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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, it has been show time and again that most IQ tests are socio-economically biased. And every "proof" in this paper is a correlation that would also hold true is you replaced "high IQ" with "had rich parents".

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That's not true. There are definitely papers that tries to control for socioeconomic factors.

Studies with twins could offer some form of either repudiation or confirmation.

Well, the key word here is "try". There is evidence suggesting that controlling for confounding factors is very difficult and many studies don't succeed. From the outside, I'm not sure how much confidence we can have that they succeeded?

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/24/you-need-more-confound...

Well, yes since IQ is the largest predictor we have for socio-economic achievement, and is highly heritable. Rich parents have rich kids & smart parents have smart kids & more often than not the two happen at the same time, because being smart is the best predictor of financial success.

That’s a circular argument though. If the IQ test is biased towards rich people then of course rich people will score better.

IQ tests are biased for wealth like bathroom scales are biased for height. What you want is an IQ measure normalized for wealth, like BMI is for height, but what would be the point of that measure ?

Have you considered the option of IQ being partially inherited and the parents also being rich because of a high IQ. In that case, IQ would still be the cause of the wealth.

Intelligence has been proven to be partially heritable. I don’t think that’s in question.

But the claim is that IQ measure wealth, not intelligence.

If wealth and intelligence are correlated, then it measures both.

I don't know enough about IQ to refute this, but let's assume it's correct. Taleb would still be wrong about his IQ claims as is the point of this post.

How is Raven's matrices biased?

I think that would be better represented as “has access to quality education and gets trained in areas needed by the economy”.

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