edited to add tl;dr: Siskind seems ticked off because recent papers on the genetics of schizophrenia are increasingly pointing out that at current miniscule levels of prevalence, even with the commonly accepted 80% heritability, actually developing the disorder is all but impossible unless at least some of the environmental factors are also in play. This is understandably very worrisome, since it indicates that even high heritability issues might be solvable without immediately employing eugenics.
Also notable because I don’t think it’s very often that eugenics grievances breach the surface in such an obvious way in a public siskind post, including the claim that the whole thing is just HBD denialists spreading FUD:
People really hate the finding that most diseases are substantially (often primarily) genetic. There’s a whole toolbox that people in denial about this use to sow doubt. Usually it involves misunderstanding polygenicity/omnigenicity, or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing. I hope most people are already wise to these tactics.
Are “Beroe” and “Adraste” placeholder names or are they calling back to some other work? My memory of Socratic dialogs through the ages is rusty.
Because the post title evokes Gödel, Escher, Bach, I assumed he was pretending to the Achilles and the Tortoise dialogues from that book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach#Structure
@gerikson “Adraste wishes to send a private message to Beroe, but suspects that Erebus is intercepting their scrolls…”
It’s both, probably. Sounds like the Alice and Bob of compsci security parable fame, except pretentious, and Mallory is the writer.
@gerikson @Evinceo An obscure French opera from the early 1700s. Google tells me that this is an Alexander quirk.
Act III
Adraste proclaims his determination to raise all other gods against Jupiter. He calls upon Juno, Jupiter’s wife, to join him in avenging Jupiter’s unfaithfulness. Juno sends Adraste away so that she can plot her revenge. She takes on a disguise as Beroe, Semele’s nurse, to enact her jealous hatred of Semele, made even stronger when she sees Semele’s beauty.