3 ms·

High SES correlates with IQ, so you're just measuring the same thing, going round and round in circles. You're just grasping at straws trying to find some argum

by sfblah 4y ago

High SES correlates with IQ, so you're just measuring the same thing, going round and round in circles. You're just grasping at straws trying to find some arguments that allow you to invalidate the obvious null hypothesis. You're doing it for political reasons, and it's totally obvious.

tptacek 4y ago
Obviously high SES doesn't measure the same thing as IQ, and genetically unrelated children are brought up identical SES environments all the time. This argument doesn't even cohere logically. (For what it's worth: research suggests that adopting low-SES children into high-SES households is associated with as much as an 18 point increase in IQ test scores.)
- sfblah 4y ago
  They don't measure the same statistic, but they correlate. You're selectively citing research on adoption. In fact, there's plenty of research showing that gains are transitory and parental IQ is a better predictor of IQ in late teen years than is the high-SES environment. This whole "mystery" is what prompted folks to ask Jensen to start studying Head Start, as it wasn't clear it was doing any good. The problem is these interventions don't work. They don't work because IQ is genetic.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    See Turkheimer: when you withdraw supports like Head Start, you get regression in the short term, but long term outcomes are significantly better, measured by graduation, matriculation into college, &c. That research is from the last 10 years years; Jensen's from the late 1960s. It doesn't help that Arthur Jensen was an out-and-proud white supremacist (sponsored by the Pioneer Fund!), and an associate of swastikas-and-all neo-Nazis. "That doesn't work because IQ is genetic" doesn't even make sense as a sentence. It implies that something being "genetic" means it's immutable. That's not even how genes work. But it's how people thought they worked in the 1960s, which is where your cite comes from.
    - sfblah 4y ago
      I can do the same character assassination on Turkheimer. His own Wikipedia page says he supports the "the radical scientific left" and that his 2003 study that you're probably quoting failed to replicate. Here's a nice take-down of him that took me 3 minutes of googling to find: https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-ed5850b028d1 https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-e...
      - runarberg 4y ago
        Oh you don’t get to talk bad about my boy Turkheimer. I remember my first university assignment when studying psychology back in 2008. It was an essay on the nature vs. nurture debate. I remember going through the sources and deeming the debate kind of stupid. Then I got to Turkheimer, particularly the legendary 2000 article of “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean” which begins with: > The nature-nurture debate is over. The bottom line is that everything is heritable, an outcome that has taken all sides of the nature-nurture debate by surprise. And concludes with: > The gloomy prospect [non-shared environment between siblings accounting for a large part of behavioral variability] looms larger for the genome project than is generally acknowledged. The question is not whether there are correlations to be found between individual genes and complex behavior—of course there are—but instead whether there are domains of genetic causation in which the gloomy prospect does not prevail, allowing the little bits of correlational evidence to cohere into replicable and cumulative genetic models of development. My own prediction is that such domains will prove rare indeed, and that the likelihood of discovering them will be inversely related to the complexity of the behavior under study. Later in a 2003 study he then goes on and demonstrate that almost all of the variability can be explained by environmental effects (E) and genetic and environmental interaction effects (G × E). None of the previous readings even considered interactions and always concluded with x% E + (100 - x)% G for some x. (EDIT: Catching up my reading I actually see that more recent behavioral geneticists are even using G × E² in their models, that is, the environment also interacts with it self, and that interaction also interacts with you genotype, making for much richer models). I turned in my paper concluding that obviously there was a flaw in previous studies that don’t look at interactions. Like why is this even being debated any more? I off course got a failing grade for the essay, being of low SES (sorry IQ) my essay skills obviously lacking as I didn’t have the skill (sorry intelligence) to formulate a coherent argument. Thankfully my boy Eric Turkheimer came to the rescue by concluding that actually in a high learning environment like a university in a country which grants equal education to everybody that my skills can be improved (sorry, I mean, my intelligence is malleable), so that I could graduate 3 years later with a first grade. No, nobody can talk bad about my boy Turkheimer.
runarberg 4y ago
I want to go back to a point you said on your first post on this topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517864): > As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like. Now I find it interesting you would say this while also believing that “High SES correlates with IQ” and “You're just measuring the same thing, going round and round in circles.” Now a sibling post goes into why IQ and SES aren’t the same thing, but suppose for the sake of argument that it is. SES is pretty much just a function of wealth, it can be measured by things like your family income, education and occupation, all pretty straight forward. You don’t need constructs such as intelligence, g-factors, you don’t need to do factor analysis to find correlations within massive tests etc. You just take the income, education, and occupation, and you have your SES. Now, if I were to look for epicycles within a model which predicts “success”, IQ would be a prime candidate here. Nothing predicts you income as well as your parent’s income, the same applies to education and occupation. So if these are the things you’d define as “success”. Or as you put it: > If jumping on chairs were what advanced modernity, we would test for that instead. And, that too would "work" because it would surely be a marker for people who were likely to be successful in life. Now ponder this for a moment. What if instead of creating a construct called intelligence and using that as the predictor for this “success” as you call it, instead we allow society to be unequal. That we grant different people different access to things like good jobs, healthcare and education. Now if said society would enforce this limited access by using something we can actually and objectively know runs in families, say money, fame, and valuable assets, that those that have less of these things get less access to the tings which grants you “success”. Wouldn’t we have a pretty good model to predict “success”. Now leaving aside this thought experiment (and snark on my part) IQ seems like a giant epicycle of you theory of success. Instead of forming our social policies around intelligence, wouldn’t it be better to form them around something we know is a prime cause of hindrance, inequality. Now you know my political stance here, so I’m not afraid to say: Solidarity among the working class! Eating the rich! Those are the real solutions. Not being gaslit by the wealthy elite that we are stupider then they.
- 4y ago

by sfblah 4y ago

tptacek 4y ago

Obviously high SES doesn't measure the same thing as IQ, and genetically unrelated children are brought up identical SES environments all the time. This argument doesn't even cohere logically. (For what it's worth: research suggests that adopting low-SES children into high-SES households is associated with as much as an 18 point increase in IQ test scores.)

sfblah 4y ago
They don't measure the same statistic, but they correlate. You're selectively citing research on adoption. In fact, there's plenty of research showing that gains are transitory and parental IQ is a better predictor of IQ in late teen years than is the high-SES environment. This whole "mystery" is what prompted folks to ask Jensen to start studying Head Start, as it wasn't clear it was doing any good. The problem is these interventions don't work. They don't work because IQ is genetic.
- tptacek 4y ago
  See Turkheimer: when you withdraw supports like Head Start, you get regression in the short term, but long term outcomes are significantly better, measured by graduation, matriculation into college, &c. That research is from the last 10 years years; Jensen's from the late 1960s. It doesn't help that Arthur Jensen was an out-and-proud white supremacist (sponsored by the Pioneer Fund!), and an associate of swastikas-and-all neo-Nazis. "That doesn't work because IQ is genetic" doesn't even make sense as a sentence. It implies that something being "genetic" means it's immutable. That's not even how genes work. But it's how people thought they worked in the 1960s, which is where your cite comes from.
  - sfblah 4y ago
    I can do the same character assassination on Turkheimer. His own Wikipedia page says he supports the "the radical scientific left" and that his 2003 study that you're probably quoting failed to replicate. Here's a nice take-down of him that took me 3 minutes of googling to find: https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-ed5850b028d1 https://cremieux.medium.com/is-eric-turkheimer-a-scientist-e...
    - runarberg 4y ago
      Oh you don’t get to talk bad about my boy Turkheimer. I remember my first university assignment when studying psychology back in 2008. It was an essay on the nature vs. nurture debate. I remember going through the sources and deeming the debate kind of stupid. Then I got to Turkheimer, particularly the legendary 2000 article of “Three Laws of Behavior Genetics and What They Mean” which begins with: > The nature-nurture debate is over. The bottom line is that everything is heritable, an outcome that has taken all sides of the nature-nurture debate by surprise. And concludes with: > The gloomy prospect [non-shared environment between siblings accounting for a large part of behavioral variability] looms larger for the genome project than is generally acknowledged. The question is not whether there are correlations to be found between individual genes and complex behavior—of course there are—but instead whether there are domains of genetic causation in which the gloomy prospect does not prevail, allowing the little bits of correlational evidence to cohere into replicable and cumulative genetic models of development. My own prediction is that such domains will prove rare indeed, and that the likelihood of discovering them will be inversely related to the complexity of the behavior under study. Later in a 2003 study he then goes on and demonstrate that almost all of the variability can be explained by environmental effects (E) and genetic and environmental interaction effects (G × E). None of the previous readings even considered interactions and always concluded with x% E + (100 - x)% G for some x. (EDIT: Catching up my reading I actually see that more recent behavioral geneticists are even using G × E² in their models, that is, the environment also interacts with it self, and that interaction also interacts with you genotype, making for much richer models). I turned in my paper concluding that obviously there was a flaw in previous studies that don’t look at interactions. Like why is this even being debated any more? I off course got a failing grade for the essay, being of low SES (sorry IQ) my essay skills obviously lacking as I didn’t have the skill (sorry intelligence) to formulate a coherent argument. Thankfully my boy Eric Turkheimer came to the rescue by concluding that actually in a high learning environment like a university in a country which grants equal education to everybody that my skills can be improved (sorry, I mean, my intelligence is malleable), so that I could graduate 3 years later with a first grade. No, nobody can talk bad about my boy Turkheimer.

runarberg 4y ago

I want to go back to a point you said on your first post on this topic (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517864 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517864): > As a consequence, social policy resembles the cycles and epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmology. Namely, all manner of social, economic and historical outcomes which are explained parsimoniously by understanding IQ as heritable are instead attributed to a Rube-Goldberg machine of racism, class warfare and the like. Now I find it interesting you would say this while also believing that “High SES correlates with IQ” and “You're just measuring the same thing, going round and round in circles.” Now a sibling post goes into why IQ and SES aren’t the same thing, but suppose for the sake of argument that it is. SES is pretty much just a function of wealth, it can be measured by things like your family income, education and occupation, all pretty straight forward. You don’t need constructs such as intelligence, g-factors, you don’t need to do factor analysis to find correlations within massive tests etc. You just take the income, education, and occupation, and you have your SES. Now, if I were to look for epicycles within a model which predicts “success”, IQ would be a prime candidate here. Nothing predicts you income as well as your parent’s income, the same applies to education and occupation. So if these are the things you’d define as “success”. Or as you put it: > If jumping on chairs were what advanced modernity, we would test for that instead. And, that too would "work" because it would surely be a marker for people who were likely to be successful in life. Now ponder this for a moment. What if instead of creating a construct called intelligence and using that as the predictor for this “success” as you call it, instead we allow society to be unequal. That we grant different people different access to things like good jobs, healthcare and education. Now if said society would enforce this limited access by using something we can actually and objectively know runs in families, say money, fame, and valuable assets, that those that have less of these things get less access to the tings which grants you “success”. Wouldn’t we have a pretty good model to predict “success”. Now leaving aside this thought experiment (and snark on my part) IQ seems like a giant epicycle of you theory of success. Instead of forming our social policies around intelligence, wouldn’t it be better to form them around something we know is a prime cause of hindrance, inequality. Now you know my political stance here, so I’m not afraid to say: Solidarity among the working class! Eating the rich! Those are the real solutions. Not being gaslit by the wealthy elite that we are stupider then they.

4y ago