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Comment by thundergolfer | Hacker News Reader

Treating “intelligence” as a synonym for “training” is a more effective and positive approach than thinking certain people have some from-birth advantage over others. So many people walk around thinking they’re stupid when they’re not. They just were not trained well in things society considers the core competencies of smart people (math, literature, physics, etc) You can read perspectives on intelligence from people who’ve won the Putnam and they convey that they ‘just’ put in a crazy amount of work training in competitive mathematics. And even before they were deliberately training for the Putnam, they were raised in an environment that trained them for mathematical competency.

Of course there is likely a genetic and/or physical component to intelligence, but the major aspect of being smart is about wealth and educational inequality.

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>but the major aspect of being smart is about wealth and educational inequality

No, this is flat out wrong. There has been so much research on this, and intelligence is both highly predictive of life outcomes (controlling for wealth) and extremely heritable. If you take the biological kids of smart people and raise them in poor households, they still turn out very smart, much smarter than the biological kids of dumb people who are raised in rich households.

Could you provide a citation? I am asking because this conflicts (not overstating) with every single study I read on this general topic. To name a few:

* The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106

* There is the decently famous Terman research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman), who was convinced that he could predict future Nobel price winners, executives and wealthy people by IQ-testing them as a child. His approach basically did not work at all - to just name on aspect; he actually excluded two future Nobel-price winners from his group of future winners because their IQ was too low

* Students who are picked to fulfill minority quotas are just as likely to have successful law careers after graduating than their picked-by-intelligence colleagues (https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-4469.2000.tb00967.x)

I could name many more, but it is not my intention to win an argument by wall-of-text here, I am genuinely interested in sources pointing into a different direction. Thank you for your time!

>The only relevant factor for predicting chess skill at any level seems to be hours spent on deliberate practice, see for example: https://doi.org/10.1002/acp.1106

This is wildly implausible, and indeed the paper makes no such claims.

> extremely heritable

But still with regression to the mean, no? The child of two great geniuses is likely to be a somewhat lesser genius. Above average, but below their parents. A few generations of such regression to the mean and there might not be that much extra intelligence in the descendants of great geniuses.

As with any multigenic inheritance with few dominants, this is true. That said, a few point difference is expected to remain in 5 generations, and if the line has more children the higher the chance of a genius line surviving.

Can you provide a link to the claim? Interesting if true.

there is a lot of studies in that topic. Even wikipedia agrees:

>Early twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%,[6] with some recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%.[7] IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with the child's age and reaches a plateau at 18–20 years old, continuing at that level well into adulthood. However, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease are known to have lifelong deleterious effects.[8][9][10]

nah, he is just trying to sell eugenics, a psuedoscientific practice, in disguise

>psuedoscientific

yeah, animal breeding and crop selection work, but it couldn't possibly work on humans

It is about the origin of the term/field.

You are right that the field of genetics is of course applicable to humans, with a lot more muddiness when it comes to the ethics - not the point.

The term "eugenics" describes a certain philosophy/set of ethics which directly grew out of racist narratives at worst and some very loose interpretations of the scientific methods two hundred years ago at best. Furthermore it can argued that the "field" of eugenics never really attempted to shed this, even as of today. Thus, calling eugenics pseudo-scientific is considered fair game. At least that's my understanding.

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