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Comment by enraged_camel | Hacker News Reader

>>Actually Paris is quite smart, she just plays an idiot for the masses.

People said the same thing about George W. Bush. We have yet to see any evidence for that assertion, both for him and Hilton.

>>There are plenty of dumb rich as even with assortative mating your children will be normally distributed, just from a higher mean.

Quite a bold claim. I'd like to see a citation.

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>People said the same thing about George W. Bush. We have yet to see any evidence for that assertion, both for him and Hilton.

GWB got a SAT mark that implies a IQ over 130. While he certainly liked to play the fool for his audience, I saw no evidence that he was stupid, just totally corrupt.

>Quite a bold claim. I'd like to see a citation.

Any trait that has more than a few hundred genes influencing it will be normally distributed with the mean of the offspring the mean of the parents. The genetic component of intelligence is influenced by a few thousand genes so it is not surprising to find that intelligence is normally distributed with the offspring mean the mean of the parents. This is population genetics 101.

One of the more interesting observations about human intelligence is the variation in high intelligence is almost all genetics while low intelligence has a quite large environmental component [1].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

Per the intro to that article, presumably high intelligence also has a large environmental component, in that you need a good environment not to squash the heritability.

btw, I think you didn't finish editing:

> normally distributed with the mean of the offspring the mean of the parents

> normally distributed with the offspring mean the mean of the parents

Yes even if you have the genetic potential for high intelligence environment can destroy it. What counts as a good environment is pretty basic though - the vast majority of people grow up in an environment which won't kill their genetic potential.

What I wrote about the means is correct. Over the population the mean intelligence of the offspring is equal to the mean intelligence of the parents. Of course with individual parents and offspring you can have sets of children where the means are not the same, but averaged over a large group the means are the same.

Ok re: IQ. Re: means, I still can't parse what you wrote the first time and I'm a native speaker. <noun> will be <verb> with <noun> <noun>?

What I wrote was a bit dense and extracting what I was try to say was not easy (this is bad writing on my part). What I was trying to say is the average intelligence of the children is the same as the average intelligence, but the actual values of the children will be scattered and this scattering will show a normal (bell curve) distribution. Putting this into numbers if the father has an IQ (g these days) of 110 and the mother an IQ of 150 then their children will be expected to have an average IQ of 130, but their actual IQs might be 115, 140, 160, and 100.

Sure, ok, makes sense.

>>GWB got a SAT mark that implies a IQ over 130.

Huh? He scored 566 on verbal and 640 on math for a total of 1206 points -- around 140 points below his Yale classmates. I'm not sure how this implies an IQ of over 130, unless you believe that Yale is attended by pure geniuses (hint: it isn't).

Furthermore, both SAT and IQ scores are highly correlated with the quality of education one receives. They don't measure innate intelligence.

But if we still care about IQ, then a 2006 study of presidential IQs estimated Bush's IQ to be around 125, the lowest in any president over the past 50 years, and higher than only three other presidents (Grant, Monroe and Harding). You can read about it if you want [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Presidential_IQ_hoax

The better the quality of your education, the greater the influence of genetics on your IQ score. At least, that was my understanding of the WP article, which says poor environment means poor heritability.

Yes that is the general consensus, but there is quite a bit of argument about if it is true. The problem as in almost all these studies in the selection of the participants.

We can argue over GWBs's IQ, but nobody with an IQ of 125 is a dummy - half the population have an IQ under 100.

Like another poster said, GWB scored 1206 in his SAT - that is below the 80th percentile. An 80th percentile IQ score is 113 - it will not get you into Yale or Harvard unless you are both a legacy admit as well as a son of a millionaire.

Don’t only the right hand side of the bell curve take the SAT [1]? Also hasn’t there been significant inflation in SAT scores over time [2]?

1. http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_154.asp

2. http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/RR-02-04-Dorans.pdf

Edit. This article is rather interesting [3]. I am not sure how much we can draw from SAT marks from along time ago other than GWB was not an idiot nor the smartest person at Yale. No dumb person is going to graduate from Yale even if they are a legacy student.

3. http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2000/01/bill...

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