3 ms·

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 tre

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.

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.