This seems wrong to me. Twin studies, GCTA estimates, and actual genetic predictors all predict that a portion of the variance in human biases is “hardcoded” in the genome.
I’d also imagine that mathematical skill is heritable. [Finds an article on Google Scholar] The abstract of https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015115 seems to agree. Yet due to information inaccesibility and lack of selection pressure ancestrally, I infer math ability probably isn’t hardcoded.
There are a range of possible explanations which reconcile these two observations, like “better genetically specified learning hyperparameters in brain regions which convergently get allocated to math” or “tweaks to the connectivity initialization procedure[1] involving that brain region (how neurons get ~randomly wired up at the local level).”
I expect similar explanations for heritability of biases.
So the genome is definitely playing a role in creating and shaping biases. I don’t know exactly how it does that, but we can observe that such biases are heritable, and we can actually point to specific base pairs in the genome that play a role.
I’d also imagine that mathematical skill is heritable. [Finds an article on Google Scholar] The abstract of https://doi.org/10.1037/a0015115 seems to agree. Yet due to information inaccesibility and lack of selection pressure ancestrally, I infer math ability probably isn’t hardcoded.
There are a range of possible explanations which reconcile these two observations, like “better genetically specified learning hyperparameters in brain regions which convergently get allocated to math” or “tweaks to the connectivity initialization procedure[1] involving that brain region (how neurons get ~randomly wired up at the local level).”
I expect similar explanations for heritability of biases.
Agreed.
Compare eg the efficacy of IID Gaussian initialization of weights in an ANN vs using Xavier to tamp down the variance of activations in later layers.