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Dear cutemonster,

I know this reply may not suffice to convince you, but unfortunately I won't be able to argue forever.

Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble?

FYI, the concept of innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia. Two of the authors I'm citing in my book (Descartes and Grothendieck) believed that innate talent existed and they both declared they would have loved to be naturally gifted like these or these people they knew.

You're declaring that these incredibly smart people were wrong about their own domains, which is a pretty bold claim to make. What do you have in support of this claim? A fake Einstein quote?

It's a sad fact of life that most quotes attributed to Einstein are fabricated. Next time, please check "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein", compiled by Alice Calaprice.

This may come as a shock to you, but Google page 1 isn't always a reliable resource. Nor is Wikipedia, even though it's quite often correct. As it happens, there's a pretty large "Heritability of IQ" bubble on the internet. It's active and vocal, but it's also quite weak scientifically — the page you're citing is a typical symptom, and it absolutely doesn't reflect the current scientific knowledge.

The IQ heritability claims that you're citing are based on twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS.

It's true that a number of people have been fooled by twin studies, most notably Steven Pinker, in Chapter 19 of the Blank Slate (did you read it?)

You see, Pinker is a linguist and apparently he isn't mathematically equipped to fully comprehend the intrinsic limitations of Bouchard's approach. Did you read Bouchard's 1990 paper on twins reared apart? Do you find it convincing? Are you aware that even The Bell Curve's Charles Murray thinks that this approach, abundantly cited by Pinker, is structurally flawed? Are you aware of the fundamental instability of IQ estimates based on twins reared together? Aren't you concerned that even a mild violation of Equal Environment Assumption, plugged into Falconer's equation, would drastically reduce the estimates?

If you don't understand what I'm talking about, if you've never read the authors and the primary research I'm citing, then it's quite likely that you're the one living in a social media bubble.

If you're interesting in learning more about the actual science of IQ heritability, I recommend using Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/comments-on-no-intel...

Feel free to also subscribe to my own Substack, where I plan to cover these topics in the coming months: https://davidbessis.substack.com

All the best, David.

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cutemonster 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble?

You're wrong about that, but you couldn't have know. I've lived in far more different places with more different people, than most people you've met.

> innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia

That's why I wrote it hadn't been well studied, not that it hadn't been studied at all.

> You're declaring that

Of course not. I'm not the source.

> incredibly smart people were wrong about their own domains, which is a pretty bold claim to make. What do you have in support of this claim? A fake Einstein quote?

That's from a letter Einstein wrote 1926 to Bohr. He wrote in German, that quote is a paraphrase in English.

Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates, And, about him being mistaken, quoting that article:

"As mentioned above, Einstein's position underwent significant modifications over the course of the years. In the first stage, Einstein refused to accept quantum indeterminism [...]" -- indicating that, at some points, he had the wrong beliefs, right.

Here's the quote explained further: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/5937/why-did-einstei...

> It's true that a number of people have been fooled by twin studies, most notably Steven Pinker, in Chapter 19 of the Blank Slate (did you read it?)

> You see, Pinker ... Bouchard's 1990 ... The Bell Curve's Charles Murray ... thinks ... structurally flawed

No, didn't read that book. Continuing in another comment.

	▲	davidbessis 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was alluding to the quote relevant to the current debate: "Genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work" — which you incorrectly attributed to Einstein.

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tptacek a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Some of the stuff on Gusev's substack is pretty startling, and I highly recommend it.

Thank you for taking the time to comment here!

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cutemonster 10 hours ago | parent [-]

> > twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS.

Here's a twin study from 2015, newer than the books (Clean Slate etc) and papers you (David) mentioned.

"Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4286575/

Figure 3 indicates that intelligence is pretty strongly inherited, and they arrive at 0.44.

Now you're saying that that doesn't matter because of GWAS? Sounds a bit hand-wavy to me.

> > Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com

Blog post looks biased. So there's a controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_heritability_problem

And there's two camps:

https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/the-missing-heritabilit...

(I like that article!)

And the two of you (Davind and Thomas) seem to be in the "The DNA Proponents" camp. The other is "The Twin Study Advocates" camp.

I guess now I'm in "The middle ground" camp, no longer in the "Twin Study Advocates".

Thanks for that. Maybe I'll check back in 10 years later and see what has happened.

	▲	tptacek 10 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The "warring camps" framing is very overstated. Greenberg, who doesn't practice in this space, believes it to be a vital concern, but giants in the twin-study practitioner field freely cite GWAS results, including the EA studies. A 2015 twin study result is basically a citation to the phlogiston era of polygenic population-wide genetic surveys. Heritability estimates of that vintage basically define away indirect genetic effects, which subsequent work appears to have very clearly established; the work now is on characterizing and bounding it, not asking whether it's real. "Blog post looks biased" is not a good way to address this unless you actually practice in the space, like the author does, and are in conversation with other practitioners in the space, like the author is. You find lots of --- let's generally call them pop science writers --- knee-jerk responding to the new rounds of heritability numbers, but those same authors often wrote excitedly about how GWAS results would bolster their priors in the years before the results were published. It's worth paying attention to the backgrounds of the people writing about this stuff! I substantially rewrote this comment, which was sprawling; the original is preserved here: https://gist.github.com/tqbf/b118ec9f9e69e0f3f61003c152d0d44...
	▲	davidbessis 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Great to see you're making progress! A few posts ago you were alluding to heritability in the 0.7-0.8 range, as a reason to dismiss the writings of Einstein, Newton, Descartes and Grothendieck. Now you're at 0.44. If you discount for a mild EEA violation correction, you'd easily get to 0.3 or below — a figure which I personally find believable. Just FYI, I don't belong to any "camp". These aren't camps but techniques and models. Intra-family GWAS provide underestimated lower bounds, twin studies provide wildly overestimated upper bounds. I don't care about the exact value, as long at it doesn't serve as a distraction from the (much more interesting!) story of how one can develop one's ability for mathematics. In any case, IQ is a pretty boring construct, especially on the higher end where it's clearly uncalibrated. And it's a deep misunderstanding of mathematics to overestimate the role of "computational ability / short term memory / whatever" vs the particular psychological attitude and mental actions that are key to becoming better at math. Now that the smoke screen has evaporated, can we please return to the main topic?