is just such an obvious example...
42:00
The cost benefit analysis is off the wall.
42:00
The treatment costs nothing, basically.
42:08
Whereas this we're talking about lifelong institutionalized mental disability, if you don't do this.
42:12
So, unfortunately there are not many other examples like that that are so clear cut, whether it's a simple sort of environmental intervention.
42:21
It is important to note though, that that intervention is not eugenics.
42:21
It's not even gene editing, which is something that might be able to be done in the future.
42:26
We could talk about that later. It's pretty complicated.
42:30
But it's an environmental intervention.
42:30
So causes and cures aren't necessarily related.
42:36
It's a simple single gene cause of this mental disability, but the treatment is completely environmental, a diet.
42:42
So it brings up a lot of good examples.
42:49
The point is that we are already doing DNA testing at birth.
42:49
And you mentioned minority report, which was always kind of silly somehow that you were going to get this from neural brain patterns.
42:57
But it's not silly if as you say, you did it in terms of genes, and that's really what the movie Gattaca is about, this 1969 movies that was so prescient.
43:08
This was before the human genome sequence was thought of, and before anybody really thought you'd be able to find the genes, that contribute to these complex traits.
43:17
And so it was amazingly prescient about the science and where it would go, but it came to this conclusion that Gattaca is sort of a byword for genetic determinism and totalitarianism, but it needn't be.
43:29
Dysgenic sort of application of genetics doesn't follow.
43:39
And in fact, Gattaca is more subtle than that.
43:39
It's not a totalitarian government, in the movie, the government people look like stormtroopers or something, but it's actually in a way worse than that.
43:51
It's, more real in the sense that it's actually led by consumers.
43:55
So DNA dating is the hot thing now.
44:01
That's in the movie Gattaca, and that's because a woman wants to find out about her prospective spouse.
44:06
So she gets some of his hair and surreptitiously does his DNA and people don't have to do it.
44:14
You don't even have to have DNA testing at birth in Gattaca, but if you don't, it's harder to get insurance.
44:19
It's harder to get your kid into a good school.
44:19
It's harder to get into a good job.
44:23
So in the movie, Vincent is the hero.
44:23
Ethan Hawke was brilliant in the movie.
44:31
He has myopia and a cardiovascular risk, so he can't get into schools because it's an insurance risk.
44:37
He can't get a decent job and he wants to be an astronaut of all things.
44:41
And his younger brother though, his parents were kind of like hippies and they didn't want to do what the state wanted them to say to do, but then next time around, they bought into the whole thing, which included prenatal embryo testing, which is something that's just happening now.
44:58
So again, Gattaca is an amazing film, but the dystopia that it depicts, it does not necessarily follow.
45:03
And I'm a cheerleader for the DNA revolution, because this is huge.
45:11
These advances are huge, even prenatal, genetic testing, that's huge.
45:17
And even bigger one is pre conceptual testing, where spouses do as they did in Gattaca.
45:24
They find out about each other's genetic strengths and weaknesses, but especially to pick up on the single gene disorders that we all have, but most of them are recessive.
45:36
That means you need a copy from your mother and a copy from your father.
45:40
If you only get one copy, you're a carrier.
45:40
So for PKU, for example, one in 50 Caucasians are carriers, but PKU is only one in 10,000.
45:46
It takes two of these carriers to mate.
45:46
And when they do one quarter of their offspring will actually have the disorder.
45:54
They'll get a double-dose.
45:58
And you could eliminate most of these single gene disorders if people found out about these mutations in their spouse.
46:04
So this is something that's...
46:12
I think there's a lot of joking about DNA romance.
46:12
There's a dozen companies now that try to sell DNA testing for matchmaking and it sounds very frivolous but you could argue even within dating, there's so much nonsense that goes on, on these dating websites.
46:32
That it's not ridiculous to think about adding DNA testing to it, to get something that's at least closer to objective.
46:37
But this is laughable for most people, but there's a very serious component.
46:43
Maybe the major implication of this DNA testing is that you could in one generation eliminate most of the single-gene recessive disorders and Ashkenazi Jews did this beginning 10 years ago when the DNA revolution just started because Tay-Sachs it's so much more common in that ancestral group.
47:01
And so they took it on themselves because in part, because a lot of the meetings are arranged anyway, but they made it part of this process to actually test for Tay-Sachs disease.
47:13
And so if a couple each had a recessive allele, a form of the gene, they each had a mutation for Tay-Sachs.
47:21
Then you knew that a quarter of their offspring would have Tay-Sachs.
47:26
And so they were advised against marrying and you wouldn't have to, you could have a kid you could do in vitro fertilization and you could determine which 25% of those embryos, the fertilized eggs have Tay-Sachs and you can only implant one anyway.
47:45
But this is the nightmare for a lot of people, designer babies.
47:51
But if you're doing in vitro fertilization, because you're afraid of some familial risk for a genetic mutation, for example, or because you can't get pregnant, you can only implant one of these embryos.
48:03
So you can decide not to decide to choose one, but that's a decision anyway.
48:10
And if I told you, "Well, here's one that has a fatal disease.
48:16
They're going to die a horrible death in the first four years of life." Is that any more...
48:21
How ethical is that to say, "Well, I don't care.
48:21
Just pick one at random."
48:21
Even though we know 25% of them have this terrible disease, Tay-Sachs is bad news.
48:27
So again, you push all my buttons here at Jim.
48:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, if it gets you telling our audience all those fascinating things, then it's worth it.
48:43
What's funny is you anticipated my Gattaca question so. Robert Plomin: Yah.
48:48
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well done. Well done.
48:48
And I too think that's a great movie.
48:50
One of the overlays that I think we have as a society is a default to pessimism and a default towards dystopias, as opposed to utopias, because I mean honestly dystopias are just so much more interesting, the villain is here, the protagonists are down here.
49:14
Robert Plomin: If it bleeds, it leads right?
49:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly, exactly.
49:17
And then I just finished awhile back rereading David Deutsche's book, The Beginning of Infinity.
49:23
And if you haven't read it, I would recommend it highly, he has a- Robert Plomin: I don't know it.
49:28
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, he's a professor at Oxford.
49:29
And basically it is why we have advanced as quickly as we have.
49:37
And it's due to the enlightenment.
49:37
I won't do the whole book.
49:37
You know what I will do, is I will put a thread that I wrote recommending it up on Twitter.
49:46
Robert Plomin: Great, that should be good.
49:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And He's a very fascinating guy.
49:47
And he demolishes pessimistic argument after pessimistic argument.
49:50
And One of the key findings for me at least, was we have this awful habit of believing we can prophesize future knowledge, and we can't.
50:05
Just listening to you 10 years ago.
50:05
I don't know how many people were prophesizing that you could eliminate a disease because of a single-gene.
50:12
I don't think anyone was.
50:18
Robert Plomin: You know what's more interesting?
50:18
The Human Genome Project, which sequenced all three billion base pairs of DNA, supposedly in 2003.
50:26
But in the last 10 years it's really been done where we know all the sequences of DNA.
50:32
People did that as pure blue sky science.
50:32
But all of the big advances that have come from that, not one of them was anticipated.
50:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
50:43
And that's the nature of discovery.
50:43
It's the nature of many of our...
50:43
Well, we all know the story of penicillin and he just forgot.
50:48
And a variety of those things.
50:48
If you go through all of the great scientific and other commercial innovations, what you find is a good deal of accidents, really funny one is...
51:00
I'm originally from Minnesota and there's a company there 3M stood for Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing. Then they went to 3M.
51:13
But you know, the sticky notes that- Robert Plomin: Yep, I know.
51:15
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You might put... Yeah.
51:16
Robert Plomin: I know that story. Yeah. That's a great one.
51:17
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, okay. Yeah.
51:18
So, they were looking for a glue that would never be able to get released and they got sticky notes instead.
51:23
I think they're very happy.
51:23
I think though that in terms of getting back to your book you have two really interesting quotes.
51:28
The first one that I want to ask you about is, "Parents matter but they don't make a difference."
51:41
Could you expound on that? Robert Plomin: Yeah. It's interesting.
51:43
You picked that up because those four pages of my book have gotten more attention than anything else.
51:47
So much so that I actually got a contract from Penguin to write a followup book on genetics and parenting.
51:51
Because if you look at parenting books, and there are literally thousands of them out there, you won't find anything about genetics.
52:04
Whereas, I think the single most important thing that parents need to know is how much influence genetics has.
52:10
And really that parents have much less control than they think they have.
52:17
Now you could be a tiger mom and get your kid to play the violin, but you can only do so many of those things.
52:24
And if your kid doesn't have the propensity towards music that, it's going to be an uphill battle. And the kid's not dumb.
52:33
I did this with my boys, my two boys, I felt it to be a cultured person.
52:33
You had to learn to read music, at least.
52:37
So I made them take piano lessons.
52:37
Now they're ornery like me.
52:43
And probably because I made them do it.
52:43
They said, "Oh no, we're not."
52:43
But they also knew that they really weren't very good at music.
52:48
They're good at a lot of things, but music wasn't their thing.
52:52
They don't like playing, learning to play music.
52:52
And so it was a real battle with them and they could see that some of their friends, without any lessons were composing music, they just loved music.
53:01
It's this appetite thing again.
53:01
So I think it's important for parents to recognize that instead of...
53:08
If anybody out there thinks their kids are a blob of clay, that you just mold to be the way you want it to be, you really got to read my book.
53:18
You got to think about genetics because genetics is the major systematic force in making us who we are as people.
53:21
And so parents are much better advised to think of themselves as resource managers, find out what your kid likes to do, give them opportunities to find out what they like to do, help them to what they like to do.
53:37
But don't preordain what they will be.
53:37
Now, it's not to say you can't make them be what you want them to be but it's kind of a losing strategy.
53:43
And you can lose your relationship with your kids as well.
53:47
It's like, if you're going to marry someone and you say, "Well there's pretty good raw material here.
53:52
I can make them into what I want them to be.
53:57
And so I'll do things for them to make them be what I want them to be." You know, forget it.
54:02
It's obvious that's not going to work, but it doesn't work with kids either very well. They're going to...
54:04
You don't do things for your kids because you want them to be what you want them to be.
54:08
You do things for your kids because you love them.
54:13
You want life to be nice for them, so you help them, but you help them be what they want to be.
54:18
So instead of going against the grain or swimming upstream, it's got to be better to step back a bit and say, "I don't have as much control as I think, damn good too.
54:29
If my kid becomes schizophrenic later in life, I'll be damn glad I'm not responsible for everything that made them be what they want them to be.
54:35
And to recognize that genetics is important."
54:41
So I think parents would be well-advised to enjoy the relationship more.
54:45
And part of that enjoyment is watching your child become who they are.
54:52
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wonderfully put.
54:53
I think another problem we face as a society is people believe very deeply that there is a correct answer machine in their mind, and there's one correct answer and that's it.
55:07
And so what happens, I think, to people is they become prematurely certain about things and premature certainty for me at least is the death knell of a thought.
55:21
Because if you're certain, you think you know something.
55:21
You assert something as a fact or something you know, when in fact it is a belief with very little evidence to support it, that's bad for society, I think.
55:33
Robert Plomin: Rightfully saying.
55:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And so the other book that I would bring up here is The WEIRDest People in the World.
55:42
Are you familiar with that book? Robert Plomin: Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
55:45
So I went back and forth as to whether I was going to recommend it.
55:45
And I finally did because of one little section that he had on social evolution, as opposed to individual evolution, that society evolves too.
55:55
And that one of the problems you can face is that you might have society evolving rapidly and...
56:05
Our good friend Chris whose podcast with you I watched, calls that cultural or social inertia.
56:12
And so how long do you think it will take?
56:20
You've mentioned some literally groundbreaking studies that can genetically get rid of a disease through environmental interventions.
56:27
How long do you think that will take to bleed its way down into your average member of society? Robert Plomin: Yeah.
56:37
Well, I think it's happening already.
56:37
It's going to happen in the medical area, already in Finland, Estonia.
56:41
And now there's a pilot project in the UK, that if you go into the hospital and they take blood, they'll ask if you want to have your DNA tested.
56:47
And then the idea is that...
56:52
It's, you can do this yourself through 23andMe you know these companies that are around, but the information you get back is pretty weird and sometimes quite dangerous.
57:02
Like if you were a woman, you could find out you have a 60% chance of having breast cancer, for example.
57:06
And they don't offer much support for that.
57:06
Whereas if you did it through a national health service, or even through an insurance group, I suppose in the US.
57:16
But it works better at the national health level where you can distribute risk across the whole population, rather than making people pay when they're at risk for these things. But they'll tell you...
57:27
They won't just give you all the results.
57:29
They'll tell you about things that you can do something about.
57:29
So if, for example, you're at genetic risk for alcoholism.
57:33
A lot of these things in obesity as well, a lot of the interventions if they happen early, they can actually be very low tech.
57:43
I mean, with alcoholism, if you don't drink a lot of alcohol over a long period of time, you're not going to be alcoholic.
57:47
If your kid was at genetic risk for alcoholism.
57:51
And I should say our DNA prediction isn't very good yet, but it will get better. And it's something now.
57:57
And if you could tell your son, your adolescent child that they're at greater genetic risks for becoming alcohol dependent.
58:03
Now that doesn't mean they're going to be an alcoholic.
58:09
It just means that if they go out and drink, as much as college students do these days.
58:14
It's like testing for whether or not someone has a genetic risk for alcoholism in a way by giving them four years worth of alcohol.
58:24
You say, "You need to do what everybody ought to do."
58:24
We all know this, that you got to monitor your alcohol use, you've got to take breaks from it to see how dependent you are on it.
58:32
But if you knew you were greater genetic risk, you might be more willing to take that seriously.
58:38
And so I think the idea of medicine is moving away from waiting until you have a problem.
58:45
Once you become alcoholic, it is damn difficult to do anything about it.
58:45
You know AA, the people say "They're recovering alcoholic."
58:51
No one ever says "I beat it, I'm no longer alcoholic."
58:55
It's a lifelong battle once you've got it.
58:55
But if you can prevent this from happening, it's our heart attacks.
59:00
It's all of medicine wants to move towards prevention because economically, socially, personally, every way you look at it, it's a no brainer.
59:10
You want to prevent these disorders, not try to cure them once they happen.
59:15
And DNA is the best early warning system we have because your DNA doesn't...
59:15
Your inherited DNA differences don't change from conception.
59:20
So that from very early in life we can predict these problems.
59:27
And the earlier you intervene with most problems, the more likely you are to be effective in preventing the problems from occurring.
59:34
So I think it's going to happen medically and then psychological traits and all the other things that people are interested in will follow in the wake.
59:44
Because once you do this DNA testing once, that same information can be used for predicting everything. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
59:52
Robert Plomin: So this is real, it is happening now.
59:53
And that's really why I wrote the book Blueprint, because I think now's the time we ought to be discussing these things.
59:58
And I'm definitely a cheerleader.
1:00:02
And I get accused of being overly optimistic about these things.
1:00:02
But I think someone has to be a cheerleader as an antidote to the doom mongering that goes on.
1:00:12
There's a lot to worry about here. Sure.
1:00:12
With any big discovery, it can be misused as well as used.
1:00:17
But I think we need people like me saying, "But look, there's all these positive things that can come from this."
1:00:23
And it's sort of what you were saying before about people, What were you talking about?
1:00:27
About people are more willing to accept negatives, the negative side of things.
1:00:32
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh yeah, we have a default to pessimism.
1:00:34
Robert Plomin: That's right. Yeah.
1:00:36
And there's more than that on the scientific side.
1:00:36
You look like you're being the good guy being cautious saying, "Oh, well this might have effect, but we've really got to be very, very careful here."
1:00:45
And I want to say, "No, let's just celebrate this.
1:00:51
This is one of the biggest advances we've had.
1:00:51
I've been waiting my 50 years of my career.
1:00:54
I never thought this would happen."
1:00:54
So I'm going to shout about it. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:00:58
Which I think is absolutely great.
1:00:58
Vatsal you had a question about imprisonment, if you want to go ahead with that.
1:01:05
Vatsal Kaushik: So when I read about Nature Of Nurture in Blueprint.
1:01:10
The first thing I thought about is what does this mean for criminal rehabilitation?
1:01:16
And I'm not sure why I thought of that, correlation is not causation.
1:01:16
But I googled criminal rehabilitation, and the very first result which I got was it says, "That criminal rehabilitation is essentially the process of helping inmates grow and change, allowing them to separate themselves from the environmental factors that made them commit a crime in the first place."
1:01:37
Robert Plomin: Uh-huh (affirmative).
1:01:38
Vatsal Kaushik: But now we know that environmental factors aren't these passive things which are happening out there in the world, they are very much influential from your genes.
1:01:43
So I was just wondering if some people are just born with this genetic predisposition of committing violent crimes.
1:01:56
What's the best way to have them participate in a functioning society?
1:02:00
Robert Plomin: Yeah, well, it's very difficult to talk about the genetics of rare events like violent crime. Do you know?
1:02:03
A lot of violent crime...
1:02:03
But occurs for very different reasons.
1:02:08
And so I don't think genetics is going to be particularly strong and I'm not saying the environments unimportant.
1:02:12
And I do think criminal rehabilitation is a major issue because if you have a criminal record, it's hard to get a job.
1:02:18
And it's so easy to fall back into the context that led to...
1:02:22
That maybe didn't cause your criminal behavior, but it certainly contributed to it. Do you know?
1:02:28
So I wouldn't at all say that efforts towards rehabilitation are not useful because of genetics.
1:02:34
I'm not even sure that genetics plays a very large role in that, especially in terms of rare things like violence, for example.
1:02:47
I mean certainly, well so.
1:02:47
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You're good at movies, so no doubt you seen A Clockwork Orange. Robert Plomin: Oh yes.
1:02:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: And we saw them trying to intervene there with mixed results at best.
1:02:58
One of the other things that I wanted to ask you is we mentioned Charles Murray earlier, who went on to, by the way, write several other books that were much better received because he avoided certain topics.
1:03:11
But I don't sense that you have any really strident critics on the other side, am I wrong there?
1:03:25
Robert Plomin: People are taking pot shots at me, but nothing compared to what Charles Murray has suffered.
1:03:28
I don't know, maybe I'm more of a softie, but the difference is Charles, keeps hammering away at these group differences.
1:03:34
And I tend to avoid them because there's....
1:03:39
Most of the differences are within groups.
1:03:39
It's individuals, Martin Luther king said, "It's the character of the individual. It's not the group.
1:03:44
It doesn't account for much of the differences between people."
1:03:49
So I'd rather study where most of the variances where most of the differences are and that's within groups.
1:03:57
And secondly, we have very good genetic techniques for definitively answering the question of much influence on individual differences is genetic or environmental.
1:04:04
And we can find genes now, thanks to the DNA revolution.
1:04:09
But for average differences between groups, none of that follows there is no straightforward killer data that will answer the question about that etiology.
1:04:20
And another reason I don't study group differences is that, you can't study everything and I get enough flack for studying individual differences.
1:04:27
And I don't want to take on group differences because I don't have to study everything.
1:04:32
So I choose not to study the group differences. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yep.
1:04:38
I think smart decision Robert Plomin: So I think that's one of the things that has really saved me from getting in the cross hairs.
1:04:44
The other thing is I don't do social media.
1:04:46
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Ah hah.
1:04:47
Robert Plomin: And it makes my life much more pleasant.
1:04:47
I can't keep up with my emails.
1:04:48
So, I'm just not going to do social media.
1:04:48
And so there's some little storms that come up but if I don't participate in that, they tend to quiet a bit. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:05:01
Robert Plomin: Because nobody gets my goat because I don't even read the stuff.
1:05:02
Again, that's a personality sort of thing, but I've decided that Twitter from what I see, and my students tell me about some of the stuff that goes on and it does seem like a cesspit, doesn't it in a way?
1:05:16
I mean, and it's good for certain things for sure, but man, it really brings out the nasties.
1:05:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So, I differ slightly.
1:05:21
I think that Twitter can be as a cesspit and that aggressive curation can turn it into a pretty marvelous thing, especially in my field, in finance.
1:05:33
And I think- Robert Plomin: Sure you don't get the crazies there do you?
1:05:37
I mean- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Well we get some.
1:05:38
Robert Plomin: You don't get the trolls.
1:05:39
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, we get a few.
1:05:41
But nothing like you would get in political Twitter or psychological Twitter, which I avoid, at all costs.
1:05:46
I don't want to go over there because it's just basically people who have descended into dogma.
1:05:53
And I believe that dogma is brain death because they're not thinking about anything.
1:05:59
They're just shouting at one another. And, that doesn't help.
1:06:02
I wanted to ask about James Flynn, the father of the well-known Flynn effect.
1:06:02
I've looked at some of his stuff and he argues, and I want to ask you if this is right, that IQs have gone up substantially over the last 100 years.
1:06:13
And then he posits that people of an earlier age were very resistant to hypothetical, or questions, or abstractions that people were far more...
1:06:29
He looks at moral code for example.
1:06:29
And he said back then, they were concrete because everything was concrete.
1:06:35
And, now we have a much more, I guess, open-minded look at moral principles that is more of a universal obstruction and then supported by logic which I think I prefer, because you can extend the argument to a great number of things that you couldn't under the concrete.
1:06:56
He gives some examples of like the late 1800s, doing surveys of Germans, and they come to the person and they say, "I'm going to tell you two things and then ask you a question.
1:07:08
The first thing I'm going to tell you is the North Pole always has snow, number one.
1:07:12
Number two, all of the bears in the North Pole are white.
1:07:21
If you were at the North Pole and you saw a bear there, what color would it be?"
1:07:29
A shockingly large number of respondents said brown. Robert Plomin: Really? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:07:34
Well, this is according to a talk that Flynn did.
1:07:38
Basically his reasoning was because a German had never seen a white bear, and they were much more literal than we were, than we of this age are.
1:07:47
I guess two questions there, but then leading into the one that I really want to talk about, because I have a thesis which I call the Great Reshuffle about what's going on right now.
1:07:58
I think that intelligence is going to play an outsized part in who's going to win and who's going to lose.
1:08:08
As far as my Flynn questions go, have IQs actually been going up?
1:08:08
Because my challenge there is we norm them, right, and we always have 100 as the norm.
1:08:15
Maybe there's another way that we could look at those increasing.
1:08:21
Then what do you think about this idea that as we learn more and more and more, our cognitive flexibility, if you will, increases? Robert Plomin: Yeah.
1:08:34
Well, first I think most people ...
1:08:34
well, at first we didn't notice that IQs are increasing because, as you say, they're standardized.
1:08:42
They're always standardized to a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, but you can look at items that are the same over the years.
1:08:46
There's various ways that you can try and get at some absolute measure, not standardized.
1:08:50
It does show, for many generations in the 20th century, that there was an increase in IQ generation after generation.
1:08:58
Now, that has stopped in the last 10 years or so.
1:09:05
Your hypothesis as to why as an explanation for it is possible.
1:09:12
There's half a dozen other explanations that people have given, the most obvious one being that after the Second World War, universal education came in, so maybe people are just better educated and they use their brains to a better extent.
1:09:24
Another going hypothesis is nutrition, especially prenatal nutrition, but also postnatal nutrition.
1:09:31
No one's ever really pinned it down, so we don't really know what it's about.
1:09:36
There are some people who think it's still a matter of test taking and greater familiarity with tests.
1:09:40
Nobody really knows what that was about.
1:09:40
It doesn't mean that genetic influence is somehow less important, because that's about an average difference from a secular difference across the generations.
1:09:59
The causes of average differences aren't necessarily related to the causes of individual differences.
1:10:05
I study individual differences rather than average differences between groups, but the causes of average differences, people can study them.
1:10:10
As I say, it's harder to study, but it's really interesting.
1:10:14
Take height, for example.
1:10:14
When Japanese started coming to America, Japanese are so much smaller than Americans, but their kids in one generation were like two inches taller than their parents, yet the genetics was just the same.
1:10:23
The correlation, the taller parents, even though they're short, had kids who were even taller than the other kids.
1:10:35
The genetics of individual differences comes through, even though there's a big mean effect, a secular change, that you think has to be due to environment, I mean in one generation.
1:10:47
We still don't even know, though, what is that about particularly. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:10:51
My next question is, one of my hypotheses about what will emerge from the Great Reshuffle is that people who are non-linear thinkers will excel versus a linear-type thinker, and that intelligence will become even more of a factor. Am I wrong? Robert Plomin: No.
1:11:15
Well, I don't know if you're right or wrong, but it certainly makes sense to me, because those are just the situations in which intelligence comes to the fore.
1:11:19
Because if in contrast you're talking about very specialized jobs where you come in and you do one bit on an assembly line or something, there's not much room for your intelligence to show itself, but this is just the opposite.
1:11:35
It's like everything's wide open, so I think that's absolutely right. It's empirical.
1:11:41
I mean, the prediction would be that intelligence becomes a better predictor of performance on Substack or anything else.
1:11:46
You can measure the performance quite well as well.
1:11:52
That's really interesting, I think, you know?
1:11:56
It's true not just of that.
1:11:56
It's across the digital world.
1:11:56
I study emerging adulthood.
1:12:02
It hasn't been studied much in the early twenties, for example, in the twenties as a whole, because in the past it didn't exist. I mean, kids ...
1:12:07
Bruce Springsteen said you get married and that's all she wrote, go to high school, get married and that's all she wrote. You get a job for life.
1:12:15
None of that happens now.
1:12:15
There's a great deal of flexibility, not just in relationships or where you live, but in jobs increasingly.
1:12:20
I mean, most young people now, they're not looking for the job they're going to get.
1:12:25
They're assuming they're going to do lots of different gigs.
1:12:29
They're going to do startups.
1:12:29
They're going to do the sort of thing you're talking about.
1:12:32
I'm sure intelligence is going to play more of a role there, although I don't think it's just intelligence.
1:12:38
I think there's also personality characteristics involved, and mental health.
1:12:44
How well you do at university, about half of the variance is due to intelligence, but about a third is due to personality characteristics like conscientiousness, for example.
1:12:53
You've got to stick to it, but also, surprisingly, mental health, because if you're depressed and emotionally unstable, it's unlikely you're going to keep your nose to the grindstone and do well at university.
1:13:05
I think all of that's true in jobs too. I think it's great.
1:13:11
It will allow people to find their genetic niche to a greater extent, because there's so much freedom.
1:13:19
Then of course, with the freedom comes the anxiety, as compared to having a lifelong job where you get this job at 16, this is what you're going to be doing when you retire. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:13:33
For example, in what I do, I'm a quantitative investor.
1:13:37
We want lots and lots of evidence, right, over a variety of market environments.
1:13:44
One of the things I've changed my mind about, universal basic income I'm now in favor of, because I think we need to be actively addressing what might happen in a world where, I think for the first time in history ...
1:13:58
at least in a democratic world ...
1:13:58
for the first time in history, people who, through no fault of their own ...
1:14:04
that's the important part, no fault of their own ...
1:14:12
have a harder time coming up to speed in this world.
1:14:12
I think we need to get very creative.
1:14:18
Universal basic income, there's a variety of suggestions.
1:14:24
Do you think that there are any other suggestions which might have, at the individual level, a helpful thing that we could do for this side of the tail? Robert Plomin: Yeah.
1:14:34
Well, I think that's very interesting, to focus on the left end of the distribution, because a lot of the concerns about meritocracy are at the high end.
1:14:42
Who gets to go to the Ivy League schools, for example.
1:14:42
That's a small portion of the population.
1:14:49
Even if you could straighten it out, which I don't think you can, it's not going to make much difference.
1:14:54
It's the rest of the distribution that's important, and the lower end especially.
1:15:00
I don't have a good solution, but an interesting analogy here ...
1:15:05
actually it's more than an analogy ... is with education.
1:15:05
A lot of people are worried about genetics because they'd say, "Oh, well, you're going to then educate the best, forget the rest."
1:15:15
First of all, policy isn't necessarily related to the knowledge. Genetics is important.
1:15:21
I can't believe education can ignore that without some cost.
1:15:27
People assume that what it means is that you're going to put resources at the high end, and there are people who'd want to do that.
1:15:32
They'd say it's very efficient.
1:15:32
You could give the kids with the most ability every possible advantage, but society doesn't depend just on the few people who make a big discovery.
1:15:42
It mostly is intellectual capital of the whole society that can carry this out, and that requires educating a lot of people.
1:15:47
I think that's a mistake in view.
1:15:53
In education, though, there's a left view.
1:15:58
The right is educate the best, forget the rest, in a way.
1:15:58
The other view is called the Finnish model, which is to say you do whatever needs to be done at the lower end of the distribution to bring them up to minimal levels of literacy and numeracy, so that they can participate in society.
1:16:15
From a societal point of view as well, there's going to be this social unrest if people feel like they're completely cut off from the rest of society.
1:16:26
I think that's an interesting model, to say it's better for us as a whole if we put more of our resources at the low end to get them up to minimal levels.
1:16:31
Because at the high end ...
1:16:36
you mentioned Galton, who's the father of behavioral genetics. He was Darwin's cousin.
1:16:40
In addition to being knowledgeable about everything, he has many interesting quotes, one of which is, "Ability will out."
1:16:47
That is, at the high end, you could lock a kid in a closet and they won't do so well, but given the normal sorts of environments, they're going to create their own environments and do pretty well.
1:16:56
We can hothouse them and do a bit better, but you've just got to stay out of their way and give them the basic resources.
1:17:01
At the low end, it's a very different story, though, and I think it makes good sense, given my values, but it is a matter of values to say what is important to you.
1:17:15
I think the point you're going to make is that it's more than just personal satisfaction and values.
1:17:19
It's for the good of society.
1:17:19
We're going to have to worry about that low end.
1:17:24
You didn't mention automation, but it's not going to take over your job.
1:17:24
It's going to take over more and more of those jobs at the lower end.
1:17:29
I mean, the next big thing is drivers, isn't it?
1:17:35
I think that that's a really good thing to be thinking about, but I just do the basic science, really.
1:17:40
I'm not very good at figuring out implications or especially what we do about these things.
1:17:45
All I learn as I get older is things are complex, and anybody who tells you simple answers ...
1:17:49
what is that famous quote, about ... Mencken?
1:17:55
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Mencken, yeah.
1:17:55
"Simple, easy and wrong."
1:17:58
Robert Plomin: Exactly right, yeah.
1:18:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love Mencken.
1:18:01
On the educational front I do have an interest, because my sister is very involved in Montessori.
1:18:05
If you understand the history of Marie Montessori, she went to the Italian authorities and requested that she be allowed to take over the worst schools.
1:18:19
In other words, in the worst area, everything bad.
1:18:27
If you know the history, she did very well with those so-called bad kids.
1:18:27
It leads me to think of it in a different light now after having talked to you, because it was an environmental intervention that perhaps those kids, because they were just of the lowest economic class, it doesn't mean that there weren't some very bright kids in there.
1:18:52
Robert Plomin: That's right.
1:18:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, Robert, I could talk to you for another three hours.
1:18:56
You're such an engaging man and such an interesting subject, but Vatsal gets after me if I let a podcast go to two hours.
1:19:02
We always close the show with the same question, and we ask our guests.
1:19:10
Let's assume that for a day, you, Robert, are emperor of the world.
1:19:19
You can't kill anyone, you can't incarcerate anyone or put them in a reeducation camp, but you can incept them.
1:19:27
I don't know if you're familiar with the movie Inception. Robert Plomin: No. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay. You can ...
1:19:32
I guess Doug Adams would call it a Babel fish.
1:19:34
You can drop a Babel fish in their ear that whispers things to them.
1:19:41
They wake up in the morning thinking that they have a new idea, but it's actually your idea. You get two.
1:19:46
What two things are you going to have the Babel fish whisper to the person, so they think it's their own idea and they start engaging in that behavior? Robert Plomin: Wow.
1:19:57
Well, I've never thought about that before, and I'm not very good at this sort of thing.
1:20:00
You know, I do the basic science.
1:20:00
I think there's one thing I would really like people to just ...
1:20:06
one Babel fish would be, "What about genetics?"
1:20:10
When they hear about things, they just consider what I think is the mountain of evidence that shows that genetics is the major systematic force making us who we are.
1:20:22
The second thing, I suppose, is the converse in a way, and that is a Babel fish that tells people to be wary of interpreting environmental correlations causally.
1:20:27
That goes back to the first one then, just to say, "What about genetics?"
1:20:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right, right.
1:20:38
Well, I'll take both of them.
1:20:38
I think that a healthy attitude towards evidence is something that we must maintain.
1:20:44
If we are increasingly seeing this pile of evidence that I ...
1:20:52
I subscribe to some academic sites and I did a search prior to our conversation, and boy, you've got some nice citations ...
1:20:58
but there is a lot of evidence that is making itself available now, and which I think will ultimately trickle down to the greater society.
1:21:14
It's very difficult, in the face of all that evidence, to say, "No, that's not right," or, "What about this?" I think that ...
1:21:19
especially because of what you advocate, which I think is great, which is, "Listen, we're not talking about inhibiting in any way.
1:21:31
What we're really talking about is what are the best things that we can do to help, based on what we found."
1:21:36
I think that both your book and you are excellent spokesmen for this, and I'd love to have you on again, because as Vatsal will know, I will talk with someone like yourself so that I can listen to your answers endlessly, but thank you so much. Robert Plomin: Okay.
1:21:57
Well, I'd love to come on again down the line, depending on how your listeners react, because there is so much to say about this, and it's happening very fast, too.
1:22:01
There's new discoveries all the time.
1:22:02
In some time now, it might be fun to come back.
1:22:02
I'm sure it would be fun to come back and chat with you again.
1:22:04
Jim O'Shaughnessy: We'd love to have you. Robert Plomin: Great.