The "10k-hour rule" was debunked again

The repeating part is about you saying basically the same thing to the previous commenter, I don't get how you do not intuitively understand that?

It's not exactly clear to me what you are asking but you seem to be making the traditional nature vs nurture argument, and you seem to think the environment is important enough to impact the IQ of an individual and more largely its abilities.

It's not clear what you mean by people's "environments are heritable" but from my point of view it was barely true in another era but nowadays with increased mobility it is just not true. Most people are very likely to have kids in a very different environment than they grew up in. And that is the case for 4 generations now, so I don't think there is any heritability there appart for a few privileged rich, I guess (then again, they have largely been replaced in the last century or two).

I have to say, I don't understand where you are going because we have a number of twin studies that clearly show that the environmental impact is not very large, at least for a single generation. There are also plenty of various fields, related to animals or plants that directly work with genetics, to change stuff regardless of the environment. GMO would not be viable if genetics weren't more important than environnement... I do think environment plays a role and is important for the very long term. But on the human scale, it takes multiple generations to have a significant change in the average so compared to the outsized influence of the base genetic material.

With everything we know about genetics, while there is no guarantee, children are largely a mix of their parents' traits, including intelligence. The higher the parents' intelligence, the higher the chance of this intelligence showing up more in the children (because intelligence is not localized at a single place in the ADN, but is spread out all other). I really don't understand people contesting that kind of thing, since it never bothers anyone when historically tall people, make, you guess it, taller people than the average. How surprising!

When it comes to the allocation of ressource, it is pretty simple: the humans who get more ressource thrive better, are allowed much more influence on the environment directly and indirectly wich can have large impact. It is not a hard argument to make that to benefit society the most, you want those ressource to go to the smartest humans available. If you do not, you dilute your benefits and may actually prevent those individuals from taking over because of poor ressource distribution. In the long term your society ends up dumber and worse off. This is basically where we are and exactly why society is getting restless in some places, it is not a tenable situation in the long term, because even though it may not look like at first glance, everyone is guaranteed to be worse off over time.

I don't know what previous commenter you're referring to.

You wrote this, to the parent I replied to.

  tptacek 14 days ago | parent | prev | next [–]

  Every time someone here mentions the heritability of IQ, I 
  wonder what they think that term means, because it clearly 
  does not mean what most people  intuitively think it does.

The "issue" you are talking about has already been addressed ; it is not something that has an effect large enough to be relevant, at least for a small number of generations. We could talk about the very long-term effects, and the necessity of territory/environment control but that's an even more politically loaded subject and it doesn't change what I say. You seemed even more confused about probability than you think I am about genetics, even if you lack that intuition, it does not make its effect go away.

Then again, since you seemd to have "forgotten" a previous comment of yours, I am inclined to think that you are either arguing in bad faith or don't really understand what you are saying. I would be happy to argue those things with a trained geneticist but since my argument is probabilistic it wouldn't even matter that much. Research seems to say the same thing I do, abeit with a lot more politicaly correct wrapping.

What effect size are you talking about? The heritability effect size? What is the "effect size" of a simple ratio of genetic variance to trait variance? What confounding effect do you think I'm suggesting to you?