4 ms·

no attempt to understand the role genetics might play in all of this.

murbard2 11y ago
It's sad because that's an obvious hypotheses (IQ correlates to income and is hereditary) and they don't even put it an the table, at best for fear of being treated like pariahs, at worst because they have internalized the absence of genetic effect on intelligence and poverty as some indisputable axiom.
- wpietri 11y ago
  When somebody doesn't state the thing obvious to a novice, it could be because it's not obvious to them, or because they're trying to hide something. Or it could be because it's also obvious to them and was obvious years ago, and by now it's so banal and irrelevant to their day-to-day work that it's not worth mentioning.
  - dlss 11y ago
    This is great. "The mark of a true expert is neglecting obvious explanations to avoid being boring." That said, I do expect this perspective to make church more bearable :p
    - wpietri 11y ago
      Well, I'm glad to help anybody through getting dragged to church. I always found that miserable. But I meant something different. Software developers, for example, mostly don't talk about voltage levels, even though everything we do is influencing a voltage level somewhere. When I describe a social interaction, I don't open with, "Well, we're all primates, so we often eat together for reasons of social bonding." When you go visit your doctor, they don't open with, "You know you'll die right? So let's talk about slightly prolonging your inevitable gruesome death." Bringing the basic frame back into focus can be interesting, and occasionally it's revolutionary. But when a novice says, "You're ignoring this super-obvious thing!" it's mostly pretty dull. It often drags a conversation from the level of a graduate seminar to a remedial class. That's not to say I'm opposed to teaching somebody the basics. But HN has a depressing tendency to assume that our raw smarts are just as good as somebody else's decades of experience. Even when, as here, those people are also obviously smart. I'd love to see more commenters asking themselves, "What if they already had considered my point?" Rather than just assuming, as here, that a team of 25 MDs and PhDs from a variety of serious institutions had just never even thought of genetics as a possible explanation for a biological phenomenon. And doing that based not on a careful reading of the paper and related work, but on a 6-item Q&A in a lightweight pop-sci magazine.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
  Denying the heritability of IQ and its attendant effect on class is just perpetuating the state they bemoan. Intelligence is heritable. Most people desire wealth. The more intelligence you have, the more able you are to achieve your desires. Smarter people, on average, will tend to become wealthier than less-inteligent people. Though regression to the mean certainly exists, even accounting for this their children will tend to be smarter than average, which will be caused by differences in brain structure. Obviously this is neither fair nor good. But natural selection is a lecherous Lovecraftian horror - we should not expect it to be fair. It's up to us to fix it. Sticking our heads in the sand an pretending everyone is equally intelligent isn't going to fix anything. If IQ is hereditary (which the evidence really does support) improving the lives of impoverished children is an engineering problem - nothing some pretty doable advances in embryo selection won't fix, basic embryo selection gives you about a standard deviation per generation, iterated embryo selection takes you to the edge of human capability in one conventional generation. The fact that IQ is heritable and increases human productivity is reason for hope. Biology is mutable, society is fixed:http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolog...
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Mostly agreeing, but your numbers on embryo selection assume we have a reliable model for predicting IQ from genome, which AFAIK we don't have. How much of the variance of the IQ can we currently explain out of a genome?
    - Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
      Yes. I should specify, we don't have it now but are likely to have it very soon. Today embryo selection for intelligence isn't possible. I think the higher 80%+ estimates are correct once controlling for reasonable nutrition.
ceejayoz 11y ago
Assuming the participants for both the experimental and control groups are randomly selected (it says they'll be recruiting 1k low-income families for use as the experiment and control), genetics should be pretty effectively ruled out as a variable.
- murbard2 11y ago
  What type of control are you suggesting? If you want to rule out genetic effects, you'd have to look at adaption studies.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    A large enough random selection of low-income persons for both control and experimental groups should rule out genetic differences as the cause of differences between the two.
    - murbard2 11y ago
      Why do you expect to see a difference between the two if the two groups come from the same population?
      - ceejayoz 11y ago
        Because, as the article states, the experimental group will be given three years of significant income supplements, while the control will not. > In this study, we’ll recruit 1,000 low-income families across the country at the time of their children’s birth. Half of the families will receive a large monthly income supplement, and half will receive a nominal monthly income supplement. They’ll get these payments every month for the first three years of their children’s lives. In this way, we’ll be able to study the effect of poverty reduction on children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development, as well as the effect on family behaviors.
        murbard2 11y ago
cryoshon 11y ago
Well, you could argue that their understanding of it is implied. Aside from simple heredity, stress during pregnancy and early life could make its mark on the child via epigenetics. We know already that this happens in mice-- a young mouse that is touched by its mother receives beneficial epigenetic changes (lower life stress, etc) than mice that are not touched by their mother or not touched a sufficient amount. There are doubtless such mechanisms at play with humans.
lucozade 11y ago
In the article the researcher does say that she wants to move from a correlation study, which this is, to a controlled study. They're trying to get funding/approval for that. TBH I'd prefer that researchers at this point would stick to saying that they've made an interesting observation, which they have, and do less of the speculation. Though that would have made a very short and quite dull article so I understand the urge to extrapolate a bit.

It's sad because that's an obvious hypotheses (IQ correlates to income and is hereditary) and they don't even put it an the table, at best for fear of being treated like pariahs, at worst because they have internalized the absence of genetic effect on intelligence and poverty as some indisputable axiom.

wpietri 11y ago
When somebody doesn't state the thing obvious to a novice, it could be because it's not obvious to them, or because they're trying to hide something. Or it could be because it's also obvious to them and was obvious years ago, and by now it's so banal and irrelevant to their day-to-day work that it's not worth mentioning.
- dlss 11y ago
  This is great. "The mark of a true expert is neglecting obvious explanations to avoid being boring." That said, I do expect this perspective to make church more bearable :p
  - wpietri 11y ago
    Well, I'm glad to help anybody through getting dragged to church. I always found that miserable. But I meant something different. Software developers, for example, mostly don't talk about voltage levels, even though everything we do is influencing a voltage level somewhere. When I describe a social interaction, I don't open with, "Well, we're all primates, so we often eat together for reasons of social bonding." When you go visit your doctor, they don't open with, "You know you'll die right? So let's talk about slightly prolonging your inevitable gruesome death." Bringing the basic frame back into focus can be interesting, and occasionally it's revolutionary. But when a novice says, "You're ignoring this super-obvious thing!" it's mostly pretty dull. It often drags a conversation from the level of a graduate seminar to a remedial class. That's not to say I'm opposed to teaching somebody the basics. But HN has a depressing tendency to assume that our raw smarts are just as good as somebody else's decades of experience. Even when, as here, those people are also obviously smart. I'd love to see more commenters asking themselves, "What if they already had considered my point?" Rather than just assuming, as here, that a team of 25 MDs and PhDs from a variety of serious institutions had just never even thought of genetics as a possible explanation for a biological phenomenon. And doing that based not on a careful reading of the paper and related work, but on a 6-item Q&A in a lightweight pop-sci magazine.
Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
Denying the heritability of IQ and its attendant effect on class is just perpetuating the state they bemoan. Intelligence is heritable. Most people desire wealth. The more intelligence you have, the more able you are to achieve your desires. Smarter people, on average, will tend to become wealthier than less-inteligent people. Though regression to the mean certainly exists, even accounting for this their children will tend to be smarter than average, which will be caused by differences in brain structure. Obviously this is neither fair nor good. But natural selection is a lecherous Lovecraftian horror - we should not expect it to be fair. It's up to us to fix it. Sticking our heads in the sand an pretending everyone is equally intelligent isn't going to fix anything. If IQ is hereditary (which the evidence really does support) improving the lives of impoverished children is an engineering problem - nothing some pretty doable advances in embryo selection won't fix, basic embryo selection gives you about a standard deviation per generation, iterated embryo selection takes you to the edge of human capability in one conventional generation. The fact that IQ is heritable and increases human productivity is reason for hope. Biology is mutable, society is fixed:http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biolog...
- murbard2 11y ago
  Mostly agreeing, but your numbers on embryo selection assume we have a reliable model for predicting IQ from genome, which AFAIK we don't have. How much of the variance of the IQ can we currently explain out of a genome?
  - Moshe_Silnorin 11y ago
    Yes. I should specify, we don't have it now but are likely to have it very soon. Today embryo selection for intelligence isn't possible. I think the higher 80%+ estimates are correct once controlling for reasonable nutrition.

ceejayoz 11y ago

Assuming the participants for both the experimental and control groups are randomly selected (it says they'll be recruiting 1k low-income families for use as the experiment and control), genetics should be pretty effectively ruled out as a variable.

murbard2 11y ago
What type of control are you suggesting? If you want to rule out genetic effects, you'd have to look at adaption studies.
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  A large enough random selection of low-income persons for both control and experimental groups should rule out genetic differences as the cause of differences between the two.
  - murbard2 11y ago
    Why do you expect to see a difference between the two if the two groups come from the same population?
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      Because, as the article states, the experimental group will be given three years of significant income supplements, while the control will not. > In this study, we’ll recruit 1,000 low-income families across the country at the time of their children’s birth. Half of the families will receive a large monthly income supplement, and half will receive a nominal monthly income supplement. They’ll get these payments every month for the first three years of their children’s lives. In this way, we’ll be able to study the effect of poverty reduction on children’s cognitive, emotional and brain development, as well as the effect on family behaviors.
      - murbard2 11y ago

cryoshon 11y ago

Well, you could argue that their understanding of it is implied. Aside from simple heredity, stress during pregnancy and early life could make its mark on the child via epigenetics. We know already that this happens in mice-- a young mouse that is touched by its mother receives beneficial epigenetic changes (lower life stress, etc) than mice that are not touched by their mother or not touched a sufficient amount. There are doubtless such mechanisms at play with humans.

lucozade 11y ago

In the article the researcher does say that she wants to move from a correlation study, which this is, to a controlled study. They're trying to get funding/approval for that. TBH I'd prefer that researchers at this point would stick to saying that they've made an interesting observation, which they have, and do less of the speculation. Though that would have made a very short and quite dull article so I understand the urge to extrapolate a bit.