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My observation is society will bend over backward. Do literally anything. Rather than actively embrace what is known about IQ as being true. Any book offering

My observation is society will bend over backward. Do literally anything. Rather than actively embrace what is known about IQ as being true. Any book offering something along the lines of “just work harder and you will get there!” stands a good chance about being widely adopted and celebrated. Because it offers a pseudoscience and publicly acceptable theory that is in opposition or replaces IQ. High intelligence is incredibly heritable and enables people to learn complex skills much faster than others. If you add in ADHD and Aspergers, I would guess I can out learn anyone but only at topics that interest me. You are not going to beat someone whose brain literally cannot turn off and who ruminates obsessively about complex topics all day. No matter how much you “practice.”

seec 3y ago
I agree, but you have to realize that very often people call it some other names, like "talent" even though it actually means the exact same thing, it is much more politically correct. And it is indeed what it is. IQ is very heritable and also predicts performance for a lot of stuff, I would say almost any activity; even for the one that do not necessarily interest the high IQ in person. But society would rather ignore that because it fears if we agree to this truth something like eugenics will gain power. Society doesn't want to think about the fact that reproduction is not exactly a right but more of a privilege on a finite planet with finite ressource. In fact, most of our current problems, even concerning the climate, can be traced back to having too many people consuming too many ressources. And people want to reproduce, they don't want to be told that they can't because they don't pass the threshold. So, we have this giant travesty, that culminates on top of massive hypocrisy that runs everywhere. And yes, for most people even if they practice hard for over 10K hours in any activity, they are not going anywhere without the "talent" (in other words, IQ high enough for the relevant activity plus some other variables).
- tptacek 3y ago
  People use the word "heritable" as if it meant "genetically determined" or "immutable", neither of which is true.
  - seec 3y ago
    You seem to believe that we don't know that, demonstrating precisely what we are talking about. Nobody ever said that this is a guaranteed thing, and that's completely beside the point. Most things in life are not 100% certain, but we work with "highly probable" or "lots more chance" all the time. Using high quality ingredients doesn't guarantee a good cake, but if you don't start there, your chances of having a good cake are much lower. You keep repeating that as if you know something special that others don't, but how it looks to me is that you are the one lacking the depth to understand the original argument.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      One thing I don't understand is the argument you're trying to make here. A condition being heritable doesn't make it 51% likely to be genetically determined. For instance, people's environments are heritable, so the "heritability" of "IQ" doesn't say anything about how society should deal with the distribution of ability. It doesn't say we should allocate resources to improving ability and it doesn't not say that. It literally begs the question. Given that: what do you take the parent comment to mean? So far as I can tell, we've never spoken before, so I'm not sure I follow the "repeating" thing, either.
      - seec 3y ago
        The repeating part is about you saying basically the same thing to the previous commenter, I don't get how you do not intuitively understand that? It's not exactly clear to me what you are asking but you seem to be making the traditional nature vs nurture argument, and you seem to think the environment is important enough to impact the IQ of an individual and more largely its abilities. It's not clear what you mean by people's "environments are heritable" but from my point of view it was barely true in another era but nowadays with increased mobility it is just not true. Most people are very likely to have kids in a very different environment than they grew up in. And that is the case for 4 generations now, so I don't think there is any heritability there appart for a few privileged rich, I guess (then again, they have largely been replaced in the last century or two). I have to say, I don't understand where you are going because we have a number of twin studies that clearly show that the environmental impact is not very large, at least for a single generation. There are also plenty of various fields, related to animals or plants that directly work with genetics, to change stuff regardless of the environment. GMO would not be viable if genetics weren't more important than environnement... I do think environment plays a role and is important for the very long term. But on the human scale, it takes multiple generations to have a significant change in the average so compared to the outsized influence of the base genetic material. With everything we know about genetics, while there is no guarantee, children are largely a mix of their parents' traits, including intelligence. The higher the parents' intelligence, the higher the chance of this intelligence showing up more in the children (because intelligence is not localized at a single place in the ADN, but is spread out all other). I really don't understand people contesting that kind of thing, since it never bothers anyone when historically tall people, make, you guess it, taller people than the average. How surprising! When it comes to the allocation of ressource, it is pretty simple: the humans who get more ressource thrive better, are allowed much more influence on the environment directly and indirectly wich can have large impact. It is not a hard argument to make that to benefit society the most, you want those ressource to go to the smartest humans available. If you do not, you dilute your benefits and may actually prevent those individuals from taking over because of poor ressource distribution. In the long term your society ends up dumber and worse off. This is basically where we are and exactly why society is getting restless in some places, it is not a tenable situation in the long term, because even though it may not look like at first glance, everyone is guaranteed to be worse off over time.
skywhopper 3y ago
Not sure how you think “IQ” is particularly meaningful to this, though. At best it measures one small contributor to all the aspects of a person. “Working hard” is also required. So is “natural inclination or ability”. Psychological and physical traits also play a role. Practice is also important. IQ alone is no more likely to make someone successful as any other piece of the puzzle.
- mewpmewp2 3y ago
  But then there are types of brains which are naturally attuned to wanting to solve certain problems. If the owners of those brains get lucky they get a brain that wants to solve problems that they can get paid very well for. It doesn't feel like hard work then. It's like what your brain was naturally wired or specialised to do.
tptacek 3y ago
Every time someone here mentions the heritability of IQ, I wonder what they think that term means, because it clearly does not mean what most people intuitively think it does.

seec 3y ago

I agree, but you have to realize that very often people call it some other names, like "talent" even though it actually means the exact same thing, it is much more politically correct. And it is indeed what it is. IQ is very heritable and also predicts performance for a lot of stuff, I would say almost any activity; even for the one that do not necessarily interest the high IQ in person. But society would rather ignore that because it fears if we agree to this truth something like eugenics will gain power. Society doesn't want to think about the fact that reproduction is not exactly a right but more of a privilege on a finite planet with finite ressource. In fact, most of our current problems, even concerning the climate, can be traced back to having too many people consuming too many ressources. And people want to reproduce, they don't want to be told that they can't because they don't pass the threshold. So, we have this giant travesty, that culminates on top of massive hypocrisy that runs everywhere. And yes, for most people even if they practice hard for over 10K hours in any activity, they are not going anywhere without the "talent" (in other words, IQ high enough for the relevant activity plus some other variables).

tptacek 3y ago
People use the word "heritable" as if it meant "genetically determined" or "immutable", neither of which is true.
- seec 3y ago
  You seem to believe that we don't know that, demonstrating precisely what we are talking about. Nobody ever said that this is a guaranteed thing, and that's completely beside the point. Most things in life are not 100% certain, but we work with "highly probable" or "lots more chance" all the time. Using high quality ingredients doesn't guarantee a good cake, but if you don't start there, your chances of having a good cake are much lower. You keep repeating that as if you know something special that others don't, but how it looks to me is that you are the one lacking the depth to understand the original argument.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    One thing I don't understand is the argument you're trying to make here. A condition being heritable doesn't make it 51% likely to be genetically determined. For instance, people's environments are heritable, so the "heritability" of "IQ" doesn't say anything about how society should deal with the distribution of ability. It doesn't say we should allocate resources to improving ability and it doesn't not say that. It literally begs the question. Given that: what do you take the parent comment to mean? So far as I can tell, we've never spoken before, so I'm not sure I follow the "repeating" thing, either.
    - seec 3y ago
      The repeating part is about you saying basically the same thing to the previous commenter, I don't get how you do not intuitively understand that? It's not exactly clear to me what you are asking but you seem to be making the traditional nature vs nurture argument, and you seem to think the environment is important enough to impact the IQ of an individual and more largely its abilities. It's not clear what you mean by people's "environments are heritable" but from my point of view it was barely true in another era but nowadays with increased mobility it is just not true. Most people are very likely to have kids in a very different environment than they grew up in. And that is the case for 4 generations now, so I don't think there is any heritability there appart for a few privileged rich, I guess (then again, they have largely been replaced in the last century or two). I have to say, I don't understand where you are going because we have a number of twin studies that clearly show that the environmental impact is not very large, at least for a single generation. There are also plenty of various fields, related to animals or plants that directly work with genetics, to change stuff regardless of the environment. GMO would not be viable if genetics weren't more important than environnement... I do think environment plays a role and is important for the very long term. But on the human scale, it takes multiple generations to have a significant change in the average so compared to the outsized influence of the base genetic material. With everything we know about genetics, while there is no guarantee, children are largely a mix of their parents' traits, including intelligence. The higher the parents' intelligence, the higher the chance of this intelligence showing up more in the children (because intelligence is not localized at a single place in the ADN, but is spread out all other). I really don't understand people contesting that kind of thing, since it never bothers anyone when historically tall people, make, you guess it, taller people than the average. How surprising! When it comes to the allocation of ressource, it is pretty simple: the humans who get more ressource thrive better, are allowed much more influence on the environment directly and indirectly wich can have large impact. It is not a hard argument to make that to benefit society the most, you want those ressource to go to the smartest humans available. If you do not, you dilute your benefits and may actually prevent those individuals from taking over because of poor ressource distribution. In the long term your society ends up dumber and worse off. This is basically where we are and exactly why society is getting restless in some places, it is not a tenable situation in the long term, because even though it may not look like at first glance, everyone is guaranteed to be worse off over time.

skywhopper 3y ago

Not sure how you think “IQ” is particularly meaningful to this, though. At best it measures one small contributor to all the aspects of a person. “Working hard” is also required. So is “natural inclination or ability”. Psychological and physical traits also play a role. Practice is also important. IQ alone is no more likely to make someone successful as any other piece of the puzzle.

mewpmewp2 3y ago
But then there are types of brains which are naturally attuned to wanting to solve certain problems. If the owners of those brains get lucky they get a brain that wants to solve problems that they can get paid very well for. It doesn't feel like hard work then. It's like what your brain was naturally wired or specialised to do.

tptacek 3y ago

Every time someone here mentions the heritability of IQ, I wonder what they think that term means, because it clearly does not mean what most people intuitively think it does.