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Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

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That's an interesting take given that the previous sentence specifically lists "these traits" and none of them sounds like "IQ":

> attractive individuals are more socially skilled, have more open social networks

I'd say you need different evidence if you want to grind that axe.

Among the Big 5 personality traits, Openness to Experience is the one most correlated with IQ.

And have you tried to find out why IQ associations are "taboo" in academia?

Yes. Have you tried to find out why making certain pieces of scientific knowledge taboo has had very bad consequences in the past?

Well I happen to have a phd in that broader domain. It's not censorship, as you imply, but IQ is just way fuzzier a concept than people outside of this area of research think. The popular view is IQ is an objective thing, exactly measurable and so on (the metaphor of brains being computers, essentially). In reality you can put a 14 year old from a bad environment into an optimal environment and their IQ increases by up to 20 points over a view years.

IQ is highly heritable, so I don't think there is any environmental factor that has this big an impact, except in extreme cases like severe malnutrition. Also note that IQ increases with age roughly into early adulthood independently of environment, so the IQ of a 14 year old increasing is a perfectly normal part of the heritable parts of development.

What's "highly"? It's likely somewhere between 15%-50% --- weak-to-medium, if you read it as a correlation coefficient.

IQ is about as heritable as body height.

> The results show that the heritability of IQ reaches an asymptote at about 0.80 at 18–20 years of age and continuing at that level well into adulthood.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-hu...

2013 is the phlogiston era of this science. Even the hereditarians hedge on the 0.80 claim now.

Source?

Alex Strudwick Young.

Link?

He's pretty easy to find. I'm not messing with you, he's just the most obvious example that came to my head. For I think kind of obvious reasons?

If you are unable to provide a specific source for your claim, you probably made it up.

If you don't know the people doing work in this field today, and instead are just Googling "heritability of IQ numbers" (which would explain the Wilson Effect paper you kind of inexplicably posted) you can find previous threads that I've discussed this in using the search bar below. Either way, "you probably just made this up" is not OK on HN.

Do you have any argument as to why what a social scientist says today is more valid than what one said 20 years ago?

I'd trust social scientists less today than 20 years ago due to the effect of social media on them. Social media creates much stronger social pressure on people to conform, and that isn't a good thing for science.

Alex Strudwick Young isn't a "social scientist".

Ah ok, yeah genetics science has came a long way 20 years so there it makes more sense to listen to modern stuff, but why the scare quotes? Do you have a problem with social scientists?

Edit: Looked him up and he disagrees with you. "My sense is that heritability of IQ is in the range of 30-70% with very high confidence.", you said "It's likely somewhere between 15%-50%". There is a massive difference between 30-70 and 15-50, 30-70 sounds much more reasonable and matches most studies on the subject I have seen.

https://x.com/AlexTISYoung/status/1889044121433571803

No, I don't. But you've lost track of the thread, because I didn't claim he said 15-50%. There's a reason I cited him where I did: to point out how silly the 0.80 estimate the previous commenter's cite was in current context. His antecedent in this thread is "even hereditarians...".

But now we have an authority figure saying 30-70, so I'll trust that over your 15-50. And yes I know why you didn't cite the 30-70, its because you disagree with it. You shouldn't say others use biased examples and then say you believe it could be as low as 15% without anything to back that up.

He didn't use a "biased example"; he used a prehistoric example based on premodern methology. The only thing we've established here is that he doesn't understand his own cite.

later

In other words, I deliberately cited someone on his side of the debate.

How much do I love that this person got promoted from woke social scientist to "authority figure" in the space of one Google query, though? Amazing.

Obviously scientists have thought about that and therefore administer age-adjusted IQ tests for different cohorts, precisely with the aim of IQ staying constant during aging of an individual. And yet here we are.

You really don't need a censorship conspiracy to explain these things. I'd recommend you try to challenge your assumptions about IQ and heritability by downloading a few textbooks about the topics. Many many papers are freely available, and the textbooks are let's say easy to find. You could try textbooks about a more accessible area like developmental psychology as it is more easily accessible and still covers these topics quite well.

The problem with the "I'm right, you are wrong, educate yourself" reply is that, because of the taboo, different books will say vastly different things about this topic. So you have to decide which books are the "good" ones and which are the "bad" ones.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=IQ

Yes, crickets.

https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/how-to-lose-tenure-with-one...

Brian Pesta was fired for malfeasance. Specifically, he gained access to data sets not authorized for his race/IQ research and not only published bullshit race/IQ stuff off it, but also (as I understand it) circulated that data to a small community of race/IQ weirdos.

That's a grave violation. The data sets in question are extremely valuable for all kinds of science, and the reason they exist is that the people donating their data trust it won't be used for noncompliant reasons. It's not substantially different than a company like 23 Or Me surreptitiously giving your genomic data to their weird Substacker friends.

Plenty of people do legitimate race/IQ work. You managed to find cite the one person who managed to do it tortiously.

"How to lose tenure with one sentence": "Maybe it will be fine to pursue my career in Florida."

Anyway, my point stands - there is plenty of research on IQ. Only if you are specifically interested in correlating IQ with genetics have ethicists at large determined your research may be harmful. We can debate about that, I guess, but the idea that one cannot use IQ in research is a hyperbole.

Actually, I want to add something to this. The general vibe in this research area is NOT that you cannot compare IQ with genes. Indeed, its more or less an accepted fact that some portion of IQ and measures like it are indeed heritable. The specific issue this person faced is in the use of race. I'm not suggesting that we accept all the woke orthodoxy whole cloth, but race really is a socially constructed concept. No person out there in the world is "of a given race" as a scientific fact. People have genes, they don't have races. The scientific community recognizes that genes influence intelligence, but has no interest in promulgating the frankly dumb idea that humans have distinct races, probably because the last time people got really into that idea it lead to concentration camps, apartheid, and the pointless destruction of vast swaths of human potential.

The main issue with the research described is that it uses genes to construct a racial narrative. If that is the world you want to live in, you do you, I guess, but I would prefer that people not be pigeon holed on the basis of (for example) arbitrary qualities like "European Ancestry," which the person explicitly states they constructed a sort of genetic fingerprint for. In a meritocratic society people should be judged on their performance, not some inference people make about what genes they have on the basis of their level of melanin, to refer to the study this guy is talking about.

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