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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 intelligen

by 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.
      - RC_ITR 4y ago
        We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies. Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance. We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me. Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value. Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.' Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers. But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).

by akavi 4y ago

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.
    - RC_ITR 4y ago
      We disagree on the predictive power of twin studies. Also please cite actual studies rather than Wikipedia. You’ll capture more nuance. We conclude that there is now strong evidence that virtually all individual psychological differences, when reliably measured, are moderately to substantially heritable For example, citation 6 implies nearly every personality trait is inherited, which seems aggressive to me. Citation 7 is a book about how the genetic links get stronger with age, which seems also odd to take at face value. Citation 4 is a study of 3k white (they excluded non-white people intentionally) British people born in the 1920's titled "Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic," but their results could be restated as 'distant members of the same family clan (in a society famous for inter-generational class structure) score similarly on aptitude tests, but we can't explain it with our data.' Anyway, as great a source as Wikipedia can be, I wouldn't take its summaries at face value, the three above examples lead me to believe (like in a lot of social sciences) there's still a lot of work to be done to actually get to answers. But, again, circling back to the problem here - even if 'smart' people lead to 'smart' children, society as it stands is awful at actually identifying and rewarding smart people (i.e. jobs aren't doled out via IQ tests).