Society absolutely needs to more correctly incentivize smart people to 'get together' to form child creating and raising units (families).
Maybe society should focus on supporting high quality environments for raising children well.
This probably includes a bunch of budget expensive things like...
* Rich interaction between smart adults and children, at low density
* Ensure good breakfast and lunch at minimum
* year round childcare
* Every child great medical care
If we like the idea of biological parents bonding strongly with their children, the whole 'work from home' and 'work life balance' things should also be strongly evaluated. I happen to think that delivering strongly on the above points would also pair well with at least some 'work from home' so that parents have time to work, time for being human, and time to be a good parent. Harder to measure experimental results probably include a healthier emotional and motivational status, lower stress for everyone involved, and maybe even higher output if not just higher quality output during hours worked.
There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.
It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801.... The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military.
Genetic heritability, which is a subset of heritability, does not generally mean what people think it means, though. To the extent IQ can be attributed genetically to parents, it does not imply a "compounding" effect where smart people continuously have smarter kids and dumb people have dumber kids. This can understood by analogy to other personal traits like eyesight, height, weight, hair color, etc. which vary within a range across generations with occasional unpredictable outliers. This is why folks who do test for intelligence, have to test each person individually and not just rely on bloodline tracking.
Yes, but since the heritability is high, the average IQ of the children will be close to the average IQ of the parents, despite the fact that it will tend to regress towards the mean.
That’s exactly how it works in the standard additive model of heritability, and we have lots of empirical evidence that heritability of intelligence matches that model very well.
IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class, with members of the same ethnic group scoring higher over the decades as that ethnic group as a whole becomes wealthier.
Socioeconomic status limits genetic potential. Thus the effects of SES dominate for those in poverty, but heritability dominates for those with higher SES.
For the intuition think of height - a malnourished child will not reach their “genetic” height. A fully nourished child will be limited by their “genetics”. Why wouldn’t other biological characteristics be similar?
Exactly the opposite is true. Adoption studies have been used to isolate the effect of SES itself, and the contribution of that factor is low: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (“Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01… Heritability was estimated to be 0.42.”).
This is just SIBS data. It has all the standard "Minnesota" limitations: the study is tiny, the cohort isn't demographically representative, adoption isn't itself random, nothing deconfounds the prenatal environment, and the children in the cohort are also adopted at different ages.
It's one thing to call out an interesting paper; it's another to act as if the matter has been settled simply by pointing to SIBS.
Compared to what though? Also, how is success in the military even defined? Highest rank? Most years served? Least injuries? The highest body count? Lowest double-digit APR% on 2018 Mustang with a rebuilt title?
You can learn about these things by following the links given by the GP of my comment and reviewing the studies they reference. The other strongest criteria of success was the time of their two-mile run (at their specific age of enlistment).
They eliminate the bottom third of applicants by ASVAB score which would mean an IQ of 93 if it translated exactly (ADVAB to IQ and SAT is only about 0.8 correlation). That is the minimum to get in to do any job at all for a minimum enlistment contract. So to talk about statistically significant career success predictors you would have to get into the low three digits, just looking at nothing but the math of IQ distributions. A cut-line of 80 would only drop the bottom 9% of the general population.
Sure, but what has that got to do with “IQ is also highly heritable?” which, in this context, suggests intelligence is something innate and biological, rather than recognizing an IQ test as a gauge skewed by culture and socioeconomic status.
Well, that was a different reference in GP's post. You can go read it. Heritability is definitely a thing, but far from the only thing and it isn't simple Mendelian inheritance - there are many components to intelligence that reflect differently in gene transfer and so while you can see a correlation in specific individuals and their immediate ancestors there are lots of exceptions and its probably a mirage - if seen at all - in any large demographic. See my other comment on the problems with eugenics in this thread.
Attacking IQ test is like vaccine denialism. People don’t like the fact that requiring individuals to cooperate can enhance health outcomes for the group as a whole. Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.
The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication, which is doubly unfortunate because it wasn’t even necessary for the plot. Society can just get dumb due to people not valuing education.
Genetically we’re not that different from cavemen, so the floor (without any weird eugenic theories about dumb people breeding too much) is “tamed caveman.”
Education is still very much present in Idiocracy (Brawndo blah blah). It's the lack of value in logic and thought process that causes the problem. When people value winning an argument on a logical fallacy, there's a severe issue. Education is oft used as the fallacy itself.
Much like today on all sides of every significant debate. Where the loudest most emotional rise on feelings over logic.
If a person doesn't immensely value learning they're wrong, they exist as part of the problem.
I think you hit on a key note about learning when they're wrong, and I think that's one of the biggest issues with social media and modern debate - namely that being wrong in public is incredibly painful and can often destroy a reputation. But then people realized there are groups who agree with them even when they're wrong, so the most important thing is to cater to them and never agree that you're wrong in public, and some percentage of people will go along with your argument.
I think never believing fully in your own ideas and always being able to admit you're wrong and always questioning is almost a super power that I wish we valued more.
A room full of people in charge of the most power nation wouldn't fall prey to something like false dichotomy, during an important address to said nation? Would they...?
It’s not the stupid people’s fault. They’ve always bred. The problem is smart people used to as well, and now we’ve stopped. Because of lots of reasons that make sense for the individuals:
- childfree is probably more enjoyable
- kids expensive and student debt crippling, so let’s delay starting till we’re 37 and own a home
- scary time/place to raise kids if you think about it too much
- etc.
So that’s thrown things out of balance. it’s not eugenics to say that smart people shouldn’t hold their birth rate so close to zero.
"Stupid people breed too much" is a proposition that is either true or false, within some worldview.
(For example, how stupid is stupid? How much breeding is to much? Is there even such a thing as too much breeding? All these are variables up for debate.)
But preventing the spread of an idea that you fear may be true, simply because you don't like the consequences, is intellectually dishonest.
Would you endorse suppressing the idea that the earth orbits the sun just because you lived in a milieu where the primacy of the church was more important than truth?
Argue against eugenics because it's unethical to prevent people from reproducing (and therefore no amount of "stupid people" reproducing is "too much"). Don't cloud your judgment by denying propositions that you fear may be true.
Depends on the timescale you care about. It is, objectively, a very big problem over larger timescales (assuming we aren't killed off and don't engineer our children's genes).
Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.
Casually tossing about an accusation like that is not at all in keeping with the guidelines for this website.
That movie can be understood in several different ways.
Also, I'd like to point out that the core problems with eugenics isn't an assertion that intelligence is hereditary, but that:
- Race is not a scientifically grounded concept
- Complex traits do not have Mendelian inheritance
- Measurement of intelligence is problematic
- Even measures that strongly correlate with success are confounded by environmental, cultural and economic factors
Thus, the conclusions drawn by eugenicists are based on their racism and prejudice, not by any scientific conclusions. It is a pseudo-scientific framework to justify (at the limit) ethnic cleansing.
The opening of the movie could also be read as a commentary or satire about a certain type of reality TV show or talk show that was popular at that time, but it was also a really cheap shot at a specific class of people and demonstrated a level of contempt that cannot really be defended.
But the rest of the movie was focused more on anti-intellectual and shallow culture and corporate greed - the heritability of intelligence never got another mention.
Maybe society should focus on supporting high quality environments for raising children well.
This probably includes a bunch of budget expensive things like...
If we like the idea of biological parents bonding strongly with their children, the whole 'work from home' and 'work life balance' things should also be strongly evaluated. I happen to think that delivering strongly on the above points would also pair well with at least some 'work from home' so that parents have time to work, time for being human, and time to be a good parent. Harder to measure experimental results probably include a healthier emotional and motivational status, lower stress for everyone involved, and maybe even higher output if not just higher quality output during hours worked.