| >Did you do poorly in school? Did you grow up in such a privileged environment that you can't believe that people like me exist? This is not about you. If you really care, I was rasied by a single-mother in relative poverty. But this is not about me, either. This is about scientific methodology, society, and everyone that participates in it. So the answer to this problem is obviously not going to involve your personal life story or your inner experience of your personal intellect. >The reason IQ isn't studied isn't because it's "not useful." It's because people who study it are systematically shunned by academia. Using the absence of evidence as evidence of widespread conspiracy is fallacious. You've been repeating this throughout the entire comment section, but you haven't given any evidence to support the claim that research is suppressed. Searching up "IQ prediction" brings up zillions of hits on Google Scholar. >I specifically remember teachers lauding me in 2nd grade for how hard I worked, when honestly I was and am pretty lazy. I remember very well sitting in class in 7th grade, watching the same presentations by the teacher that all the other kids watched and then with zero studying getting 100% correct on the test while many of them struggled. And I remember going to many of their houses and seeing that their home environments were either equivalent or superior to mine. Your main point is anecdata? I certainly had the same experience you had, but the most general claim I can make is that school was a breeze for me, not that I was universally smarter than everyone else. That would be intellectually imprudent, and not very smart at all. A more intellectual prudent approach is to focus on the things that didn't come easy to you, but easy for others. I remember being subject to IQ testing, where I did extremely well. Obviously, I did extremely well in school too. But that correlation should be trivial. Before IQ measures any 'general' intelligence, it first measures test-taking ability. Through what means is most of our success in school determined? Test-taking. >At base, the environmental argument boils down to something like this: "Anyone in the world could have beaten Magnus Carlsen to become world chess champion if they'd just had the proper environment." Such an argument is so obviously preposterous that the prior should absolutely be that it's false. That is such a ridiculous straw man. I'm seriously questioning your apparent intelligence if you are going to be straw manning views, as oppossed to steel-manning them. The point of contention is that between-group (i.e. racial) heritability of IQ is not explained by genetic factors, not that people are born 'tabula rasa'. The other point of contention is that heritability and genetic determination are separate concepts, and that it was a methodological error by Charles Murray to conflate the two to draw conclusions about between-group heritability of IQ. >Another point: We already know IQ is genetic. Witness that the housecat and humans have vastly different IQs, and no cat will ever perform better on an IQ test than the median human. Again, the prior obviously should be that IQ is genetic. So after straw-manning the arguments, you make the sweeping claim that IQ is genetic. Actually, we have mountains of evidence that show income and socioeconomic status affect IQ; the widely cited Turkheimer (2003) study showed that in impoverished families, 60% of variance in IQ was accounted for by family environment, genes contributed next to 0%, while the reverse was found in rich families. Is that surprising, that if one is struggling, that they would not be less likely to reach the 'genetic potential' of their intelligence, the same way that a malnourished child is less likely to reach the 'genetic potential' of their athleticism? The problem with your arguments is that they are riddled with bizarre leaps of logic, and seem to be motivated by your incessant belief in predestined intellectual superiority of other people. It is obviously the case that some people, by nature or nurture, are generally brighter than others, there's no disputing that. But what is to be done about it? If we follow the science, which almost unanimously shows that environmental and societal factors play a huge role in 'IQ gaps' -- perhaps more so than molecular genetics -- the right kind of 'solution' is one that ought to be plural, and ought to be inclusive. We are dealing with society after all, which was the point of contention in The Bell Curve. That is, if we want smarter people, and we want people to reach their innate potential, then we should make our society more egalitarian, where families struggle much less than they do today. Charles Murray reaches the opposite conclusion. Why do you think that is? There is probably a parsimonious account that explains both his choice in using flawed methodology and exclusionary policy proposal of cutting welfare. I'll let you guess at what is, and it ends in -ism. |
I agree that IQ measures test-taking ability. If you agree with that and agree with it being genetic, then all that's left is seeing that IQ correlates strongly with life outcomes like income. If you want to disagree with IQ being "intelligence" then fine. Who cares what you call it. What matters is there is this genetic factor that correlates with life outcomes.
Magnus Carlsen isn't a straw man. He's a demonstration of genetic determination apart from environmental factors you're lumping in as "heritability." His abilities are genetic, not environmental. Same with someone like Kim Peek. What _is_ ridiculous is for you to argue such things aren't genetic, and that extraordinary claim requires proof.
The point about the housecat is strong. It shows that we already know that the brain is "programmed" by genetics. It's a simple point, of course, but it's one you seem not to understand or to ignore. On Turkheimer's study, yes you can lower people's IQ by various means (a simple one is lead poisoning). That doesn't mean there isn't a genetically determined IQ ceiling for each person.
But your last paragraph is where you showed your real stripes. I get it. You desperately want everyone to have the same genetic IQ so you can rev up the Rube Goldberg machine of woke machinery to argue everything is implicit bias and racism.
The truth is, on average you can't make it so families struggle less and poverty disappears, because both of those concepts exist in reference to a distribution. Compared to families in, say, 1500 Poland, NO American families struggle or live in poverty. There will always be a distribution of outcomes around a median, and a key determinant of those outcomes will always be genetic factors, among which are physical strength, speed, endurance, dexterity and, yes, IQ.
It must have been a hoot playing D&D with you as a kid. "OK I'm fine rolling for Strength, Dexterity and Constitution but if you insist on rolling for Intelligence I'm going home and putting up a poster on your house saying you're a racist!"