Thread by @peligrietzer

I truly don't know anything more shocking than the neverending literature on how every tractable 'nurture' effect disappears by early adulthood

Like, you'd think that if some nurture thing reliably makes kids do worse in junior high there's gonna be a chain reaction leading on to less good college prospects, then less fancy job and whatnot, but instead the influence just disappears!

The only sane interpretation I can think of is that modern Western societies are structured to involve a bunch of resets in between, like, 12 and 21. Adolescence, and then young adulthood, is designed exactly to disrupt feedback effects from parental nurture

By the way, the usual caveat applies that by 'nurture' we're looking at parents and not at cultures or cities or neighborhood

Still, absolute insane stuff, with hardly a study anywhere to challenge it

If 'nurture' straight up didn't work that would be one thing, but 'nurture works till puberty than all downstream effects slowly wash out until they're gone by 23' is a real mystery

We know that parental 'nurture' influences juvenile delinquency, for instance, so the fact that even that has no downstream effects by 23 is genuinely weird to me

Kind of seems like holding class and race constant, Western countries do in fact supply basically infinite Bildung-redos and reputation-redos between 12 and 21?

Actually I'm not 100% sure how many studies I've read that aren't mostly from a white middle class community, so maybe it's just 'holding a white middle class community constant'

If parental nurture effects don't 'wash out' in the same way when you study an e.g. black working class community, that could be a nuclear quant validation of 'only white people get to freely fuck around and find themselves'

Useful side-note

Also important side-point

OP wasn't meant to rehash 'nurture' argument in general, but to get at the specific weirdness that recorded effects on (for example) junior high behavior don't have long-term consequences