Parenting is much less about genetics than about building a whole person that seeks uncertainly with confidence.

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Research Roundup

62%

Is your child’s future written in their genes? Our choices as parents has an even bigger impact on their futures.

While there are strong genetic correlations for both educational attainment and income, parental influence and other environmental factors play an even bigger role. Comparing within-family versus population-based predictions substantially reduced the predictive power of genetics, highlighting the impact of indirect parental effects and assortative mating. In fact, “62% of the intergenerational transmission of occupational status cannot be ascribed to genetic inheritance of common variants but other factors such as family environments”.

A separate study investigated how parents' cognitive and non-cognitive skills affect their children's educational outcomes. It reveals that indirect genetic effects—the influence of parental genes on the child's environment—“explain 36–40% of population polygenic score associations”. Who the parents are shapes the environment they create for their children, which in turn influences the children's development, independent of direct genetic inheritance.

Breaking this fatalism about genetics allows us to see the importance of parents' choices. We already know that higher-SES parents are more likely to believe that investing in their kids will pay off, which translates to real-world disparities in parental behaviors and children's developmental outcomes. An  intensive intervention involving regular home visits and personalized feedback led to significant improvements in parents’ beliefs about their impact on their children, and these “augmented beliefs are associated with enriched parent-child interactions and higher vocabulary, math, and social-emotional skills for the children”. Notably, a simpler set of quick and easy interventions didn’t produce this sustained change in parenting of in child outcomes.

Genetics is a major factor but it isn’t destiny. When parents believe their hard work will pay off…it does. (Subjective utility at work!) Whether you are seeking to robot-proof your kids or yourself one of the most important lessons is that you can change.

Uncertainty Unwelcome

We hate uncertainty. It makes us worse.

When people explore in real world contexts, “people display a preference for certainty and actively avoid taking risks”. In fact, “the observed risk-averse strategy is suboptimal in the sense that it prevents foragers from maximizing their overall returns”. We consistently avoid risk and uncertainty even when it undermines our outcomes.

And this preference for confidence over uncertainty has longer-term negative effects beyond immediate rewards: it undermines learning. As people learned a new task, increases in their “confidence was associated with reduced electrophysiological markers of feedback processing and decreased updating of beliefs following feedback receipt”. If only confidence equaled accuracy—“when choosing whether to pay a fee to receive further feedback, participants’ subjective confidence, rather than the objective accuracy of their decisions, guided their choices”.

Far too often we are seeking confidence and avoiding uncertainty, even when it hurts us. We need to raise a generation that leans into uncertainty.

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Weekly Indulgence

I have given so many talks and written quite a few essays for the FT over the years—in London, Amsterdam, DC, and (in the photo above) NYC.

And there’s more to come. Keep an eye out for a new essay soon!

Stage & Screen

• January, Toronto: University of Toronto AI Day!
• February, Dublin: A private event but I know we'll do much more
• February, Athens: Medical school education
• March, SF: Entrepreneurs, throw off the shackles of conformity!
• May, Porto: Innovation in Portugal.
• June, South Africa: Finally I can return. Are you in SA? Book me!
• June, SF: Golden Angels
• October, UK: More med school education

If your company, university, or conference just happen to be in one of the above locations and want the "best keynote I've ever heard" (shockingly spoken by multiple audiences last year)?

SciFi, Fantasy, & Me

While I’ve never been a comic “fan” (despite living years in San Diego I spent a total of 1 hour at ComiCon…but of course they should invite me to give a keynote anyhow!) I have read and watched more superhero comics than I can remember. While note every series need be Astro City, The Invisibles, or All-Star Superman, there is one trope in comics that has always bothered me, and this trope ruined series 3 of What If..: science and engineering (which, first of all, are separate things) aren’t about punching or wanting.

Marvel has had some fun if silly tech scenes, such as Tony Stark using Jarvis to figure out time travel. But Riri doing 12 hours of SCIENCE! in 7 minutes and then later taking control of the villains’ tech through pure willpower…what lazy writing. For that matter, why are the omnipotent Observers going into battle with swords and boxing gloves?

People don’t get tired of superhero movies; they get tired of bad movies.

Vivienne L'Ecuyer Ming