It earned its “flagged off HN” badge in under 2 hours
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.
Unlike our understanding of IQ, the game of matching shapes where the loser gets a teen pregnancy. That’s been fully explored.
Science: “our current understanding of genetics leads us to believe IQ is not heritable”.
This fucking guy: “IQ is heritable and you just haven’t proved it yet. Citation: I belong to a race with good genetics, unlike you”
Honestly, I’m really surprised to hear that IQ is not even a little bit heritable, given that IQ test performance correlates with level of education, which correlates with wealth, which is heritable.
True, wealth is not genetic, but heritability has an interesting definition which leads to some unintuitive cases of heritability abd non-heritability. For instance, wearing earrings is heritable while having ears is not.
@bitofhope @swlabr One of those quiet little scientific revolutions; cheap genetic testing let biologists realise that insects they had classified as different species were not, they were different morphs using the same genes. This let in the idea of developmental plasticity and the current consensus is that a whole lot of stuff is developmental, not genetic.
In humans, almost everything brain-based (sexuality, identity, language, symbol manipulation…) is likely significantly developmental.
If you click enough links, you get to this substack article which I think all the discussion is about. https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height
Which indicates that IQ is a little bit heritable, just much less than other traits and with way more confounds.
Which, when you think about the extreme examples, makes sense - if your parents were humans, and mine were golden retrievers, you will be a human and I will be a golden retriever, and you will almost certainly have a higher IQ than me.
That’s because the HN poster I quoted, like many many MANY people, has conflated predicting iq based off of genes with heritabilty. I’d recommend reading the linked substack, the author’s much more succient and knowledgeable than I am, and I wouldn’t want to misrepresent his point
IQ is a little bit heritable. But there are plenty of things which are very heritable and also not genetic to use as comparisons, like accents or posture or little societal rituals of communication, compared to which IQ is barely heritable at all. And that’s without cracking into memes/tropes/narremes, skills, maths, or other more-abstract inheritance.
IQ is heritable and it can’t be fully explained by wealth. Twins raised in different families have a high IQ correlation between them whereas non-twin siblings raised in the same household have far less IQ correlation. This suggests that IQ is likely affected by some combination of genetics and the maternal womb environment much more so than the household environment (where wealth would play a big factor).
Now, the maternal womb environment is not wholly uncorrelated with wealth. Maternal health including lifestyle, activity, and nutrition may play a big role here. Since all of those are positively correlated with wealth, this suggests a potential cause (which still needs to be investigated) of maternal health on fetal brain development and therefore IQ.
IQ test performance correlates with level of education
I read somewhere that this claim owes a little too much to the inclusion of pathological cases at the lower end of the spectrum, meaning that since below a certain score like 85 you are basically intellectually disabled (or even literally brain dead, or just dead) and academic achievement becomes nonexistent, the correlation is far more pronounced than if we were comparing educational attainment at the more functional ranges.
Will post source if I find it.
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.
Any time you see something like this, what it’s really saying is:
IQ is intelligence to me and nothing you say can dissuade me. I just have a high enough IQ to write a disclaimer for plausible deniability.
I want to make a HN account and reply to the ‘depression and schizophrenia is or isn’t a hardware/software issue’ posters and tell them there is actually is a working IQ test, and they all just failed it.
@Soyweiser @sneerclub It is not possible to understand neuroscience using a “hardware/software” paradigm. That is a model created by humans to make building working computers possible. Brains develop without any such abstraction constraining the process.
Or at least what people are thinking of as “software” is wrong; neuroscience is 100% “hardware”. Can’t expect techbros to understand memetics or iatrogenic illnesses, though, not when they’re fixated on the idea that people with depression/schizophrenia/etc. are having “issues” rather than experiencing society.
I knew this was good stuff when the majority of HN commenters where huffily complaining about the tone.
an hackernews:
a high correlation between intelligence and IQ
motherfuckers out here acting like “intelligence” is sufficiently well-defined that a correlation between it and anything else can be computed
intelligence can be reasonably defined as “knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income”
eat a bag of dicks
