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The Latest On Intelligence

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Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#81

Post by aqme28 »

leoedin wrote: post #59
yesbabyyes wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the worst possible environment...say, repeated concussions to the head via a hammer, will still result in a human scoring far above any non-human. I'm pretty sure you're wrong. I think research suggests that dolphins, parrots, bonobos and some other animals have tested higher than humans.

At standard IQ tests? Surely the creature doing a a standard IQ test needs at the very least opposable thumbs? There will of course be exceptions, but a brain damaged but somewhat functioning human will always score better than a non-human at human-designed intelligence tests. The argument isn't that a dolphin or bonobo isn't potentially smarter than a brain damaged human, but that by designing our tests for human us…

What are you trying to point out? That IQ tests as they are written for humans are biased in favor of humans?

Intelligence between humans and animals can (or could) be compared, but--like when testing between human populations--you wouldn't use a test that is so heavily biased against one of the groups that they can't even attempt it.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#82

Post by slurgfest »

scott_s wrote: post #46
slurgfest wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be strange to assume uncritically that Nobel prizes were given out in a way which was completely unbiased. For example, it is at least highly plausible that there are biases on the basis of nationality, connections, school background and other things which have nothing to do with merit, ethnicity OR culture as such. So it seems strange to me to suggest that it must be some aspect of Jewishness that determine…

I'm actually not assuming that - I tried to write something to that effect, but I wasn't pleased with what I wrote. Take my comment with the pre-condition that if we're going to assume it has something to do with Jews themselves, it need not be attributed to genetics.

Absolutely understood, and I apologize if that came across as a sharp rebuttal.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#83

Post by randomdata »

vectorpush wrote: post #44
stephengillie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define "poverty"? Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves.

> Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves. What's your point? Ownership of an arbitrary appliance doesn't mean you're able to put food on the table or afford tuition for your children. You don't need to eat a TV every night to survive nor can you fill up your gas tank on microwaves. Besides, in the developed world, TVs and microwaves are a dime a dozen and are regularly discarded because their abundance m…

He asked a good question. To what level does the bar need to rise to eliminate poverty as something that holds someone back? Is easy access to food and education that level?

My gut feeling that wealth disparity is a bigger issue than absolute wealth. If the poor lived in mansions and drove Ferraris, but the rich owned entire islands and private rocket ships that travel to Mars, the poor people still wouldn't have access to what the wealthier people have, still setting them back from achieving their true potential.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#84

Post by jfoutz »

mistercow wrote: post #6
Symmetry wrote: post #2

"The extent to which genes matter to intelligence varies by social class (genetic inheritance matters more if you're wealthy, less if you're poor)." It's always seemed obvious to me that this ought to be true - that is that environment will matter more if you have greater differences in environment. In the extreme case if you feed kid A and don't feed kid B, then kid A will end up with an infinitely greater IQ than k…

The point is actually more subtle than that though. What they're saying is that holding social class constant , genetic difference is more important for the wealthy than the poor. For example, kid A and kid B are both wealthy and have significant genetic differences related to factors affecting intelligence. In this case kid A and kid B are likely to have significantly different intelligence from each other. Converse…

Feel free to ignore me, i've got nothing to hold up as any kind of authority on the subject, but i'm curious if my thinking is irrational.

I'd thought genetics only mattered for the elite. I'd always used the olympics as an example of this. Take a few hundred people with the best drive, nutrition, and training from all over the world. What's left to set them apart? genetics.

If you're not elite, who cares? you can just eat better, work harder, train smarter, whatever.

To put it another way, how often is genetics the limiting factor? If you've really done all you can do to improve, then you can blame stuff you can't actually do anything about, like genetics.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#85

Post by goodside »

tokenadult wrote: post #49
Alex3917 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if this is true, but I heard recently that the best predictor of IQ is actually the gene that controls determines the size of your mom's vagina, because that is what mediates the risk of brain cell loss due to lack of oxygen at birth. Kind of a funny, but also quite telling about the state of genetics.

Not sure if this is true That's definitely NOT a well replicated finding. In general, no study has ever shown any single-gene allele variation with strong effect on IQ across the general population. There are rare genes (but, really, mostly rare chromosome abnormalities) that have devastating effect on IQ, resulting in mental retardation, but the variance in IQ in the general population above and below the population…

The two tables here identify specific polymorphic genes and linkage regions predictive of IQ: http://www.psy.ed.ac.uk/people/iand/Deary%20(2009)%20Hum%20G...

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#86

Post by ShawnBird »

vectorpush wrote: post #44
stephengillie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you define "poverty"? Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves.

> Most impoverished Americans have TVs and microwaves. What's your point? Ownership of an arbitrary appliance doesn't mean you're able to put food on the table or afford tuition for your children. You don't need to eat a TV every night to survive nor can you fill up your gas tank on microwaves. Besides, in the developed world, TVs and microwaves are a dime a dozen and are regularly discarded because their abundance m…

Anecdotal evidence: When I was the poorest I have ever been I had a TV and microwave.

My microwave came with my apartment and the TV was free because a neighbor had just got a new one. I still had to live off ramen.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#87

Post by spindritf »

calibraxis wrote: post #79
Juniper wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an incredible statistic. If the cause is cultural then it's a wonder there isn't a plethora of books advising on how to raise children the Ashkenazi way. Are there any such books?

Typical HN racism and misogyny aside, why not go to the top of the intellectual world and listen to Chomsky and Einstein? There's no end of opinions from them. Chomsky in particular answers emails quickly. So no need to ape some culture's forms, but rather ask their most successful members. The problem is, their answers don't please many who'd ask such questions. Einstein claimed: "This crippling of individuals I con…

We don't want to know what Chomsky or Einstein thought about the educational system, that's irrelevant. What we really want to know is how their parents treated them. Actually, we want something more general -- commonalities in Jewish upbringing, especially of those who went on to be successful.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#88

Post by slurgfest »

gwern wrote: post #73
tokenadult wrote: post #5

I would upvote this twice if I could. I have read the underlying paper Nisbett, R. E., Aronson, J., Blair, C., Dickens, W., Flynn, J., Halpern, D. F., & Turkheimer, E. (2012, January 2). Intelligence: New Findings and Theoretical Developments. American Psychologist, 67, 130-159. http://psychology.msu.edu/pers_hambric3/PSY493%20Spring%2020... Daniel Willingham reviews in the submitted post, and the paper is a joint re…

My problem with upvoting is that I have read the underlying paper, and I'm not impressed at all. This paper takes a hugely nurturist approach, and at parts verges on dishonesty. I consider myself - if not an expert, at least very well informed - on the topic of dual n-back and I was flabbergasted when I read pg11 of the PDF. There is not a single mention of the many failures to replicate, methodological critiques, or…

Labeling the paper with the epithet "hugely nurturist" tells nothing about the paper but everything about what you are doing. You are attempting the early dismissal of some viewpoint you disagree with on a more or less political grounds but this has not very much to do with science.

Most cognitive tasks used inside an MRI are about as meaningless as benchmarks. It seems gratuitous to turn this into evidence of intentionally dishonest malfeasance and frame the whole thing as some kind of pseudo-political debate. Just engage the data, please?

Setting aside the political tone you've taken here: the idea that nature and nurture are dichotomous (or can even be meaningfully separated) is not supportable.

It has been observed many times that because heritability includes a genes x environment interaction term, it does not mean that something is 'genetic' - and real-world examples have been provided in this thread.

You cannot build an adequate understanding of development on the caricature that there is a dichotomy between 'nature' and 'nurture'. DNA and RNA cannot do anything without a developmental environment. You do not have any organism without development, which necessarily occurs in an environment. There are strong adaptive reasons for learning in big primates and it is well known to occur. On the other hand, you do not have development or learning without machines to implement them; these are not built without genes but neither can genes build them in a vacuum. It is a perpetual interchange and the components are viciously complementary and embedded in the same feedback loops to a point where it is nearly meaningless even to argue about nature vs. nurture.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#89

Post by CWuestefeld »

Symmetry wrote: post #72
CWuestefeld wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a pretty huge assumption, that micro-nutrients are a significant part of any difference. You've assumed, first, that it's poverty that causes the lowered IQ, rather than that both poverty and lower-IQ are both effects of a common cause. Second, even if there really is a causal chain, why in the world would you assume that the difference is related to nutrition? Why not, for example, cultural differences in the…

If poverty doesn't cause lowered IQ how would explain children adopted into non-improrished households having higher IQs? I don't have good evidence that nutrition is the primary factor here, but there is a lot of research saying that nutrition is important with respect to IQ.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is one of the classic logical fallacies[1]. You persist in the assumption that poverty causes lower IQ, rather than the possibility that both poverty and lower IQ are correlated because they share a common cause.

[1] See http://www.skepdic.com/posthoc.html

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#90

Post by [deleted] »

sp332 wrote: post #58
Alex3917 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's assuming the birth goes correctly though. If the umbilical cord is wrapped around your neck and you're coming out breech then that's another story. My understanding is that it has a large effect in a small number of cases.

We're talking about "the best predictor of IQ" which is not the same thing as having a large, negative effect in a small number of cases.

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