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by lamuerteflaca 4023 days ago
Thankfully you are being downvoted. Reading between the lines you are arguing that poor people are simply genetically stupid.

I counter that by saying that even though only a few can win a marathon most people with some training can finish it within a reasonable time.

Getting a doctor degree is the exact same thing. Sure, there are a few geniuses but you need not be one to become a medical doctor.

My point is that most people are intelligent enough. Hence most poverty is no because of the lack of it. Other issues are at play. Birth lottery is a strong one.

2 comments

Unfortunately, you are not.

It is evident that /some/ of the poverty is due to genetically caused low IQ. That is a completely factual and unideological statement.

It is probably not the sole cause of poverty.

Wouldn't it be nice to figure out what the actual causes are and how much they each contribute?

Otherwise, the treatment would be more like blodletting and using perfume against miasmas than anything actually helpful.

IQ is heritable, to the extent intelligence increases one's human capital ( quite a bit) intelligent people will on average be richer than less intelligent people. This explains much of the differences in educational outcomes. I'm all for improving outcomes for poor children, but the solutions will need to be technological not environmental. I don't expect people to be able to separate the normative from the descriptive when it comes to their sacred issues, but the whole "education and nutrition is all that matters" approach is basically Lysenkoism.

We are in this strange dynamic where our inability to perceive ugly truths cause us to perpetuate the outcomes we so bemoan, leading to an arms race of ineffective interventions and reflexive shunning of people who actually care about the real cause of the problem. It might be nice if everyone were equally intelligent, but that's an engineering goal not the state of things now.