Nice to see Jim Manzi posting — Merry Christmas, guy!
You lost me with that last paragraph, though. Surely it will not be “the fact of our ignorance in this area” that “is likely to be very important to thinking about public policy in the upcoming decades”: rather it will be our increasing understanding in this area. The fact of our ignorance was, after all, around from the beginning of time up to 1953.
And what does this mean: “We do not have the practical ability to understand why person X has normal psychological make-up Y based on analysis of his or her genome”? Do you mean to say this is a thing we metaphysically cannot understand? What is the evidence for that? The name Auguste Comte mean anything?
Any trait known to be heritable or partly so — a category that at this point encompasses most of the behavior, intelligence, and personality trait clusters — must be encoded or partly encoded in the genome, or be a secondary effect of something so coded. Figuring out the codes will undoubtedly be difficult. For all the interesting stuff, the gene-to-phene pathway is hardly ever one-one, nor even necessarily one-many or many-one: Sometimes it’s many-many.
As a card-carrying member of the New Mysterian brotherhood, I’m certainly open to the idea that certain things may be beyond our ken. We only have a three-pound lump of meat to work with, after all. The genome-to-phenome coding, however, is just a problem in molecular biology, a problem of a kind we know how to tackle, and indeed are tackling with some modest successes. On straightforward bench work like that, I’ll go with Hilbert: Wir müssen wissen, wir werden wissen.
We do not have the practical ability to understand why person X has normal psychological make-up Y based on analysis of his or her genome”? Do you mean to say this is a thing we metaphysically cannot understand?
No, he means that at best we have weak correlations between some very broadly defined and categorized personality traits and certain gene variants.
Precisely how a slightly different protein ends up being expressed as a particular (broadly defined) personality trait is beyond us for the foreseeable future, your ability to imagine a science-fiction future where that's not the case notwithstanding.
The only reason we know about the correlations we do is because we already knew about those personality traits independently, and we statistically "match" those known personality traits up with gene variations. However, we lack the ability to take gene variations that haven't been previously correlated with personality traits, and determine what personality traits they will result in. Finding more and more correlations won't do anything about that basic conceptual issue. Correlating inputs and outputs is not the same as understanding them.
As a card-carrying member of the New Mysterian brotherhood
Aka, the Embrace Irrationality When Materialism Runs Afoul Of Logic club
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd I'll go with Gödel.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDerb, as I read Jim Manzi he was cautioning against what he thinks will be a widespread belief as gene ID becomes more common that people will assume we understand the whys of genetics. Right now, all we have is a primitive understanding of the hows, based on primitive observation.
Will we one day understand spefically why replacing a particular AT pair with a CG one makes a person more irritable than another person, or more generous, or whatever? Perhaps. But I think JM's point was that we're not remotely near that time now, but people who hear confident assertions that scientists have discovered such-and-such a gene that "makes" people be this or that may not appreciate the distinction.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIf Derb were an orthodox New Mysterian and TRULY a conservative pessimist he would believe the correct phrase: We can't know. We won't know.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI agree that there are some things we can't know.
First item on the list: We cannot know definitively WHICH things are unknowable.
If scientists of the past had played the game of "We have failed to understand X. Therefore X is beyond human understanding. Therefore there is no point spending time researching X." then, undoubtably, many great and useful discoveries would have gone... undiscovered.
There are some things we can't know, but this abstract truth is of limited practical usefulness. Science never indicates "X is unknowable". Science can indicate "X is not known YET." Pretending otherwise is just placing an artificial limitation on the possible horizons of our knowledge.
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