5 ms·

Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is highly hereditary, as research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming, and peop

Or maybe it's because, somewhat depressingly, IQ is highly hereditary, as research has shown for decades and new gene research is currently confirming, and people with lower IQs tend to have more children.

Will_Parker 9y ago
And connecting the two dots too loudly makes you into a monster.
- busemann 9y ago
  Of course, there's almost zero chance that the genes that represent high intelligence are equally distributed between races and ethnic groups. The whole field of intelligence research is a political minefield these days, at least in the Western world. In related news, France has lost 4 IQ points over the course of a decade: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615001221 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615... Quote: "Dysgenics and replacement migration are proposed as causes."
- gnbfrdjng 9y ago
  Just lazy.
- Mangalor 9y ago
  Well drawing strict conclusions in a field that's still highly debated by researchers does, yes.
  - solveinequality 9y ago
    psychometricians largely aren’t debating the existence of intelligence, its variability, or the fact that it is heritable.
    - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
      Actually... http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-testing.aspx http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-testing.aspx http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-fallacy-study-8425911.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-funda... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-test-controversies-persist/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-test... If intelligence were simple we'd know how to test for it. It isn't, and we don't. Not reliably, and certainly not in ways that are absolutely independent of culture and background. The UK used to have a concept called "mental agility", which seems to be closer to the abilities measured by IQ than the much more complex quality psychologists call general intelligence. You can have exceptional mental agility - the ability to remember and manipulate symbols and parse symbolic relationships quickly - and still be an utter idiot when it comes to dealing with some or all of reality. A high IQ will not protect you from ideological beliefs, especially if you grow up with no exposure to other viewpoints, from a lack of mental openness (not to be confused with a lack of curiosity), from "moral" perspectives that are self-reinforcing prejudices, from poor socialisation, and so on.
burkaman 9y ago
Why would this effect suddenly present itself in 2004? Why hasn't it caused average IQ to decline for all of human history? "A recurrent fear during the past century is that the mean IQ level of populations will decline because persons with lower IQ scores have above-average fertility. Most microlevel data demonstrate such fertility differentials, but population IQ levels have risen rather than fallen. In this article, a simple two-sex model shows that negative fertility differentials are consistent with falling, rising, or constant IQ distributions. Under a wide variety of conditions, a constant pattern of fertility differentials will produce an unchanging, equilibrium distribution of IQ scores in the population. What matters for IQ trends is how the IQ distribution in one generation relates to the equilibrium distribution implied by that generation's fertility differentials. Intuition fails in this important area because it does not account for the macro structure within which micro results must be interpreted." - http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/230135 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/230135 Also note that there is "a strong inverse correlation between early life intelligence and mortality". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology#Overall_mortality_and_morbidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology#Overall...
- chongli 9y ago
  Because birth control is a recent invention. Before that, it took smarts to survive in a crapsack world. We have this stereotype of peasants and medieval people as being stupid in general but all the evidence shows otherwise. You had to be smart and capable of making robust plans to eke out a living on hardscrabble.
  - yasp 9y ago
    Also, until recently mortality rates used to be a lot higher.
- lsd5you 9y ago
  The most likely explanation is the prior to perhaps 200 years ago the differentials were different. (Also having lots of children may not result in a lot of descendents, so is an insufficient measure). This would be due to the fact that in an era before universal rights and universal economic security there were reproductive consequences to intelligence (or lack of). So there is no evolutionary pressure. Evolution is a (brutal) system of unfairness that represents everything that modern progressive values work against. This is something that will need reconciling (or many technologists will hope for genetic engineering I guess) or in the long term will not be sustainable. Consider your children are on average genetically inferior to you. This is mathematically true. A society which uniformly has 2 children per person + 100% survival will regress. In fact it may take something closer to mediaval or even prehistoric reproductive outcomes to have positive evolutionary pressure. This could be many people having 4-5 children, with many other people who are 'unfit' not having children at all (either remaining childless or dying early). The subsequent improvements in education,environment and nutrition have likely provided a dividend that masked a fall in underlying genetic intelligence. Naturally as those gains have been fully realised the underlying trend will reassert itself.
CyberDildonics 9y ago
The book outliers says that research shows roughly half of IQ dictated by genetics. Do you have research that contradicts this?
- yasp 9y ago
  50% would be "highly hereditary".
  - Will_Parker 9y ago
    It's interesting to visualize what % heritable actually means. Here is a graph from a recent study trying to predict height from human genes. They found a correlation of 0.64 https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4qSTryry0so/WcAhygytvTI/AAAAAAAAS1E/LVDdmbClw18BikVNOCKHGthr4tJSm-YgwCLcBGAs/s1600/image%2B%25281%2529.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4qSTryry0so/WcAhygytvTI/AAAAAAAAS... That means, in practice, your height outcome tends strongly toward a fairly narrow range around the predicted mean. I found it illuminating to visualize the pattern. (The full article is http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2017/09/accurate-genomic-prediction-of-human.html http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2017/09/accurate-genomic-predict...)
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  50% is a lot...
- door 9y ago
  how about the fact that IQ tests are bullshit that measure literally nothing inherent and are used to ossify racial and class disparities and you can improve your IQ score just by taking IQ tests multiple times.
Mangalor 9y ago
Or maybe it's not so simple, and IQ can also be changed by environment. It's not a crazy idea that people with more money have better access to education.
- yasp 9y ago
  IQ being highly hereditary doesn't mean that it isn't also influenced by environment.
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  And people with more money have less kids. So more intelligent people have less kids, more intelligent people make more money, can spend more to develop those fewer kids' educations, so you have an ever decreasing amount of 'smart' kids and thus the average IQ goes down.
door 9y ago
wow glad that a comment promoting actual eugenics "science" in 2017 is the top one on this post
klenwell 9y ago
Actually, reading James Flynn's book What Is Intelligence?, I got the impression that environment and culture plays a huge factor in IQ. Genetics is a factor, obviously, too. But accepting IQ as a mostly function of race or sex, which some people are always itching to do whenever this is brought up, is reductivist. In his book, Flynn attributes part of the mysterious increase in IQ during the 20th century to the spread of general education and inculcation of scientific and logical modes of reasoning more broadly. He recounts a story from Soviet anthropologists who travelled through Russia studying peasants at the beginning of the 20th century. An anthropologist presented a villager with a simple syllogism: All swans are white. If I told you there was a swan in the next village over and sent you over to report its color for me. What color do you expect it to be? Peasant's response: I don't know. I'd have to go check. Which makes sense when you exist in a world in which you're operating mostly on the basis of personal relationships and trust is based on a person's word and status and not on abstract and institutionalized forms of knowledge. You'd be an idiot to trust the word of some stranger you just met. But this guy probably did not do so well on the IQ test he was given. In fact, check out this statement from Flynn's Wikipedia page: Women, he argued, caught up to men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic)
- yasp 9y ago
  >James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, finally agrees that these IQ gains are not g factor gains [1], but believes that they still represent economically relevant skill gains. This is doubtful for two reasons: first, because measures of aca- demic ability over time do not reveal any concomitant Flynn-like gains [2, p. 8; 3]. Second, because we know from large-scale military re- search that almost all the predictive power of IQ tests in training contexts comes through g alone [4, p. 129]. [1] Flynn, JR. The Flynn Effect: Rethinking intelligence and what affects it [2] Flynn JR. Searching for justice: the discovery of IQ gains over time. Am Psychol 1999;54:5–20. [3] Flynn JR, Weiss LG. American IQ Gains From 1932 to 2002: The WISC Subtests and Educational Progress. Int J Test 2007;7:209–24. [4] Ree MJ, Earles JA. The ubiquitous productiveness of g. In: Rumsey MG, Walker CB, Harris JH, editors. Personnel selection and classification. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl- baum; 1994. p. 127–36.
dingledog 9y ago
Please educate yourself in heritability studies before repeating this line. The amount of confusion on this issue is baffling. I'm currently a PhD studying in this very field, and the word almost certainly doesn't mean what you think it means. Heritability, in the abstract, refers to the _variation_ in a trait that is explained by genetics. It is not a measure of how much genetics influences the underlying trait. "Having legs" is a trait with 0 heritability, because variations in leg-ownership are largely explained by environment. Heritability also crucially depends on the population you're studying -- hair color has a heritability score of 0 in African and Asian populations, but is much larger in European populations. More worrisome, the methods for establishing heritability are methodological dubious (twin studies, for example, violate an enormous number of statistical assumptions heritability models rely on). This is simply ignored by the bulk of researchers in this area. For a really good treatment of this phenomenon read this post: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-trouble-with-twin-studies/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-trouble-with-twin-s... Even the notion of "intelligence" as a meaningful construct is in question. Really: the literature on intelligence is just so nauseatingly bad you should doubt nearly everything you read.
craftyguy 9y ago
So you're saying the movie Idiocracy is where we will end up? Guess I had better start investing in Gatorade.

Will_Parker 9y ago

And connecting the two dots too loudly makes you into a monster.

busemann 9y ago
Of course, there's almost zero chance that the genes that represent high intelligence are equally distributed between races and ethnic groups. The whole field of intelligence research is a political minefield these days, at least in the Western world. In related news, France has lost 4 IQ points over the course of a decade: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615001221 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289615... Quote: "Dysgenics and replacement migration are proposed as causes."
gnbfrdjng 9y ago
Just lazy.
Mangalor 9y ago
Well drawing strict conclusions in a field that's still highly debated by researchers does, yes.
- solveinequality 9y ago
  psychometricians largely aren’t debating the existence of intelligence, its variability, or the fact that it is heritable.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    Actually... http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-testing.aspx http://www.apa.org/research/action/intelligence-testing.aspx http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-fundamentally-flawed-and-using-them-alone-to-measure-intelligence-is-a-fallacy-study-8425911.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/iq-tests-are-funda... https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-test-controversies-persist/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/iq-test... If intelligence were simple we'd know how to test for it. It isn't, and we don't. Not reliably, and certainly not in ways that are absolutely independent of culture and background. The UK used to have a concept called "mental agility", which seems to be closer to the abilities measured by IQ than the much more complex quality psychologists call general intelligence. You can have exceptional mental agility - the ability to remember and manipulate symbols and parse symbolic relationships quickly - and still be an utter idiot when it comes to dealing with some or all of reality. A high IQ will not protect you from ideological beliefs, especially if you grow up with no exposure to other viewpoints, from a lack of mental openness (not to be confused with a lack of curiosity), from "moral" perspectives that are self-reinforcing prejudices, from poor socialisation, and so on.

burkaman 9y ago

Why would this effect suddenly present itself in 2004? Why hasn't it caused average IQ to decline for all of human history? "A recurrent fear during the past century is that the mean IQ level of populations will decline because persons with lower IQ scores have above-average fertility. Most microlevel data demonstrate such fertility differentials, but population IQ levels have risen rather than fallen. In this article, a simple two-sex model shows that negative fertility differentials are consistent with falling, rising, or constant IQ distributions. Under a wide variety of conditions, a constant pattern of fertility differentials will produce an unchanging, equilibrium distribution of IQ scores in the population. What matters for IQ trends is how the IQ distribution in one generation relates to the equilibrium distribution implied by that generation's fertility differentials. Intuition fails in this important area because it does not account for the macro structure within which micro results must be interpreted." - http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/230135 http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/230135 Also note that there is "a strong inverse correlation between early life intelligence and mortality". - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology#Overall_mortality_and_morbidity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_epidemiology#Overall...

chongli 9y ago
Because birth control is a recent invention. Before that, it took smarts to survive in a crapsack world. We have this stereotype of peasants and medieval people as being stupid in general but all the evidence shows otherwise. You had to be smart and capable of making robust plans to eke out a living on hardscrabble.
- yasp 9y ago
  Also, until recently mortality rates used to be a lot higher.
lsd5you 9y ago
The most likely explanation is the prior to perhaps 200 years ago the differentials were different. (Also having lots of children may not result in a lot of descendents, so is an insufficient measure). This would be due to the fact that in an era before universal rights and universal economic security there were reproductive consequences to intelligence (or lack of). So there is no evolutionary pressure. Evolution is a (brutal) system of unfairness that represents everything that modern progressive values work against. This is something that will need reconciling (or many technologists will hope for genetic engineering I guess) or in the long term will not be sustainable. Consider your children are on average genetically inferior to you. This is mathematically true. A society which uniformly has 2 children per person + 100% survival will regress. In fact it may take something closer to mediaval or even prehistoric reproductive outcomes to have positive evolutionary pressure. This could be many people having 4-5 children, with many other people who are 'unfit' not having children at all (either remaining childless or dying early). The subsequent improvements in education,environment and nutrition have likely provided a dividend that masked a fall in underlying genetic intelligence. Naturally as those gains have been fully realised the underlying trend will reassert itself.

CyberDildonics 9y ago

The book outliers says that research shows roughly half of IQ dictated by genetics. Do you have research that contradicts this?

yasp 9y ago
50% would be "highly hereditary".
- Will_Parker 9y ago
  It's interesting to visualize what % heritable actually means. Here is a graph from a recent study trying to predict height from human genes. They found a correlation of 0.64 https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4qSTryry0so/WcAhygytvTI/AAAAAAAAS1E/LVDdmbClw18BikVNOCKHGthr4tJSm-YgwCLcBGAs/s1600/image%2B%25281%2529.png https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-4qSTryry0so/WcAhygytvTI/AAAAAAAAS... That means, in practice, your height outcome tends strongly toward a fairly narrow range around the predicted mean. I found it illuminating to visualize the pattern. (The full article is http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2017/09/accurate-genomic-prediction-of-human.html http://infoproc.blogspot.ca/2017/09/accurate-genomic-predict...)
Mikeb85 9y ago
50% is a lot...
door 9y ago
how about the fact that IQ tests are bullshit that measure literally nothing inherent and are used to ossify racial and class disparities and you can improve your IQ score just by taking IQ tests multiple times.

Mangalor 9y ago

Or maybe it's not so simple, and IQ can also be changed by environment. It's not a crazy idea that people with more money have better access to education.

yasp 9y ago
IQ being highly hereditary doesn't mean that it isn't also influenced by environment.
Mikeb85 9y ago
And people with more money have less kids. So more intelligent people have less kids, more intelligent people make more money, can spend more to develop those fewer kids' educations, so you have an ever decreasing amount of 'smart' kids and thus the average IQ goes down.

door 9y ago

wow glad that a comment promoting actual eugenics "science" in 2017 is the top one on this post

klenwell 9y ago

Actually, reading James Flynn's book What Is Intelligence?, I got the impression that environment and culture plays a huge factor in IQ. Genetics is a factor, obviously, too. But accepting IQ as a mostly function of race or sex, which some people are always itching to do whenever this is brought up, is reductivist. In his book, Flynn attributes part of the mysterious increase in IQ during the 20th century to the spread of general education and inculcation of scientific and logical modes of reasoning more broadly. He recounts a story from Soviet anthropologists who travelled through Russia studying peasants at the beginning of the 20th century. An anthropologist presented a villager with a simple syllogism: All swans are white. If I told you there was a swan in the next village over and sent you over to report its color for me. What color do you expect it to be? Peasant's response: I don't know. I'd have to go check. Which makes sense when you exist in a world in which you're operating mostly on the basis of personal relationships and trust is based on a person's word and status and not on abstract and institutionalized forms of knowledge. You'd be an idiot to trust the word of some stranger you just met. But this guy probably did not do so well on the IQ test he was given. In fact, check out this statement from Flynn's Wikipedia page: Women, he argued, caught up to men in these nations as a result of exposure to modernity by entering the professions and being allowed greater educational access. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Flynn_(academic)

yasp 9y ago
>James Flynn, namesake of the secular increase, finally agrees that these IQ gains are not g factor gains [1], but believes that they still represent economically relevant skill gains. This is doubtful for two reasons: first, because measures of aca- demic ability over time do not reveal any concomitant Flynn-like gains [2, p. 8; 3]. Second, because we know from large-scale military re- search that almost all the predictive power of IQ tests in training contexts comes through g alone [4, p. 129]. [1] Flynn, JR. The Flynn Effect: Rethinking intelligence and what affects it [2] Flynn JR. Searching for justice: the discovery of IQ gains over time. Am Psychol 1999;54:5–20. [3] Flynn JR, Weiss LG. American IQ Gains From 1932 to 2002: The WISC Subtests and Educational Progress. Int J Test 2007;7:209–24. [4] Ree MJ, Earles JA. The ubiquitous productiveness of g. In: Rumsey MG, Walker CB, Harris JH, editors. Personnel selection and classification. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erl- baum; 1994. p. 127–36.

dingledog 9y ago

Please educate yourself in heritability studies before repeating this line. The amount of confusion on this issue is baffling. I'm currently a PhD studying in this very field, and the word almost certainly doesn't mean what you think it means. Heritability, in the abstract, refers to the _variation_ in a trait that is explained by genetics. It is not a measure of how much genetics influences the underlying trait. "Having legs" is a trait with 0 heritability, because variations in leg-ownership are largely explained by environment. Heritability also crucially depends on the population you're studying -- hair color has a heritability score of 0 in African and Asian populations, but is much larger in European populations. More worrisome, the methods for establishing heritability are methodological dubious (twin studies, for example, violate an enormous number of statistical assumptions heritability models rely on). This is simply ignored by the bulk of researchers in this area. For a really good treatment of this phenomenon read this post: https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-trouble-with-twin-studies/ https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/03/the-trouble-with-twin-s... Even the notion of "intelligence" as a meaningful construct is in question. Really: the literature on intelligence is just so nauseatingly bad you should doubt nearly everything you read.

craftyguy 9y ago

So you're saying the movie Idiocracy is where we will end up? Guess I had better start investing in Gatorade.