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Comment by greatgirl | Hacker News Reader

There is no wikipedia page on heritability of intelligence, only heritability of IQ. It makes me consider whether the rest of what you've said is actually incorrect since you made such a conflation.

Intelligence is a notoriously hard thing to define and measure, and I think it's more easily predicted by environmental factors than genetics. The idea that smart people breed and have smart children and that's why some people are smart and others are dumb, is more of a cop-out, since predictors of success that tests like IQ try to explain are more accurately explained by socio-economic factors.

Basically this has no real world implications. I realise this isn't the argument you were trying to make necessarily, you were just pointing out a perceived 'fact', but it lacks a lot of nuance that could lead to dangerous assumptions about the real world, especially since you related it to sexuality.

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If people demanded as much rigor for other subfields of psychology as they require for psychometrics of intelligence, the whole word would simply get rid of all psychology departments.

People have no clue how much more rigorous these studies than anything else in the field and adjacent fields.

Of course I demand rigor in a subfield that exists almost entirely to inform policies like segregation, eugenics, welfare, education, etc, and I find studies based on IQ tests and the g factor to be very much inadequate at being socially relevant.

> Did you know that there is also a strong correlation of intelligence between parents and adopted children? Kind of puts the OP's claim to bed a bit.

Only in young children. The correlation vanishes as the children age. You were wise to delete this remark from your comment.

> Don't think I'm not aware of the history and research of this area.

Heh.

You replied only to the parts i deleted, unfortunately. Neither of your responses even dispute my points.

> Neither of your responses even dispute my points.

First you try to insinuate that IQ is not related to intelligence and even if it were intelligence has not practical application in the "real world".

Your first point was disputed by the comments related to how rigorously this subject is studied and documented, due to it being a third-rail area of academia.

I am going to dispute your second point myself. That rigorous study and documentation associates IQ with intelligence and intelligence with 'g' which, although not precisely defined, is associated with (at least) higher problem-solving ability.

So now your argument reduces to "higher problem-solving ability has no practical application in the 'real world'".

And so I will just dispute that statement out of hand because problem-solving ability is what has allowed humans to become the dominant animal on Earth.

My point is that you seem to not understand how rigorous is the field compared to academia as a whole and especially those fields that shape policy nowadays. In fact, intelligence research was always on the forefront of using cutting edge methodology and some tools that are used in psychology were invented specifically to research intelligence. Spearman invented factor analysis to measure cognitive performance, to this day this test is still used in behavior research.

If you think that IQ studies are inadequate, don’t even look at other fields that study humans (aside maybe from double blind trials in medicine), you are going to have a heart attack.

By your standards we need to ignore 90% of academia and solely rely on physics research to guide our policy.

Factor analysis has its own set of problems. Watch this at least past 30 or 40 minutes. https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo

I have completed over 30 ECTS credits studying econometrics in graduate school, I think I have enough grasp of statistics and factor analysis to not get schooled by some breadtuber who produces infotainment content for teenagers.

Very rational of you.

That was gratuitously obnoxious.

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