| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago |
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| ▲ | nyc_data_geek1 5 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| >>IQ is highly linked to genetics. Citation desperately needed. How can you prove that empirically? What is your methodology for controlling for environmental factors in making that assertion, including factors associated with access to resources, tutors, having a full belly every morning, and not being constantly flooded with stress hormones as a result of grappling with the daily reality of living in poverty? |
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| ▲ | hx8 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I don't want to come off as supporting the grandparent comment, but ultimately there is at least some degree of heritability of IQ [0]. US IQ also seemed to have peaked in the 1990s [1]. It's quite a leap to claim that immigration is the cause of the US IQ decline. The best explanations seem to be that it's environmental [2]. The general decline in IQ is impacting several countries. 0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ 1 https://nchstats.com/average-iq-by-state-in-us/ 2 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29891660/ | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I’m not implying immigration leads to US decline. The pool I refer to is international. China. Environmental factors
Of China have been changing in the past 3 decades leading to extraordinary gain in IQ. This re normalizes the IQ every year which leads to what appears to be a decline in IQ in the US. Genetics plays a part because with the economic infrastructure of China supporting students to their maximum potential it brings the playing field on par with US. China no longer has to deal with poverty effecting IQ scores. This with environment in parity the only thing left is really genetics. | |
| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Heritability != DNA. | | |
| ▲ | quotemstr 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Do you expect embryo selection startups to fail? Come on. I know you're smart enough to have heard about GWAS. I'll bet you 3:1 odds embryo selection works. If you're serious about your anti-hereditarian position, take me up on my offer. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think embryo selection companies, to the extent they don't actually result in people selecting for embryos with autism, are brilliant products. They're "magician's choice" setups: embryo selection promises single-to-low-double-digit improvements in metrics that aren't fully evaluable for over a decade after the product is paid for, on metrics with huge variability and low test-test reliability. The people paying for the products are generally upper-income and already predisposed to invest in educational achievement, which is the actual outcome the customers care about to begin with. It's a can't-lose proposition for the vendors. So, no, of course I'm not going to take you up on that bet. It's like betting against Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is a farce but I'm not dumb enough to short it. I'm not an "anti-heriditarian". I think there's probably a lot of value, long term, in embryo selection for things like disease avoidance. I also believe there's natural variability in cognitive ability; I don't believe all people are "blank slates"; that's a caricature (or, if you like, a deliberate wrong-footing of people who reflexively reject psychometrics and genetics for ideological reasons) of the actual concern I have. Finally, I don't know what anything you said has to do with what I said. I said, very simply, "heritability != DNA". That's an objective, positive claim. Was this bet your attempt at rebutting it? | | |
| ▲ | quotemstr 5 days ago | parent [-] | | It's interesting: to the extent the orthodox position acknowledges that genetically mediated trait inheritance exists, it cases it in terms of "disease" and "treatment". It's morally wrong to select an embryo for height, but acceptable, even imperative, to use genetics to screen for "shortism". I'm sure you've read Gwern's essay on polygenic trait inheritance. I'm not sure repeating the literature would be productive here. We have every reason to believe that embryo selection and genetic engineering more generally won't just "cure disease" but make us taller, smarter, more beautiful, and longer lived -- and there's nothing wrong with that. Of course there's a lot of variability. At some point technology will improve to the point that denying the effect exists will seem ridiculous, although I'm sure plenty will try. I will say, though, that downplaying trait inheritance and the way genetics is the mechanism for this inheritance produces models that don't predict reality nearly as well as models that incorporate hereditary via genetics, and especially when it comes to education, we're throwing public money down the toilet as long as we make policy using inaccurate models. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I have no idea what the first paragraph you wrote means. I don't have a moral issue with embryo selection. Select them for eye color for all I care. I don't know what any of the rest of this has to do with what I said. I ask again: are you writing all this by way of declaring that "heritability == DNA"? That's a straightforward discussion we can have. Why avoid it? |
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| ▲ | kasey_junk 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | What is the success criteria of the bet? | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I'm just happy for an opportunity to rattle off my embryo-selection rant! :) |
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| ▲ | dmbche 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | IQ testing is flawed at its core, and engaging with it is akin to phrenology. | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent [-] | | IQ is one of the most heavily studied constructs in psychology. Modern IQ tests have over a century of development behind them, starting with Binet and refined through versions like the WAIS-IV and Stanford–Binet. They have high test–retest reliability, meaning a person’s score tends to be stable unless there’s brain injury, illness, or some major change. Scores correlate strongly with academic performance, job performance in cognitively demanding roles, and even certain life outcomes like income, health behaviors, and longevity. There’s also a body of neuroscience work showing links between IQ and measures like processing speed, working memory, and brain connectivity. The “IQ is BS” meme mostly comes from misunderstandings and misuse. People often assume IQ is meant to measure all kinds of intelligence when it really focuses on certain reasoning and problem-solving skills. Early tests had cultural biases, and while modern versions address this better, that history sticks. It’s also been used for discriminatory purposes, which has left a bad taste even when the measurement itself is valid. Critics are right that IQ doesn’t capture creativity, emotional intelligence, or practical skills—but psychologists never claimed it did. In short, IQ is a valid and reliable measure for a specific set of cognitive abilities. It’s not the whole story of intelligence, but dismissing it outright ignores a large and consistent body of evidence. | | |
| ▲ | dmbche 5 days ago | parent [-] | | No, and your chatgpt written response is uninspired (edit: and contradicts itself multiple times!). Sadly, you are not as smart as you fantasize. Also, that replication crisis, that was in psychology, was it? | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent [-] | | It wasn't written by chatGPT — I myself like to use dashes. There are no contradictions and I never mentioned anything personal. Going to personal insults and remarks is a strategy for people who have no logical argument so they resort to alternatives. The replication crisis doesn't apply. IQ is one of the most studied and replicated statistics in psychology. IQ IS in fact the exception to the replication crisis. Your beliefs are a myth. |
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| ▲ | nyc_data_geek1 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You know what else is heritable? Wealth, the possession of which tends to help with standardized test scores. | | |
| ▲ | peterfirefly 5 days ago | parent [-] | | That causality goes in the other direction. Wealthier parents tend to be smarter (that's how they got wealthy or managed to keep inherited wealth) and tend to have smarter kids... who then tend to up on the wealthier side of the spectrum. It's very unfair. It's also very real. Your fantasy is not real. | | |
| ▲ | dmbche 5 days ago | parent [-] | | Capital agregates. The ruch don't make smart kids - smarts are not genetic. Your fantasy is not real. |
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| ▲ | medvezhenok 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Whether its genetic or environmental doesn't matter here. Existence of a correlation is enough reason to break down any analyses by demographic data to have a clearer picture of what's going on. That's just basic data science. | |
| ▲ | 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Bro. Genetics determines intelligence between a mouse and a human. It’s definitive. Yet through some black magic that same genetics that allows a person to be taller then another person and that makes a human more intelligent then a fish, this same genetics doesn’t touch intelligence between different humans. Makes sense. | |
| ▲ | sp1nningaway 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent [-] | | The thing to do when this happens is to flag the comment, and, if you think it's really bad, mail hn@ycombinator.com. Writing about how the author is a "dumb asshole" is actually counterproductive; please don't do that! | | |
| ▲ | sp1nningaway 5 days ago | parent [-] | | I probably would have just flagged and moved on, but I don't have an enough karma and at the time of my reply I didn't see anyone pushing back against the parent effectively. The parent got flagged and is now dead so the point is moot, but thank you for your level-headed response to me and to others elsewhere in the thread! | | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 5 days ago | parent [-] | | No I'm just voted down. Not flagged. You were voted down as well because your response is against the rules and rude. What I said got you angry. But I am stating a factual truth and opinion. You need to learn how to respect other peoples opinion, because your anger and disillusionment is what causes the same thing as censorship. The truth hurts, but you can't restrict it just because it hurts. |
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| ▲ | lagniappe 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Say it with your chest: the comment is implying USA has more immigrants, and the immigrants arriving have lower outcomes on IQ related tasks. |
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| ▲ | bluGill 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Not just immigrants (though that is likely what was intended). It could also imply non-immigrants with lower IQ are having more babies. | |
| ▲ | ninetyninenine 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. Pre 2000s IQ scores from China were largely lower because China didn’t have the infrastructure to support such tests to its full potential. It’s not immigrants. Immigrants are in general more intelligent than people from the US. I’m saying the average IQ of people outside of the US has risen and that is a huge part of the declining IQ in the US. IQ is normalized every year and if the IQ of say China rises significantly every year that would appear as if the US IQ is lowering even if everything in the US actuality stayed the same. If anything immigrants heighten the IQ of the US. Look at the proportion of Faang engineers. These companies essentially require IQ tests for entry. There’s a reason why these companies are overloaded with immigrants or people with origins from abroad. A lot of people making stupid assumptions about what I said in this thread. I am in fact really remarking on China. The economic rise to power makes IQ tests originating from China influence the normalization of IQ in a big way. It’s still offensive to people but I believe on average IQ is generally higher for China than the US. The bell curve is essentially a bit more to the right for China. Also try not to get offended. These are statistical facts. I feel immigrants got offended but really what I’m saying should be offensive to white people. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is in fact not good evidence for IQ being "highly linked to genetics". |
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| ▲ | exoverito 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | It still amazes me that people believe that intelligence has no link to genetics. Down's syndrome is not simply a social construct, Trisomy 21 is a genetic disorder from a third copy of chromosome 21, distorting gene dosages and resulting developmental pathways. Nearly all phenotypes are a mixture of genetics and environment, yet some traits have a much higher degree of heritability. For example, height has a heritability of 60 to 80%, once you control for sufficient nutrition it's almost entirely due to genes. The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics: The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores.
Identical twins reared together: 0.86
Identical twins reared apart: 0.76
Biological parent and child: 0.42
Adoptive parent and child: 0.19
And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Correlation... If you do not believe this, then I would have to hypothesize you are succumbing to motivated reasoning out of a deeper value system placing equality above all other values. This is a well known pattern of belief amongst leftists, where they think humans are infinitely malleable blank slates and all inequalities can be rectified given enough social engineering. They deny objective group differences because they want a utopia where everyone is equal. This is clearly unrealistic, but furthermore it contradicts their value of diversity, where if people are diverse, then you would expect variation in all traits, intelligence included. | | |
| ▲ | legacynl 5 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > The most elegant proof of IQ being linked to genetics:
>
> The same person taking an IQ test twice has mean correlation of 0.85 or above in their scores. Identical twins reared together: 0.86 Identical twins reared apart: 0.76 Biological parent and child: 0.42 Adoptive parent and child: 0.19 And of course, any two random people will have a correlation close to 0. How is this proof of IQ being linked to genetics if adoptive parents can have 1/2 of the correlation that identical twins have? I think this proves that genetics only has a minor part, and upbringing/environment seems to be the most important factor. | | |
| ▲ | exoverito 18 hours ago | parent [-] | | First of all, you misread the figures. The correlation between identical twins reared together is 0.85, while adoptive parent and child is 0.19. Second of all, correlation coefficients do not scale linearly. A correlation of r=0.85 means r^2 explains 0.72 of the variance, while a correlation of 0.19 explains 0.03 of the variance. In other words, adoptive parents have 0.03/0.72=4% of the effect on IQ as being an identical twin does. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'm not a blank-slateist or an anti-hereditarian, as someone else claimed earlier today. I understand that cognitive disabilities are often causally --- mechanistically understood --- genetic. But leaving aside things like Trisomy 21, your evidence here is twin study heritability. Heritability is not genetic determinism; it's almost a category error to claim otherwise, since "heritability" is really just a way of framing the question of whether something is genetically determined --- you still have to answer the question! There's a whole big research field controversy about this, "missing heritability", exploring (in part) why molecular genetics results, especially when corrected for things like within-family bias, are returning such lower heritability estimates than classic twin studies. I do not believe that any random child selected at birth has an equivalent potential to win a Fields Medal, given the optimal environment to do that in. But the "hard truth nobody wants to face", from the parent commenter, is subtextually about race --- and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit. | | |
| ▲ | sksinx 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > and there the evidence is a wreck; extraordinarily unlikely to bear any fruit Is there any new reading here? I used to follow this stuff much more closely a decade ago, but came to the conclusion most scientists will go to great lengths to avoid saying some races (if they don’t barrage you with pedantry regarding what race is) are on average different in some axis than others. There were a few out there who were able to say the politically incorrect thing only because objective science was strongly in their favor, but they still had the full force of the consensus academia coming down on them. I lost interest when, much like history, it became obvious the field was too political for any real truth to be found. Maybe in 100 years or so. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 5 days ago | parent [-] | | This is very actively studied, and the idea that it's somehow suppressed in the academy is another pervasive Internet myth --- put it on the shelf alongside "every employer would use IQ tests to hire but they're illegal" (they most certainly are not). I think what some people are noticing is that there aren't splashy results to confirm, like, The Bell Curve. Yeah, that's because The Bell Curve was really dumb; it's from the phlogiston era of this science. | | |
| ▲ | sksinx 5 days ago | parent [-] | | > it's from the phlogiston era of this science. I’ll try again in 100 years :) |
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| ▲ | dmbche 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Intelligence is not a defined measurable trait But keep fantasizing you're born in the best race in the world, lucky you |
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| ▲ | skellington 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | You're right. It's the only human trait that has no genetic link. Convenient. That's why dogs and humans also have equal IQs. |
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| ▲ | mushroomba 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Tabula Rasa remains the axiom upon which the entire post-war world is founded. Regardless of its truth, to question it is to question this world's fundamental belief. To speak against it is to speak against existence itself.
The emperor's robes are fine indeed. |
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| ▲ | dmbche 5 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
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