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Comment by thras | Hacker News Reader

Biological explanations, while non-PC, do a rather good job of explaining the available evidence.

I've seen precious little research on biological explanations. I'm betting all my money on culture. I'm in eastern Europe, and I feel parts of black culture familiar. And to be honest, I don't like it. We have here too a subculture in which people display gold chains and like songs about money and enemies, and pretty much to everybody's surprise it's socially determined, not ethnically.

You've seen precious little research? I assume you've actually looked? Read things like The Bell Curve, etc.?

I'm not saying there is _no_ genetic component - I would be surprised if it wasn't. Just that compared to culture it's not important. I didn't read The Bell Curve, but as far as I know (and refreshed with a bit of googling) it states that IQ is partly hereditary - I don't think anybody doubts this - and makes it easy to go further and say some groups of people are smarter. This is most likely true, but still not so important.

I just finished reading What Intelligence Tests Miss, by Keith Stanovich. Summary: critical reasoning skills are much much better predictor of academic and social success then IQ, and (that's the shocker) largely _not_ correlated with IQ. And this is just one of the factors which influence success. Even if a group is a few IQ points above or below average, the final effect is very unlikely to affect anything.

edit: Oh, and yes, critical reasoning skills, even if they're not as well studied as IQ is (which is a shame, but it's being corrected) have a much much smaller genetic component and are easier to change during lifetime.

These books come out every so often. 5 years ago "emotional intelligence" sold copy.

IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8. The rest seems to be non-shared environment. IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation). There's a hell of a lot of research out there that has shown this again and again.

I'd like to see Stanovich's definition of "critical reasoning" and the studies that show it to be both uncorrelated with IQ and a good predictor of academic success and future income. There just isn't that much left to predict -- two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.

I'm going to bet that whatever he has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.

This is where I originally found him (from HN actually): http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1

But you won't find much more in this, unfortunately. For the link (or lack thereof) between IQ and critical reasoning search for Stanovich, it's mostly his own research. For link between (parts of) critical reasoning and academic success look up Mischel's marshmallow experiment. Personally I never saw 0.8 correlations with IQ mentioned anywhere, so I'd be grateful for a pointer.

Impulse control is strongly linked with IQ.

Also, which 0.8 correlation were you asking about?

Can you point me in a direction for source?

Academic success and income, sorry.

Here's .8 for academic success: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi...

I'm sorry about the number for income -- everyone has it at a correlation of .3 to .6. I believe that I was thinking of Lynn's numbers for national incomes, which is correlated at .7 or so to average IQ.

IQ is a very good predictor of academic success and future income (.7 to .8 correlation).

I'm joining the call of another participant here for references to back up that statement.

There just isn't that much left to predict

This seems to be mistaking a statement about what is currently observed with a statement about what might be possible under experimental interventions. No one has shown what the maximum possible influence of other independent variables might be.

I'm going to bet that whatever he [Keith Stanovich] has defined as "critical reasoning" actually has a high correlation with IQ when measured.

You will lose the bet. He and other authors on cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have already repeatedly replicated the result that many forms of rationality have meager or no correlation with IQ. He cites the references in his book.

> two uncorrelated variables can't both have a correlation coefficient of .8.

Can you prove this? I think that the greatest possible correlation is sqrt(1/2) (around .7), but I have no idea how to prove it.

(Formally, the conjecture is as follows: if X,Y, and Z are random variables, and k is a real constant, with:

  corr(X,Y) = 0
  corr(X,Z) > k
  corr(Y,Z) > k

then k < sqrt(1/2).

It is indeed possible for corr(X,Z)=corr(Y,Z)=sqrt(1/2), here's an example. With sample space {a,b,c,d}, let X,Y, and Z be:

     a   b   c   d
  X: 1,  0,  0, -1
  Y: 0,  1, -1,  0
  Z: 1,  1, -1, -1

But I ran a program looking for cases with k > .7 and couldn't find anything.)

Thanks for doing the math. I appreciate the pursuit of curiosity here on HN. There is a different issue here to be curious about, and that is exactly what a calculation of broad heritability definitely predicts. It predicts a lot less than what many readers unfamiliar with genetics might guess. It happens that some of the leading authors on human behavioral genetics just wrote an article about what heritability does and does not mean

Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220.

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/cdir/2009/00000018...

(one online abstract)

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/122587149/abstrac...

(the main link to the article)

Alas, a peek behind the pay wall that was available the other day when I posted this article here on HN

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838534

is now dead. But I have the full text of the article at hand, as I am currently attending a weekly journal club with some of the authors, and one key paragraph from the article must be read by anyone who draws conclusions from heritablity figures:

"Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)."

This simply reemphasizes a point that is familiar to anyone who has studied genetics carefully, namely that the pre-Mendelian concept of heritability says nothing about malleability, the degree to which a trait can be influenced by environmental variables.

Angoff, W. H. (1988). The nature-nurture debate, aptitudes, and group differences. American Psychologist, 43, 713-720.

Mange, A. & Mange, E. J. (1990). Genetics: Human Aspects.

Kaufman, Alan S. (1990). Assessing Adolescent and Adult Intelligence.

So the statement above that heritability somehow constrains the expression of IQ or of consequences of IQ such as occupational success is actually conceptually incorrect. But I appreciate you going to the effort of doing the math.

Another thought is that relating one correlation coefficient to another with linear algebra probably depends too heavily on applying linear tools to a not fully linear model. Increases of income are plainly linear and are on a ratio scale. (There is a zero point for income, and each dollar increase in income has the same magnitude anywhere along the scale.) But IQ test standard scores are at best ordinal scales, so it is already an abuse of mathematics to treat them as a linear variable, or to treat a figure derived from them as a linear variable.

IQ has a heritability coefficient of between .5 and .8.

Kindly explain why that is at all relevant to the issue at hand. (Since you have been carrying on a conversation with another participant here as the thread has deepened, it might be a good idea to make clear just what point of his you were responding to with that point.)

I can't say with certainty now, but when I was a genetics student in a fairly decent University, I remember we laughed at "The Bell Curve". It wasn't considered classic scientific reading.

There are a million places to start if you want to find a critique, but you can start with Gould's "The Mismeasure of Man".

"Mismeasure of Man" was propaganda written by a Communist paleontologist who knew next to nothing of psychometrics.

EDIT: Yes I'm a bit bitter about it, I read it and believed it for years, before learning better. I don't like wasting my time and I HATE being lied to (and even more being taken in).

There are a million critiques, many of which I've read. Some are better than others. By far the most ill-informed is The Mismeasure of Man. It's the worst of the bunch, written by an idiot. If you want a intelligent critique, I can point you to some.

Now, Murray had problems in The Bell Curve -- he didn't properly understand regression to the mean, for example. But did you students actually read it before laughing? He was pretty solid on most of the genetic topics he covered (a small part of the book).

Here's a good start to correcting your opinion about Gould: http://www.2blowhards.com/archives/2009/01/a_week_with_gre.h...

You're whole scientific reasoning is based on....The Bell Curve?!

I'd have a laugh too. And some of whatever you're drinking.

Earl Grey.

Not really - blacks from Africa and the Carribean do very well academically. It is only the American blacks that do poorly. They have the same biology and often a better starting line than the immigrants. Why is that?

I believe social factors play the biggest role and not biology. An example would be me. I am the last person in my family from the Caribbean islands. Academically, I am successful, my brother and sister (both US citizens) are wandering in and out of college. Because I was always treated different from them, socially and academically, I grew up with a different mindset.

It was drilled into my head that I should feel lucky to be in the US. My siblings don't have that problem, they are part of the US. I notice that these social changes can happen to any group and is not specific to black/asian/hispanic. One of my high school friends, 2nd-generation India-American, is going to be in jail for a long time. He has fully absorbed the gangster culture even though according to most race-based sociological studies he shouldn't be in jail.

IQ is roughly 50% genetic; school success is probably roughly 50% IQ (personal guesstimate). So my rough guess is about ONE-QUARTER of the DIFFERENCE in school success BETWEEN INDIVIDUALS is genetic. Hard work, and consistent work even more, make a big difference in practical success - in school or business. EDIT: I meant the differences between fairly normal levels of school success above - the difference between low achievers and the very best is probably more than 50% influenced by IQ

It's a selection effect. Only a select population comes to America for college. Tellingly, the average population there doesn't do very well at all at home. And over here, they only do well comparatively. Compare them to say, Eastern Europeans, and it's a different story. Not many Nobel prizes per capita, I'm afraid.

That you are looking at people who "emigrated" to Shaker Heights also suggests a selection effect. There's really no easy answer in this case.

The problem isn't "why are blacks and whites different" but "why do blacks and whites who have similar outcomes still produce children who have different outcomes?" Three possibilities:

1. The premise is flawed; just being in Shaker Heights doesn't suggest significant uniformity.

2. Regression to the mean.

3. Culture, etc. But that begs the question of difference once again, but re: culture rather than achievements. Unless it's all hollywood's fault.

Please, by all means, elucidate your "non-PC" ideas, with relevant, broad-based (not cherry-picked) evidence.

Human beings are still evolving. Much or most of what's been changing in recent evolutionary history have to do with brain development. When you examine things like the HapMap, you find that the gene distribution of these changes is different in different places. Yes, I mean different in that non-PC way.

Are a couple of recent papers from Science good enough?

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5741/1717

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5741/1720

Stupid and illogical ideas usually do a great job of explaining complex and subtle phenomena - its too bad that they're stupid and illogical.

At least have the courage of your convictions and be brave enough in the truth of your pronouncements to say what you really mean: "White people are smarter than Black people on average, by their very nature".

Perhaps you don't say it because, as is often the case, utterance of foolishness is its own reminder.

Please do us the favor of explaining why you believe his idea is stupid and illogical. If you have just taken that on faith, that's not very helpful.

Simply - race is a bastardization of many historic cultural sentiments; it has almost no use in relation to human-being;

http://www.aaanet.org/stmts/racepp.htm

http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/v36/n11s/full/ng1455.html

In hindsight, your question is far more stupid than his "idea". It's called the principle of insufficient reason; we aren't to suppose an a priori difference amongst type without proof - so the burden of proof is on the supposer. That you would ask me to explain why his idea is illogical, without first establishing that his claim is based in logic is justification enough for labeling your question stupid.

Haven't you simply assumed uniformity? By the way, you called it an "idea" first, not me. And it's a little disappointing for someone who's new here to be resorting to the use of insulting labels so quickly.

Yes, uniformity is assumed. Difference must be proven. Think for a moment - how could logic work the other way? Given a categorical set of entities, if we could assume prima facie that there were differences in an arbitrary subset of said set, our categorical heading would be meaningless! For you have derived a contradiction before you even started; Set of A properties, subset of set have not A property, wtf... This is basic. I would hope that if someone offers up an explanation for some event, that they would have taken the time to be sure that their explanation is rational. If they haven't, I am well within my bounds to call that explanation what it is - stupid and illogical - regardless of how long I have had an account on this forum. And in that regard, how can you be sure I haven't been an avid reader of this forum since its inception? And what does it matter...? As to the "" around idea; that was meant to convey the notion that this isn't HIS idea, nor is it a new one. You can google eugenics for an eye-opening history lesson on his "idea".

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