Lead poisoning causes more death, IQ loss than thought: study

> otherwise identical cohorts.

You could do this stratification/matching for any IQ study. What's special about lead-IQ?

hahaha ok, but that product is a hot-water heater built into your kitchen tap to do away with your hot water kettle. Presumably, that's not plumbed to your teapot with a lead boiler and faucet. (weird, "plumbed" means "leaded")

Does it? Most of what I’ve seen amounts to assume races are have equal inherent IQ distributions, given test results are unequal the assumption is then tests must be inherently biased (examples of recent immigrant non-English speaking Jews improving their IQ scores as they learned English) or differences are caused by socio economic factors. That logic would fall apart if the original assumption wasn’t made, but anything starting with a prior that races can have different IQ distributions is thrown out as racist. The progressive book ‘The Genetic Lottery’ kind-of makes the case for polygenic factors considered evenly distributed amongst the races as a basis for that assumption but in my view their logic has a number of holes in it. If there is a better treatment of the topic I’m genuinely interested in reading it.

> "it just measures your ability to take tests"

This is largely wrong. One could be a master at test-taking and not come close to a high score.

That said, familiarly with the test/item structure almost certainly helps, especially for folks with the potential to score high (see below).

> or "it just tells you how rich your parents are")

Hmm… family wealth and IQ may be correlated, but not perfectly so. There are plenty of low-IQ rich people and also plenty of high-IQ poor people.

> what's your response to studies like this?

Probably too many confounding variables. That said, this study is a publishable unit that can push one or more funded agendas, so here we are.

> Is there anything that can be said about the effect of lead on cognitive function?

While I know a bit about IQ, I don’t know much about the details of the relationship of IQ and lead.

> Why might IQ be a good measure of lead-induced stupidification

Maybe it’s not. See “funded agendas” comment above.

> but unreliable for literally anything else?

(the main reason I replied is below)

People really need to let go of this idea in a reasonably reliable way.

1. IQ measures reasoning ability. It is quite good at measuring this.

2. People put a lot of weight onto how IQ correlates with a bunch of other things, but these are not things that IQ tests are designed to measure. As such, these correlations may not be meaningful in some cases. So the “literally anything else” that IQ is allegedly not good for is almost entirely things that IQ tests are not designed to measure. I don’t think it’s prudent to disregard the test/measure because of misuse by some folks (typically within agendas).

3. People get very self-conscious about IQ scores. Let me help with that. IQ scores are a measure on a particular day that can vary from day to day for any one person. For any given test taker, they are trying to optimize what they score out of a theoretical max (i.e., their “true IQ”). Many, many things cause people to score lower than their potential max — lack of sleep, lack of food, external distractions, distress (physical, mental, emotional), anxiety, ambivalence, lack of test familiarity, etc. Very few things cause them to score higher than their max (it will almost certainly be within the confidence interval). It’s ok. Retake the test if it matters (it usually doesn’t).

4. IQ matters most in three areas, imho. The first is at the extremes. Gifted/genius folks and learning disabled folks need additional resources. How and whether this is implemented is highly debated. The second is in leadership positions. You want your leaders (e.g., in the military) to be within about 20 IQ points of those they lead. The idea is that > 20 IQ delta folks see the world in fundamentally different ways, so leading someone who views the world so differently is difficult and largely inefficient. The third is with one’s significant other. Same as above, it will be hard to be understood (if that’s your goal) by someone who is +/-20 IQ points away from you.

I hope this helps.

Don't lick your boards, wash your hands before you eat, and if you're really concerned, wear gloves while handling solder wire.

The smoke from soldering isn't lead - a soldering tip is (if it's not literally glowing into the yellows) far, far too cold to vaporize any lead from solder - you need to be 1500+C for it to start being a problem, and you're not soldering that high. It's rosin smoke, and if you're in doubt, leave your iron in a puddle of solder - it shouldn't smoke, it should just sit there liquid after the initial rosin has burned off.

The rosin smoke isn't great, but it's not a lead toxicity issue.

Your concern is lead on your hands from the wire, and then eating afterwards without a good scrubbing. I don't think it will penetrate your skin, but you could always wear a pair of gloves if you wanted. There are some shooting sports soaps that are designed to help really rip any lead off your hands, so you might use one of those if you're concerned.