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Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents, and that's been proven multiple times with large-scale studies of adopted twins. It would

Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents, and that's been proven multiple times with large-scale studies of adopted twins. It wouldn't surprise me if reward response was similar. But it's unlikely we'll make any advancements in our understanding of genes and intelligence or behavior, because this kind of research is out-of-favor and almost impossible to fund now.

Avicebron 3y ago
Well, I think the issue isn't the research exactly, it's the motivations behind doing the research. Like, if it was determined tomorrow, with a huge article in nature or another journal that's suitably popular/prestigious that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited, what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news.
- nostromo 3y ago
  Because you end up with bad science, like (potentially) the study posted here. If you refuse to consider the role of genetics, then everything is going to look like environmental impacts. This has a real impact on policy and investment, because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success. Trying to remain ignorant isn't going to help us here, even if we have good intentions.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    > because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success. And presumably learn from it. While wasting a lot of money and effort (and people) on programs that won't work isn't good, neither is not trying because the effect is presumed, pre hoc, to be small or non-existent. We live in a world where most people aren't enabled to achieve their potential. Figuring out that extrinsic rewards don't work to motivate behavioral changes or achievement for some people of a certain category, regardless of why, will hopefully result in the testing of other non-extrinsic-reward interventions that may work to motivate.
    - concordDance 3y ago
      > And presumably learn from it. While it might be easier than for regular people, it's still extremely hard for a politician/academic or political faction/academic faction to admit error. It's almost always possible to come up with a reason for why something didn't work that doesn't require giving up on a centrally important idea.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  As far as I can tell, the reason why science is continually trying to prove black people inferior (let's not bury the lede) is in order to put the current condition of black people in America as a result of nature and not of hundreds of years of slavery and slave breeding, and of the current condition of black people in Africa to their inferior brains instead of the violent takeovers of their countries, mass enslavement and massacres, and the installation of friendly dictators to ship their resource wealth overseas. Normally you look for deficits in people in order to account for them with special help, but this is a science just looking to shed blame. It's like testing for dyslexia to find kids that you shouldn't bother trying to teach to read. Or even worse, retroactively justifying your decision not to teach redheaded kids how to read by doing a survey of redheaded kids who were never taught to read, over a dozen generations, and finding them stupid. That's the problem. The field is hopelessly tainted, and being an area that would be difficult under any circumstances (due to mass social effects rather than mass genetic effects), meaningful designs would be hard to find even if the researchers were motivated by something other than justifying the past. In my experience, the people most obsessed with arguing and proving the usefulness of IQ are somewhere between 110-120. The people obsessed with the heritability of IQ and the supposed dominance of nature over nurture are often people who have raised terrible children. aside: one thing I'm curious about and haven't found is that there are a number of researchers who show differences between American black achievement (slave descendants) and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (who started arriving in 1965.) I haven't seen a lot of race science speculating about that: did slavers (either Western or the Africans who sold them) have some sort of filter that only put the stupid blacks into slavery? Were all the smart ones culled, and/or their intelligence intentionally bred out of them over generations? Did the admixture of the genetics of so many white slavers into their slave stock lower slave intelligence, or raise their propensity to violence? Or does that entire line of inquiry (or intense study of slave breeding in general) hold no interest for people trying to justify 18th century race science?
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    The Caribbean has a history of slavery not unlike the U.S., so the fact that Caribbean immigrants are better off is genuinely interesting. Of course, institutional factors are the most likely difference; among other things, the British got rid of slavery a generation or so before the U.S. did, and there was no real equivalent there to the U.S. Civil War and failed Reconstruction. There are also cultural differences that will of course matter, but they're causally downstream of that basic stylized fact.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news. Governments offering free embryo selection plausibly.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > if it was determined tomorrow...that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited IQ is 50 to 80% inherited [1]. (We can only predict about 10% of it with genetics [2].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
  - tptacek 3y ago
    For whatever it's worth, since you cited Plomin, if you Google him (or that study) you'll get a lot of interesting writing about how not-especially-useful that result turns out to be. A good shot/chaser on polygenetic behavior indicators is Shalizi's "g" writing, which is mostly about the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory data analysis, which seems pertinent.
mjburgess 3y ago
Unfortunately the field of observational statistics called "psychometrics" which has "proved" this using "twin studies" is largely bunk. The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor, which is almost certainly false; and in general, there is no way of establishing causation without interventional experiments. If the effects were plausibly non-linear, we would need 1 trillion+ data points even to establish statistically significant differences. These fields are all cargo-cult stats, putting data into GUIs and printing pro-forma reports. The people involved are in way over their heads, to the degree that there isnt anything to "reproduce" let alone try to reproduce the experiments: they dont have any. The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data. When and where we are born definitely has an effect on personality, irrespective of family, in most cases. Astrological star data is a proxy for the when and where, and while thus would not be causative, would often be correlative. So it makes sense to do PCA on it as you'll identify a lot of good correlations.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    You are correct that star positions are proxies. The problem in the case of psychometrics is that the claim is that the stars (here: genes) arent proxies, but bonafide causes. So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes). In the vast vast majority of observational genetic studies genes are just proxies, in the the same way the star signs are. In other cases, they're mere correlations. In the case of IQ (and basically all social genetic studies) it is highly likely that any correlated genes are merely proxies for geographic-historical distributions of peoples over time and it was the long-time-scale geographic and historical effects (culture, education, wealth, famine, poverty, war...) that we see in attainment. (Setting aside that IQ tests aren't valid above average IQ and have extremely bad properties both at the individual and population level for most of the measured range. )
concordDance 3y ago
> Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents Note that heritability numbers are specific to a particular environment. E.g. if you have a more random environment with some kids exposed to lead poisoning, some to malnourishment and some to parasites you will get lower heritability figures. Most studies on this are conducted in countries like Sweden and the USA on middle class populations.

Avicebron 3y ago

Well, I think the issue isn't the research exactly, it's the motivations behind doing the research. Like, if it was determined tomorrow, with a huge article in nature or another journal that's suitably popular/prestigious that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited, what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news.

nostromo 3y ago
Because you end up with bad science, like (potentially) the study posted here. If you refuse to consider the role of genetics, then everything is going to look like environmental impacts. This has a real impact on policy and investment, because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success. Trying to remain ignorant isn't going to help us here, even if we have good intentions.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > because we waste time on money on programs that have no chance of success. And presumably learn from it. While wasting a lot of money and effort (and people) on programs that won't work isn't good, neither is not trying because the effect is presumed, pre hoc, to be small or non-existent. We live in a world where most people aren't enabled to achieve their potential. Figuring out that extrinsic rewards don't work to motivate behavioral changes or achievement for some people of a certain category, regardless of why, will hopefully result in the testing of other non-extrinsic-reward interventions that may work to motivate.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    > And presumably learn from it. While it might be easier than for regular people, it's still extremely hard for a politician/academic or political faction/academic faction to admit error. It's almost always possible to come up with a reason for why something didn't work that doesn't require giving up on a centrally important idea.
pessimizer 3y ago
As far as I can tell, the reason why science is continually trying to prove black people inferior (let's not bury the lede) is in order to put the current condition of black people in America as a result of nature and not of hundreds of years of slavery and slave breeding, and of the current condition of black people in Africa to their inferior brains instead of the violent takeovers of their countries, mass enslavement and massacres, and the installation of friendly dictators to ship their resource wealth overseas. Normally you look for deficits in people in order to account for them with special help, but this is a science just looking to shed blame. It's like testing for dyslexia to find kids that you shouldn't bother trying to teach to read. Or even worse, retroactively justifying your decision not to teach redheaded kids how to read by doing a survey of redheaded kids who were never taught to read, over a dozen generations, and finding them stupid. That's the problem. The field is hopelessly tainted, and being an area that would be difficult under any circumstances (due to mass social effects rather than mass genetic effects), meaningful designs would be hard to find even if the researchers were motivated by something other than justifying the past. In my experience, the people most obsessed with arguing and proving the usefulness of IQ are somewhere between 110-120. The people obsessed with the heritability of IQ and the supposed dominance of nature over nurture are often people who have raised terrible children. aside: one thing I'm curious about and haven't found is that there are a number of researchers who show differences between American black achievement (slave descendants) and black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (who started arriving in 1965.) I haven't seen a lot of race science speculating about that: did slavers (either Western or the Africans who sold them) have some sort of filter that only put the stupid blacks into slavery? Were all the smart ones culled, and/or their intelligence intentionally bred out of them over generations? Did the admixture of the genetics of so many white slavers into their slave stock lower slave intelligence, or raise their propensity to violence? Or does that entire line of inquiry (or intense study of slave breeding in general) hold no interest for people trying to justify 18th century race science?
- zozbot234 3y ago
  The Caribbean has a history of slavery not unlike the U.S., so the fact that Caribbean immigrants are better off is genuinely interesting. Of course, institutional factors are the most likely difference; among other things, the British got rid of slavery a generation or so before the U.S. did, and there was no real equivalent there to the U.S. Civil War and failed Reconstruction. There are also cultural differences that will of course matter, but they're causally downstream of that basic stylized fact.
concordDance 3y ago
> what material changes would you want/expect to see in society in relation to that news. Governments offering free embryo selection plausibly.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> if it was determined tomorrow...that intelligence (and rewards for the sake of this thread) is totally inherited or even 80% inherited IQ is 50 to 80% inherited [1]. (We can only predict about 10% of it with genetics [2].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg.2017.104
- tptacek 3y ago
  For whatever it's worth, since you cited Plomin, if you Google him (or that study) you'll get a lot of interesting writing about how not-especially-useful that result turns out to be. A good shot/chaser on polygenetic behavior indicators is Shalizi's "g" writing, which is mostly about the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory data analysis, which seems pertinent.

mjburgess 3y ago

Unfortunately the field of observational statistics called "psychometrics" which has "proved" this using "twin studies" is largely bunk. The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor, which is almost certainly false; and in general, there is no way of establishing causation without interventional experiments. If the effects were plausibly non-linear, we would need 1 trillion+ data points even to establish statistically significant differences. These fields are all cargo-cult stats, putting data into GUIs and printing pro-forma reports. The people involved are in way over their heads, to the degree that there isnt anything to "reproduce" let alone try to reproduce the experiments: they dont have any. The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data. When and where we are born definitely has an effect on personality, irrespective of family, in most cases. Astrological star data is a proxy for the when and where, and while thus would not be causative, would often be correlative. So it makes sense to do PCA on it as you'll identify a lot of good correlations.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  You are correct that star positions are proxies. The problem in the case of psychometrics is that the claim is that the stars (here: genes) arent proxies, but bonafide causes. So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes). In the vast vast majority of observational genetic studies genes are just proxies, in the the same way the star signs are. In other cases, they're mere correlations. In the case of IQ (and basically all social genetic studies) it is highly likely that any correlated genes are merely proxies for geographic-historical distributions of peoples over time and it was the long-time-scale geographic and historical effects (culture, education, wealth, famine, poverty, war...) that we see in attainment. (Setting aside that IQ tests aren't valid above average IQ and have extremely bad properties both at the individual and population level for most of the measured range. )

concordDance 3y ago

> Most of an individual's intelligence is inherited from their parents Note that heritability numbers are specific to a particular environment. E.g. if you have a more random environment with some kids exposed to lead poisoning, some to malnourishment and some to parasites you will get lower heritability figures. Most studies on this are conducted in countries like Sweden and the USA on middle class populations.