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Comment by badRNG | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre that the second to top comment (on the linked page) immediately turned the conversation into one about the commenter's view on racial/sexual supremacy and goes on to say "correspondingly, there are also ethnicities that are less intelligent" (I'm assuming they are implying supremacy of their own group.) It's quite jarring the frequency one comes across white supremacist/misogynist talking points when one tries to engage with programming/computer science communities online.

It makes me appreciate the largely positive and safe experience HN provides, despite the occasional user that insists the opposite.

Edit: some of the comments appear to have been removed/deleted or otherwise fallen off, though the comment about "ethnicities that are less intelligent" is still up near the top.

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The unfortunate reality is that group level differences in characteristics associated with intelligence are measurable. It is pretty much an open secret in genomics.

Additionally, given how regression to the mean works, a small enough endogamous minority will display larger deviations from the mean (positive or negative) than larger ethnic groups that usually constitute the majority.

I agree that it is a really tricky line to walk. The brazen pursuit of truth or tabooing of prospectively society uprooting revelations. Both are a result of the same observation, just different moral systems.

I'm sure many grapple with this struggle in their own way. However, ostrasizing those who find themselves on the other side of that fence by shouting various 'X-isms', is neither productive nor effective.

Group level differences in IQ and its components are measurable. As someone not remotely progressive and who simply does not care about their values, I don’t believe any of these things actually amount to a workable definition of intelligence. I base this on my experiences with the very well-sifted meritocrats I encounter daily.

Unfortunately again, IQ is highly predictive. It obviously clashes with the massive emphasis on merit, grit & educational attainment placed by western liberal ideology. It fundamentally shakes the very foundation of outcome based evaluation of one's protestant/puritanism, especially in American Academia.

(the deeply rooted nature of protestantism in the pro-science / anti-religion/ Academic community in the US is long discussion I would love to have at some point. I want to be clear that I do not mean it in a derogatory manner. It is an observation. Not a value judgement)

Imagine if grit, intelligence and productivity within a capitalistic system were highly predictable at birth. Then the claim to eliteness that lends these elite institutions power, will suddenly get the appearance of genetic superiority. It quickly starts sounding like old school eugenicists. They/We will become what they claim to hate.

Intelligence is an easier discussion in the east. The floor for the value you bring to society is not based on your intelligence alone. They also don't hide the brutal realities for survival/thriving in a society where you might lack vital skills from birth.

I think everyone on HN would agree that a feudal-class system determined at birth, is not a desirable outcome. As it stands now, ignoring the ground realities has led to us building exactly that. The tabooing of IQ does not serve to stop the creation of this dystopia. It serves to obscure the reality that we might already be living in it.

Razib Khan [1] writes a lot about intelligence from a genetic standpoint (He works in population genomics).

One quote of interest

    General intelligence is one of the most predictive psychological measures in existence. 
    The chestnut of wisdom that ability to test well measures how well you take a test is true but trivial. 
    The implication that test measurement does not correlate with other aspects of performance is manifestly false. 
    Those with higher measured IQs have higher incomes, greater educational attainment, and lower crime rates 
    (this remains true among siblings who differ in IQ). 
    This is well known within psychological science, 
    but for various reasons has been obscured and downplayed by broader American culture.

    As with the athletically gifted, 
    the differences in outcomes is most obvious in those who are intellectually gifted at a young age. 
    The chart below shows the outcomes of 259 children identified as very gifted in their early teens on the SAT:


    One out of thirteen of these extremely bright children became tenured professors. 
    One out of thirty-three wrote a book. Nearly half obtained doctorates. 
    These are not average kids who simply “test well.” 
    There is luck in life, but the die is loaded. 
    Very high intelligence is no guarantee of exceptional achievement, 
    but it clearly changes the probabilities.

[1] https://razib.substack.com/p/applying-iq-to-iq

[2] https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q...

It comes back to the idea that intelligence comes back to performing well in our current narrow paradigm with all its rules and constraints. It could be very differently defined for instance in a world where the fundamental rules are different.

The people I speak of have high incomes, high education levels, don’t break the law, can solve logic puzzles very fast, etc. They are also extremely stupid.

The fact that you personally happen to know some people who are successful despite being "stupid" (whatever that means according to you), is not really any sort of convincing point. And at any rate, the fact that a "stupid" person _can_ be successful certainly says nothing about how likely to be successful any given "stupid" person is.

I invite you to consult your own experience.

High IQ people are often more skilled than others in explaining away gulfs between their understanding and encounters with reality. For IQ believers, such people still get to be called intelligent. For me, it makes them stupid.

The fundamental problem with the “open secret” is a lack of a definition of what intelligence is. Something that works very well in our current paradigm may not do so well in another. If a mental trait is more advantageous in another paradigm, that would be classified as intelligence.

>The unfortunate reality is that group level differences in characteristics associated with intelligence are measurable. It is pretty much an open secret in genomics.

Do you have any evidence to support these assertions?

We don't even have a reliable way to measure intelligence (a concept that is troublesome enough to even define), much less conclude that there are so-called "group level differences."

They were very careful to say characteristics associated with intelligence for exactly this reason, I presume.

Yes.

Afaik, they are looking at measurable traits that we think are associated with intelligence.

Intelligence itself is a much much harder problem to unravel.

I think it is ironically relevant.

People complain about the target selection and first-mover advantage of Von Neumann, in the same thread which seems to be taken over by collateral damage of polarizing identity politics propaganda, set to target social cohesion of American civilians (which leaks into Western culture) done by the very same adversaries targeted decades back by Von Neumann.

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