5 ms·

> Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false. No it isn't. This is only one study of dozens, possibly even hundreds, that

> Also, in general the idea that greater intelligence means higher income is false. No it isn't. This is only one study of dozens, possibly even hundreds, that have been conducted over the years: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289607000219#:~:text=The%20numbers%20suggest%20that%20IQ,income%20is%203.6%20times%20lower https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602.... The findings are always the same... the more IQ you have, the better off you end up doing, once you control for every other variable. But I get why no one on HN wants to hear that. IQ is something you didn't earn. It's not yours. It was given to you, and not only was it given to you, you're not allowed to refuse it either. You either have it or you don't. And what's worse, even if you want to be smarter, that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best. Someone with a 100 IQ will never be able to study enough or learn enough to match someone with a 160 IQ. Its a lifelong, glaring, undeniable reminder that the Universe is not fucking fair and does not fucking care about anyone. And I've known enough people that are the demographic of HN to know that, not only does this intrinsically eat at their core because you can't deny it or evade it, but it also shatters their utopian ideals - that if we just eliminate all <insert social justice term of the zeitgeist here> that we can lift everyone up. Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now.

lm28469 6y ago
> Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now. The only reason we can't is because people like you think we can't and take the status quo as a god given immutable system which is inherently "right". There are plenty of things to be done to reduce, instead of increase, inequalities
- cbozeman 6y ago
  You can't do anything about it because we don't genetically enhance children. Yet. As of two years ago, we mapped out about 2000 genes that contribute to intelligence. A decade ago, we knew of 100. Another decade or two from now, we'll have it entirely mapped out and we'll start to engineer our kids. The reason we'll do this is because our enemies will do this and a high IQ population is a strategic advantage. Its not about "systems" or the status quo. The status quo changes over time, always. Used to be, your ability to throw a spear and kill an animal for the tribe set you apart. Then, what vagina you came out of and what sperm were used to create you designated your station in life. Then, it became your ability to facilitate trade between parties. Later, it shifted to your ability to leverage the output of your fellow man to build a factory or a railroad. Now, in the Information Age, you're limited solely by your IQ, your creativity, and your grit. Those who advanced in the systems above all had grit, determination, willpower, drive. That's a necessary condition and likely always will be, but the other conditions all changed. IQ will likely be the stopping point, at least for humanity. What happens beyond us, that's anyone's guess. Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-vision". You think if we just build the right "system", we can eliminate all this. Not for a very long time. Probably not ever, and if we ever do, we won't be humans in the current sense, because whereas you're concerned with systems, I'm concerned with human nature, and as it we exist right now, human nature won't support any system where billions of people are propped up by millions for their survival. The resentment it generates, on both sides, is simply unsustainable. The "smart" people who generate all the wealth that the rest of society survives on will resent having to work to maintain society, and the rest of society that receives that wealth will resent not having the same quality of life as the "smart" people who make it all possible in the first place, usually not realizing they'd all be starving to death if the "smart" people decided to merely shut off access. And we won't end up a society of all philosophers and artists because frankly you have to be smart to be a decent philosopher and you have to be creative to be an artist. Most people have middling qualities of both traits. Furthermore, due to the interconnectedness of our global society, people are interested in, can access, and generally are only interested in the "best". Andrew Yang said it best during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle in regards to trying to "regulate" and "break up" Big Tech. No one's interested in using the second-best tech product. Don't believe that? Android and iOS are essentially at parity. You could also say Samsung and Apple are at parity. Almost no one uses Windows Phone OS even though its perfectly acceptable as an operating system and was more than capable of doing what almost every single person needs. But it was the second-best choice, with Android / iOS being the best. We see how that played out. I'm afraid we're in a really rough, really shitty ride. I want to be wrong, because if I'm wrong it means a better world, but I'm using the history of human nature as my reference.
  - lm28469 6y ago
    > Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-vision". You think if we just build the right "system", we can eliminate all this. Aiming for an utopia seems better than building a dystopia. I also never said "eliminate" but "reduce". You seem very focused on IQ as if it was the only metric to measure human lives potential. My grandparents aren't geniuses, neither I am, but they seemed to have had least a more positive life to aim for when they grew up and built a family I think we're both converging toward the same point but you view the system as a necessary evil that has to create inequalities due to things out of our reach like IQ and that we neither can nor should do anything about it. All I'm saying is that we could use a bit of that IQ to steer the system towards a society that doesn't systematically shits on the lower 70% of the population. Of course I'm also very pessimistic about the achievability of this, but I believe this is something we should strive for instead of just shrugging it off, yes the world is unfair, it doesn't mean we should make it more so.
    - cbozeman 6y ago
      The system isn't a necessary evil, its merely too big to topple by outside forces. The insiders have no incentive to bring the system down because of the myriad benefits to which it provides them. For every one insider who legitimately wants to balance the system out, there's 95 others that will pay lip service to this ideal, then do whatever they want, followed by four or so real jackasses who either believe the system is totally fair, or that the rest of society "deserves" it. Every year we get to see this in action at Davos. You have a bunch of billionaires all flying to hang out with each other on their private jets while wringing their hands over global warming / climate change. They're all smart enough to know that their private jets output enormous amounts of CO2 emissions relative to the amount of passengers being moved, but no one changes... no one changes because if you arrive on a commercial airliner, even if you were to fly Emirates on their most luxurious fare, you still "look poor" compared to your peers, who all arrived on Gulfstream G650s or whatever... Michael Crichton pointed this out almost 15 years ago in a speech entitled, "Who Will Do The Sacrificing For Global Warming?" and literally pointed out what I just said above, only with a different location. People follow leadership, not rhetoric. If people in power aren't willing to change, no one will. After all, why should I reduce my consumption if Al Gore won't? He's worried about global warming, yet still lives in an 8000 sq. ft. mansion that consumes $1000 of power per month. Hate to quote a video game, but its so succinct, so powerful, I just feel compelled - "Deeds. Not words." - Sejuani, League of Legends
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pessimizer 6y ago
Could you help me find where they controlled for family income in this particular study? The thing most correlated with IQ test score is your parents wealth (and childhood pleasure reading.) If you then say that IQ score is then correlated with income, it's just saying that rich parents have rich children, and laundering that fact through theories about the existence and detection of general intelligence. You'd want to look for radical changes in income from parents to children, and look for reflections of that in IQ scores.
superbcarrot 6y ago
The summary of the study you linked to points to the opposite of what you're saying: > Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. > ... higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
Yes, there is an effect, but it's nowhere near as strong as you think: >“Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year,” he says. For example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an average IQ score of about 100. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-are-no-better-off/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-... I'm sure IQ has some effect on inequality but I'd bet money it's logarithmic rather than exponential.
imtringued 6y ago
>that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best Actually, poverty can drive IQ down. You can raise your intelligence by not being poor. By instating government policies that prevent the worst kind of poverty you can directly drive IQ gains.

lm28469 6y ago

> Well you can't. And you won't. Life's not fair and there's literally nothing you can do about it right now. The only reason we can't is because people like you think we can't and take the status quo as a god given immutable system which is inherently "right". There are plenty of things to be done to reduce, instead of increase, inequalities

cbozeman 6y ago
You can't do anything about it because we don't genetically enhance children. Yet. As of two years ago, we mapped out about 2000 genes that contribute to intelligence. A decade ago, we knew of 100. Another decade or two from now, we'll have it entirely mapped out and we'll start to engineer our kids. The reason we'll do this is because our enemies will do this and a high IQ population is a strategic advantage. Its not about "systems" or the status quo. The status quo changes over time, always. Used to be, your ability to throw a spear and kill an animal for the tribe set you apart. Then, what vagina you came out of and what sperm were used to create you designated your station in life. Then, it became your ability to facilitate trade between parties. Later, it shifted to your ability to leverage the output of your fellow man to build a factory or a railroad. Now, in the Information Age, you're limited solely by your IQ, your creativity, and your grit. Those who advanced in the systems above all had grit, determination, willpower, drive. That's a necessary condition and likely always will be, but the other conditions all changed. IQ will likely be the stopping point, at least for humanity. What happens beyond us, that's anyone's guess. Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-vision". You think if we just build the right "system", we can eliminate all this. Not for a very long time. Probably not ever, and if we ever do, we won't be humans in the current sense, because whereas you're concerned with systems, I'm concerned with human nature, and as it we exist right now, human nature won't support any system where billions of people are propped up by millions for their survival. The resentment it generates, on both sides, is simply unsustainable. The "smart" people who generate all the wealth that the rest of society survives on will resent having to work to maintain society, and the rest of society that receives that wealth will resent not having the same quality of life as the "smart" people who make it all possible in the first place, usually not realizing they'd all be starving to death if the "smart" people decided to merely shut off access. And we won't end up a society of all philosophers and artists because frankly you have to be smart to be a decent philosopher and you have to be creative to be an artist. Most people have middling qualities of both traits. Furthermore, due to the interconnectedness of our global society, people are interested in, can access, and generally are only interested in the "best". Andrew Yang said it best during the 2020 presidential campaign cycle in regards to trying to "regulate" and "break up" Big Tech. No one's interested in using the second-best tech product. Don't believe that? Android and iOS are essentially at parity. You could also say Samsung and Apple are at parity. Almost no one uses Windows Phone OS even though its perfectly acceptable as an operating system and was more than capable of doing what almost every single person needs. But it was the second-best choice, with Android / iOS being the best. We see how that played out. I'm afraid we're in a really rough, really shitty ride. I want to be wrong, because if I'm wrong it means a better world, but I'm using the history of human nature as my reference.
- lm28469 6y ago
  > Unfortunately, you're still falling back into "utopia-vision". You think if we just build the right "system", we can eliminate all this. Aiming for an utopia seems better than building a dystopia. I also never said "eliminate" but "reduce". You seem very focused on IQ as if it was the only metric to measure human lives potential. My grandparents aren't geniuses, neither I am, but they seemed to have had least a more positive life to aim for when they grew up and built a family I think we're both converging toward the same point but you view the system as a necessary evil that has to create inequalities due to things out of our reach like IQ and that we neither can nor should do anything about it. All I'm saying is that we could use a bit of that IQ to steer the system towards a society that doesn't systematically shits on the lower 70% of the population. Of course I'm also very pessimistic about the achievability of this, but I believe this is something we should strive for instead of just shrugging it off, yes the world is unfair, it doesn't mean we should make it more so.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    The system isn't a necessary evil, its merely too big to topple by outside forces. The insiders have no incentive to bring the system down because of the myriad benefits to which it provides them. For every one insider who legitimately wants to balance the system out, there's 95 others that will pay lip service to this ideal, then do whatever they want, followed by four or so real jackasses who either believe the system is totally fair, or that the rest of society "deserves" it. Every year we get to see this in action at Davos. You have a bunch of billionaires all flying to hang out with each other on their private jets while wringing their hands over global warming / climate change. They're all smart enough to know that their private jets output enormous amounts of CO2 emissions relative to the amount of passengers being moved, but no one changes... no one changes because if you arrive on a commercial airliner, even if you were to fly Emirates on their most luxurious fare, you still "look poor" compared to your peers, who all arrived on Gulfstream G650s or whatever... Michael Crichton pointed this out almost 15 years ago in a speech entitled, "Who Will Do The Sacrificing For Global Warming?" and literally pointed out what I just said above, only with a different location. People follow leadership, not rhetoric. If people in power aren't willing to change, no one will. After all, why should I reduce my consumption if Al Gore won't? He's worried about global warming, yet still lives in an 8000 sq. ft. mansion that consumes $1000 of power per month. Hate to quote a video game, but its so succinct, so powerful, I just feel compelled - "Deeds. Not words." - Sejuani, League of Legends

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pessimizer 6y ago

Could you help me find where they controlled for family income in this particular study? The thing most correlated with IQ test score is your parents wealth (and childhood pleasure reading.) If you then say that IQ score is then correlated with income, it's just saying that rich parents have rich children, and laundering that fact through theories about the existence and detection of general intelligence. You'd want to look for radical changes in income from parents to children, and look for reflections of that in IQ scores.

superbcarrot 6y ago

The summary of the study you linked to points to the opposite of what you're saying: > Regression results suggest no statistically distinguishable relationship between IQ scores and wealth. > ... higher IQ scores sometimes increase the probability of being in financial difficulty.

wing-_-nuts 6y ago

Yes, there is an effect, but it's nowhere near as strong as you think: >“Each point increase in IQ test scores is associated with $202 to $616 more income per year,” he says. For example, a person with a score of 130 (in the top 2%, in terms of IQ) might earn about $12,000 more per year than someone with an average IQ score of about 100. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-are-no-better-off/ https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11711-smarter-people-... I'm sure IQ has some effect on inequality but I'd bet money it's logarithmic rather than exponential.

imtringued 6y ago

>that's almost nothing you can do that'll raise IQ by a few points - at best Actually, poverty can drive IQ down. You can raise your intelligence by not being poor. By instating government policies that prevent the worst kind of poverty you can directly drive IQ gains.