It earned its “flagged off HN” badge in under 2 hours
an hackernews:
a high correlation between intelligence and IQ
motherfuckers out here acting like “intelligence” is sufficiently well-defined that a correlation between it and anything else can be computed
intelligence can be reasonably defined as “knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income”
eat a bag of dicks
deleted by creator
ooh can I play? A species’ or race’s intelligence can be reasonably defined by how rapidly it extracts resources from the surrounding area.
That would be the Lexus-and-the-Olive-Tree definition, like the one by which McDonald’s burgers are the best cuisine
Second, is the more common “IQ isn’t intelligence” trick. Sure, the measure doesn’t encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.
Any time you see something like this, what it’s really saying is:
IQ is intelligence to me and nothing you say can dissuade me. I just have a high enough IQ to write a disclaimer for plausible deniability.
Also:
I took an online IQ test in 2004 and scored 160 i am very smart --hakernews, probably
I knew this was good stuff when the majority of HN commenters where huffily complaining about the tone.
Imagine being a skilled San Francisco-style tech worker, at the apex of your industry, and the heights of intellect and rigor you can scale outside of that very specific context turn out to be “race science” apologia. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
It’s pretty on-brand for a techbro to search for answers in what they see as “the code” (genome) while ignoring the entire rest of the fucking world.
They’re too stupid to understand anything beyond “the code”, its unsurprising they’re treating it as a technological hammer in a world of nails
at the logical end of this reasoning they do sound like a bunch of tools
In particular, two semantic tricks are used. First, the fact that current genetic markers aren’t a good prediction for IQ heritability is used as an argument against it. The other likely explanation that our understanding of those markers is widely incomplete is not explored.
Unlike our understanding of IQ, the game of matching shapes where the loser gets a teen pregnancy. That’s been fully explored.
Science: “our current understanding of genetics leads us to believe IQ is not heritable”.
This fucking guy: “IQ is heritable and you just haven’t proved it yet. Citation: I belong to a race with good genetics, unlike you”
Honestly, I’m really surprised to hear that IQ is not even a little bit heritable, given that IQ test performance correlates with level of education, which correlates with wealth, which is heritable.
True, wealth is not genetic, but heritability has an interesting definition which leads to some unintuitive cases of heritability abd non-heritability. For instance, wearing earrings is heritable while having ears is not.
IQ is a little bit heritable. But there are plenty of things which are very heritable and also not genetic to use as comparisons, like accents or posture or little societal rituals of communication, compared to which IQ is barely heritable at all. And that’s without cracking into memes/tropes/narremes, skills, maths, or other more-abstract inheritance.
@bitofhope @swlabr One of those quiet little scientific revolutions; cheap genetic testing let biologists realise that insects they had classified as different species were not, they were different morphs using the same genes. This let in the idea of developmental plasticity and the current consensus is that a whole lot of stuff is developmental, not genetic.
In humans, almost everything brain-based (sexuality, identity, language, symbol manipulation…) is likely significantly developmental.
@bitofhope @swlabr This completely messes with the idea that you can use “good genes” as a guarantee of a desirable outcome.
It also hauls in the idea of environment as the arbiter in more-difficult-to-ignore ways. Even if you’re using Origin and nothing since, you should be aware that “fitness” means “in some specific environment and moment in time”, only there’s this drive to ditch that. Recognising how much developmental plasticity matters breaks any concept of inherent quality of organisms.
That’s because the HN poster I quoted, like many many MANY people, has conflated predicting iq based off of genes with heritabilty. I’d recommend reading the linked substack, the author’s much more succient and knowledgeable than I am, and I wouldn’t want to misrepresent his point
IQ test performance correlates with level of education
I read somewhere that this claim owes a little too much to the inclusion of pathological cases at the lower end of the spectrum, meaning that since below a certain score like 85 you are basically intellectually disabled (or even literally brain dead, or just dead) and academic achievement becomes nonexistent, the correlation is far more pronounced than if we were comparing educational attainment at the more functional ranges.
Will post source if I find it.
@Architeuthis @bitofhope Taleb calls that a “dead man bias,” though I don’t know if he originated the critique. https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39
If you click enough links, you get to this substack article which I think all the discussion is about. https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/no-intelligence-is-not-like-height
Which indicates that IQ is a little bit heritable, just much less than other traits and with way more confounds.
Which, when you think about the extreme examples, makes sense - if your parents were humans, and mine were golden retrievers, you will be a human and I will be a golden retriever, and you will almost certainly have a higher IQ than me.
… but, apparently, if your parents were particularly bright humans and mine were relatively dim humans, but we then got adopted by the same family and given the same educational opportunities etc., the chance that you will end up brighter than me is only very slightly better than 50/50.
I want to make a HN account and reply to the ‘depression and schizophrenia is or isn’t a hardware/software issue’ posters and tell them there is actually is a working IQ test, and they all just failed it.
@Soyweiser @sneerclub It is not possible to understand neuroscience using a “hardware/software” paradigm. That is a model created by humans to make building working computers possible. Brains develop without any such abstraction constraining the process.
Or at least what people are thinking of as “software” is wrong; neuroscience is 100% “hardware”. Can’t expect techbros to understand memetics or iatrogenic illnesses, though, not when they’re fixated on the idea that people with depression/schizophrenia/etc. are having “issues” rather than experiencing society.
non-linear analogue electrochemo-computer with distributed processing centers, multiple unmapped signalling sidechannels, multiple overlapping interdependent sets of subsystems, liquid temperature management, and no jtag
and that’s just on the intro leaflet
