Mark Manson

social sciences.

Yeah.

There's some humanities departments that'll it's kind of the default point of view.

It's the default point of view of far left political ideology is that we're all born kind of pure and innocent and that it's society that corrupts us.

And it is all the trauma and awful things that happened to us that like bake in our personalities and everything.

First thing I, I feel like I know with pretty good certainty blank slate ism is false.

And there's just the amount of evidence that is amassed, particularly over the last like 40 years, is just overwhelming.

Almost every significant psychological trait or measurement that we have, there's some degree of heritability involved in it.

In some cases, a lot of heritability involved.

Steven Pinker has a fantastic book called The Blank Slate.

It is like a 600-page book digging into all of the research

like dispelling the assumptions of blank slate ideology and in that book

He talks about a certain category of research, which I'm completely fascinated with.

It is probably some of the research that's actually changed a lot of my personal views on just human nature and human behavior, and that is twin studies.

It started at the University of Minnesota with a researcher named Bouchard, and he started identifying twins that had been separated at birth and adopted by separate families in separate places.

And so you get these unbelievable stories of, like,

Tracking down two identical twins grew up in completely different places, completely different families, completely different socioeconomic conditions, different religions, different households, different cultures, like everything.

And it turns out that like they're both.

firefighters.

They both married a woman named Linda.