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| ▲ | matthewdgreen 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If IQ potential was 50% genetic, then the teaching would potentially raise your actual IQ by affecting the other 50% which is huge. IQs scores in populations and individuals change based on education, nutrition, etc. But even if we hypothesized a pretend world where “g” was magically 100% genetic, this (imaginary) measure is just potential. It is not true that an uneducated, untrained person will be able to perform tasks at the level of an educated, trained person. Also The Bell Curve was written by a political operative to promote ideological views, and is full of foundational errors. | | |
| ▲ | clove 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You've made the mistake of thinking that if IQ were 50% genetic (it isn't - it's way more than that, but that's beside the point), then the remaining proportion is completely (non-shared) environmental. Researchers in this field actually break down the non-genetic component into four major components:
1. Shared environment
2. Non-shared environment
3. Error Shared environment accounts for so little variance that it might as well be ignored; while non-shared accounts for little more than error. Note that including error in the non-genetic component, just as you've done in your post above, you are viscerally downplaying the otherwise undeniably predictive link from genes to IQ. In other words, whatever number you give is automatically deflated due to the way a psychometric is measured. This has never been the source of debate. Back when I was going through grad school in intelligence, people didn't have to overthink how they presented the data. Intelligence was already a mature field, and we discussed the data openly. But in the past couple decades or so, a lot of people such as yourself popped up, attempting to craft irrelevant, statistically incorrect arguments against the results of certain well-established psychometrics that happen to not fit within whatever mental world your brand of politics ascribes. If you really cared about the data, you'd be discussing the numbers. But your interest in this previously niche topic isn't in understanding reality; it's in justifying your worldview, which is why you deny the established data, immediately present a caveat stating that the data doesn't matter in the first place, appeal to emotions, and finish it all off by claiming those who disagree with you have been brainwashed. None of those four arguments have any merit in a genuine discussion on this topic. | | |
| ▲ | hirvi74 3 days ago | parent [-] | | How can research claim the genetic component of IQ is so high when there are so many environmental variables that have to be accounted for in order for the genetic component to even be able to manifest? For example, if two identical twins are separated at birth. If one is raised in an educationally rich and nurturing environment and the other is raised in a horribly abusive and neglectful environment, then I am not sure the two would probably score the similarly on any given IQ test despite their genetic commonalities. Meanwhile, I imagine things like eye color, hair color, etc. which have a strong genetic component would remain consistent between the two. | | |
| ▲ | EnPissant 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Here is a twin study that places the heritability of IQ to be around 80%: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu... | | |
| ▲ | matthewdgreen 2 days ago | parent [-] | | My understanding is that’s way at the upper end and there are other reputable studies (which you can search for) that put it down around 50% in twin studies, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be smart just because your parents are. But that’s irrelevant. The question being asked was: if IQ is genetic, why do we need teaching? This is like asking why you’d need ever need gas if you had extra-large fuel tank installed in your car. |
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| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | ok_computer 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Lower and median IQ people still benefit from literacy, numeracy, and art to function in society. The point of education systems isn’t to boost individuals’ dimensionally reduced 1D metrics but rather enrich their lives and contributions to society. There will always be distributions of abilities and means but that doesn’t justify neglecting the bulk of tax paying people. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 4 days ago | parent [-] | | It used to be that society worked just fine with people of all grades of smarts. But we're rapidly getting to the point that to be able to earn a living wage you need to be above average, especially if you are sole income provider for a while. AI is further steepening that S curve's mid-section. | | |
| ▲ | ok_computer 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think that has more to do with our willingness or ability to value labor in a highly abstracted overseas and automated economy. In addition, there has been a complete disconnect between $1USD purchasing power and generation ability based on capital scale. I don't know what financial crisis or tax policy or free trade agreement or visa program that stems from. I think that in the knowledge worker class, people tend to confuse their learned skills and inherited starting point to their innate abilities. Illusory superiority is best mocked in prairie home companion's Lake Woebegone, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" [0]. Give kids a stable home environment with loving supportive parents, three square meals a day, 9+ hours of sleep and opportunity to pursue their creative or sports interests and you'll have a class of highly functioning humans of different abilities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Wobegon#The%20Lake%20Wobe... It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current job, housing, and grocery market though. I cannot imagine the stress of being a sole provider. My point is to not conflate genetic superiority to the multitude of factors that go in to making a talented skillful worker, where I think nurture cannot be discounted. | | |
| ▲ | mrDmrTmrJ 3 days ago | parent [-] | | "It does feel like a squeeze just functioning in the current - housing, and grocery market though" If housing were far cheaper and traded just at the cost of new construction. ($250/sq-ft for new build 6 story, $400/sq-ft for 30 story mass timber, $600/sq-ft steel and concrete). We'd see that people can easily live in the current job market! The fundamental problem in our economy is the artificial scarcity of housing (through local regulation) in the cities and towns where the economy is booming. |
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| ▲ | mr_toad 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | With the automation of agriculture and manufacturing economies have become highly service oriented. Low skilled service jobs have always paid poorly. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Poorly in the USA or Canada does not equal poorly in Europe and some other countries outside of Europe. Some societies never paid a living wage to begin with. The USA for instance has structurally blocked minimum wage increases on the flimsiest of pretexts for many years now. Meanwhile, inflation is through the roof. The end result of that combination is very predictable. |
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| ▲ | jdietrich 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | G is (largely) immutable, but knowledge and skills are not. The economy is not zero-sum and we all benefit from increasing the total amount of human capital. Unfortunately, thinking around education is dominated by people who wrongly believe that the economy is zero-sum. | | |
| ▲ | api 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Throughout 99% of human history, the economy was mostly zero sum. If someone was rich it was because they stole it. If a group was wealthier it was because they stole it. By "stole it" I'm including theft of labor through slavery as well as the usual conquests and raiding. There was little to no innovation over time spans as long as thousands of years. Most of human culture and philosophy evolved during these periods and bakes in the idea that the pie is finite and that anyone with more of it has stolen it, because that was just an accurate picture of reality. A growing pie is a rare condition. It has happened a few times during periods of high civilization: Egypt, Greece, and Rome in the West and similar examples exist in lots of other places. A rapidly growing pie is entirely new. The modern world is an extreme historical aberration built on the scientific method, modern engineering methods, and the discovery of massive amounts of exploitable cheap energy in the form of first fossil fuels, then nuclear power, then (today) learning to exploit things like solar and wind energy at exponentially larger scales. Other innovations that have fed into this unique condition include synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics, vaccines, etc. Humans have never lived in an environment like this. Everything in our evolution and our accumulated culture is screaming that it's wrong -- that it will either collapse tomorrow (hence the perennial popularity of doomerism) or that it must be built on some kind of insanely massive crime because otherwise where is all this wealth coming from? That's because it's impossible. It cannot be. The idea that wealth can be created at this scale is just... not a thing that has ever existed until maybe 200 years ago max but really more like 80-100. Before that there was only subsistence and theft. Edit: I'm not arguing that there is no slavery or near-slavery or theft/conquest in the modern world. These things certainly still happen. I'm arguing that it is not the primary source of our massive wealth. Slavery and conquest have always been around and no society has ever been this wealthy or grown this fast. Not even close. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people. Similarly a lot of our wealth is just a facade. Most of it derives from the stock market, yet the market cap of the stock market is now dramatically larger than all of the money in existence. Consider that the system that created this mess only started in 1971 (the end of Bretton Woods) and it already only being propped up by ever more extravagant financial games. The house of cards is likely to come down without our lifetimes, which will make this one of the shortest lived economic experiments, and failures, ever. 'Doomerism' isn't a response to the growth, but to the increasingly unstable fundamentals underpinning everything, let alone in an era that's also an obvious geopolitical inflection point as well. [1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q | | |
| ▲ | api 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | So the change from sleeping on hay and riding horses and subsistence farming to this is just a facade? I'm not talking about numeric wealth, which I agree is hand wavey, but actual tangible physical wealth as well as our insane increase in knowledge and capability. I can go watch videos from the surface of Mars and pictures of galaxies from the beginning of time, then go to the doctor and get injected with something that programs my immune system to resist diseases I've never encountered, then ask an AI to explain any concept from the history of science or mathematics. I am middle class and live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, and some of the things I just described are available to the very poor. This is simply nuts and it is not a facade or an illusion. The collapse of the numeric financial industry won't take all this away unless we let it. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It's unusual to repeatedly refer to wealth and economics if you mean technological progress. And yeah we have obviously made tremendous technological strides, though I also would not entirely idealize that either. When you say that you live better than a pharaoh in a lot of ways, would you rather be a pharaoh or middle class, let alone lower, now a days? Technology is definitely the driving factor behind all changes in society, and it's an absolute requirement for our species to ultimately survive in this universe. It's also made it easier than ever for a larger chunk of those those of ability to live lives that would not have been possible for them in the past. But on a social level, it's overall effects are, in a seemingly large chunk of cases, somewhat sordid. | | |
| ▲ | TheOtherHobbes 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Economics doesn't measure wealth, it measures money, which is a proxy for political power and social status. In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality. Wealth in an anthropological sense means the extent to which a culture is increasing its collective intelligence - its ability to understand itself and the world, and to invent and create more interesting and open possibilities for humans to live in and explore. It's assumed technology is the only way to do that, but that might not be true. Technology is a harsh medicine with spectacular benefits but terrible costs and side effects. There might be other processes which get to the same ends in more subtle ways. This culture certainly likes to believe it's the only possible game in town. But cultures tend to do that - until something changes and they discover it's not true. | | |
| ▲ | dragonwriter 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Economics doesn't measure wealth Economics measures a lot of things, including wealth. It often uses monetary units as as the units of measure for both stocks like wealth and the numerator of flows like income, but even then its not actually measuring money, its using various techniques to convert things into money-equivalents to have common units. > which is a proxy for political power and social status. “Wealth”, “political power”, and “social status” are different ways of saying “the ability to get other people to do things you want them to do”. They are different lenses on the same thing. > In economics those are primary, and everything else is labelled an externality. No, in economics “externality” is the label given to a cost or benefit accruing as a result of a transaction to a party other than a direct participant in the rransaction. These are important because they explain one reason why even if rational choice theory did hold (which it doesn’t), markets could produce non-ideal results, because market decisions are based on (and optimize in aggregate, if the assumptions of rational choice theory hold), only those costs and benefits that are internal to the transactions (that is, accruing to direct, voluntary participants in the transaction.) |
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| ▲ | tick_tock_tick 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You're ignoring inflation. Real (inflation adjusted) median earnings are up 12%, in total, over the past 45 years. [1] That also understates the problem because many things (education, healthcare, debt costs, etc) are understated or not even considered in inflation measurements. There's also been a substantial increase in baseline necessities for the average person (internet, computing device, etc). Factor these in and it's fairly safe to say that real incomes have declined for the majority of people. So what your saying even though peoples baseline expectations are higher they got, cellphones, Netflix, and are taking home more money? | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 3 days ago | parent [-] | | No, for the average person the cost of a basic computing device and the rent attached to operate it, is probably eating up the extremely modest gain in income. And in modern times that's not really a luxury so much as a necessity, meaning people today are in effect earning less, significantly less for many, than they did 45 years ago. I intentionally avoided entertainment, which is of course also greatly increasing costs even further - though that's probably at least partially balanced by the internet which provides an immense amount of entertainment for just the already accounted for baseline cost. | | |
| ▲ | tick_tock_tick 2 days ago | parent [-] | | So everything is better, entertainment is ridiculously cheap, and they are earning more money? You keep saying "effect earning less" but your own linked data shows the opposite. | | |
| ▲ | somenameforme 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Are you trying to troll, or do you genuinely not understand what I said? If the latter, try rereading. If you still don't understand, I can try to rephrase. |
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| ▲ | Workaccount2 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I think what you are missing is that wealth is actually just "motivation to do work" in quantifiable pieces (we call it "currency", and mark-to-market assets for convenience). If I could bake a muffin that would make you effortlessly glide through, say, a full day of perfectly laying bricks without taking a break, a warehouse of those muffins would mean I'm extremely wealthy. No money, markets, or currency necessary. It's the purified extract of wealth. With that in mind, you can see that there is still huge room for more wealth creation. The majority of humans are still doing work that doesn't motivate much work from other humans. | | |
| ▲ | deadfoxygrandpa 3 days ago | parent [-] | | this sounds like a weirdo version of the labor theory of value that youve come up with on your own |
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| ▲ | cluckindan 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I would hazard a guess that a lot of the so-called wealth is not actual, directly owned material wealth, but immaterial numbers: indirect, abstract proof of ownership — in Baudrillard jargon, simulacra of ownership. Numbers, which, due to their illiquid nature and their disconnect from material ownership, cannot be instantly and fully redeemed without sacrificing most of their purported value. | | |
| ▲ | holbrad 3 days ago | parent [-] | | How can you possibly explain the world getting massively materially richer then ? Are the new drugs we create immertial ? The better faster processor abstract ? The energy we produce unreal ? | | |
| ▲ | cluckindan 3 days ago | parent [-] | | We haven’t stopped extracting materials or producing goods. In fact, there are about 7 billion more people now than in 1800, dawn of the industrial age. We are hundreds if not thousands of times more productive in terms of work than in the pre-industrial age. However, most of our so-called ownership begins in a fiat currency that is essentially a company token. https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ |
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| ▲ | lukan 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Assuming the assumption it is true (which I doubt) - there obviously is still value in teaching knowledge, so making students know more and practical skills, not produce more intelligent students. You can have a IQ of over 200, but if no one ever showed you how a computer works or gives you a manual, you still won't be productive with it. But I very much believe, intelligence is improvable and also degradable, just ask some alcoholics for instance. | | |
| ▲ | pama 4 days ago | parent [-] | | IQ of 200 (or higher) do not exist according to the original definitions of this metric. You need a population of 219 billion or higher to have a 95% chance that a sample exists with 6.66 standard deviations away from the mean (assuming mean of 100 and std of 15). Ofc the tests are of limited value and things can be gamed, but it would be silly to try and identify samples that have no chance of existing. | | |
| ▲ | csa 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > IQ of 200 (or higher) do not exist according to the original definitions of this metric Just to expand in this point… Most IQ tests for adults lose a lot of precision over 130 (2sd), and they are extremely imprecise over 145 (3sd) — almost to the point that a scores over 145 should simply be labeled 145+. When I did a deep dive into the IQ test literature 20 years ago, the most reliable correlated predictors for 145+ were standardized tests like the GRE. That said, standardized tests like these have high specificity and (relatively) low sensitivity — that is, very few false positives and many false negatives. | |
| ▲ | 010101010101 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “Is unlikely to exist” and “does not exist” are two very different statements, but it really doesn’t matter because GP’s point stands if you replace the exaggerated IQ with something reasonable like 160. | | |
| ▲ | pama 4 days ago | parent [-] | | OK. The more precise statement is that when the test was created you would have had about 99.3% to 99.42% chance that such a sample did not exist if you were to test all the population this test was designed for (depending on population statistics of the time that are a bit unclear). To be clear, I do not endorse the validity of these tests or their interpretation at any level. Learning to be a lifelong learner can take almost anyone a really long way. The analogy to neural nets is that bigger nets dont always make a better model after a point and every human starts at a very priviledged/huge network capacity. |
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| ▲ | cedilla 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | "The Bell Curve" is, let's say, highly controversial and not a good introduction into the topic. Its claim that genetics are the main predictor of IQ, which was very weakly supported at the time, has been completely and undeniably refuted by science in the thirty years since it's publication. | | |
| ▲ | alphazard 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is misleading. Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it. It's the most replicated finding in psychology, and any questions you have about twins or groups with similar or different genes have probably been investigated. There is a lot of noise online in the form of commentary about IQ, so it's important to look at actual data if you are skeptical/curious. | | |
| ▲ | robwwilliams 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Not sure what you mean precisely. Yes lots if work in IQ, but that does not mean there is a grand consensus. I am a geneticist who studies cognitive function. The single most common misunderstanding about estimates of heritability is that a high heritability implies full genetic causation without potential malleability. That is total wrong. Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly. | | |
| ▲ | EnPissant 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Heritability is always measured in the context of Environment X. If you change to Environment Y or Z then the heritability will often change greatly. That's not a very meaningful statement. If you took two twins and severely malnourished one of them it would not be useful to say: "See! IQ is mostly environmental!". You have to assume some kind of baseline environment that nearly everyone will share, and that can be full-filled just by the virtue of growing up in a country like America. Otherwise, you are just concerning yourself with insignificant outliers. Here is a twin study that places the heritability at ~80%: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu... | | |
| ▲ | robwwilliams 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Wow, a baseline environment everyone in America shares. Come visit Memphis. | | |
| ▲ | EnPissant 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you think that twin study included any children raised in a Memphis ghetto? |
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| ▲ | cakealert 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Unfortunately most of the malleability is non-systematic (can't be engineered by a third party). Which means it's caused by the nonlinear dynamics between the genes and environment. | |
| ▲ | hirvi74 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | As a geneticist who studies cognitive function, if you get a moment, do you mind reading this blog [1] and stating if you think it's factually correct or not? My genes are too poor, and thus, my IQ is likely too low for me to be certain I can trust my own opinions on the matter. [1] http://bactra.org/weblog/520.html |
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| ▲ | hirvi74 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > It's the most replicated finding in psychology Why would it not be? It's not like intelligence was some sort of unknown intrinsic discovery that psychologist happened to uncover. Intelligence was defined and the tests were created to support the definition. I've done quite a lot of personal, hobby-research on this subject, and I remain convinced that IQ deserves to be met with a lot of skepticism and controversy. I do believe the tests measure something insofar that all tests measure something, but I am not certain that either intelligence, or at least intelligence alone, is the only thing being measured on those tests. Not to mention, with over one hundred years of intelligence research, what good has actually come from the field? Historically, there was plenty of racism, eugenics, and the furthering of certain political agendas that have come from intelligence research. Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research? Has IQ positively contributed to the field of education? Has the research helped increase human quality of life and happiness? Of course, leave it to psychology -- its most "robust and replicated finding" is, essentially, useless. | | |
| ▲ | briHass 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | One that jumps immediately to mind is IQ testing used for epidemiology, such as exposure to toxins and the effects on children. IQ tests were used in the original study (Phillip Landrigan) used to show how leaded gasoline causes cognitive imparement in children. For things that cause sub-clinical imparement, you need a way to test for lowered intelligence, that doesn't rise to disability level. That's a few million, if not billion people who's lives have been improved by having IQ tests that were used to force environmental regulation worldwide. | | |
| ▲ | hirvi74 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The trends of removing lead from gasoline and such were already happening prior to IQ being used as evidence. In fact, the only way IQ could be used as evidence would be for the lead to already have started to be removed. So, using IQ for such was a data point, but it was not the cause of the movement. |
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| ▲ | Jensson 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Again, whose life has actually been improved from this research? IQ showed there were tons of poor people with high IQ and thus it was worth providing higher schooling to poor people, that is a big one. Without IQ research people would just argue all poor people are dumb, but you can't do that now since we have proof that they aren't, they are just uneducated. Another group it helped massively was women, without IQ tests do you really think women would get into higher education that quickly? IQ tests proved women weren't dumber than men, something people have long believed. If you think its bad that women and poor people today are allowed to get higher education, then sure IQ just had bad consequences, but I feel most think those are good things. | | |
| ▲ | hirvi74 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > Without IQ research people would just argue all poor people are dumb I do not believe that this was true without evidence. > do you really think women would get into higher education that quickly? Yes. I believe WWII played a much larger role in this, i.e., men being off to war and many women filling traditional men's roles sufficed as proof that women were capable of many of the same tasks men were. |
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| ▲ | ants_everywhere 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Anyone who wants to learn about IQ should Google it This is bad advice because Google returns poor results for most medical questions, including ones about controversial topics like IQ. IQ was adopted as a pet cause by hard right wing political theorists, for example one of the authors of the Bell Curve. When I was in grad school for psych, nobody serious studied it. Occasionally one person was still working on it, and everybody in the department whispered about them being a kook. This was at an elite psych department, it may have been different in smaller departments. Often times if you see someone posting information about IQ it's either (1) they're selling IQ tests, (2) they're selling services that administer IQ tests, or (3) they align with a political faction that politicizes IQ. If you want to learn about IQ, the best thing is probably to find a recent review article published by a top tier journal that does not specialize in IQ research. My take the last time I looked into it was that it helps locate people who have learning disabilities, but it's not great at predicting individual outcomes. The measure most people intuitively think of is correlation of IQ with success, keeping SES constant and throwing out the lowest range of IQ. That is, you want to know the incremental benefit of having a higher IQ given that you're not suffering from a learning disability. And you also don't want to accidentally measure the obvious impact that having more money gives you more opportunities. When you make these adjustments it quickly becomes clear that IQ is much messier than people in this thread are claiming. For example, heritability varies by SES. And heritability is generally not what people think it is naively. |
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| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Do note that The Bell Curve is not considered controversial in general. The part about race and genetics is. Also genes being the sole predictor of IQ is not an accurate description of the book’s premise. | | |
| ▲ | breakyerself 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | No the whole book is controversial. It's a political argument for dismantling the welfare state disguised as a review of science. They laundered a bunch of work by racial eugenicists along with a bunch of other junk science methodology. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo?si=bzVMwGU4XjPrk4sr | | |
| ▲ | nialse 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I hear you are invested in this line of thought, and that is okay. I just don’t agree with the analysis, and not with the labeling. | | |
| ▲ | breakyerself 3 days ago | parent [-] | | It doesn't rely on work by Eugenicists? | | |
| ▲ | nialse 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Fortunately, science does not rely on the character of its purveyors but on the quality of the evidence. | | |
| ▲ | breakyerself 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The quality of the evidence wasn't any better than the character of the purveyors. You're an apologist for bullshit. |
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| ▲ | machomaster 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Calling something "controversial" is a total non-argument. The book's science about IQ is solid. In actuality, the content of the book was simply a collection of mainstream scientific consensus ideas at that time, without specific controversial add-ons. It's only after the book was published, the book unexpectedly was attacked by proto-woke people. | | |
| ▲ | breakyerself 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Yeah Nazi aligned eugenicist science is totally mainstream. | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Inventing strawman out of thin air in order to drown discussion, to attack individuals and paint them evil, that's literally what Nazis did. How ironic. |
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| ▲ | root_axis 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The controversial part is specifically the policy recommendations that we avoid investing resources in certain racial groups because problems in their communities can be explained by genetics. | | |
| ▲ | laichzeit0 4 days ago | parent [-] | | So were their claims falsified? | | |
| ▲ | root_axis 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You can't determine someone's IQ based on their race, you need to give them an IQ test to do that, thus the suggestion that we prejudge people based on their race is seen as racist. You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial. | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | This is a clear example of people confusing explanation ("how things are") with recommendation/support ("ought to be"). | | |
| ▲ | root_axis 3 days ago | parent [-] | | The controversy is with respect to "what ought to be". The fact that there are measurable IQ differences between groups is not in dispute. | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 2 days ago | parent [-] | | All the controversy I have seen come from people, who think that even talking about possible differences between groups of people is racist, sexist, whathaveyou. | | |
| ▲ | root_axis 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Is it really? I'm sure those people exist, but obviously that's not the case in this thread, so I don't know what to tell you. It's also true that genuine racists and sexists are definitionally motivated by prejudice based on group differences, so a discussion without paying nuance to that reality is begging for controversy. | | |
| ▲ | laichzeit0 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I read the book Bell Curve years ago, but I remember the analysis being that the found statistically significant differences between race and IQ. The authors argued that individual differences in IQ within a population are strongly influenced by genetics (heritability estimates around 40–80%). They emphasized that this doesn’t mean IQ is fixed, but that genes play a large role in explaining why individuals differ. Their ultimate policy argument was less about race per se, and more about what society can realistically do. They argued that large-scale social programs (e.g., Head Start, income redistribution, affirmative action) had limited power to reduce cognitive inequality or close gaps, because much of IQ variation was resistant to environmental manipulation. On the genetic vs. environmental debate about group differences, their ultimate claim was: we don’t know, but genetics might contribute, and pretending otherwise could be harmful to honest policy discussion. But really, if you can't go about doing more studies on race and IQ, we'll never really know. It's a valid and legitimate scientific question | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is an extremely studied question, and The Bell Curve operates in the phlogiston era of this science. The idea that this is a forbidden topic only whispered about in the academy is an Internet myth. Most of the reason you don't hear about current research into behavioral genetics is that a, uh, very particular excitable subset of Internet commenters are actually interested in this research, and the research results aren't coming out the way they want them to. (You can get an isomorphic answer substituting psychometrics for behavioral genetics; this is the "twin studies" line of research that Richard Herrnstein relied on in the book, and it too is actively studied, but not talked about because the answers don't come out the way --- let's call them "Herrnstein fans" --- want them to). |
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| ▲ | machomaster 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The wokeistic science-denying has taken some steps back lately, but I am basing my observation on 20+ years of unbased and delusional attacks I have been witnessing. If you are interested you can take a deep dive into the articles/opinions/statements that were made against those books/authors immediately after books were released and for decades after. If you want, I can give you a few helpful/analytical youtube videos about the subject. |
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| ▲ | antegamisou 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You might feel that the racism is scientifically justified, but that belief is controversial. Sir, this is HN, we love junk science and Sam Altman. |
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| ▲ | holbrad 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > has been completely and undeniably refuted by science in the thirty years since it's publication. This is literally the exact opposite. | | |
| ▲ | aredox 3 days ago | parent [-] | | This is exactly the case. The only thing IQ tests measure is the ability to score well at an IQ test. Just look at what MENSA has produced: buffoons. |
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| ▲ | fortran77 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I've read the book. I says that aspects of IQ can be heritable, but doesn't ever say "genetics are the main predictor of IQ". Quoting direcly from the book: "It seems highly likely to us that both genes and the environment have something to do with IQ differences” and the book states that "the exact contribution of genes versus environment is unknown." | |
| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How much of that controversy is manufactured, though? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_IQ_Controversy,_the_Media_... (if even Wikipedia can't drag this through the mud...) | | | |
| ▲ | hemabe 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And yet, in the US, the first start-ups are offering the possibility of testing embryos for their IQ. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-c... | | |
| ▲ | torginus 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > they claimed selecting the “smartest” of 10 embryos would lead to an average IQ gain of more than six points Ethics aside this sounds like BS - how do you measure the IQ of someone against someone else who was never born? | | |
| ▲ | Spooky23 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Fertility is a field with a lot of weird BS because it’s mostly direct pay and there’s no insurance company to deny bullshit. They probably do some weird test, then pick the embryos that look the prettiest. How do you prove that little Jimmy wasn’t the smartest embryo? | |
| ▲ | nradov 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's at least mostly BS. Researchers have found certain genes which have a weak statistical correlation with high IQ but the mechanism of action is unknown. And it's not an additive thing: the interactions and relationships between individual genes must play some role but that has barely been studied at all. There's no guarantee that an embryo with those genes will grow up to be intelligent, or that they won't have other problems. But there's enough "dumb money" in Silicon Valley to provide a customer base of insecure suckers for these startups. https://www.wsj.com/us-news/silicon-valley-high-iq-children-... | | |
| ▲ | whatshisface 4 days ago | parent [-] | | One of the dark comedies playing out in the world right now is that if random physical features are correlated with IQ testing due to co-heritability, users of IVF selection will be imprinting them on their own kids. |
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| ▲ | breakyerself 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | So if a start up makes a claim it must be real? Theranos investors would like a word. |
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| ▲ | brabel 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Really? If not genetics then what is it? Just random?? | | |
| ▲ | hemabe 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | IQ is largely genetic, even if some people claim otherwise. The evidence for this is now overwhelming: even when different ethnic groups grow up in very similar conditions in the same country, the PISA (which correlates r=0.9 with IQ) scores measured vary greatly. For example, among second-generation children in Germany, there are significant differences in PISA scores. Polish children achieve similar or even better scores than German children. Turkish children, on the other hand, remain at the same poor level that their parents (the first generation of immigrants) achieved in the tests. Twin studies and studies of adopted children also leave no doubt that there is a very strong genetic component that determines IQ.
Even Wikipedia assumes that heritability can be as high as 80%. Links https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article174706968/OECD-Studie-... | | |
| ▲ | judofyr 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Your first link (Wikipedia) directly contradicts your examples: > Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis[18][19][20][21]. The scientific consensus is that genetics does not explain average differences in IQ test performance between racial groups.[22][23][24][25][26][27]. | | |
| ▲ | lumb63 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I suspect that this is an instance where “the scientific consensus” is wrong because to suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole. I would love to be wrong, so if someone could explain this to me, I’d be very receptive to an explanation of why this logic is wrong: First, let’s substitute emotionally charged terms for more neutral terms; e.g. imagine rather than discussing intelligence and race, we are discussing something else highly heritable and some other method of grouping genetically similar individuals, e.g. height and family. The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me. It is in the realm of “I cannot fathom how an intelligent person could disagree with this” territory for me. If variable A has a causative correlation with variable B and two groups score similarly with respect to variable A, then they are probably similar with respect to variable B. Of course there are other variables, such as nutrition, sleep, and what have you, but that does not eliminate a correlation. In fact, for something which is “highly heritable” it seems to me that genetics would necessarily be the predominant factor. It’s a really unfortunate conclusion, so again, I’d love to be wrong, but I cannot wrap my head around how it can be. | | |
| ▲ | judofyr 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole. There's many scientists who have published the "contrary". They were not ostracized from science or from society as a whole. These saw next to none negative impact to their position while they were alive. Other scientists have published rebuttals and later some of the originals articles have been retracted. J. Philippe Rushton: 250 published articles, 6 books, the most famous university professor in Canada. Retractions of this work came 8 years after his death. Arthur Jensen: Wrote a controversial paper in 1969. Ended up publishing 400 articles. Remained a professor for his full life. Hans Eysenck: The most cited living psychologist in peer-reviewed scientific journal literature. It took more than 20 years before any of his papers were retracted. There's a lot of published articles about the "contrary view" that you can read. You can also read the rebuttals by the current scientific consensus (cited above). > The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me. But this is not an analogous claim since you're talking about disparities between families. The analogous claim would be: "although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between groups have a genetic basis". A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance. [1]: Secular Changes in Relative Height of Children in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan: Is “Genetics” the Key Determinant? https://biomedgrid.com/pdf/AJBSR.MS.ID.000857.pdf | | |
| ▲ | Jensson 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > A very simple example for height[1]: The Japanese grew 10 cm taller from mid-20th century to early 2000s. Originally people thought that the shortness of the Japanese was related to their genetics, but this rapid growth (which also correlates with their improved economy) suggests that the group difference between Japanese and other groups was not related to the genetic component of height variance. Every group grew taller as they got richer, but Japanese people are still short even today when they are rich. So existence of other factors doesn't rule out the genetic factor. |
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| ▲ | jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're wrong. Some of the smartest kids I know are from immigrant children. It is their background - and society's response to that background - that hinders them, not their genetics. More so if they aren't lily white. Note how anything you say about this subject will be used to generalize to much larger groups (of which you can find some prime examples in this very thread) than the ones that IQ tests themselves target: individuals. And you can't say much about how an individual scores on their IQ test without accounting for their environment because that's a massive factor. All of your arguments more or less equate to 'I don't understand the subject matter, but I'd like to see my biases confirmed'. And, predictably, you see your biases confirmed. But some of the smartest individuals that ever lived came from backgrounds and populations that - assuming the genetic component is as strong as you make it out to be - would have precluded them from being that smart. Bluntly: wealth and access to opportunity have as much to do with how well you score on an IQ test versus what your genetic make-up is. Yes, it is a factor. No, it is not such a massive factor that it dwarfs out the other two once you start looking at larger groups. Income disparity and nutrition alone already negate it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effect_of_health_on_intelligen... And that's just looking at that particular individual, good luck to you if your mom and dad were highly intelligent but you ended up as the child of drugs or alcohol consumers. Nothing you personally can do about that is going to make up for that difference vs growing up as the child of affluent and moderately intelligent people. IQ tests are a very imprecise yardstick, and drawing far reaching conclusions about the results without appreciating the complexity behind squashing a multi-dimensional question into a single scalar, especially when you are starting out from a very biased position is not going to lead to a happy ending. Before you know it you'll be measuring skull volume. |
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| ▲ | bearl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Specifically, as well stated by [23] there is no such thing as “race.” The premise of racial group differences is not possible; we can’t have racial differences if race is not real. Sadly, a lot of people very much believe in race, especially the ones that shouldn’t! | | |
| ▲ | robwwilliams 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Geneticist use the word “ancestry” to refer to summarize the historical geographic origins of genetic variants that we are inherit. Ancestry can be reliably estimated by genome analysis. Race, like the gender, is now considered a social construct. The meanings of words are defined by a community of users who find them useful in communicating. Race and ancestry are both useful words. | |
| ▲ | holbrad 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People who say there's no such thing as race are complete charlatans playing semantic word games. | | |
| ▲ | og_kalu 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. That's not semantics. Yes it's real, but for social, not genetic reasons. | | |
| ▲ | holbrad 3 days ago | parent [-] | | >has no genetic justification That is comically retarded. Like do you have any understanding of the words you are using ? If there's no genetic justification, how would it be possible to trivially determine someone's race just from their DNA ? | | |
| ▲ | jonnybgood 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > If there's no genetic justification, how would it be possible to trivially determine someone's race just from their DNA ? Genetic ancestry is determined by correlation with geographic origins and population. In other words, where a set of genetic markers are highly concentrated. It says nothing about race. | |
| ▲ | flir 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It isn't. |
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| ▲ | flir 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | So define one. A race. | | |
| ▲ | Der_Einzige 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatic_maxim | | |
| ▲ | og_kalu 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, so race obviously has no genetic justification. It's real in the way other social constructs are real. | |
| ▲ | flir 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | aka "a category that appears self-evident to me". This was my thinking, also. Good cluster of links. |
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| ▲ | machomaster 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | A group of people that have lived long enough in relative isolation that they became unique, distinguished and separate from other races. | | |
| ▲ | og_kalu 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem is that Human 'races' are not in fact unique, distinguished and separate from other 'races'. Genetically, two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'. | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 2 days ago | parent [-] | | The problem you describe only concerns people who don't know anything about the subject, but still have no shame to have strong opinions about it. Nobody in race sciences (anthropology, etc) claim that there are only unique races that are separate from each other and don't mix. This is a clear strawman. The fact that there is mixing between races does not mean that races don't exist. You can make an emulsion out of water and oil, but water and oil still are their own things. And the science has all kinds of specific categorization for human groups that go way beyond the rough separation into 3-4 main races. All the mixing, separation, migration, isolation, etc have been taken into account. It's a pity this kind of topic/science is basically a taboo in the Western World and for real info and honest discussion have to go to other systems/countries/languages. | | |
| ▲ | og_kalu 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My example has nothing to do with race mixing lmao. Two Sub Saharan Africans today are literally descendants of people that never left the continent, there's no amount of 'race mixing' that would causing one of them to be genetically closer to another 'race' than to each other if race was a genetic reality. You're just an idiot with poor reading comprehension. Between us, you are clearly the one with no clue about what he's talking about. There’s more genetic variation within any so-called racial group than between groups, race mixing or not. Clearly, 'race' has no genetic justification. | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | You are only further proving my exact point. You must be one of those clueless people who think that sex is fluid and is a social construct because there is in certain characteristics a bigger difference within each sex than between the medium of each sexes. |
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| ▲ | 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | flir 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | "long enough"? "relative isolation"? "unique" how: genetically? culturally? phenotypically? | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You are asking questions that are already were answered if you cared to RTFM/LMGTFY. Shortly: - Unique how? Optimally genetically, but this has practical problems that the field of paleogenetics is trying to work on. Until then must use: classical morphological features, odontology, dermatoglyphics, biochemical characteristics. - How long enough? Depends on the type of group. There are different levels of human group classification, both above the traditionally understood "races" and a lot below that. |
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| ▲ | delichon 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've been told that there's no such thing as a circle because there's no such thing as a perfect circle. The claim that race does not exist seems to be in that category. | | |
| ▲ | throwaway284927 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You seem to be arguing that talking about races within humans may be useful even if the reality only approximates the definition of race (similarly to the idea of a "circle", which even though it does not apply in all it's precision to any real object it may still be a useful concept as an approximation nonetheless). However, I don't think that comparison is particularly insightful, and it may even be a bit misleading in my opinion because of the important differences in how those two things are defined (circle and race). After all, the reason why no real object is an actual circle is because the definition of circle is so to say an "ideal" definition that no real object can fit in all it's precision. It's natural to assume that no real object will have all of it's "points" perfectly distributed according to a circle's equation (without even getting philosophical as to how these mathematical definitions relate to the real world, or if they do at all). If one rejects any "approximate", non exact application of the concept, then it will be mostly useless when it comes to describing or understanding the real world (because you won't be able to use it for anything). On the other hand, the concept of "race" is quite the opposite to ideal: it's not "ideal" as the circle is, in fact it's more of a pragmatic/working definition. It's more like the definition of "chair": many things may or may not be considered a chair, but usually people don't feel that there's "no such thing as a chair" in the real world. On the contrary, it's more common to feel that anything "could" be a chair because it has a malleable definition based on the context, instead of nothing being "precisely" a chair because there are some rigid constraints to the definition that no real object can actually fit. When the idea of races within the human species is pushed against, it's not because "race" is an ideal concept that no real thing may implement in all it's precision (as would be the case with the circle). I won't present these actual reasons (which could get quite political) here, but I will say that I definitely wouldn't consider those two claims to be in the same category: - Saying that X real object is not a circle, or that no real object can be (exactly) a circle has to do with the fact that the concept of circle is ideal and by definition nothing "real" will fit it perfectly. - Saying that (in the human species) there are no races is, however, not based on a quality of the definition of the concept of "race" (specifically, it's not ideal), but on some quantitative judgements about what kind of thing qualifies as a race an what doesn't (pretty much like the concept of "chair", "food", etc. which are not ideal and there's some room for discussion based on context when it comes to whether some specific object fits the category or not). | | |
| ▲ | Jensson 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Ok, so saying race doesn't exist is like saying chairs doesn't exist, since you can't really say what is a chair, what is a shelf and what is a table, correct? Technically you could say that a chair is a table or a shelf, but people still like to call them chairs, you know the difference when you see it. Races is like that, scientists can't define it but its still a useful concept like a chair. Scientists can't exactly define what a chair is either, but its still a very useful concept and we can discuss chairs and everyone understand what we mean. | | |
| ▲ | og_kalu 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Two sub Sahara African men could be more genetically distinct than one of those men and a random white man even they should be both 'black'. The thing about race is that it has no biological justification. It's still 'real' of course but in the same way money has 'real' value. It's a powerful social construct. | | |
| ▲ | ryandv 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > The thing about race is that it has no biological justification. > It's a powerful social construct. This is 100% correct, and yet progressive academics have yet to figure out how to slot this fact into their ideology without creating incorrigible inconsistencies. For instance - if race is a social construct just like gender, why is transracialism frowned upon, while transgenderism is lauded? Quoting Richard Dawkins, famous debunker of Creationist and religious bullshit [0]: Why is a white woman vilified and damned if she identifies as black,
but lauded if she identifies as a man? That's topsy-turvy, because
race really is a continuum, whereas sex is one of the few genuine binaries
of biology.
The most coherent (but unsatisfying) answer I have found in the literature is that society has "intersubjectively" agreed to accept transgenderism and not transracialism, where "intersubjectively" ultimately translates to some level of "because we said so and this is society's new fanfiction head canon:" [1] What matters, then, is that intersubjectively we have all agreed that
ancestry is relevant to the determination of one’s race.
It's worth noting that intersubjectivity is basically a religious concept, as defined in the Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. [2]There is no science or biology on the far LGBTQ+ progressive left. Only pseudoscience and apologetics befitting of a Creationist. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cubkdBuvJAQ [1] https://philpapers.org/archive/TUVIDO.pdf [2] https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_9182 |
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| ▲ | togetheragainor 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Is this the consensus because it’s true, or because anybody who suggests otherwise is pilloried and driven out of academia? | | |
| ▲ | jdiff 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I think you'd do well to read this person's thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44933637 | | |
| ▲ | togetheragainor 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That person didn't address the current climate in academia at all. Their examples of "contrarians" are all long-dead professors whose papers were published many decades ago in a different academic climate. That doesn't refute that academia in America has suffered ideological capture since, and questioning the "scientific consensus" on certain politically-charged topics is career suicide. Also their Japan example seems poor. Japan remains a short a country relative to their prosperity. They're several centimeters shorter than a country with a similar GDP per capita, like Czech Republic. They're about the same average height as Somalians, despite having significantly better food security and a GDP per capita that's over 50 times higher. |
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| ▲ | froh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | especially Germany is a very poor example for this claim as school performance (PISA) in this country correlates with the parents academic background more than anything. if your parents aren't educated you can be intelligent AF and still will fail the German school system while you can be dumb as a brick but still make Abitur if your parents drill you through. in Germany. and Welt is a media source with a right conservative agenda pushing the genetics narrative. | | |
| ▲ | holbrad 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Surely this is completely logicalal if IQ is largely heritable. The smarter richer parents are more likely (But not guaranteed) to have smarter children. So it would be completely expected for the smarted person you know to come from a rich family even if their environment had no effect. (Though it likely does) | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > Surely this is completely logicalal if IQ is largely heritable. > So it would be completely expected for the smarted person you know Maybe we should make the occasionalal exception. | |
| ▲ | jdiff 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's internally logically consistent, but inconsistent with the data when measured and controlled properly. |
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| ▲ | robwwilliams 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes. The smartest kid in my elementary school in Blankenese, Hamburg, Germany (a filthy-rich neighborhood) was an asthmatic son of the stable master of Alex Springer. By far the smartest kid. But he did NOT go to gymnasium. He was my best friend and I was furious at this social injustice. I was 10 and this was my first exposure to rigid class injustice. It still makes me mad. All of the other dumb rich kids from Blankenese went to gymnasium, me included. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 days ago | parent [-] | | This is pretty common. In the 80s (when I went to high school in Europe) the best way to predict whether or not someone would go to Gymnasium or Athenaeum was to look at how wealthy their parents were. It is still exactly the same today. | | |
| ▲ | hadlock 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I had to research what gymnasium meant, in the US that just means P.E. which is a class where you do generic sports for an hour each day. Are you saying, in Germany, you can't choose to go academic route in primary/secondary school? The teachers and school decide if you will go into vocational school for mechanics, electrician, etc? That seems to imply class mobility is nearly zero in German education. | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 2 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I had to research what gymnasium meant, in the US that just means P.E. which is a class where you do generic sports for an hour each day. Except... that's not it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gymnasium_(school) > Are you saying, in Germany, you can't choose to go academic route in primary/secondary school? The teachers and school decide if you will go into vocational school for mechanics, electrician, etc? There is an end-of-the-year test for kids in what would be the 8th grade here (and this is not Germany, but the Netherlands), if your last year's teacher sucked or simply doesn't like you then you're off to the vocational school or at best HAVO because there are a limited number of slots for VWO (Athenaeum / Gymnasium). > That seems to imply class mobility is nearly zero in German education. It's not zero, but it isn't nearly where it should be, and again, my experience is mostly with NL. Merit matters but it certainly isn't everything and there are certain schools where the gatekeeping is very visible. One way in which this happens is by keeping the number of slots for the highest level artificially low in spite of demand. You then have the choice of moving out of a region to a location where there is room or to accept a lower grade of education for your children. This is very frustrating, especially because kids with the right last names of course always mysteriously get in. The better schools have a system where they share the first year of high school between all of the pupils and only then do they give the option to choose which track a particular pupil wants to follow. But these are not in the majority. | |
| ▲ | robwwilliams 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Sorry, yes “gynasium” is the academical track. There are two “lower” tracks. All decided when you are 11 years old! Not sure uf this is still SOP but was in the 60s through ???. | | |
| ▲ | froh 2 days ago | parent [-] | | just to add: 11y old is in Berlin where the schooling branch is selected in 6th grade. it's at 9 years of age outside Berlin, during fourth grade. |
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| ▲ | flir 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect | |
| ▲ | aredox 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And it doesn't occur to you the parents may help their kids during their studies? You never went to your father of mother to ask them to explain a concept you struggled with in class? Now imagine your parents didn't get an education and couldn't help you. Where would you be now? | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Remarkable how you jumped from 'IQ is largely genetic' to 'Turkish children remain at the same poor level that their parents achieved in the tests'. Don't you see your the mistake in your reasoning there? Probably that too can be explained by genetics or maybe by a failing education system but the point is: there are very dumb Germans and very smart Turkish people who would still score different on an IQ test in German. Especially after going through the German school system (which of course would never discriminate against children with a different ethnic background /s) and so on. The confounding factors at play here make the whole comparison without accounting for those factors utterly meaningless. | | |
| ▲ | hemabe 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Germans have an average IQ of around 100 (it used to be 105 before immigration). Turks have an IQ of 85-90. If you are not biased, you can clearly see these differences in everyday life. With a few exceptions, the intellectual achievements of fellow citizens of Turkish origin tend to be rather low. The situation is different when you look at migrants from high-IQ countries, such as China (who have an IQ of 104). These children often achieve amazing results, for example in the International Science Olympiads. The US is actually only able to achieve top places in the Math Olympiad thanks to Chinese migrants. Almost the entire US team consists of people with a Chinese background. Look at this picture of the US-Team for 2023 if you want to know, what I mean: https://maa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Screen-Shot-2024-... | | |
| ▲ | jacquesm 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Could you maybe fuck off with the overt racism? It would make HN instantly a lot better. You are well into 'not even wrong' territory. Thanks. |
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| ▲ | robwwilliams 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You do understand that these estimates of heritability depend of a relatively stable estimate of the environmental variance. If environment variance goes up heritability goes down. Sure, genetic variants modulate (not “Determine”) an IQ score and reaction times etc. But this does NOT mean IQ scores are unmalleable by environmental factors. |
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| ▲ | qayxc 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The brain has pretty high plasticity. A large host of factors contribute to the final outcome, from mental stimulation to training to overall health, stress (both physical and mental), and nutrition. It has been shown that IQ scores improve significantly just by taking them multiple times (training) [1]. They also vary if the tested person is sleep deprived, sick, or stressed. [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7709590 | | |
| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You do have to consider that g is the amount of plasticity though, which is mainly genetic. A better way is to think of it is that genetics provides a potential capacity which may or may not be fulfilled. Training helps individuals to varying degrees. | | |
| ▲ | matthewdgreen 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That seems intuitive to me, but lots of other things in science seemed intuitive because I wanted to believe them. If the measured IQ difference in individuals can be overwhelmed by simple factors like “have I taken the test before”, we don’t really have a useful empirical measurement to say these things and we’re just stating our hopes and dreams. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent [-] | | The training effect in test-retest is dependent on g as well. It is intelligent to learn from past experiences. Measuring g is hard and taking shortcuts is tempting. A reasonable repeatable g factor test takes hours, and is too often replaced by a single test. There are ways around the test-retest issues but they are roads less travelled. | | |
| ▲ | thechao 4 days ago | parent [-] | | My high school was right across from a branch of a university (UHD) where the PhD candidates developed IQ tests. We (the HS students) could take them for extra credit. My favorite example was a block-arranging test (there was a set of blocks & some pictures). Anyways, they printed the blocks "symmetrically"; once I figured that out, making the picture was limited only by how quickly I could move. (The test normally had you looking at all sides of the cube, repeatedly.) My "IQ" was well over 200 on that test. The candidate said that it was going to set their lab back bag years. | | |
| ▲ | mieubrisse 3 days ago | parent [-] | | A similar thing happened to me. I once took a timed test with a section that had me translating a string of symbols to letters using a cipher, response being multiple choice. If you read the string left to right, there were multiple answer options that started with the same sequence of letters (so ostensibly you had to translate the entire string). But if you read the string right to left, there was often only one answer option that matched (the right one). So I got away with translating only the last ~4 symbols, regardless of how long the string was. I blew through the section, and surely scored high. I always wondered: did they realize this? Or did it artificially inflate my results? And looking at the highest-entropy section felt natural to me, but only because of countless hours as a software engineer where the highest-entropy bit is at the end (filepaths, certain IDs, etc). Is it really accurate to say I'm "more intelligent" because I've seen that pattern a ton before, whereas someone who hasn't isn't? I suspect not. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 3 days ago | parent [-] | | If the pattern generalizes to other tasks, maybe the test was right? ;) Appreciate your post and the post you commented on. Taking shortcuts in test development often ends up being detrimental. There is also an inherent challenge in developing test for people who may well be smarter than you are. It’s like that programmer thing: “If you write the smartest program you can, and debugging is harder than writing code. Who’s gonna debug the code?” Many people have tried developing “smart” tests for cognitive abilities, some realize when they fail, some unfortunately don’t. |
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| ▲ | flir 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Consider genetics as a ceiling. An upper bound. Take the same child, give it an "ideal" upbringing or an abusive upbringing. You're going to get different IQ scores out of the adult. I believe you can see this in the Flynn Effect. | |
| ▲ | gus_massa 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Nutrition: just remove a few vitamins and watch the IQ drop like a stone. Even a "balanced" diet with 500kcal/day will be harmful. Education: in spite of the claims, a good education raise the IQ measurement. The test leak and school add similar tasks. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Counter point: does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic. | | |
| ▲ | gus_massa 4 days ago | parent [-] | | >>> They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern. >> what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here? > does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic. Yes, if you ignore or compensate everithing else, it's mainly genetic. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That is correct. The null hypothesis tested is: if you compensate for everything the result is the same for everyone, given that genetics have no effects on g. Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected. Thus, mainly genetic factors underlie the g factor. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Just to clarify: the prevailing notion in many context were that genetics does not matter and thus given the necessary social and educational interventions every human would prosper. Sadly, this is not the case. We are limited by our biology AND the extend we and our environment manages us to fulfill our potential. | | |
| ▲ | bearl 4 days ago | parent [-] | | But we are not limited by our biology. With tools and technology we can change our limits. From pharmaceutical tools like adderal to neurolink style brain implants to ai assistants to genetic engineering, the limitations in our cognitive capacity are becoming less salient every day. The importance of g in the future asymptotically approaches 0 the farther out you go, at least in terms of economic outcomes. It will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded. But I would guess that openness to experience and/or conscientiousness will eventually displace g as predictors of economic success, if they haven’t already. G is useful when everyone does paperwork in offices, but when everyone is on UBI and/or living in government camps g won’t matter as much, again aside from the capacity for moral reasoning but that can be offset with a stricter and more draconian legal system. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 3 days ago | parent [-] | | “It [g] will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded.” Excellent quote! Unfortunately not all high g people engage in moral reasoning, and I fear that they will tend to exploit lower g people, rather than to help them utilize AI to compensate. There is a real opportunity to help individuals with cognitive impairments enhance their abilities with AI. The question is how, and how they collectively feel about it. |
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| ▲ | flir 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We are limited by our biology. A dog can't play the harmonica. That doesn't sound like a deep insight, to be honest. | |
| ▲ | gus_massa 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think everyone is using a different definition of the g factor. | | |
| ▲ | nialse 4 days ago | parent [-] | | One is certainly not, unless one is not well read. The g-factor is one of the most stable findings in psychology. It is well established and well defined. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 4 days ago | parent [-] | | If you're calling g-factor "that which remains after you have eliminated all environmental factors", then you're not using the common definition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics). To challenge your other assertion, I'll quote the article: > The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations. (We've had a lot of discussions of IQ on Hacker News. My observations suggest that everyone who supports it in more than 3 comments in the same thread is a scientific racist with a poor understanding of the research on IQ.) | | |
| ▲ | nialse 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Working in psychometrics I’m in the somewhat conservative “g is simply shared variance of many tests measuring human abilities”-camp. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412107?origin=crossref&seq=1 I’m not subscribing to the notion that g should be controlled for environment, quite the contrary, but if you do, what is left is the part of g which is genetics. EDIT: The bit of knowledge I have comes from being published in psychiatric epidemiology on the topic of cognitive impairment and substance use. | | |
| ▲ | wizzwizz4 3 days ago | parent [-] | | That's not the claim you were making earlier. (Although, strictly-speaking, it's still wrong: many factors other than genetics are involved in producing a newborn infant, famously epigenetics. If you classify these all as "genetic factors", then yes, the claim is tautologically true by way of redefining words.) I'd be interested to see how you'd go about controlling for those other things: so far, I haven't seen anyone manage it. |
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| ▲ | robwwilliams 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The simple answer that is usually right: “A god-awful complex mixture of genetic variation, stochastic variation during development, and innumerable environmental influences, all interacting in a big recursive hairball.” I hope that satisfies everyone ;-) | | | |
| ▲ | pona-a 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Education? Or more directly, socio-economics. The many of the subjects tested never had any experience with this kind of formal testing, had little to no education, and of course predictably failed on several abstract tasks. It might be that the very pattern of sitting down and intensely focusing on apparently meaningless problems isn't as innate as expected. | | |
| ▲ | A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Eh, I wish we could retire socioeconomics as a valid term. It can mean just about any factor and for it to be used it scientific publications and even normal discourse that goes beyond Facebook level discussion, feel a little counter-productive. What, exactly, did you mean though? | | |
| ▲ | pona-a 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I thought I was being clear. Access to education, which is a function of wealth, race segregation, and/or cultural expectations, or in other words, economic + social factors. For example, if a family encourages their child to work from the earliest allowed age at the expense of schooling, that's a manifestation of both economic and social pressures. |
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| ▲ | mdp2021 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Personal development. It's a "subtle" skill. You train it (though maybe less directly than other skills). | |
| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | smokel 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | If it isn't nature, then it probably is nurture. Averaged over the entire population, that is indeed mostly random. |
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| ▲ | A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It is not controversial at all. It was deemed inappropriate due the amount of 'wrongthink' it causes. We can argue about what followed and whether its claims have been nullified, but given how much conversations started with it, I sincerely doubt the argument that it should not be the introduction is reasonable. In a sense, it is the source of the debate. |
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| ▲ | terminalshort 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | There is no logic. Some people are just born much smarter than others and there is nothing you can do about it if you aren't one of them. The implications of that fact are too much for most people to accept so we pretend that it isn't true. | | |
| ▲ | A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 4 days ago | parent [-] | | That is a very fatalist perspective. In HS, I was in a class with 3 kids, who were genuinely smarter than me ( not by a notch, mind; comparatively speaking I was just dumber ). I agree that pretending I was/am not dumb by comparison would not help, but suggesting 'nothing you can do about it' is not entirely accurate either. Frankly, the reason I slowly got less dumb is because of my exposure to them. There is something awe-inspiring about seeing a guy using cold logic to guide you through something and be 100% correct. | | |
| ▲ | terminalshort 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I guess you could call it fatalist, but is it fatalist to say I was born to be 5'10" and there's not a damn thing in the world I can do to be 6'? Isn't it the same with intelligence? You may feel smarter now, but are you really? What, exactly, makes you fell like you are? Do you think that if you met those same people today they wouldn't still be significantly smarter than you? | | |
| ▲ | A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 3 days ago | parent [-] | | I would argue that while similiar, they ( height and intelligence ) are not exactly the same. Brains have plastiticity to them, which allows some level of calibration and adjustment ( though seemingly mostly intended and used to overcome damage ) << You may feel smarter now, but are you really? Best I can tell you is that, looking back, I was definitely dumber:D To your point, that may be just experience talking. << What, exactly, makes you fell like you are? Now that is a good question. I think it is mostly reflection on what was and comparison to what is. << Do you think that if you met those same people today they wouldn't still be significantly smarter than you? Hard to say; life has a way of beating you on a consistent basis and, from what I understand, all 3 have kids, which bring their own challenges ( you certainly can't pursue what you want to pursue as easily ). |
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| ▲ | conradev 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Intelligence is not knowledge and it is not wisdom. You have to “learn” to get those. It’s much more akin to VO2 max in aerobic exercise, something like 70% genetic. It is still good for everyone to exercise even if it is harder or easier for some. | |
| ▲ | twodave 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One’s ceiling may be more or less stable, but there are many instances where individuals have certain underdeveloped cognitive skills (of which there are a litany), undergo training to develop those skills, and then afterwards go on to score (sometimes much) higher on IQ tests. Children with certain disabilities such at autism or FASD tend to see more dramatic differences. This isn’t to say they “became more intelligent,” but rather that the testing is unable to measure intelligence directly, rather relying on those certain cognitive skills as a proxy for intelligence. | |
| ▲ | csa 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Which makes me wonder what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here? Many/most people (esp. young people) are not pushed to the limits of their capacity to learn. Quality interventions guide people closer to these limits. | |
| ▲ | tim333 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Education is to learn stuff, not increase your IQ. | | |
| ▲ | Consultant32452 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I would argue the purpose of public education is directionally to attempt to level the playing field between people who start with a lot and people who start with a little. And in this regard, it is an absolute failure. People sometimes attribute public schooling to helping someone "escape poverty" or whatever, but I think it's mostly IQ and big 5 personality traits. And it's extremely unfortunate that both of those appear to be largely genetic. Here's a real brain bender. Let's assume it takes approximately average IQ to understand basic algebra, so approximately 100 IQ. Half of the population has less than that IQ. Squinting really hard and making things up, something like 40% of the population is intellectually incapable of understanding exponential growth and decay. So how can it be legal/ethical for them to sign a contract to get a credit card or a mortgage if they literally cannot understand it? That's just one example. Once you crack this egg open, it breaks a lot of things required for modern society to function. | | |
| ▲ | skappapab 4 days ago | parent [-] | | > So how can it be legal/ethical for them to sign a contract to get a credit card or a mortgage if they literally cannot understand it? It’s not. Part of being fair and equitable is simply acknowledging we can’t hold everyone to the same standard. One day we’ll look at all this schooling, etc as the equivalent of trying to train people to grow taller. I’d argue you can’t be a good ruler if you don’t acknowledge these limitations of your citizens. I’d have to dig it up but there was a wealthy slave owner during reconstruction who basically expressed (via personal letter) his concern freed slaves would become a permanent underclass if held to the same expectations as the rest of society. Given the current state of things, it’s a fairly impressive prediction. I don’t say this to attract downvotes but from a genuine position of creating a society that is safe and plentiful for all. We need to create new systems and expectations (that will be disparate in their application and impact). And no, they don’t have to be explicitly “racist”. Refusing to acknowledge these limitations is akin to neglect and despite all the emotional signaling ultimately harmful and preventing real progress. |
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| ▲ | moi2388 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Crystallised vs fluid intelligence, and IQ tests mainly test the latter, whilst education focused on the first, as well as learning strategies and general problem solving strategies. Also, even if intelligence was 100% genetic, we could still in theory increase everybodies IQ equally with education and the previous statement still holds. | |
| ▲ | regularization 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > concerning g is that it's largely genetic, and immune to "intervention" AKA stability Biology seems to be the destination for smuggled in quasi-religious beliefs. Lysenkoism, creationism and in the case of a segment (or more?) of the western professional-managerial class, this kind of Bell Curveism. In the past people were satisfied with the divine apotheosis of people into a superior Brahmin class, or chosen people, or even in more modern times a Calvinistic elect, which this is an attempt to smuggle in as a secular, "scuentific" basis. If we were watching elementary particles smash together in an accelerator, the idea that a brain could be boiled down to a number and ranked in order, and said this be due to differential genes and such would be seen as absurd. Especially considering human behavioral modernity happen two to three thousand generations ago, if one knows a genetic time scale. For our version of biological Lysenkoism or creationism, this all goes out the window though. Speaking of Lysenkoism, it is akin to the Marxist idea of false consciousness - the people who believe such ideas can see the errors of Lysenkoism or creationism, but the crank idea tied to their particular system makes a lot of sense to them. I think of al-Andalus in Spain the 1450s, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683. Until a few centuries ago, Europe could barely keep itself free of Arab or Turk rule (and often didn't). Change back a few centuries and this would be about the genetic superiority of the Arab brain over the Caucasian. It's all quite silly. | |
| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
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| ▲ | robwwilliams 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Human IQ has been going up at a very fast rate for the last 100 years. Kids tested by the Army being enlisted for WW1 who had a mean score of 100(by definition) in 1917 now would have a mean score of lss than 80. Tons of interesting work on why IQ is shooting up, but it definitely is NOT genetics. This is known as the Flynn effect. Here is the wikipedia entry in case you want more details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect Video games like Civilization and Myst etc, probably add 5 to 10 IQ points to kids. My 9 year old knew all about Greek triremes. Me: What the heck is a trireme? Most if what people call “genetic effects” are actually “genetic-by-environment” interaction effects. Chane the environment and you change the APPARENT heritability. Good example is the genetics of substance use disorders which range from 30 to 60%—-but IF AND ONLY IF there are drugs around to which you are exposed in YOUR environment.? Same applies to good and bad schools. | | |
| ▲ | bena 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Don’t confuse knowledge with intelligence. Knowing what a trireme isn’t a sign of intelligence, it’s trivia. Being able to figure out how to build a trireme is intelligence. And I don’t mean looking up instructions and doing, I mean being able to reconstruct the knowledge from baser principles. This is not to say you or your son aren’t intelligent, just that knowing about triremes isn’t a sign of it. | | |
| ▲ | robwwilliams 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Just a funny story. Exposure to vocabulary is an important factor in learning to think. | | |
| ▲ | machomaster 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Has nothing to do with IQ. Knowing fancy words can only fool some people to think that the speaker is smarter; but it won't influence the actual IQ. |
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| ▲ | depressedpanda 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If a child is, e.g., two standard deviations below the norm, it is cruel to expect it to keep up with the pace of other students. Education can be better adapted to the child's needs. | |
| ▲ | LtWorf 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | According to a study, IQ of a group can increase of like 20 points if you motivate them by taking 2 hours of boring test by paying them :) | |
| ▲ | pbmonster 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Isn't this argument directly countered by the fact that you can study for IQ tests and subsequently do better? | | |
| ▲ | kingkawn 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Yes but they need a bullshit gold star to make themselves feel special |
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| ▲ | breakyerself 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It's not genetic. The bell curve is garbage. It's a not a work of science. It's a work of political argumentation built on pretending to be science. | |
| ▲ | guelo 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | The Bell Curve is a classic in racist science and it accelerated the destruction of america's greatness which was always that we are a land of immigrants. |
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