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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=35517

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.

sfblah 4y ago
Well, thankfully for you, you're getting your wish. For more than 50 years social policies in the west have been built around exactly your claims. And it's a dismal failure. Inequality is growing, not shrinking. These solutions won't ever work, because they refuse to acknowledge the actual problem. What people want to understand is the preconditions of the high SES status. Not everyone who achieves high SES has rich parents. Take Japanese people in America. They were placed in internment camps in the 1940s, yet today they have substantially higher median incomes than whites. How is this possible? Ashkenazi Jews faced unimaginable hardship for centuries, yet they manage to have remarkable success. Jews have won 26% of all Nobel Prizes in sciences, more than 100x what would be expected by chance. Arguing that's environmental is just silly. Their environment couldn't have been worse! Now to your overall political point, I actually disagree there too. I honestly think it's possible that this quarantining of IQ science and cancel culture are looked favorably upon by elites because they know that they preserve the status quo. In fact, policies that embrace IQ and intelligence research would be far more expensive. Rather than pretending an 80 IQ person is going to be able to become a lawyer, society would have to reckon with the hard truth that such a person is probably going to need meaningful monetary assistance his entire life. Accepting IQ would probably mean something like reparations for slavery would actually have to be paid -- not out of some guilt trip, but because many of these folks need the money to keep up in society. And, you're not going to be able to get away with a single lump sum, because they're going to need the help every year. So, even with an anti-rich ideology, I just don't think your arguments hold water. You're falling for a head-fake. Haven't you ever wondered why so many super-wealthy people embrace liberal politics? This is why.
- runarberg 4y ago
  So we are steering away from psychology and into sociology, political science, and history now. That is fine, IQ deserves to be treated as a multi-disciplinary endeavor, and it should be failing across the board. But be aware that you are making this harder for your self, as IQ was never popular outside of psychology, particularly not in political science (as you have probably observed). Although my personal readings in the literature are limited to psychology, and therefor my opinion is less informed as we steer into these other disciplines. Before I get into the bulk of my argument I want to address this first: > Haven't you ever wondered why so many super-wealthy people embrace liberal politics? This is why. Now I’m not super well versed in polling numbers, but I was under the impression that the ultra-rich voted overwhelmingly conservative, that is, the proportion of conservative voters are higher among the most wealthy group of the population. However, perhaps you know more about polling numbers among demographics than I. And now to the bulk of my arguments. So what you are describing in your above post is that there is variation in the system, as people can move across classes. In a previous system, namely feudalism (or the caste system in India), this wasn’t possible. By abolishing feudalism we allowed people to move across the SES spectrum. Although capitalism allows some movement, there is still plenty of friction. Perhaps intelligence is this friction but I need to see more evidence to believe that. Or to apply Marx’s razor: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest.” Your examples all have simpler alternative explanation. Not all Japanese Americans were detained in concentration camps, some—particularly the wealthier—were able to self-exclude, meaning they had a place outside the exclusion zones, and were than able to return to their wealth after executive order 9066 was rescinded. This was a huge minority of course, but it speaks volumes that it was wealth, not intelligence, which determined who could and could not self-exclude. There have also been thousands of Japanese people that have migrated since 1944, and Japanese internal policies make it so that since 1945 most Japanese migrants are of the mid- to upper classes. Your example with Ashkenazi Jews is just acknowledging the fact that culture exists and often follows racial lines such that people from a common background seek similar education and occupations. Note that SES includes both education and occupation. Also note that critical race theory explains race as a cultural phenomena instead of biological. So this observation is not surprising in an SES model as long as some horizontal movement between classes is allowed. Reading about Ashkenazi Jews actually lead me to this excellent summary by Vox in the matter: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/30/21042733/bret-stephens-jewish-iq-new-york-times https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/30/21042733/... In short, this can be explained with statistics as “Small average differences make big differences to outliers” so even if you believe IQ is a good metric for intelligence (and you shouldn’t), and Ashkenazi Jews do have higher IQ on average (which they might), this is still not enough to establish there is any genetic basis for the group difference, as this is exactly what you’d expect to see given the statistics. When you only look at the extremes, the expected value also becomes extreme. So your statistics about > 100x is simply wrong.

sfblah 4y ago

Well, thankfully for you, you're getting your wish. For more than 50 years social policies in the west have been built around exactly your claims. And it's a dismal failure. Inequality is growing, not shrinking. These solutions won't ever work, because they refuse to acknowledge the actual problem. What people want to understand is the preconditions of the high SES status. Not everyone who achieves high SES has rich parents. Take Japanese people in America. They were placed in internment camps in the 1940s, yet today they have substantially higher median incomes than whites. How is this possible? Ashkenazi Jews faced unimaginable hardship for centuries, yet they manage to have remarkable success. Jews have won 26% of all Nobel Prizes in sciences, more than 100x what would be expected by chance. Arguing that's environmental is just silly. Their environment couldn't have been worse! Now to your overall political point, I actually disagree there too. I honestly think it's possible that this quarantining of IQ science and cancel culture are looked favorably upon by elites because they know that they preserve the status quo. In fact, policies that embrace IQ and intelligence research would be far more expensive. Rather than pretending an 80 IQ person is going to be able to become a lawyer, society would have to reckon with the hard truth that such a person is probably going to need meaningful monetary assistance his entire life. Accepting IQ would probably mean something like reparations for slavery would actually have to be paid -- not out of some guilt trip, but because many of these folks need the money to keep up in society. And, you're not going to be able to get away with a single lump sum, because they're going to need the help every year. So, even with an anti-rich ideology, I just don't think your arguments hold water. You're falling for a head-fake. Haven't you ever wondered why so many super-wealthy people embrace liberal politics? This is why.

runarberg 4y ago
So we are steering away from psychology and into sociology, political science, and history now. That is fine, IQ deserves to be treated as a multi-disciplinary endeavor, and it should be failing across the board. But be aware that you are making this harder for your self, as IQ was never popular outside of psychology, particularly not in political science (as you have probably observed). Although my personal readings in the literature are limited to psychology, and therefor my opinion is less informed as we steer into these other disciplines. Before I get into the bulk of my argument I want to address this first: > Haven't you ever wondered why so many super-wealthy people embrace liberal politics? This is why. Now I’m not super well versed in polling numbers, but I was under the impression that the ultra-rich voted overwhelmingly conservative, that is, the proportion of conservative voters are higher among the most wealthy group of the population. However, perhaps you know more about polling numbers among demographics than I. And now to the bulk of my arguments. So what you are describing in your above post is that there is variation in the system, as people can move across classes. In a previous system, namely feudalism (or the caste system in India), this wasn’t possible. By abolishing feudalism we allowed people to move across the SES spectrum. Although capitalism allows some movement, there is still plenty of friction. Perhaps intelligence is this friction but I need to see more evidence to believe that. Or to apply Marx’s razor: “Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by class interest.” Your examples all have simpler alternative explanation. Not all Japanese Americans were detained in concentration camps, some—particularly the wealthier—were able to self-exclude, meaning they had a place outside the exclusion zones, and were than able to return to their wealth after executive order 9066 was rescinded. This was a huge minority of course, but it speaks volumes that it was wealth, not intelligence, which determined who could and could not self-exclude. There have also been thousands of Japanese people that have migrated since 1944, and Japanese internal policies make it so that since 1945 most Japanese migrants are of the mid- to upper classes. Your example with Ashkenazi Jews is just acknowledging the fact that culture exists and often follows racial lines such that people from a common background seek similar education and occupations. Note that SES includes both education and occupation. Also note that critical race theory explains race as a cultural phenomena instead of biological. So this observation is not surprising in an SES model as long as some horizontal movement between classes is allowed. Reading about Ashkenazi Jews actually lead me to this excellent summary by Vox in the matter: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/30/21042733/bret-stephens-jewish-iq-new-york-times https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/12/30/21042733/... In short, this can be explained with statistics as “Small average differences make big differences to outliers” so even if you believe IQ is a good metric for intelligence (and you shouldn’t), and Ashkenazi Jews do have higher IQ on average (which they might), this is still not enough to establish there is any genetic basis for the group difference, as this is exactly what you’d expect to see given the statistics. When you only look at the extremes, the expected value also becomes extreme. So your statistics about > 100x is simply wrong.