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The Latest On Intelligence

danielwillingham.com

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Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#91

Post by hazov »

justin_vanw wrote: post #69

"A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed." There is a strong cultural bias among much of the research community to go out of their way to deny any genetic factors in intelligence. Perhaps this is well intentioned, but it is absurd. I have come across very few squirre…

I just curious how you can support your point about squirrels, besides you falling prey of the bias of trying to advance an argument with a sole point.

For example, can these squirrels ancestors had better nutrition than the average squirrel, can we know about that just after seeing they mastering fire or wondering if they could learn calculus? I believe this type of question, the relation between nutrition and intelligence, can be answered much easily than searching for genes and looking for some desirable psychological trait in there, this can be easily tested in animals as well in a large couple of generations.

Either way I am not a biologist or even an psychologist so this is my take as a mathematician/statician. Also I'm not so confident science will ever come as close to explaining this completely.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#92

Post by vibrunazo »

Am I the only one who reads these kinds reports and has that impression that today's psychology and biology is less than 0.1% of the way to provide a useful model for intelligence? The best measurement of intelligence that we have today (IQ tests) seem completely worthless for practical purpose compared to what we actually need to know to build solutions on. IQ tests are still too bad to measure actual "intelligence", as defined by our colloquial meaning and practical real-world potential. (as opposed to the official technical definition) Being able to measure people's intelligence would be extremely useful. IQ test results, not so much.

New findings about the impact of genetic vs environmental influences on IQ tests. Is about as useful finding new evidence about genetic vs environmental influences on people's ability to pass a "lick your elbow" test. Why should I care? It sure is interesting, and hey, anything "for science!". But, meh...

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#93

Post by guard-of-terra »

spindritf wrote: post #87
calibraxis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But that's the cargo cult way. You end up replicating a lot of unrelated random things and may still lose the essense of it.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#94

Post by sageikosa »

brittohalloran wrote: post #38
mistercow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it implies that if you're wealthy, you are able to fully meet your intellectual potential, thus the greater spread for wealthy children.

And conversely, if you are poor, you are hard pressed to gather the resources needed to improve your cognitive faculties, and may appear indistinguishable from someone who doesn't even want to gather intellectually enriching resources.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#95

Post by Symmetry »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #89
Symmetry wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The way you do a controlled experiment in science is that you have a number of subjects, you subject only some of them to some new condition, and then you look for statistically significant differences between the group subject to the condition and the one that wasn't.

That was what happened in the study I mentioned.

Now, you can say that this wasn't absolute proof and you'd be right, because science doesn't provide any absolute proof. But if you're going to throw out this evidence you're going to have to throw out the rest of modern medicine too.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#96

Post by calibraxis »

spindritf wrote: post #87
calibraxis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure who "we" are, and why "we don't want to know" things despite wanting to be smarter. In any case, Chomsky certainly wasn't secretive about his education and parenting. Did you look it up?

"My father was, professionally, a Hebrew scholar, and worked with Hebrew grammar. And my mother was a Hebrew teacher. My father sort of ran the Hebrew school system in the city of Philadelphia, and my mother taught in it. He taught in Hebrew College later. There's a Graduate University of Jewish Studies, Dropsie College, which he taught in."

"Actually, I happen to have been very lucky myself and gone to an experimental-progresive Deweyite school, from about the time I was age one-and-a-half to twelve [John Dewey was an American philosopher and educational reformer]. And there it was done routinely: children were encouraged to challenge everything, and you sort of worked on your own, you were supposed to think things through for yourself -- it was a real experience. And it was quite a striking change when it ended and I had to go to the city high school, which was the pride of the city school system. It was the school for academically-oriented kids in Philadelphia -- and it was the dumbest, most ridiculous place I've ever been, it was like falling into a black hole or something. For one thing, it was extremely competitive -- because that's one of the best ways of controlling people. So everybody was ranked, and you always knew exactly where you were: are you third in the class, or maybe did you move down to fourth? All this stuff is put into people's heads in various ways in the schools -- that you've got to beat down the person next to you, and just look out for yourself."

Ok, raised by teachers/scholars who even ran a school system, and went to a school which cultivated critical thinking. Surprising that he turned out to be such a successful academic...

No need to turn to racist theories, or cultural mysticism. Answers are quite simple, but not everyone wants to hear them.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#97

Post by justin_vanw »

hazov wrote: post #91
justin_vanw wrote: post #69

"A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed." There is a strong cultural bias among much of the research community to go out of their way to deny any genetic factors in intelligence. Perhaps this is well intentioned, but it is absurd. I have come across very few squirre…

I just curious how you can support your point about squirrels, besides you falling prey of the bias of trying to advance an argument with a sole point. For example, can these squirrels ancestors had better nutrition than the average squirrel, can we know about that just after seeing they mastering fire or wondering if they could learn calculus? I believe this type of question, the relation between nutrition and intel…

My point is that humans are much more intelligent than squirrels. Is this because of environment? Not at all, it is because we have the genetic programming to develop huge brains. The difference in intelligence between humans and squirrels is determined almost entirely by heredity.

The reason I point this out is that it is very common to see comments about heredity not being a factor in human intelligence. It may well be that heredity does not explain differences in intelligence between two humans, or it may be that heredity almost completely explains any differences in intelligence among humans. Science will eventually figure out the truth of the matter. However, heredity plays a very dominant role in determining intelligence, the only question is whether humans are all so genetically similar with regards to intelligence that environmental factors dominate genetic factors.

EDIT: The way I phrased the first paragraph sets up a false choice. Intelligence differences among humans could be hereditary, environmental, or most likely a complex combination of the two.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#98

Post by tokenadult »

goodside wrote: post #85
tokenadult wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You didn't speak about the amount and reliability of prediction of IQ in your kind reply. I have referred to that publication. The publication by Deary and Johnson you link to was published in 2009. I was quoting a more recent publication by Wendy Johnson, a frequent co-author with Deary at Edinburgh, in one of my other replies in this thread. Here are a couple of publications by Deary, Johnson, and various co-authors with more recent publication dates than what you have kindly linked:

The review article "The neuroscience of human intelligence differences" by Deary and Johnson and Penke (2010)

http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur...

"At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]."

Johnson, Penke, and Spinath (2011) "Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not"

http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He...

"Presuming this is correct and, as Visscher and Keller appear to have implied, applicable to most behavioural traits, this indicates that literally thousands of genes are likely involved in each trait, with no single polymorphism having substantial effect, which is the quasi-infinite model to which Munafo and Flint refer. Whatever would we as psychologists do with such information?"

There are more publications on the issue where these came from. I am familiar with the current literature on the subject, both from an online discussion group hosted by the Behavior Genetics Association and from a weekly "journal club" during the school year (at which I met Wendy Johson, the co-author of the publication you linked to, and of other more recent publications I am linking to in this thread). The hope of many behavior genetics researchers was finding a simple genetic model of normal allele variation in just a few genes having a large and consistent influence on IQ in the normal range. That hope has been dashed by the data as further studies have been conducted, and as researchers attempt to replicate the studies of earlier authors in new data sets.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#99

Post by jongraehl »

slurgfest wrote: post #88
gwern wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 intent…

Surely you're aware that a tremendous amount of ink and (social-)scientist hours have been spent doing "science" with the presumption that there "are no genes for IQ" etc., so it makes sense to be on guard against biased writing (at least by publication/file-drawer bias) on the topic.

You have gwern wrong. He's an unbiased scientist on this topic.

Re: The Latest On Intelligence

#100

Post by scott_s »

bluekeybox wrote: post #20
scott_s wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful about coming up with an explanation for a result, and then thinking it is obvious : http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

Very interesting point, but I'd argue it has different implications to different fields of study. In physics, for example, if ten years from now it turned out that the existence of Higgs boson, in hindsight, was an "obvious" part of a wonderfully intuitive theory, most physicists would be elated and consider it a proof of the strength of their theory. Arguably a different story in social science.

I'm not sure that analogy works because the Higgs boson was not a surprise. It was predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics. I also worry that you're abusing the word "obvious."
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