There's a really peculiar aspect of IQ that many are not aware of. The heritability of IQ changes as you age - becoming more heritable over time. What this mean

There's a really peculiar aspect of IQ that many are not aware of. The heritability of IQ changes as you age - becoming more heritable over time. What this means is that environmental factors can play major differences in a youth's IQ. For instance a child that goes to great schools, has a supportive family, and so forth and so on will generally have a substantially higher IQ than a child from a less favorable environment. But the weird thing is that if you take two adults and compare their IQs the difference there has a negligible weighting for environmental factors. Modern studies put the heritability of adult IQ upwards of 80%. This also has the extremely counter intuitive implication that our privileged child's academic advantage in youth doesn't necessarily carry over into adulthood. And similarly an adult who came from a less fortunate background will not often suffer (at least in terms of intellectual ability in so much as IQ can measure) for it, as an adult. The reason I mention this is because the person coming from a privileged background would ostensibly have a much higher degree of belief in themselves and presumably a wider array of well supported interests. Our '8 year old solves nuclear fusion in spare time' clickbait articles invariably, coincidentally, happen to have a parent or two who is a nuclear physicist. Yet in the end that self confidence and supported interests don't amount to anywhere near as much as we'd expect. ---- One other major argument against this is the sharp rise of parenting where parents genuinely belief, and work to prove, that their child is the next Einstein. And this happening at the same time that the Flynn effect has entirely disappeared, and in some cases substantially reversed, in much of the developed world. The Flynn Effect was the observation that IQs were increasing over time. IQ is a relative value with 100 always set as the mean with a standard deviation of 15 points. But a '100' in 1900 was scoring, in absolute terms, worse than a 100 in e.g. 1920. And this kept happening. But then sometime around the 1990s this trend began reversing. [1] Flynn observed an average increase of about 3 points per decade. In many places in the world today we are seeing a decline of about 2 points per decade. Think about what that means in absolute values. That's a net change of -5 points per decade. That is one third of a standard deviation decline, per decade! Getting into hypotheses here is counter productive and outside the point I'm making which is simply that we've, in most parts of the developed world, decided to begin pretending that every child is special. If IQ were connected to self confidence and belief in oneself - we'd expect to see something at least vaguely looking like a positive correlation here. Instead we've seen a completely unprecedented and sharp reversal in IQ. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...