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Comment by username90 | Hacker News Reader

No, intelligence is mostly inherited. If your biological parents were smart then you will almost surely be smart and vice versa. And smart people end to earn more money, so intelligence is indirectly correlated with parental wealth. But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly. They do a bit better, but their biological parents still matters more.

If it was easy to produce smart kids then we would already do it, since smart people are so much more valuable to society the small amounts it requires to add that extra value would be nothing. But no country has managed to do this so far, its just a slow climb that follows the same trend in every western society no matter what policies they implemented.

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It's not uncommon for smart people to be poor. You can be intelligent and have intelligent parents that came from poor countries, maybe parents that experienced a debilitating traumatic experience keeping them from working, or mental illnesses that don't inhibit intelligence, but do inhibit basic survival.

> But when you put kids from poor parents into rich households they will continue to do poorly.

Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?

> Have you considered it’s because being a poor child is itself a traumatic experience that isn’t magically cured by being ripped away from family and put into an environment of material abundance?

What you've said is unfalsifiable voodoo mumbo-jumbo. Even if someone proved you wrong here and started the experiment with the poor child at newborn level, which is what people do when these bad faith criticisms are lobbed, you'd just claim that the DNA of the baby inherited generational trauma, which is what people with your bad faith criticism resort to once the criticism is inevitably proven wrong.

> inherited generational trauma

https://www.cdc.gov/genomics/disease/epigenetics.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

I don't see how this points at evidence of inter-generational trauma which to my knowledge is recognized as bullshit voodoo. Can you explain where it does so?

No I literally mean food and housing insecurity are traumatic for children, both of which are common in poverty. This is well studied.

This doesn't hold up to the smallest amount of rational thought. Is everyone from a poor country less intelligent? How about a poorer city, they are stupider? This sounds like an argument made by a lucky person who wants to attribute that luck to some personal superiority.

> If your biological parents were smart then you will almost surely be smart and vice versa.

Doesn’t really work like that. IQ is heavily influenced by environmental factors.

The best way to produce smart kids is for smart parents to produce offspring.

Unfortunately, most smart and educated people are actually doing the opposite. That is, not having kids.

Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions. Read “guns germs and steel” for why human development through the ages has a lot do with just being at the right place at the right time.

> Intelligence is not completely due to genetics as you are suggesting and has to do more with socio-economic conditions

This goes against all of the scientific literature we have. Intelligence is determined by genetics. It can be artificially lowered via poor socio-economic conditions, but it mostly cannot be lifted by higher socio economic conditions. In laymans terms, a traumatic life can make a child who was otherwise going to be smart not so smart, but a good life cannot make a child who was going to be dumb intelligent. Socioeconomic conditions can lower the intelligence determined by genetics, they cannot improve intelligence determined by genetics.

If everyone could reach their genetic limits we'd run into a lot less problems.

I think this is a bit of a mischaracterization of both the science and what I was saying. Genetic intelligence is not a min/maxed limit that we all have to work hard to reach. It is something that is fairly static and innate. It can be disrupted by trauma/nutrition but obviously for the vast majority of people that is absolutely not the case. We are born with, and live up to, our genetic intelligence. Very few of us in the first world were undernourished or subjected to extreme trauma at childhood.

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