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People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons. If not everyone can be expected to

People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons. If not everyone can be expected to learn and be proficient in everything due to genetics, then suddenly merit itself is also based strongly on luck, and now the belief that people with greater merit should have better lives no longer seems fair. Intelligence is now just another gift to the fortunate who are destined to have a better life. How can you feel good about using your considerable advantages to the detriment of others if your merit is the result of a jackpot paid out at birth? Even if you believe that with enough time and perseverance you can overcome your lack of intelligence compared to another person, you have to ignore the fact that having to spend more time on something (but actually, everything) than everyone else will put you further and further and further behind everyone else in a way that compounds quickly. Modern society is ostensibly structured this way: the smart will win. If intelligence becomes genetic, it can instead be said that "the lucky will win." And successful people desperately want that to not be the case, because they want to believe they deserve their considerable advantages. And they want to be guilt free about the miserable lives some people lead; it's their fault for being stupid, after all.

SilverRed 5y ago
Even without genetics this problem still exists. What about the people with parents who push their kids harder? What about the people born in areas with better education? You could push these questions all the way to debating if you ever had any free will to begin with or if your whole life was the result of your environment. And ultimately does it even matter what the answers to these questions are? If rewarding people for being smarter drives the population to move towards the goal, then why not keep things like that?
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  The problem isn't rewarding people for being smarter, it's predatory practices to take advantage of people who don't know any better, or leaving those who will never be smart enough for a really good job to rot in minimum wage hell.
asdff 5y ago
I think time well spent is a huge factor to anyone success. Most pro athletes, chess champions, musicians, artists, etc, picked up their hobby at a young age in most cases, and just stuck with it until adulthood and enjoyed the compound effects of having a teacher or coach spend time with you multiple times a week for decades. I think you can put anyone in that environment and they would become elite in whatever you push them into if they stick with it. On the other hand when you look at people that have bad outcomes in life, they generally don't have any good role models or much parental presence in their lives, and that seems to be a much stronger factor than genetics in terms of finding success in this world.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  No, some people are so stupid that they will never be able to do tasks much more complicated than e.g. sweeping the floor. You are trying to conjure a vision of the world that is comfortable to believe, but that vision does not reflect reality.
  - AliceWong 5y ago
    I'm not sure the assumption that the comment above you is somewhat delusional is not necessarily reasonable here. I do think its that people are interpreting "everyone" differently. To me, 'everyone' does not mean literally every person but rather the vast majority. Whether this number is 95% or 90% is going to be interpreted differently. I think nearly all of us can agree that as intelligence falls on a bell curve there will always be those unfortunate enough to not be able to do certain tasks. However the nature of the bell curve does mean that around 90% of people are above ~80 IQ.
    - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
      If you take someone with an IQ of 100 and train them for a decade I think it's still very unlikely that they would become an elite chess player/musician/etc. I see intelligence mostly as your rate of learning. That means you're competing with people who will get better faster than you. The only way to beat that is to outwork them, but there are only so many hours in the day.
throwawaylinux 5y ago
I don't believe this idea because few or nobody sees a moral problem in acknowledging there is a strong genetic component to physical attractiveness, or physical features (like height) that give an advantage in "merit" in some paths of life. Nor do people have a problem acknowledging your parents, the country in which you were born, their wealth and fitness as "good parents" for the early years of your life plays a massive role in your chance of "success" in life, however you define that. I.e., all components of luck. You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else. I don't think it's unfair or morally wrong that an attractive person can be paid to model whereas I can not. Or a very tall person could be paid to play basketball while a short person who has more skill and practiced much longer and harder can not.
- luckylion 5y ago
  > You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else. I think progessives care mostly about the economic consequences, not a judgement of someone as a person.
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    What are the economic consequences? Whether or not it is genetic or due to any other confluence of luck or upbringing or other personal attributes, the end result is the same. Also as I said, there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      The end result between nurture vs nature might be the same, but if it's all nurture, than "we can change it" and no price is too high to get to "the new man". If it's not, even the best funded policies with the best intentions can only get you so far, and inequality will remain. Not because of a conspiracy that is keeping some down while lifting others up, but because of nature. I do believe that it would be good on all counts if they would accept genetics, because it would allow for asking much better questions, but I can see why they can't: they're heavily invested in the opposing position and few people are happy to just throw away an investment. > there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics. That's true, but maybe that's because they matter less? I.e. if inequality was primarily defined by height or beauty, they might have a harder time with it. Intelligence & related non-physical things are more important, I believe everybody intuitively accepts that.
woko 5y ago
> People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons. More so because there is no proof for that. Individuals exhibit different levels of intelligence. Sure, life is unfair. However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"? What we observe could be explained by many other more convincing factors: early learning activity, more care to the child's education, logical and clear answers to the kid's questions about the world around him, help with the homework, etc. With proper early learning activity for the baby, and amazing teachers for the early teachings, the kid has a strong foundation. From there, compound returns.
- deltasixeight 5y ago
  >However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"? Genes determine differences in intelligence between say a human and a dog or a human and a bird. Genes also determine physical size, skin color and basically every difference in human attributes. What black magic makes it so that these genes just happen to not at all influence intelligence among humans? You can't see it but ideology is influencing your bias. You are unable to see how ludicrous it is to say intelligence isn't inherited when literally every single other thing is.
- jhoechtl 5y ago
  > However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. While they do not necessarily inherit intelligence, there is a non-zero likelihood that eg. intelligence is a gene-thing. This non-zero likelihood might be bigger than a primarily by moral standards led discussion might suggest us to be.
- concordDance 5y ago
  > However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Do you have an alternative explanation for the results of twin studies on IQ then? It's also not just IQ, so many things very strongly correlate between identical twins. > Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"? Does natural selection only work on non-humans then?

SilverRed 5y ago

Even without genetics this problem still exists. What about the people with parents who push their kids harder? What about the people born in areas with better education? You could push these questions all the way to debating if you ever had any free will to begin with or if your whole life was the result of your environment. And ultimately does it even matter what the answers to these questions are? If rewarding people for being smarter drives the population to move towards the goal, then why not keep things like that?

DangitBobby 5y ago
The problem isn't rewarding people for being smarter, it's predatory practices to take advantage of people who don't know any better, or leaving those who will never be smart enough for a really good job to rot in minimum wage hell.

asdff 5y ago

I think time well spent is a huge factor to anyone success. Most pro athletes, chess champions, musicians, artists, etc, picked up their hobby at a young age in most cases, and just stuck with it until adulthood and enjoyed the compound effects of having a teacher or coach spend time with you multiple times a week for decades. I think you can put anyone in that environment and they would become elite in whatever you push them into if they stick with it. On the other hand when you look at people that have bad outcomes in life, they generally don't have any good role models or much parental presence in their lives, and that seems to be a much stronger factor than genetics in terms of finding success in this world.

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
No, some people are so stupid that they will never be able to do tasks much more complicated than e.g. sweeping the floor. You are trying to conjure a vision of the world that is comfortable to believe, but that vision does not reflect reality.
- AliceWong 5y ago
  I'm not sure the assumption that the comment above you is somewhat delusional is not necessarily reasonable here. I do think its that people are interpreting "everyone" differently. To me, 'everyone' does not mean literally every person but rather the vast majority. Whether this number is 95% or 90% is going to be interpreted differently. I think nearly all of us can agree that as intelligence falls on a bell curve there will always be those unfortunate enough to not be able to do certain tasks. However the nature of the bell curve does mean that around 90% of people are above ~80 IQ.
  - ZephyrBlu 5y ago
    If you take someone with an IQ of 100 and train them for a decade I think it's still very unlikely that they would become an elite chess player/musician/etc. I see intelligence mostly as your rate of learning. That means you're competing with people who will get better faster than you. The only way to beat that is to outwork them, but there are only so many hours in the day.

throwawaylinux 5y ago

I don't believe this idea because few or nobody sees a moral problem in acknowledging there is a strong genetic component to physical attractiveness, or physical features (like height) that give an advantage in "merit" in some paths of life. Nor do people have a problem acknowledging your parents, the country in which you were born, their wealth and fitness as "good parents" for the early years of your life plays a massive role in your chance of "success" in life, however you define that. I.e., all components of luck. You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else. I don't think it's unfair or morally wrong that an attractive person can be paid to model whereas I can not. Or a very tall person could be paid to play basketball while a short person who has more skill and practiced much longer and harder can not.

luckylion 5y ago
> You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else. I think progessives care mostly about the economic consequences, not a judgement of someone as a person.
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  What are the economic consequences? Whether or not it is genetic or due to any other confluence of luck or upbringing or other personal attributes, the end result is the same. Also as I said, there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    The end result between nurture vs nature might be the same, but if it's all nurture, than "we can change it" and no price is too high to get to "the new man". If it's not, even the best funded policies with the best intentions can only get you so far, and inequality will remain. Not because of a conspiracy that is keeping some down while lifting others up, but because of nature. I do believe that it would be good on all counts if they would accept genetics, because it would allow for asking much better questions, but I can see why they can't: they're heavily invested in the opposing position and few people are happy to just throw away an investment. > there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics. That's true, but maybe that's because they matter less? I.e. if inequality was primarily defined by height or beauty, they might have a harder time with it. Intelligence & related non-physical things are more important, I believe everybody intuitively accepts that.

woko 5y ago

> People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons. More so because there is no proof for that. Individuals exhibit different levels of intelligence. Sure, life is unfair. However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"? What we observe could be explained by many other more convincing factors: early learning activity, more care to the child's education, logical and clear answers to the kid's questions about the world around him, help with the homework, etc. With proper early learning activity for the baby, and amazing teachers for the early teachings, the kid has a strong foundation. From there, compound returns.

deltasixeight 5y ago
>However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"? Genes determine differences in intelligence between say a human and a dog or a human and a bird. Genes also determine physical size, skin color and basically every difference in human attributes. What black magic makes it so that these genes just happen to not at all influence intelligence among humans? You can't see it but ideology is influencing your bias. You are unable to see how ludicrous it is to say intelligence isn't inherited when literally every single other thing is.
jhoechtl 5y ago
> However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. While they do not necessarily inherit intelligence, there is a non-zero likelihood that eg. intelligence is a gene-thing. This non-zero likelihood might be bigger than a primarily by moral standards led discussion might suggest us to be.
concordDance 5y ago
> However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Do you have an alternative explanation for the results of twin studies on IQ then? It's also not just IQ, so many things very strongly correlate between identical twins. > Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"? Does natural selection only work on non-humans then?