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I'm confused by this comment - are you trying to say IQ isn't heritable? Or just that both nature and nurture play a role? And why rely on anecdotal evidence -

by deogeo 7y ago

I'm confused by this comment - are you trying to say IQ isn't heritable? Or just that both nature and nurture play a role? And why rely on anecdotal evidence - just read the second paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ. It even agrees with your experience: "IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics, for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. [..] Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores; however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects."

scarface74 7y ago
I’m saying that if you happen to grow up in a more affluent environment and/or with parents that have the right connections of course you will have better outcomes. But too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”.
- jlawson 7y ago
  Just because you had some advantages doesn't mean your accomplishments are worth nothing. If you start out on home base and end on second you did well. If you start out on second and finish a home run you did well. Let's please not have this attitude that the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances. It's just not true. Everyone has the opportunity to achieve something relative to their circumstances, and many do, and deserve credit for it, at all levels.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    I didn’t say that my accomplishment are “worth nothing” but I’m also not naive enough to think my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck. I didn’t start programming in 65C02 assembly in middle school in the mid 80s because I knew a couple of decades later that it would be a thriving field. Even when I graduated college in the mid 90s, computer science wasn’t paying that much more than any other college degree. There are plenty of people who “work hard” in other fields that don’t make as much as I do.
    - jlawson 7y ago
      >my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck. That's near the opposite of what I said. Please don't lazily pattern match me to some strawman argument and attack on that basis. I'm happy to continue if you want to respond to what I actually wrote.
      - orbat 7y ago
        Complaining about strawmen is pretty rich coming from someone who said that the person you're arguing with had the attitude that "the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances", considering that was never said. You just came up with it, and now you're all huffy about someone doing the same thing to you
        jlawson 7y ago
        What I responded to was >too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”. Implying that none of them are actually self-made. Which would mean that people born into decent circumstances cannot be self-made. In other words, they cannot take credit for any kind of accomplishment. It's a reiteration of a common position; my interpretation is not extreme. Perhaps I misinterpreted something, in which case I'm happy to be corrected. In any case, I certainly didn't explicitly reverse the meaning like was done to me.
Spooky23 7y ago
The point is the resources make things easier. HN commenters tend to ascribe a lot of value to IQ. The problem is that proxies for IQ like the SAT are very fallible. The $800 my parents invested in a Kaplan course, increased my score on the SAT by 6 percentile points.

by deogeo 7y ago

scarface74 7y ago

I’m saying that if you happen to grow up in a more affluent environment and/or with parents that have the right connections of course you will have better outcomes. But too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”.

jlawson 7y ago
Just because you had some advantages doesn't mean your accomplishments are worth nothing. If you start out on home base and end on second you did well. If you start out on second and finish a home run you did well. Let's please not have this attitude that the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances. It's just not true. Everyone has the opportunity to achieve something relative to their circumstances, and many do, and deserve credit for it, at all levels.
- scarface74 7y ago
  I didn’t say that my accomplishment are “worth nothing” but I’m also not naive enough to think my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck. I didn’t start programming in 65C02 assembly in middle school in the mid 80s because I knew a couple of decades later that it would be a thriving field. Even when I graduated college in the mid 90s, computer science wasn’t paying that much more than any other college degree. There are plenty of people who “work hard” in other fields that don’t make as much as I do.
  - jlawson 7y ago
    >my “success” is solely because of my “hard work” and none of it can be attributed to luck. That's near the opposite of what I said. Please don't lazily pattern match me to some strawman argument and attack on that basis. I'm happy to continue if you want to respond to what I actually wrote.
    - orbat 7y ago
      Complaining about strawmen is pretty rich coming from someone who said that the person you're arguing with had the attitude that "the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances", considering that was never said. You just came up with it, and now you're all huffy about someone doing the same thing to you
      - jlawson 7y ago
        What I responded to was >too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”. Implying that none of them are actually self-made. Which would mean that people born into decent circumstances cannot be self-made. In other words, they cannot take credit for any kind of accomplishment. It's a reiteration of a common position; my interpretation is not extreme. Perhaps I misinterpreted something, in which case I'm happy to be corrected. In any case, I certainly didn't explicitly reverse the meaning like was done to me.

Spooky23 7y ago

The point is the resources make things easier. HN commenters tend to ascribe a lot of value to IQ. The problem is that proxies for IQ like the SAT are very fallible. The $800 my parents invested in a Kaplan course, increased my score on the SAT by 6 percentile points.