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Smart people tend to have gifted children, this is, unfortunately, factual.

Being smart is a poor proxy for success, you have to have access to the right knowledge and resources at the right time, and often the “smart” move is short term.

It could be argued (and often is), that the reason intelligence is strongly predicted based on heritage (though of course: not guaranteed) is due to your parents interactions with you as a child.

like many things, I’m not qualified to answer.

Sufficed to say that some of the smartest people I personally know are more limited in their success than some of the confident yet much less intelligent people I know: who seem to be, in general, much more successful.

If true, this doesn't say anything about heredity though. It could just as well be all about environment and smart people carrying the same kind of environment on.

Yes, I made that point.

The correlation between success and intelligence is as you say highly circumstantial. There are few areas of endeavor where intellectual prowess is the determining factor—normally persistence, luck, and resources are more determinant.

That said, the experiences of my youth in animal husbandry make me a strong believer in genetic determinism.

It is empirically practical to use breeding alone to predict cognitive abilities, behaviors, tendencies, and elicitable capabilities in animals, given identical rearing environments. Right down to nervous ticks, inherent fears, very specific nuisance behaviors, as well as predictable desirable behaviors, dispositions, and fascinations. Even preference for certain types and even colors (shades?) of toys over others. The fine grained nature of determinism in behavioral tendencies is remarkable.

There is so much overlap of structure and function within mammals that it is extraordinary to claim that apes are somehow exceptional by categorically fundamental properties rather than degree.

Great apes are much more adaptable and capable than most animals, and environment probably plays a much greater role in our development because of the power of our faculty for learning, but that does nothing to negate the underlying heritability of extremely fine grained cognitive traits.

Animals are in no way blank slates when they are born. Genetic or in-utero programming plays a huge role in cognitive processes, and cognitive capacity is a direct dependent of physical structure.

One does not predict the other necessarily, but there is still a difference between a partially full mug and an overflowing shot glass, even if they hold the same volume in practice.

We are born with unequal capacities in both physical and cognitive realms. It is an uncomfortable truth. We do ourselves a disservice when we try to pretend inconvenient things are not so just so we don’t have to face uncomfortable choices.

Why is that unfortunate? That doesn't sound unfortunate to me.

because if your parents are not smart, you're not likely be either.

It also gives some valid argumentation to people who promote race theory... which is, obviously, a racist ideology.

If your parents are smart, you'll have advantages in cognitive and educational development. People without those advantages deserve supports to get similar benefits that don't depend on their parents. Seems easy to square for me.

> It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value.

I agree that that could be a motivation. But I would also say that having a motivation for a given result doesn't preclude that result. That is generally true in science.

I'm not an expert. But there seems to be fairly overwhelming evidence that some significant amount of intelligence is heritable. That IQ is a reasonably good measure (or proxy) for intelligence. And that IQ correlates well with a lot of other things like educational attainment and income.

That doesn't mean that your genes determine your future. But it does suggest that some people are "born" in a better position than others -- aside from their socio-economic status.

This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things.

> This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable.

I don't understand why so many commenters here are arguing against a straw man. The article author does not and never did believe in the "blank slate" theory. The author has a "centrist" view that genes matter but are not the only determining factor.

I'm not reacting against the article, but the people mentioned in the article that the author is critiquing.

I was responding to the previous comment, not so much the article.

> The author has a "centrist" view that genes matter but are not the only determining factor.

Nobody thinks genes are the only determining factor (that's a straw man on the other side :)

Most people agree it is somewhere on a continuum. Some people think it leans more one way; others the other way. Some people want it to lean more one way; others want it to lean more the other.

> I was responding to the previous comment, not so much the article.

How so? You said, "This shouldn't be controversial. Height is well-known to be heritable. Being tall gives you a better shot at making the NBA. The same is true for many other things." But there's no indication that the previous comment was arguing the opposite of that. Rather, the previous comment was arguing against this idea: "Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame."

I said quite a bit more than what you quoted. And I find your interest in my comment and why I made it... odd.

I'm sorry if I didn't get my point across in a way that satisfies you. But I suggest you take a step back and re-read what both of us wrote. Or maybe just move on.

The author questions whether genes are a meaningful factor, in the large, and comes down against it. I don't think that makes them a centrist; I think they're just rejecting a caricature (the "blank slate") laid out by people strongly invested in the idea that intelligence is determined genetically.

> At 30%, one does observe a faint correlation between genetic potential and IQ. The correlation becomes clearer at 50%, while remaining quite noisy. This is an essential aspect to keep in mind: 50% may sound like a solid heritability figure, but the associated correlation is rather modest. It’s only at 80% that the picture starts to “feel like” a line.

My understanding is that the author thinks the heritability of IQ is somewhere between 30% and 50%, but not 80% or 100%, and not 20% or 0%.

There's also the problem that many "IQ" tests are heavily biased toward a Western, Anglophone education.

Being able to correctly say, for instance, which of four options a "façade" is most like has nothing to do with inherent intelligence; it has to do with whether you were taught the meaning of the word "façade", and the four (often somewhat uncommon) words presented as the choices. The same is true for any of the questions that are, even in part, testing your vocabulary.

Presenting such a test to two people, one of whom was educated at a private school in New York City, and came from a family that highly valued reading and education, and the other at a public school in rural upstate NY, and came from a family that thought it was "too woke" for boys to read books, it is painfully obvious which one will do better, regardless of any genetic factors.

> the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value

What’s particularly annoying is that this can so easily be proven false. No amount of heritable IQ points are gonna help if you’re born to a starving family escaping genocide in Sudan.

But also, “IQ” has been a useful characteristic for a few decades to maybe a few centuries at most. For most of human existence, pure physical strength was likely much more useful than the ability to do abstract thinking.

So even if we accept all these easily disproven ideas, it’s still clearly evident that the fact that they’re in a position to benefit from these supposedly heritable traits is only because they happen to be extremely fortunate to be born in a time and place where these traits are actually valuable.

Several 9s of humans that ever existed would have found an Einstein level of genius worthless

> Several 9s of humans that ever existed would have found an Einstein level of genius worthless

Substituting "generations" for "9s", whatever that is...

Citation needed.

How do you know it didn't take Einsteinian-level intelligence to first make the leap that fire can be controlled, or flint knapped, or ochre used to paint images?

> It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value. To do otherwise requires living one’s life in cognitive dissonance; how could they be worthy of such riches while others struggle to just pay the bills? Surely success and intelligence is just an inborn thing, and thus inevitable and unchangeable. There’s nothing they can do, and it was always going to end up that way. Inevitability erases any feelings or guilt or shame.

I've never understood the idea that winning the genetic lottery somehow makes a person more "deserving" or "worthy" than another. To me, the whole idea of "meritocracy" is a moral abomination.

How do you understand meritocracy? It seems natural that those that do valuable things get rewarded a lot.

Ideally everyone would get the same chances to do valuable things but that's not how the world is setup. Unfortunately.

However trying to change that must be done with care as it's easy to increase injustice (looking at most communist systems)

> It seems natural that those that do valuable things get rewarded a lot.

I'm not fond of the term "rewarded." I understand how prices are determined by supply and demand in economics. Obviously in the labor market, some skill that is in high demand and/or short supply will bring a high price. However, economics are largely amoral. The economic system is not an ethical system to reward the worthy and punish the unworthy, just a method of distributing resources.

There's both an uncontroversial and a controversial interpretation of "meritocracy." Uncontroversially, those who are best qualified for a job should do that job, especially for life-and-death jobs like in medicine. This is how the argument usually starts, with the uncontroversial interpretation, but then it slyly shifts to the controverisal interpretation, that certain people "deserve" more money than others, often a lot more money, due to their qualifications. And while we may want economic incentives for the most qualified people to persue certain jobs, overall it doesn't appear to me that the economic incentives align with societal benefit. For example, we massively reward professional athletes and entertainers much more than doctors and nurses.

Ultimately, the controversial notion of meritocracy is used to justify enormous disparities of wealth, where a few people have so much money that they can buy politicians and elections, whereas others are so poor that they have trouble affording the basics like food, shelter, and medical care. And supposedly that's all based on "merit", which I think is crap.

> It’s not that surprising that many successful people seem to be strong fans of heritability, or more broadly, of the idea that metrics like IQ point to some sort of “universal independent” metric of value. To do otherwise requires living one’s life in cognitive dissonance; how could they be worthy of such riches while others struggle to just pay the bills?

It doesn't require any such thing. It doesn't take a super genius to understand the roles of chance and circumstance have on one's lot in life.

I agree it doesn’t take a super genius to understand that, but it does require something like deep emotional intelligence and ethical sense for someone immensely successful to truly accept that chance and circumstance may be largely responsible for their success.

There aren’t a lot of billionaires out there acting in a way that shows this. At best, they give the idea some lip service.

> There aren’t a lot of billionaires out there acting in a way that shows this

What would that be?

Complex question that depends on one’s ethical views, but I’d say not pushing the idea that inequality is good, or retweeting people that are obviously ideological making heritability claims, is a good start.

From there, the sky is the limit. Directly helping underserved communities access the same networks/resources is another. A handful of billionaires have also donated their entire wealth, but the laudability of that depends on your ethical stance of course.

I don't see how lack of either of the suggested options is any kind of indication that the person doesn't accept that success has a factor of chance.

I doubt there's even a claim that this is right ethically or that you are not displaying a hipocrisy here. How far is your own wealth from the worldwide median?

I really don’t understand what point you’re trying to make.

That someone could be a billionaire, spend their time writing essays about how inequality is good, retweet and give attention to people insisting that intelligence and success are mostly inheritable – and yet also deeply understand that their success is largely dependent on chance? Uh, I guess such a person could exist, but it seems like you’re just nitpicking here.

And of course there is an obvious ethical claim here: that people who benefit from a system and become wealthy should feel some sort of ethical obligation to contribute to or improve access to that system. Or at least not actively try to deny that such a system helped them. This is a complicated topic which is why I said “depending on one’s ethical views.”

No idea what my personal situation has to do with this, but I assure you, I’m not a billionaire, nor am I wealthy, unless merely being born in a Western country implies that one is wealthy (a nonsensical claim.)