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I don't know how the author used the word "heritable", however if we expand the scope beyond genetics – eg, a child of an academic parent might inherit that par

by kypro 3y ago

I don't know how the author used the word "heritable", however if we expand the scope beyond genetics – eg, a child of an academic parent might inherit that parent's cultural attitudes towards education via their upbringing – then it would be even more uncontroversial to say that IQ is "largely" heritable. I personally assumed the author meant the variance of IQ within a population is "largely" a product of genetics. Assuming they they believe this genetic factor is around 50% then this would not be a controversial position to hold among intelligence researchers.

tptacek 3y ago
Yes: that's what I took the author to mean too. And that's not an argument heritability statistics can make. My point is that the author has confused "heritability" with "genetic determination".
dmn322 3y ago
> I don't know how the author used the word "heritable"... If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all. Look at this list of the most cited cognitive scientists in the journal "cognitive science"... https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/ https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/ #1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are. Turns out right on his wikipedia page he wrote a book about what he thinks about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions. It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion. I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would. If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.

by kypro 3y ago

tptacek 3y ago

Yes: that's what I took the author to mean too. And that's not an argument heritability statistics can make. My point is that the author has confused "heritability" with "genetic determination".

dmn322 3y ago

> I don't know how the author used the word "heritable"... If the author doesn't really know what heritability means, then maybe they're not in a position to be communicating to the world about what the "overwhelming evidence" shows, or even having an opinion on the matter at all. Look at this list of the most cited cognitive scientists in the journal "cognitive science"... https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/ https://exaly.com/rankings/author/journal-2/19263/ #1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Elman ... Jeffery Elman. I wonder what his stance on the matter is. Let's see if there's a quick way to determine what his thought on heritability are. Turns out right on his wikipedia page he wrote a book about what he thinks about it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rethinking_Innateness It's call "Rethinking Innateness," questioning the over-attribution to genetics of gene x environment interactions. It took me all of 2 minutes to look that up. The author of this article clearly just completely made up what they said. They had no basis or intellectual discipline in arriving at their opinion. I had never heard of Jeffery Elman (though I'm familiar with some of his work on RNN's apparently). I had the same thoughts about gene x environment interactions that he apparently describes in his book. I arrived there through a combination of reading papers about the impact of genetics on psychological and cognitive function as well as using critical thinking... as I bet most who have studied cognitive science would. If I were going to publish a blog post, let alone a book, I would at least do the bare minimum 2 minute google search to see if I'm completely making stuff up before I make claims, implied or explicit, about the consensus of a whole field.