4 ms·

I read a large part of this article. While it appears to be really serious notably by the vocabulary used, like other articles trying to "debunk" genetic intell

by gwervc 2y ago

I read a large part of this article. While it appears to be really serious notably by the vocabulary used, like other articles trying to "debunk" genetic intelligence it pushes too hard its narrative. In particular, two semantic tricks are used. First, the fact that current genetic markers aren't a good prediction for IQ heritability is used as an argument against it. The other likely explanation that our understanding of those markers is widely incomplete is not explored. Second, is the more common "IQ isn't intelligence" trick. Sure, the measure doesn't encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
bokoharambe 2y ago
It just seems strange to me that, like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything. At a certain point, you have to wonder if something other than genetics accounts for the observed heritability.
- sillysaurusx 2y ago
  Environmental factors are certainly a part of those. I heard a story of someone being stranded at a lighthouse alone for many months, and he had a break from reality which affected him the rest of his life. It's always seemed interesting that the brain can be damaged by stress rather than physical injury – or that perhaps stress causes physical injury.
- practicemaths 2y ago
  Maybe it isn't entirely a hardware issue. Maybe it is a software issue. Where do persons get their software from? The environment. Observing how their parents/family/etc interact. I think it's fair to say that communication matters and that communication & experiences will have an affect on peoples perceptions.
  - passion__desire 2y ago
    Depression is clearly a hardware issue. So also ADHD.
    - practicemaths 2y ago
      So riddle me this. Hypothetical situation. Take two dogs from the same litter. Raise one with love and kindness. Play with it. Socialize with it. Then take the other one and neglect and abuse the hell out of it. Which dog do you think will show signs of depression? Still think it's clearly just a hardware issue?
      - passion__desire 2y ago
        If you give all the love in the world to a schizophrenic, will he stop hallucinating?
        randomdata 2y ago
        If you put an LLM on better hardware, will it stop hallucinating?
        itishappy 2y ago
        Anthropomorphization of LLMs is bad, but the reverse is worse. This is not psychology. Although... has anyone tried quantizing schizophrenia?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        roywiggins 2y ago
        https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude
        2y ago
- gruez 2y ago
  >like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything Source? Wikipedia says: >A central point of debate on GWA studies has been that most of the SNP variations found by GWA studies are associated with only a small increased risk of the disease, and have only a small predictive value. The median odds ratio is 1.33 per risk-SNP, with only a few showing odds ratios above 3.0.[1][46] These magnitudes are considered small because they do not explain much of the heritable variation. This heritable variation is estimated from heritability studies based on monozygotic twins.[47] For example, it is known that 40% of variance in depression can be explained by hereditary differences, but GWA studies only account for a minority of this variance.[47] which admittedly isn't airtight proof for "depression is 100% genetic!!1", but isn't exactly "just aren't finding anything" either.
  - pfisherman 2y ago
    It is a bit more nuanced than that. An incorrect unstated assumption here is that schizophrenia or depression is a singular disease rather than a group of observable symptoms where any two cases may or may not have the same underlying cause. There are certain types of schizophrenia that are highly heritable and others that are more sporadic. Highly pathogenic variants tend to be very rare because those regions of the genome are under evolutionary constraint. GWAS are used is to figure out which genes may be involved in the pathology. So we are essentially looking at rare cases of inherited disease to figure out which genes might play a role in more common non inherited versions.
Blot2882 2y ago
> but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ. How does one find a definition of intelligence that allows us to correlate it to anything? My understanding is an IQ is defined and intelligence is not.
- AlanYx 2y ago
  Psychometric intelligence ("g") is defined correlationally viz. cognitive tasks; that is, the definition is itself a correlation. But it's robust in the sense that it correlates beyond the correlations used in its definition, e.g.: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatt...
  - Blot2882 2y ago
    "g" is a measure of narrow set of skills and job performance outcomes that favor western developed society. It's not an observable, it's an inferred value. It makes sense that people good at math and reading are going to perform well in jobs that involve math and reading. And people without access to good schooling or even textbooks are going to have worse performance. I don't think it's appropriate to measure intelligence as a correlation between the few things a statistician cares about, personally. It would be a naively meritocratic view to think performing well at the highest paying jobs is a decent measure for intelligence.
    - hirvi74 2y ago
      http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html I am not sure if my 'g' is high enough that psychologist will allow me to express my opinions on the topic, but I have found the argument in the blog I linked to be quite interesting.
Xen9 2y ago
One must add that IQ & height distributions ALSO look the same despite the latter and artificial one being a good proxy for intelligence.
karol 2y ago
Agreed. It's a classic post-modern 'we cannot define intelligence even when we see it'. IQ is such a bad proxy for intelligence! There's no gene for IQ! Regardless, let's keep digging in genes because that's the established science and grants are coming our way. This is the best available study to date! If that's not a great example of looking in a wrong place, I am not sure what is.
- hirvi74 2y ago
  I've often wondered if IQ is in protected state in the field of psychology. What I mean: Psychology cannot afford for IQ to be disproven or invalidated. Doing so would completely undermine a significant portion of field. It would be like if evolution was disproven in biology -- absolutely gutting. (Just an analogy, don't kill me). I see this when people bring up Lewis Terman's studies on giftedness or Richard Feynman's IQ score of ~124 -- especially the latter. People come rushing out of the woodworks with statements like, "Well, Feynman was probably goofing off," "Feynman's result cannot be accurate -- he was a Putnam Award winner in high school," "Test were different back then," etc.. Sure, all of those could be right, but we only can operate off of what we know. The actual cold truth? We will never know. However, like a knife through the heart, people refuse to even accept Feynman's score as a possibility. Feynman was an exceptional person. Exceptional people are outliers -- perhaps in more than one way. Personally, I think it crushes people's souls to know that a famous theoretical physicist scored lower on an IQ score than expected, but still accomplished more in life than they did. That is why I personally believe life is the one true IQ test. You get one shot. One's true intelligence is what you do with it. But hey, maybe my IQ is too low?
cool_dude85 2y ago
Lol, who ran a correlation analysis between intelligence and IQ to convince you that the "correlation" between the two is high?
- aithrowaway1987 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Mensa is mostly just a club for people who are disproportionately cultural outsiders. A lot of them have the same interests that are harder to come across in regular day to day life. It's not so much a circle jerk of "we are so smart" as it is a circle jerk of "no one else wants to play SET! with me".
    - wenc 2y ago
      I was a gifted child and in the 1980s before the internet it gave me a community of adults who had a life of the mind and were for the most part professionals, whose experiences I really benefited from a lot from as a 12 year old. I don’t know if the IQ test (Advanced Raven Matrices) was a useful bar — there were lots of smart people who weren’t in Mensa — but there were enough smart people in it that I found a community of like minded folks. It’s not easy for kid to find a community like that but I did. Most people think Mensa is full of self aggrandizing nerds but that wasn’t my experience (it varies by chapter). Mensa probably doesn’t have a purpose today but pre Internet it did, even if by accident. I don’t think IQ is a useful membership criterion due to sheer arbitrariness but sometimes arbitrary groupings of people can work. I would also say that people who have a knee jerk negative reaction against Mensa are no more likeable than the socially inept segment of the Mensa membership they disparage. They have the same kind of puffed up pride that they dislike.
  - wenc 2y ago
    Why do you feel so strongly justified in holding this opinion? Is it just vibes? Do you have data?
blackbrokkoli 2y ago
Who ever measured the "correlation" between intelligence and IQ and how? ...given that intelligence is not only abstract, but also not defined consistently?

by gwervc 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

bokoharambe 2y ago

It just seems strange to me that, like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything. At a certain point, you have to wonder if something other than genetics accounts for the observed heritability.

sillysaurusx 2y ago
Environmental factors are certainly a part of those. I heard a story of someone being stranded at a lighthouse alone for many months, and he had a break from reality which affected him the rest of his life. It's always seemed interesting that the brain can be damaged by stress rather than physical injury – or that perhaps stress causes physical injury.
practicemaths 2y ago
Maybe it isn't entirely a hardware issue. Maybe it is a software issue. Where do persons get their software from? The environment. Observing how their parents/family/etc interact. I think it's fair to say that communication matters and that communication & experiences will have an affect on peoples perceptions.
- passion__desire 2y ago
  Depression is clearly a hardware issue. So also ADHD.
  - practicemaths 2y ago
    So riddle me this. Hypothetical situation. Take two dogs from the same litter. Raise one with love and kindness. Play with it. Socialize with it. Then take the other one and neglect and abuse the hell out of it. Which dog do you think will show signs of depression? Still think it's clearly just a hardware issue?
    - passion__desire 2y ago
      If you give all the love in the world to a schizophrenic, will he stop hallucinating?
      - randomdata 2y ago
        If you put an LLM on better hardware, will it stop hallucinating?
        itishappy 2y ago
        Anthropomorphization of LLMs is bad, but the reverse is worse. This is not psychology. Although... has anyone tried quantizing schizophrenia?
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        roywiggins 2y ago
        https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude https://www.anthropic.com/news/golden-gate-claude
        2y ago
gruez 2y ago
>like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything Source? Wikipedia says: >A central point of debate on GWA studies has been that most of the SNP variations found by GWA studies are associated with only a small increased risk of the disease, and have only a small predictive value. The median odds ratio is 1.33 per risk-SNP, with only a few showing odds ratios above 3.0.[1][46] These magnitudes are considered small because they do not explain much of the heritable variation. This heritable variation is estimated from heritability studies based on monozygotic twins.[47] For example, it is known that 40% of variance in depression can be explained by hereditary differences, but GWA studies only account for a minority of this variance.[47] which admittedly isn't airtight proof for "depression is 100% genetic!!1", but isn't exactly "just aren't finding anything" either.
- pfisherman 2y ago
  It is a bit more nuanced than that. An incorrect unstated assumption here is that schizophrenia or depression is a singular disease rather than a group of observable symptoms where any two cases may or may not have the same underlying cause. There are certain types of schizophrenia that are highly heritable and others that are more sporadic. Highly pathogenic variants tend to be very rare because those regions of the genome are under evolutionary constraint. GWAS are used is to figure out which genes may be involved in the pathology. So we are essentially looking at rare cases of inherited disease to figure out which genes might play a role in more common non inherited versions.

Blot2882 2y ago

> but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ. How does one find a definition of intelligence that allows us to correlate it to anything? My understanding is an IQ is defined and intelligence is not.

AlanYx 2y ago
Psychometric intelligence ("g") is defined correlationally viz. cognitive tasks; that is, the definition is itself a correlation. But it's robust in the sense that it correlates beyond the correlations used in its definition, e.g.: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatters.pdf https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatt...
- Blot2882 2y ago
  "g" is a measure of narrow set of skills and job performance outcomes that favor western developed society. It's not an observable, it's an inferred value. It makes sense that people good at math and reading are going to perform well in jobs that involve math and reading. And people without access to good schooling or even textbooks are going to have worse performance. I don't think it's appropriate to measure intelligence as a correlation between the few things a statistician cares about, personally. It would be a naively meritocratic view to think performing well at the highest paying jobs is a decent measure for intelligence.
  - hirvi74 2y ago
    http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html http://bactra.org/weblog/523.html I am not sure if my 'g' is high enough that psychologist will allow me to express my opinions on the topic, but I have found the argument in the blog I linked to be quite interesting.

Xen9 2y ago

One must add that IQ & height distributions ALSO look the same despite the latter and artificial one being a good proxy for intelligence.

karol 2y ago

Agreed. It's a classic post-modern 'we cannot define intelligence even when we see it'. IQ is such a bad proxy for intelligence! There's no gene for IQ! Regardless, let's keep digging in genes because that's the established science and grants are coming our way. This is the best available study to date! If that's not a great example of looking in a wrong place, I am not sure what is.

hirvi74 2y ago
I've often wondered if IQ is in protected state in the field of psychology. What I mean: Psychology cannot afford for IQ to be disproven or invalidated. Doing so would completely undermine a significant portion of field. It would be like if evolution was disproven in biology -- absolutely gutting. (Just an analogy, don't kill me). I see this when people bring up Lewis Terman's studies on giftedness or Richard Feynman's IQ score of ~124 -- especially the latter. People come rushing out of the woodworks with statements like, "Well, Feynman was probably goofing off," "Feynman's result cannot be accurate -- he was a Putnam Award winner in high school," "Test were different back then," etc.. Sure, all of those could be right, but we only can operate off of what we know. The actual cold truth? We will never know. However, like a knife through the heart, people refuse to even accept Feynman's score as a possibility. Feynman was an exceptional person. Exceptional people are outliers -- perhaps in more than one way. Personally, I think it crushes people's souls to know that a famous theoretical physicist scored lower on an IQ score than expected, but still accomplished more in life than they did. That is why I personally believe life is the one true IQ test. You get one shot. One's true intelligence is what you do with it. But hey, maybe my IQ is too low?

cool_dude85 2y ago

Lol, who ran a correlation analysis between intelligence and IQ to convince you that the "correlation" between the two is high?

aithrowaway1987 2y ago
[flagged]
- Workaccount2 2y ago
  Mensa is mostly just a club for people who are disproportionately cultural outsiders. A lot of them have the same interests that are harder to come across in regular day to day life. It's not so much a circle jerk of "we are so smart" as it is a circle jerk of "no one else wants to play SET! with me".
  - wenc 2y ago
    I was a gifted child and in the 1980s before the internet it gave me a community of adults who had a life of the mind and were for the most part professionals, whose experiences I really benefited from a lot from as a 12 year old. I don’t know if the IQ test (Advanced Raven Matrices) was a useful bar — there were lots of smart people who weren’t in Mensa — but there were enough smart people in it that I found a community of like minded folks. It’s not easy for kid to find a community like that but I did. Most people think Mensa is full of self aggrandizing nerds but that wasn’t my experience (it varies by chapter). Mensa probably doesn’t have a purpose today but pre Internet it did, even if by accident. I don’t think IQ is a useful membership criterion due to sheer arbitrariness but sometimes arbitrary groupings of people can work. I would also say that people who have a knee jerk negative reaction against Mensa are no more likeable than the socially inept segment of the Mensa membership they disparage. They have the same kind of puffed up pride that they dislike.
- wenc 2y ago
  Why do you feel so strongly justified in holding this opinion? Is it just vibes? Do you have data?

blackbrokkoli 2y ago

Who ever measured the "correlation" between intelligence and IQ and how? ...given that intelligence is not only abstract, but also not defined consistently?