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I implied nothing. I said what I said. Your solution, however, leaves much to be desired. Affirmative action for the unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonde

by thras 17y ago

I implied nothing. I said what I said. Your solution, however, leaves much to be desired. Affirmative action for the unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonderful economic success on any scale.

socjus 17y ago
If your original comment really does imply nothing beyond what it literally said, it is superfluous. All it offers is a correlation - which is insufficient to show whether poverty causes stupidity or the opposite - and a qualitative, unsubstantiated 'explanation' for why stupidity causes poverty and not the other way around.
- thras 17y ago
  You're right. I didn't say which caused what. I can if you'd like though: Sibling and SES-normed adoption studies tend to show that intelligence is the cause and not the result.
  - davidmathers 17y ago
    I wasn't going to waste my time responding to this, but wikipedia made it easy: The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns[8] states that IQ scores account for about one-fourth of the social status variance and one-sixth of the income variance. Statistical controls for parental SES eliminate about a quarter of this predictive power. Psychometric intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social outcomes.[8] One reason why some studies claim that IQ only accounts for a sixth of the variation in income is because many studies are based on young adults (many of whom have not yet completed their education). On pg 568 of The g Factor, Arthur Jensen claims that although the correlation between IQ and income averages a moderate 0.4 (one sixth or 16% of the variance), the relationship increases with age, and peaks at middle age when people have reached their maximum career potential. In the book, A Question of Intelligence, Daniel Seligman cites an IQ income correlation of 0.5 (25% of the variance). A 2002 study[75] further examined the impact of non-IQ factors on income and concluded that an offspring's inherited wealth, race, and schooling are more important as factors in determining income than IQ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
    - thras 17y ago
      I hadn't come across the APA link you provided before, but I had read the Bowles study. He's absolutely right if you assume that inherited wealth, race, and schooling are all independent of IQ. But there's plenty of evidence to show they aren't. So he's not right. In fact, his analysis is quite representative of a certain kind of study you see every so often: you can always make the IQ effect disappear by relying on IQ-correlates instead. I can give you a half-dozen papers that use the same trick. Nobody is impressed by them. Now, instead of copying and pasting from Wikipedia, maybe you should actually look into the literature in the future. You'll come up with a much fairer sampling of what's out there.
      - davidmathers 17y ago
        Cosma Shalizi will handle this one for me: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html Let me sum up. 4. Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment, correlations between variance components, etc. 7. Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed, responsive to purely environmental interventions. ... I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to know about differences between people who do not have significant developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the distinction between "human equality" and "genetic identity", and ask why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable.
        thras 17y ago
njharman 17y ago
> Affirmative action for the unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonderful economic success on any scale. Yeah, so? "Affirmative action" (I call it society's obligation to care for the unfortunate) for blind, crippled, veterans, mentally retarded, etc is also unlikely to lead to an economic success. Why don't we just round up all the "burdens" on smart, successful, beautiful people and kill them. They're limiting society's economic success! And as we all know money is the most important consideration in any decision.

by thras 17y ago

I implied nothing. I said what I said. Your solution, however, leaves much to be desired. Affirmative action for the unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonderful economic success on any scale.

socjus 17y ago

If your original comment really does imply nothing beyond what it literally said, it is superfluous. All it offers is a correlation - which is insufficient to show whether poverty causes stupidity or the opposite - and a qualitative, unsubstantiated 'explanation' for why stupidity causes poverty and not the other way around.

thras 17y ago
You're right. I didn't say which caused what. I can if you'd like though: Sibling and SES-normed adoption studies tend to show that intelligence is the cause and not the result.
- davidmathers 17y ago
  I wasn't going to waste my time responding to this, but wikipedia made it easy: The American Psychological Association's report Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns[8] states that IQ scores account for about one-fourth of the social status variance and one-sixth of the income variance. Statistical controls for parental SES eliminate about a quarter of this predictive power. Psychometric intelligence appears as only one of a great many factors that influence social outcomes.[8] One reason why some studies claim that IQ only accounts for a sixth of the variation in income is because many studies are based on young adults (many of whom have not yet completed their education). On pg 568 of The g Factor, Arthur Jensen claims that although the correlation between IQ and income averages a moderate 0.4 (one sixth or 16% of the variance), the relationship increases with age, and peaks at middle age when people have reached their maximum career potential. In the book, A Question of Intelligence, Daniel Seligman cites an IQ income correlation of 0.5 (25% of the variance). A 2002 study[75] further examined the impact of non-IQ factors on income and concluded that an offspring's inherited wealth, race, and schooling are more important as factors in determining income than IQ. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
  - thras 17y ago
    I hadn't come across the APA link you provided before, but I had read the Bowles study. He's absolutely right if you assume that inherited wealth, race, and schooling are all independent of IQ. But there's plenty of evidence to show they aren't. So he's not right. In fact, his analysis is quite representative of a certain kind of study you see every so often: you can always make the IQ effect disappear by relying on IQ-correlates instead. I can give you a half-dozen papers that use the same trick. Nobody is impressed by them. Now, instead of copying and pasting from Wikipedia, maybe you should actually look into the literature in the future. You'll come up with a much fairer sampling of what's out there.
    - davidmathers 17y ago
      Cosma Shalizi will handle this one for me: http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html Let me sum up. 4. Now that people are finally beginning to model gene-environment interactions, even in very crude ways, they find it matters a lot. Recall that Turkheimer et al. found a heritability which rose monotonically with socioeconomic status, starting around zero at low status and going up to around 0.8 at high status. Even this is probably an over-estimate, since it neglected maternal effects and other shared non-familial environment, correlations between variance components, etc. 7. Randomized experiments, natural experiments and the Flynn Effect all show what competent regressions also suggest, namely that IQ is, indeed, responsive to purely environmental interventions. ... I suspect this answer will still not satisfy some people, who really want to know about differences between people who do not have significant developmental disorders. Here, my honest answer would be that I presently have no evidence one way or the other. If you put a gun to my head and asked me to guess, and I couldn't tell what answer you wanted to hear, I'd say that my suspicion is that there are, mostly on the strength of analogy to other areas of biology where we know much more. I would then — cautiously, because you have a gun to my head — suggest that you read, say, Dobzhansky on the distinction between "human equality" and "genetic identity", and ask why it is so important to you that IQ be heritable and unchangeable.
      - thras 17y ago

njharman 17y ago

> Affirmative action for the unintelligent is unlikely to lead to wonderful economic success on any scale. Yeah, so? "Affirmative action" (I call it society's obligation to care for the unfortunate) for blind, crippled, veterans, mentally retarded, etc is also unlikely to lead to an economic success. Why don't we just round up all the "burdens" on smart, successful, beautiful people and kill them. They're limiting society's economic success! And as we all know money is the most important consideration in any decision.