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Comment by jf- | Hacker News Reader

IQ is one of those topics which is, unfortunately, inescapably political. If important psychometric traits, like intelligence and personality, are highly heritable, then one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning points of view is undermined: that everyone is inherently equal, that anyone can achieve anything given the right education, environment and resources.

Add to this the fact that we know that other heritable traits may be ethnically distributed, and we have a particularly difficult thesis.

The solution to this for some, is that IQ cannot be allowed to be meaningful, as the idea is simply too dangerous. The article above and much of this discussion are the result.

Simply put, this is a battle of ideology masquerading as a debate over a matter of fact. This is not the kind of discourse you would get if people were discussing the precise atomic weight of hydrogen.

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you are being downvoted but what you are describing is unfortunately exactly what is going on.

There is that political push to pretend everyone is exactly equal. Following that doctrine, Every difference would only be to blame on your environment. Over the last couple years, this trend is going over well established scientific proofs. That ideology is getting very dangerous and I think we are getting into a dark age of science for those controversial subjects where political correctness and playing nice will be seen as more important than scientific proofs.

You’re painting a picture that every social justice-aware person is pushing for equality, while ignoring calls for equity and how that’s distinctly different.

Can you share what "equity" means in the context of social justice?

Over the years I have tried to understand what "equity" means. I have been unable to comprehend "equity", despite reading many articles and definitions and listening to many discussions, I do not understand what "equity" is.

The leftist position isn't that everyone is inherently equal but that everyone should be valued equally and afforded equal opportunity regardless of their race/gender/ability. The idea of an "IQ" measure is too close to the idea of measuring inherent value, which shouldn't be contingent on things like how much nutrition you had as a child. Furthermore, the idea of "IQ" could be considered dangerous because it often serves to mask the harmful biases that actually inform our impressions of people.

I think individuals on the left have a variety of beliefs on the subject.

Yes, and almost none of the beliefs on the Left are akin to "everyone is equal in all measurements, therefore IQ is dangerous."

Even Karl Marx acknowledges inherent differences in people when he writes, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

You’re simply wrong. Believing in nurture over nature is a common belief on the left.

The left uses any inequality of outcome, like the unequal representation of minorities and women in the software development industry, as evidence of discrimination without allowing for the possibility these differences are due to different abilities, choices, or desires.

And if anyone challenges the belief that all outcomes should be equal, they retreat behind the very different argument you've just made, which nearly everyone agrees with.

The motte and bailey tactic.

> The left uses any inequality of outcome, like the unequal representation of minorities and women in the software development industry, as evidence of discrimination without allowing for the possibility these differences are due to different abilities, choices, or desires.

No, the left doesn't. On a number of levels; as well as not ruling out the possibility of non-discriminatory causes (while being skeptical of handwaves in that direction), the left broadly recognizes that differences in choices and desires are natural and obvious consequences of visible discrimination in society, and thus even when they are direct factors not inconsistent with discrimination as root cause.

I'm as skeptical as you are of "handwaves", and I'd like to see definitive research into this very important topic. Government intervention should be based on proof, not skepticism or bias.

But the left won't allow research or even discussion of the topic, so we don't know whether IQ, for example, is actually a cause of the unequal outcome in software development.

Merely discussing the greater male variability hypothesis is enough to cause research to be disappeared. [1]

And suggesting that IQ may be unequal between groups is enough to end careers.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17938318

Greater male variability isn't a hypothesis, is it? It's clear in the data from longitudinal IQ studies, or so I thought. It's more a fact than a hypothesis.

Hold on, I'm a lefty - and don't particularly like that brush you're tarring me with. Now before we go on, I do agree with some of your points. The results we observe are driven by many factors and individual choice is one of them. I object to 'positive discrimination' and the like as it's personally unfair. However, I do have that deep troubling feeling that there is bias all over the place. I'll just go with gender, as you mentioned it (and yes, this is all anecdotal). I'm in the UK, working for an Israeli company. The UK office (and US) is a veritable 'sausage-fest' - however Israel and India have a far higher proportion of women doing these technical roles. My point is that these "personal desires" seem to vary by geography, rather than gender. Now, why would this matter, if everybody gets to do what they want? Well, income. Many western industries seem to have massive gender bias within them - and women always seem to end up in the ones that pay less (which for want of a better metric is our best indicator of 'value' we have). Now within a job role, once you balance in hours worked/flexibility/anything-you-care to include the gender pay gap isn't too bad. It's there, but not enough to annoy me. My quibble is that if you/I had two children, one male, one female, equal in every way - the male child is going to earn more.

That's another area that merits research beyond simply assuming that an unequal outcome implies discrimination, and research to-date isn't entirely supportive of that assumption:

> A massive study that looks worldwide at how national wealth and gender equality affect the choices men and women make ... found greater national wealth and gender equality are tied to bigger differences in preferences between men and women.

1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/when-times-are-go...

Lets imagine you do a human study that measure the incentives and disincentives of seeking high income job, based on gender. What would the results be?

How does society treat men who do not prioritize work income in life vs men who prioritize work income over other aspects in life.

How does society treat women who prioritize other aspect of life over work income vs women who prioritize work income?

After measuring that and how high the amplitude is, we can rather easily see the building blocks of the pay gap.

To take a bit of data from Sweden, a man who is in the bottom 50% of the income pool has less than half the probability of having children of his own. Increased income has a very strong correlation with fathering children. For women this is the opposite with fewer children at higher income, but the amplitude is significant smaller than for men. The difference in children between high income and low income women exist but is comparable small.

If we could align those incentives so they point in the same direction and with the same amplitude then those two children, one male, one female, would likely end up with the same income later in life.

Believing that all humans are equal and any differences in outcome is the result of discrimination is a caracature of leftist views akin to labelling conservatives "just people out to screw over the poor".

My observation is that the biggest chasm between left and right is the burden of proof for discrimination. The left believes discrimination is the basic human condition and one must prove that a decision or process is fair, or else it is biased by default. The right believes discrimination is an abberation, much like crime, and guilt must be proven, not presumed.

Interesting view I hadn't heard before.

Notably, under the left's view, believing a system is just would require proving a negative.

Is basically 'guilty until proven innocent'; a recipe for eternal identitarian strife; totally different from how we approach structurally similar questions on other topics.

I'd agree with the OP - I'd never thought about it like that before. My addition to the theory would be that left & right look identify the issue from different perspectives. e.g. You can look at the planet as whole today, and see there are massive disparities - then try to drill down and work out how to fix it holistically. Or, you can look at those immediately around you, sort that out, and hope that all people do this and it will ultimately ripple up.

Well, the leftist position is that everyone is equally capable of producing economic value beneficial to the collective state, and should be given those opportunities to do that.

The left is a spectrum, there are left leaning people, and people who would like to see communism implemented in the United States. For left leaning people, center, and right leaning people equality of opportunity is desirable and will maximize scientific progress, abundance, and quality of life.

What far left people want is equity, which is vastly different and is equality of outcome. They view the world in a very black and white lens in which any endeavor/business/group which doesn't perfectly match population distributions must be inherently racist/sexist/etc because there aren't any differences or preferences between any groups.

I’m not sure what this has to do with leftists, as the idea that Taleb is a leftist is absolutely risible. He’s a reactionary egomaniac who thinks all of his ideas are correct simply because they are HIS ideas, and obviously HE can never be wrong

I never mentioned leftists, I said words to the effect of assuming a blank slate is one of the implicit assumptions of left-leaning world views. Taleb can share such a belief without explicitly being on the left.

This is a straw man, sort of akin to asserting that all right leaning people believe that might makes right.

Very well, maybe not everyone who would describe themselves as on the left would have this belief, but in my experience it is very common.

I think you may be confusing the assumption that people are equal (blank slate) with treating people equally (not misapplying aggregate statistics to individuals and not being an asshole). The latter doesn't require the former. Some leftists might argue for a blank slate but I'm not even sure this is the majority view.

I had a discussion on this topic a while ago, and IMO a reasonable stance to take could be that, yeah, there might be some congenital differences among people in terms of their abilities to perform certain tasks. However, this doesn't mean that people should be treated way too differently just based on that factor.

Isn't the ultimate left-wing dream "everybody doing whatever they enjoy/are good at, but treated absolutely equally"? Obviously we can't really be there yet due to a limitation on the total amount of available resources, and we do have to reward people more who hold important positions and make big impacts. However the point is if somebody is born without that much resources/luck/congenital abilities or whatnot, it's not their fault and they should still be totally respected and well treated. That could be a more sensible way to approach this instead of being absolutist.

Also I still believe that luck and resources far outstrip so-called "raw talent" in the vast majority of cases/jobs, unless you are to be Usain Bolt or something. So the importance of IQ or not doesn't really change their point that much.

You could also say it undermines a major tenant of right wing politics too: that wealth is earned. If your wealth results from a genetic lotto ticket, you didn't earn anything. You just got lucky. This could be an argument for wealth redistribution.

If true, strong heritability of ability could undermine much of present day politics.

Potentially, but you would need to define what is meant by earning. Is earning defined by subjective difficulty? Is ability already part of the concept of earning, such that what we find virtuous about earning is in part the capacity to do a thing?

There is also a more fundamental difference between the two propositions, the first is empirically measurable: people have the same or broadly similar potential, or they do not. The second is a value judgement regarding who deserves what, which is ultimately a moral or aesthetic matter. This seems to me somehow more difficult to decide upon and somewhat weaker in its force.

(I upvoted you by the way because I think that’s an interesting point)

I made that argument largely to show the versatility of sophistry. You can take a proposed fact, like strong heritability of ability, and weave many arguments around it.

I have in fact heard people argue for strong socialism on the basis of heritable inequality. This would assume the definition of "earn" as to acquire through individual goal directed action. If most of the ability behind that action was not itself acquired through anything but luck, then this could undermine the notion of a moral claim to outcome.

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