4 ms·

> I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time. Then rephrase the above question: since when did that become abhorrent or wron

> I mean holding an idea can be both legal and abhorrent/wrong at the same time. Then rephrase the above question: since when did that become abhorrent or wrong? We know that IQ is hereditary. This is a simple statistical fact: there is positive correlation between the IQ of children and their parents. And if cognitive ability translates into higher incomes, this would mean income is hereditary I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else. In reality saying these differences are hereditary is saying nothing about that. Saying IQ is hereditary isn't saying some people will never be smart. Obesity is hereditary, too. That doesn't mean the children of obese parents can never be a healthy weight. Nobody's body cheats thermodynamics. Likewise people's IQ can be improved by exercising mental tasks.

joshuamorton 6y ago
As far as in know, murray claims that the hereditary nature is [primarily] due to genetics, which is certainly more controversial than observing that it is hereditary.
- manfredo 6y ago
  We also know that obesity is in part due to genetics. That doesn't mean people are doomed to be obese. It's a fact that anyone can lose weight if they expend more calories than they consume. My point is that people are perceiving a very different implication than what Murray or SSC are actually saying. E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome. In reality, IQ is far more malleable and can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it.
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    > E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success. Taking a step back though, I'll trust you on obesity, but we do t have hard evidence that I'm aware of that intelligence is genetic. For example, cognitive ability and IQ aren't the same, and even if they were, there are all kinds of things (like language) that are clearly heritable but obviously not genetically so.
    - manfredo 6y ago
      Cognitive ability is an abstract thing, IQ is a form of measuring it. It's like using 10k running time, amount of weight lifted in a deadlift, bench press, and squat as a measurement of athleticism. Regardless, > This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success. This statement seriously makes me doubt whether you've read Murray . The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. The notion that less intelligent people are inferior is the complete opposite of what he actually wrote.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        > Cognitive ability is an abstract thing, IQ is a form of measuring it. It's like using 10k running time, amount of weight lifted in a deadlift, bench press, and squat as a measurement of athleticism. No, it's like picking one of those and using it as the measure. If you pick 10k running time, you'll be biased towards mid-length endurance athletes. If you pick deadlift, you'll be biased towards raw strength athletes. The question of if Usain Bolt or Hafthor Bjornsson is more athletic is malformed, it requires us to ask which athletic talents we value more highly (not to mention comparing to someone like Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady, where social interaction is a component of the athletic achievement). Similarly, most measures of IQ contain implicit assumptions about what intelligence means, and those assumptions are based on western cultural norms. Even tests designed to be less culturally biased, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, aren't free of this issue. And this ignores cultures where decision making is often a team sport, so being forced to take a test without aid is an unusual environment, and may be, culturally, a malformed question. > The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines). That they are genetically inferior and society needs to cater better to their inferiority: "we should be more willing to help the cognitively disabled". Not that they may be just as well equipped as everyone else, and we should address the biases in society that mismeasure their intelligence, such as biased IQ tests and other cultural assumptions about what intelligence is. The Bell curve doesn't engage with any of this criticism (it predates some of, but by no means all of it). It assumes that the measure is objective and valid. I've read enough of Murray, and enough criticism of him, to understand how he's wrong.
  - cutemonster 6y ago
    > can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it. There's a personal upper limit that can be improved only when one is a child from what I've read. Whilst at the same time, damaging one's cognitive intelligence is doable at any age, yes. And to some extent, undoing the damage You wrote elsewhere: > The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability" Makes me interested in reading the book :-)
- yibg 6y ago
  Aren’t all hereditary traits due to genetics?
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    No. Spoken language, and religion are generally hereditary. They're not genetic. Such traits are socially heritable. Lots of other things (wealth, approximate birth location, etc. are also heritable, though perhaps not as strongly. This are also clearly not genetic.)
    - sanxiyn 6y ago
      We now have GWAS. Social heritability is ruled out as explanation of IQ inheritance.
    - yibg 6y ago
      Interesting. Is this a common definition? Heredity as far as I understood referred to genetic inheritance. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity Including religion and language as part of the definition seems to be overloading it. In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        Ah, you're correct. I made a mistake (that I make far too often), conflating the words "heritability" and "hereditary". Such factors are socially heritable. But manfredo was incorrect to say that "We know that IQ is hereditary.", we don't, really. We observe that it is heritable, but the extent to which that is social, genetic, or epigenetic is not clear. Apologies. That said, there's also epigenetics, which hurts my brain. > In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes? Broadly speaking, no (like obviously, in some sense it is, right?), but most common attempts to measure intelligence don't really do a good job of deciding what intelligence is. This can be fine if you're trying to draw conclusions about individuals that are generally culturally homogenous (if you're comparing solely amongst a group of pro basketball players, the one with the best bench press is probably above average, even if it isn't really a great judge of basketball skill), but not when trying to compare athleticism between a group made up of basketball players and powerlifters.
- sanxiyn 6y ago
  Not any more. We literally have a predictive function that takes DNA sequence as input and returns intelligence-correlate as output. It is public and you can run it with a couple of lines of Python. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    I too can take as input a set of genetic markers and predict educational attainment. That does not mean that those genes affect my cognitive ability. It may mean they affect my eye color and people are biased against dark eyes, so I can't get into college.
    - sanxiyn 6y ago
      Yes, that's gene x environment interaction, and it isn't ruled out. By taking DNA as input, it DOES rule out environment. People DID argue it's environment, and they should retract that.
      - joshuamorton 6y ago
        This doesn't follow. The output is still socially influenced. If you look at my DNA, and my DNA makes me brown-eyed, and people discriminate against brown-eyed people, such that I perform worse, my DNA will predict worse performance. But this is entirely due to environmental factors. In fact, from my reading of the paper, their major conclusion was only for those of European ethnicity (and even then only accounted for a small percentage of the overall difference in attainment), so they didn't try to address questions about racial influence, for example. Specifically, for people of European descent, their method is about as predictive as a socio-economic predictor. For a multi-ethnic group, their method is 3-5x less predictive than a socio-economic predictor. Saying that people should retract claims of environmental heritability is ridiculous: those methods are still far more predictive.
        sir_bearington 6y ago
ardy42 6y ago
> I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else. I think there's something there. I'd add to that the kinds of ideologies that latch on to the idea that IQ is heritable are another reason to treat the idea as abhorrent. It would be one thing if the question was just one of intellectual curiosity, but it's very much not that. The idea has a looong history of being used to justify racial prejudices. Irrespective of the correctness or incorrectness of the idea, it's totally legitimate to make it taboo for the above reason alone. Sort of like it's legitimate to make garden-variety political flamebait taboo. Everyone knows where it leads. That is, everyone except sometimes people who imagine themselves to be "above it all" due to their identification with "reason," or "intelligence," etc.
- manfredo 6y ago
  No I don't believe it is just to make it taboo. It's not only unjust it's counterproductive. To do this is to build an argument with it's foundation laid in falsehood. And that makes for a very weak argument, as well as making others doubt your integrity as they see you try and deny sometimes you know is true. At it's most benign this just results in people making fools of themselves as they try and deny reality. At it's worst this results in the likes of Lysenkoism - false beliefs that become entrenched and have real negative impact on society. If some people take a true fact and abuse it to push unjust claims, the focus on addressing the abuse of facts. Not the facts themselves. And Slate Star Codex has done a good job of this. His explorations of these controversial ideas almost invariably entail refutations of abusive use of those ideas.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    Moreover, if you tar an idea that aids racists, it means that it means that racists will have better arguments than you. This is not a good thing for egalitarianism!
Noos 6y ago
We know height is hereditary too. But our attitude about it is that it's generally irrelevant to most people's lives, and not something people should judge on, give advantages for, or discriminate against. If you are at the extremes, well, yes sometimes you get advantages and disadvantages in certain circumstances, but apart from basketball teams and horse jockeys, no one is ordering society over it. The problem is the IQ fetishists go past this into kind of speaking about it as a virtue or lack. It gets a little closer to someone who really really thinks height is important and short people are holding things back. They put way too much societal importance on height as a measure of success, when people of all sizes can lead fulfilling, comfortable lives. There's always something off when they discuss it, which is why I kind of got tired of those people in rationalism. It's like caring that you are only 5'7" instead of 6 foot tall.
- ALittleLight 6y ago
  Height is important for some things and IQ is important for others. You probably don't want a four foot center on your basketball team, or a 75 IQ surgeon operating on you.

joshuamorton 6y ago

As far as in know, murray claims that the hereditary nature is [primarily] due to genetics, which is certainly more controversial than observing that it is hereditary.

manfredo 6y ago
We also know that obesity is in part due to genetics. That doesn't mean people are doomed to be obese. It's a fact that anyone can lose weight if they expend more calories than they consume. My point is that people are perceiving a very different implication than what Murray or SSC are actually saying. E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome. In reality, IQ is far more malleable and can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it.
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  > E.g. saying cognitive ability is genetic evokes images of Gattaca-like society where people's fate is determined by their genome This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success. Taking a step back though, I'll trust you on obesity, but we do t have hard evidence that I'm aware of that intelligence is genetic. For example, cognitive ability and IQ aren't the same, and even if they were, there are all kinds of things (like language) that are clearly heritable but obviously not genetically so.
  - manfredo 6y ago
    Cognitive ability is an abstract thing, IQ is a form of measuring it. It's like using 10k running time, amount of weight lifted in a deadlift, bench press, and squat as a measurement of athleticism. Regardless, > This does seem to be murray's contention. I don't think SSC agrees though. And this is actively harmful if you subscribe to the view that it is malleable: claiming that it can't be changed and that someone is "inferior", as Murray does, probably isn't going to set them up for success. This statement seriously makes me doubt whether you've read Murray . The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. The notion that less intelligent people are inferior is the complete opposite of what he actually wrote.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      > Cognitive ability is an abstract thing, IQ is a form of measuring it. It's like using 10k running time, amount of weight lifted in a deadlift, bench press, and squat as a measurement of athleticism. No, it's like picking one of those and using it as the measure. If you pick 10k running time, you'll be biased towards mid-length endurance athletes. If you pick deadlift, you'll be biased towards raw strength athletes. The question of if Usain Bolt or Hafthor Bjornsson is more athletic is malformed, it requires us to ask which athletic talents we value more highly (not to mention comparing to someone like Kobe Bryant or Tom Brady, where social interaction is a component of the athletic achievement). Similarly, most measures of IQ contain implicit assumptions about what intelligence means, and those assumptions are based on western cultural norms. Even tests designed to be less culturally biased, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, aren't free of this issue. And this ignores cultures where decision making is often a team sport, so being forced to take a test without aid is an unusual environment, and may be, culturally, a malformed question. > The central thesis of his book The Bell Curve is that society needs to do a better job helping people on the lower end of cognitive ability lead fulfilling and productive lives. Right, the unstated assumption here being that they are genetically predisposed to having lower cognitive ability (and further that this ability is highly correlated along racial lines). That they are genetically inferior and society needs to cater better to their inferiority: "we should be more willing to help the cognitively disabled". Not that they may be just as well equipped as everyone else, and we should address the biases in society that mismeasure their intelligence, such as biased IQ tests and other cultural assumptions about what intelligence is. The Bell curve doesn't engage with any of this criticism (it predates some of, but by no means all of it). It assumes that the measure is objective and valid. I've read enough of Murray, and enough criticism of him, to understand how he's wrong.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  > can be developed through exercise or atrophy through lack of it. There's a personal upper limit that can be improved only when one is a child from what I've read. Whilst at the same time, damaging one's cognitive intelligence is doable at any age, yes. And to some extent, undoing the damage You wrote elsewhere: > The book has an entire chapter called "Raising Cognitive Ability" Makes me interested in reading the book :-)
yibg 6y ago
Aren’t all hereditary traits due to genetics?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  No. Spoken language, and religion are generally hereditary. They're not genetic. Such traits are socially heritable. Lots of other things (wealth, approximate birth location, etc. are also heritable, though perhaps not as strongly. This are also clearly not genetic.)
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    We now have GWAS. Social heritability is ruled out as explanation of IQ inheritance.
  - yibg 6y ago
    Interesting. Is this a common definition? Heredity as far as I understood referred to genetic inheritance. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heredity Including religion and language as part of the definition seems to be overloading it. In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes?
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      Ah, you're correct. I made a mistake (that I make far too often), conflating the words "heritability" and "hereditary". Such factors are socially heritable. But manfredo was incorrect to say that "We know that IQ is hereditary.", we don't, really. We observe that it is heritable, but the extent to which that is social, genetic, or epigenetic is not clear. Apologies. That said, there's also epigenetics, which hurts my brain. > In any case, is it really controversial that intelligence is at least partially influenced by genes? Broadly speaking, no (like obviously, in some sense it is, right?), but most common attempts to measure intelligence don't really do a good job of deciding what intelligence is. This can be fine if you're trying to draw conclusions about individuals that are generally culturally homogenous (if you're comparing solely amongst a group of pro basketball players, the one with the best bench press is probably above average, even if it isn't really a great judge of basketball skill), but not when trying to compare athleticism between a group made up of basketball players and powerlifters.
sanxiyn 6y ago
Not any more. We literally have a predictive function that takes DNA sequence as input and returns intelligence-correlate as output. It is public and you can run it with a couple of lines of Python. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  I too can take as input a set of genetic markers and predict educational attainment. That does not mean that those genes affect my cognitive ability. It may mean they affect my eye color and people are biased against dark eyes, so I can't get into college.
  - sanxiyn 6y ago
    Yes, that's gene x environment interaction, and it isn't ruled out. By taking DNA as input, it DOES rule out environment. People DID argue it's environment, and they should retract that.
    - joshuamorton 6y ago
      This doesn't follow. The output is still socially influenced. If you look at my DNA, and my DNA makes me brown-eyed, and people discriminate against brown-eyed people, such that I perform worse, my DNA will predict worse performance. But this is entirely due to environmental factors. In fact, from my reading of the paper, their major conclusion was only for those of European ethnicity (and even then only accounted for a small percentage of the overall difference in attainment), so they didn't try to address questions about racial influence, for example. Specifically, for people of European descent, their method is about as predictive as a socio-economic predictor. For a multi-ethnic group, their method is 3-5x less predictive than a socio-economic predictor. Saying that people should retract claims of environmental heritability is ridiculous: those methods are still far more predictive.
      - sir_bearington 6y ago

ardy42 6y ago

> I think what people find abhorrent are the perceived implication rather than the message itself. I'm going to hazard the guess that you're perceiving the implication that saying class differences are hereditary is implying that inequality isn't a problem, or some social groups won't ever have high incomes, or something else. I think there's something there. I'd add to that the kinds of ideologies that latch on to the idea that IQ is heritable are another reason to treat the idea as abhorrent. It would be one thing if the question was just one of intellectual curiosity, but it's very much not that. The idea has a looong history of being used to justify racial prejudices. Irrespective of the correctness or incorrectness of the idea, it's totally legitimate to make it taboo for the above reason alone. Sort of like it's legitimate to make garden-variety political flamebait taboo. Everyone knows where it leads. That is, everyone except sometimes people who imagine themselves to be "above it all" due to their identification with "reason," or "intelligence," etc.

manfredo 6y ago
No I don't believe it is just to make it taboo. It's not only unjust it's counterproductive. To do this is to build an argument with it's foundation laid in falsehood. And that makes for a very weak argument, as well as making others doubt your integrity as they see you try and deny sometimes you know is true. At it's most benign this just results in people making fools of themselves as they try and deny reality. At it's worst this results in the likes of Lysenkoism - false beliefs that become entrenched and have real negative impact on society. If some people take a true fact and abuse it to push unjust claims, the focus on addressing the abuse of facts. Not the facts themselves. And Slate Star Codex has done a good job of this. His explorations of these controversial ideas almost invariably entail refutations of abusive use of those ideas.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  Moreover, if you tar an idea that aids racists, it means that it means that racists will have better arguments than you. This is not a good thing for egalitarianism!

Noos 6y ago

We know height is hereditary too. But our attitude about it is that it's generally irrelevant to most people's lives, and not something people should judge on, give advantages for, or discriminate against. If you are at the extremes, well, yes sometimes you get advantages and disadvantages in certain circumstances, but apart from basketball teams and horse jockeys, no one is ordering society over it. The problem is the IQ fetishists go past this into kind of speaking about it as a virtue or lack. It gets a little closer to someone who really really thinks height is important and short people are holding things back. They put way too much societal importance on height as a measure of success, when people of all sizes can lead fulfilling, comfortable lives. There's always something off when they discuss it, which is why I kind of got tired of those people in rationalism. It's like caring that you are only 5'7" instead of 6 foot tall.

ALittleLight 6y ago
Height is important for some things and IQ is important for others. You probably don't want a four foot center on your basketball team, or a 75 IQ surgeon operating on you.