Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Okay it’s fair to question calling ‘effort’ part of intelligence; what I meant is that nurture/environment and experience and motivation are a large part of what gets measured with any and all psychometric tests. And we do know that practicing for IQ tests can raise scores somewhat.

FWIW, I wasn’t arguing against the idea of intelligence being heritable or having a biological component. Intelligence is heritable, but also there are large environmental and nurture components as well. Using the word “highly” might be technically accurate but somewhat misleading, the heritability of IQ for example averages around 50% across many studies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ).

I was just pointing out that the way we measure intelligence does not measure intelligence itself directly, it only ranks people. We don’t know how much smarter someone who’s IQ 150 is than someone who’s IQ 100, we only know how many people are smarter than either score. Calling someone with a high IQ profoundly gifted is not actually supported by the ranking metric we’re using.

High intelligence does exist, I completely agree. What “high” actually means is debatable. But why is being amazing at art or music different from having high intelligence? Not sure I agree, and I think that statement is suspicious and deserves some justification. I think a lot of people would consider Bach and Mozart intelligent.

The actual reference to different brain structures in the Wikipedia article also mentions the positive correlation between socioeconomic status of children and their measured intelligence. That’s enough to question what’s actually being measured, and whether a correlation between cortical thickness and IQ really does represent a correlation between cortical thickness and intelligence, or something else.

I'm not hugely familiar with the topic, but my understanding is that we have various tests for things that we colloquially might call intelligence, and then we run a PCA, and the first principal component is what we call `g`. So like it's very possible that g helps with musical ability and painting ability too. But those things might also have heavy contributions from some other axis (certainly I can't draw for crap). You could call this different kinds of intelligence, or you could just say, whatever they are, it's something different from what we call intelligence.

It makes perfect sense to me that socio-economics would correlate. You might suppose that kids of lower SES could have a ceiling effect from e.g. worse nutrition, more pollution, or lower access to brain enriching activities (the Genie case is an extreme example of how early neglect can be long-term catastrophic). And of course, g correlates with economic success, and is heritable, so you expect that high g kids will correlate with high g parents which correlates with high SES.

> it’s very possible that g helps with musical ability and painting ability too.

The development of g rests on that assumption, but the measured correlations vary, and the correlations are lower for music & painting than between, e.g., STEM subjects.

Also interesting - the cross-subject correlations g measures actually decrease as intelligence increases. The smarter someone is (as measured by psychometric tests), the more likely they are to be “smart” in a single subject and not all subjects. This is an interesting self-contradiction in the whole theory.

> It makes perfect sense to me that socio-economics would correlate.

Yeah, I totally agree. But, it’s very important to know that the people like Spearman and others who developed IQ and g and other concepts of intelligence in the 1920s were specifically looking for the innate biological component of intelligence that explains “gifted” ability in the absence of nurture and environmental factors. That’s where this use of “gifted” came from - it’s pre-supposing that intelligence was not heavily influenced by the wealth of your parents, and they didn’t know how important nutrition and pollution were at the time. This is why I think using “gifted” is problematic. From that paper I linked to: “Reframing ‘gifts’ as ‘talents’ underscores both the domain-specific nature of these abilities and that their extent should be viewed as dynamic rather than static or preordained.”

One question that occurs to me - who are these gifts bestowed by? There are two obvious answers: nature and God. I think nature is historically what is meant by ‘gifted’ in the context of education, but I’ll speculate there’s at least a little bit of historical religious influence on the choice of that word. Given that we know that SES, nutrition, environment, education, parenting and many other factors have real measurable influences on both intelligence and outcomes for people, the nature & God explanations are somewhat lacking, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com