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| ▲ | 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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| ▲ | 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). | |
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| ▲ | 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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