7 ms·

>We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves. The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and th

by RC_ITR 4y ago

>We are artificially selecting the worst people to reproduce and dooming ourselves. The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people. I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:~:text=International%20research,-Map%20of%20countries&text=Lynn%20and%20Harvey%20(2008)%20found,for%20the%20years%201950%E2%80%932000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:....
akavi 4y ago
Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence. I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  >the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics. How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)? EDIT: To be clear, I know Western culture has pushed a narrative that intelligence is an intrinsic thing that anyone can have, but in practice, it's a reflection of learned skills like reasoning and abstraction. That's the entire point of education, if you don't practice those skills (with some exceptions), you are likely worse at them. https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-does-education-improve-intelligence-a-meta-analysis https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-does-...
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education. The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children. The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
  - lnsru 4y ago
    There are enough teachers and doctors from other countries working as post delivery drivers in Germany because their education isn’t being accepted in Germany.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      Sure, by no means am I trying to make some argument that immigrants or manual laborers are worse or inferior. In fact the opposite! I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors. Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was). We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.
      - medvezhenok 4y ago
        "Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults." I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
> I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes. I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid". I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  Sure, but that's an argument against abstraction/specialization that is also somewhat hard to really buy into. How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to? Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things. EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.
- stonogo 4y ago
  I saw that meme too, except the version I saw had the top comment included in the crop, which was something to the effect of "warnings are put on products in response to customer behavior, not as a preventative measure. somebody's parents tried to drink battery acid."
alach11 4y ago
> The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people. What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ
- RC_ITR 4y ago
  So you get studies with very confident titles like this: Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic Then you read the paper and you see: A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent... Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)... Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants... Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy. So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why. That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.

by RC_ITR 4y ago

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago

Also the rate at which people with lower IQs reproduce isn't really alarmist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:~:text=International%20research,-Map%20of%20countries&text=Lynn%20and%20Harvey%20(2008)%20found,for%20the%20years%201950%E2%80%932000 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fertility_and_intelligence#:....

akavi 4y ago

Both "smart people have smart children" and 90% of this forum being smarter than their parents could be true if "being on this forum" was selected on intelligence. I don't have the time to work through the math concretely, but intuitively, imagine that the intelligence of parents is normally distributed, and the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Set the cutoff for "participating on HN" to to some threshold. Given the right set of parameters, most of the "weight" in the aggregate child distribution above the threshold will come from the long tails of the child distributions of parents in the fat part of the parent distribution.

RC_ITR 4y ago
>the intelligence of their children is a tighter normal distribution around the parents' intelligence. Again, this is the core fallacy of eugenics. How many current US PhD's are the children/grandchildren of immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs (or maybe even went through extended periods of unemployment)? EDIT: To be clear, I know Western culture has pushed a narrative that intelligence is an intrinsic thing that anyone can have, but in practice, it's a reflection of learned skills like reasoning and abstraction. That's the entire point of education, if you don't practice those skills (with some exceptions), you are likely worse at them. https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-does-education-improve-intelligence-a-meta-analysis https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/publications/how-much-does-...
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  immigrants from underdeveloped countries who lacked education and worked manual jobs Why are you conflating immigrants from underdeveloped countries with low intelligence? The parents could be have been (likely were) highly intelligent, just lacking the opportunity or access to education. The current US PhD's that are the children/grandchildren of immigrants aren't a random selection, they are the product of smart motivated parents working the system (immigration system, education system, admissions system) for and with their children. The core fallacy of Eugenics is not that intelligence is heritable, it is that you can avoid terrible moral hazards when you try to meddle in this stuff.
- lnsru 4y ago
  There are enough teachers and doctors from other countries working as post delivery drivers in Germany because their education isn’t being accepted in Germany.
  - RC_ITR 4y ago
    Sure, by no means am I trying to make some argument that immigrants or manual laborers are worse or inferior. In fact the opposite! I'm trying to say that regardless of who your parents are, your intelligence is primarily driven by your education (and your attitude towards education), with slight variance for genetic factors. Therefore, we should not be anxious about "dumb people reproducing en masse" (as GP was). We should be worried about educating everyone equally and fairly.
    - medvezhenok 4y ago
      "Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%, with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults." I don't think 50-80% heritability should be hand-waved away as "slight variance". I think what you're talking about is the manifestations of the intelligence (i.e. you can't be a rocket scientist if you never had the chance to learn about it), but not the intelligence itself.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

> I think 90% of this forum believes themselves to be smarter than their parents, so maybe pump the brakes. I hope not. I saw a pretty funny meme on Reddit today that went something like "50 years ago car manuals explained how to adjust the valves in your engine. Now they ask that you don't drink the battery fluid". I think another big downside of so much technological progress is that people no longer need to understand, and get the benefit of learning, how things work. Yeah, it was a PITA that 35 years ago I had to muck with config.sys and autoexec.bat files, but it helped me have a better understanding of how things worked under the covers. There was some discussion on HN recently about how many Gen Z folks are woefully unprepared digitally for the workforce because they are so used to iPhones/iPads/apps, etc., that you don't know how thing actually work - like people not understanding what the file system is.

RC_ITR 4y ago
Sure, but that's an argument against abstraction/specialization that is also somewhat hard to really buy into. How do you smelt bronze? How do you grow crops? How do you build a lean-to? Knowing how to do all those things does give you a very intrinsic understanding of a lot of things, but it's probably not wise to force everyone to learn those things. EDIT: Apparently you don't smelt bronze, you smelt pure metals out of ores. lol.
stonogo 4y ago
I saw that meme too, except the version I saw had the top comment included in the crop, which was something to the effect of "warnings are put on products in response to customer behavior, not as a preventative measure. somebody's parents tried to drink battery acid."

alach11 4y ago

> The fallacy of eugenics is that 'smart' people have 'smart' children and the same for 'dumb' people. What makes you say that's a fallacy? Everything I've read has shown intelligence to be highly hereditable. I'm not saying we should make policy changes based on that, but the science behind intelligence being (at least partially) hereditable seems pretty conclusive. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

RC_ITR 4y ago
So you get studies with very confident titles like this: Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic Then you read the paper and you see: A total of 3511 CAGES (2115 females) participants had DNA extracted...Individuals were excluded from this study based on unresolved gender discrepancy, relatedness, call rate (≤ 0.95), and evidence of non-Caucasian descent... Analyses of individual SNPs and genes did not result in any replicable genome-wide significant association. A gene-based test for association27 showed one genome-wide significant association (P = 9.2 × 10−7), with formin-binding protein 1-like (FNBP1L) on gf (Supplementary Figure 7). This single genome-wide association result for FNBP1L did not replicate in the independent NCNG sample (P = 0.211, gene-based test)... Despite the fact that no specific genetic variants have been robustly associated with human intelligence, apart perhaps for APOE at older ages34,35, our results show for the first time that a substantial proportion (approximately 40 to 50%) of variation in human intelligence is associated with common SNPs (Minor allele frequency (MAF) > 0.01) that are in LD with causal variants... Only 1% (approximately) of the variance was explained in the prediction analysis due to the individual SNP effects being very small and therefore estimated with much error, which detracts to a great extent from the accuracy (8-11%) of the prediction equation30. Our finding that 40-50% of phenotypic variation is explained by all SNPs is fully consistent with the low precision of a predictor based upon a discovery sample of ~3,500 individuals; estimation of the SNPs’ effects is different from prediction accuracy. So basically, what they did, was take a bunch of British people born in the 1920's (a time/place famous for its rigid inter-generational class history), and found that members of certain family trees (that's more or less what it means to be British and have similar SNP distributions) scored similarly on tests, despite the fact that there's no real model to express why. That and twin studies (which also have their obvious limits) are about the extent of current "evidence" for inherited intellect. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but 'conclusive' is hardly how I would characterize the state of true evidence-based research.