Very interesting read, didn't think the SD would be so high for offspring.
I always find it interesting when people attack the genetic aspect of IQ as nonexistent. Given the heritability of almost literally everything else in our body, why is it such a stretch that intelligence, the most complicated of all, is also heridible?
If that were the case, I'd love to know EXACTLY what Bill Gates's parents did growing up differently than mine. I read all the time, had a normal childhood, good food available, etc, yet am nowhere near his level of intelligence. Was it the cereal he ate? The weather? The arguments break down immediately when a simple (and proven) solution makes much more sense... it's his genes!
> I'd love to know EXACTLY what Bill Gates's parents did growing up
Firstly comparing yourself to a top 1.43e-8% successful person is pointless.
But more importantly, IQ isn't everything, nowhere near, success is somewhat random, but also influence by so very much more - location, environment, economic background, personality, confidence, family, friends, a random person you meet or interaction you have...
You make success by making opportunities for these things to happen.
Agreed, if you read the biography (or even just the Wikipedia entry) on gates you’ll see how much privilege and access contributed to his successes. Smart? Certainly. A genius? I dunno, I think I could have done just as well (I’m no genius).
I find it odd even discussing it is taboo these days.
Even on a small scale its freaky. I have two kids, raised in the same house, largely with the same style but 2 years apart. Yet they are still entirely different. My oldest is more like her mother in personality and the way she works through stuggles, deals with issues, people etc. Eseentially the lens she views the world on. She has academically struggled, and we have had to work with her (and my wife) on how we deal with things that arent "easy" or overcoming not being a natural talent at things.
My son on the other hand is so much more like me its freaky. He has to know how things work, or the why something works etc. Hes able to pick up more binary/finite tasks quite quickly for his age and even manipulating things/working on things in 3d or problem solving he is beyond his years. I can buy him, at age 5, pretty complex LEGO sets, like the 1000 piece ages 7+ or 9+ setups and he can pretty much do them solo. My wife is straight up intimidated doing them with him.
Frankly im more worried about him socially as a result long term and I am doing my best not to project that onto him now as its not a problem yet, but I can see some of the struggles I had with blending in or assimilating socially being a problem too (and I had a TOTALLY different upbringing).
Ultimately I cant think of it being much more than they are just wired differently. They approach things and the world differently (but still similarly to the differences between my wife and I).
Bill Gates doesn’t have a particularly high IQ. But, his parents did do an extreme amount to set him up.
The most important thing was his mother served on “United Way’s executive committee where she served most notably with IBM's CEO, John Opel” which played a major role in IBM choosing DOS from a tiny company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Maxwell_Gates
On top of this he grew up in a high income ultra competitive family. This meant he went to exclusive private schools with early access to computers. He also learned the basics of business much like how a child of farmers, lawyers, etc tends to learn a lot about their professions. Family game nights were extremely cutthroat which fostered the idea to keep pushing for #1.
I don't think anyone knows Bill Gates IQ. Online it looks like it is all guesses, and I can't imagine Gates taking a test, much less publicizing the results. He's smart enough to know that it could only hurt him, not help him.
157 ± 6, 95% confidence interval.
We did the most scientific, or at least the least non-scientific estimate.
It is based on several assumptions but still closest to truth to our view.
For a deep dive into the logic and mathematics behind our calculation:
https://www.cognidna.com/celebrity-IQ-estimations/
Once there, simply click on Bill Gates' image for a comprehensive breakdown of our estimation process.
You’re correct, I should have said he didn’t get to extreme wealth from having a 1 in 1 billion super outlier IQ. As to your point we don’t have a specific score, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any evidence whatsoever. A very high SAT score does suggest a high intelligence but he didn’t win a Putnam prize or show similar extreme outlier performance.
Sure, but I’m sure there are plenty of math professors living on low pensions with much higher IQs even in their old age — financial success is not particularly related to IQ. There is some correlation, but it has much more to do with privilege and luck.
Is desire/ability to solve puzzles correlated with success in the business world? Frankly, I doubt it based on the sample of people I've seen who would rather be right than be rich
That’s a sign of intelligence but not an IQ test. Extreme test preparation, unusually large vocabulary, etc played a a major role in people’s scores.
It may seem strange to test “test prep” not just intelligence, but the goal is to predict success in collage. Extremely motivated students have an advantage just like extremely intelligent ones. The test would be less accurate if preparation was less effective.
To be clear, I say this having gotten an extreme score not to denigrate the test.
I expect the SD to be much higher in the real world, as anybody who has observed real children and their parents, for example a teacher, can attest. When you add environmental and cultural factors, as well as other genetic traits that strongly correlate with social success, such as agression, physical attractivity and verbal skills, it's pretty much a coin toss.
What we know for sure from educational studies is that early intervention at the 2-6 years of age can completely negate any "inherited" learning issues, be they genetic or culturally acquired via parental neglect. So maybe that's where the focus should be.
You also have to ask how much sense does the premise hold. How do you exactly determine which allele relates to inheritable intelligence? It seems almost impossible to separate and control for social factors, i.e. to actually find the that the genetic markup of white upper-middle class people is the best predictor of "intelligence", because there is no definition of intelligence that this group is not better trained and better socially positioned to exhibit.
This fundamental difficulty in defining a culturally neutral measure of intelligence (and it's pervasive tendency to produce racist outcomes) has pushed the field into disrepute and makes people attack its conclusions.
I don’t think people argue that IQ - whatever it is - is not heritable. I think the mechanism of inheritance is in question.
You have your biological determinists - who believe that genetics (molecular mechanisms) are the mechanism of heritability; and you have blank slate people - who believe that the environment provided by the parents is that main mechanism of inheritance.
I personally find it to be kind of laughable because intelligence is not well defined. As I have gotten older and wiser I have realized that intelligence is multi dimensional, and the people who harp on IQ tend to be lacking along dimensions not related to analytic thinking - i.e. social, emotional, physical intelligence.
And we're gonna be BTFO'd on all those dimensions by AI ;D
By twist of postmodern irony, it turns out the most impressive thing our brains could do is the stuff we feel is the most basic: walking and picking up cups.
This is less surprising if you consider that muscle control has been in evolutionary development for 500 million years while higher reasoning is 2 million years old and language is just 200,000 years old.
While there is currently no complete understanding of the specific genes responsible for mental abilities, research suggests that genetics do play a role in cognitive development. However, it is also true that the environment in which a child grows up can have a significant impact on their mental abilities. It is important to note that while genetic factors may influence cognitive development, it is not solely determined by genetics, and other factors, such as education, socialization, and access to resources, also play a crucial role. Therefore, it is essential to consider both genetic and environmental factors when discussing mental abilities.
The representation of how genes mix in offspring is often oversimplified, and as such, any predictions made based on this method are likely to be limited to average outcomes. While this method may be useful for statistical analysis, it may not be suitable for predicting mental development or other complex traits of an offspring, where a range of factors will play a role.
Bill Gates also had a connected family and a lot of luck. There are far more upperclassmen who, after meeting, you'll find yourself asking, "If you're so rich, why aren't you so smart?", rather than saying to yourself "Wow, no wonder he's so successful - he's just so smart!"
This kind of deterministic attitude is a problem that's been fooling people for thousands of years, where they equate things like wealth with merit. I don't know what the solution is. Maybe Taleb should be required reading in schools. Maybe there is no solution and these people will continue to be exploited, as they always have been, for fun and profit.
“Attacks” against “the genetic aspect of IQ” are often informed criticisms of common misunderstandings of IQ, heritability, and genetics.
Obviously genetics are an important part of determining intelligence. That does not mean smart people who are attracted to smart people will produce smart kids.
That seems to be a common belief that arises when people think about genetics and intelligence, despite the numerous counter examples in other heritable traits with a genetic component (e.g. kids are not always taller or even as tall as their parents).
This ^
His parents had a ton of resources to allocate to him. They probably consciously or unconsciously taught him to think through logical problems the way they did thus allowing him to intrinsically be able to tackle problems quicker as he had the frameworks ingrained in him early on.
It's obviously a large genetic component. People arguing against that are doing so because they don't want to deal with the unpleasant implications of that fact. That's why the arguments are so heated. They are entirely based on emotion.
Oof. This is a toy model, and it has a serious problem with one of its assumptions:
> we can calculate that approximately 10,000 alleles control IQ
> Assume that the genotypes of parents 1 and 2 are completely independent, and that at each allele, the child has a 50/50 chance of inheriting each parent’s copy of that allele.
I’m not an expert, but I’m fairly confident that genetics don’t work like that. (IIRC they do in middle school, but they stop almost immediately in college…) Humans (mostly) have 26 pairs of chromosomes, and those chromosomes are full of bases, genes, alleles, etc. And they are not even close to independently inherited: gametes inherit long stretches of consecutive bases from a single parental chromosome. It’s a fascinating process and you can read about it here:
This has a large effect on the statistics of what one inherits from whom. I imagine it explains much of why people are likely to retain complex traits from their grandparents than one might expect, especially in cases where one or both parents are first-generation mixes of genetically rather distinct parents.
In any event, there are nowhere near 10k SNPs that can be independently inherited from a given pair of parents.
I have no particular comment on the overall model or conclusions of the OP, but it should at least acknowledge that its toy model is really quite implausible. (But I will note that my college class on genetics backed up its discussion of intrachromosomal recombination with math that was, if anything, even worse!)
Just so you guys know, this take is from my fellow ftxbro Caroline Ellison. This is her old blog. She deleted it, but it was archived. Now it's unironically number one on hacker news front page lol.
He bases this argument around the fact that IQ scores are not very predictive of income/wealth which I don't find very convincing as an argument that it's a "pseudoscientific swindle." Anybody who has been in the real world for a while and thinks that having a high IQ is the best/easiest way to make money isn't very smart.
A common trait among high IQ individuals is that they derive happiness from knowledge and learning, not so much from money. Sometimes there is overlap, like right now being a huge AI nerd, and you can make a fortune. But more often than not your choice academic field is low paying and out of the spotlight (like studying beetle migration patterns).
The article you've been posting even supports the idea that IQ testing is good for identifying the unintelligent. I'm referencing your own material and suggesting that there is value in identifying and helping those people.
And why should we believe his/your assertion that capitalistic value is the only objective measure of intelligence? No surprise an options trader wants to equate financial success to greater intelligence.
Interesting that we ignore the physical environment as a contributing factor in IQ, growth, and development. For example:
* Iodine supplementation during early life (a few weeks) increases IQ
* Organophosphate exposure increases autism (also why people who live near airports have higher incidence of cancer)
* Phalates and non-sticks reduce male reproductive organ size
* Music lessons in children increases IQ.
* L-arginine during childhood increases height and free growth hormone
So this article was number one on the hacker news front page and exploding in comments and internet points, but suddenly it vanished from public visibility. I don't see it marked as [flagged]. Did the webmasters just get embarrassed of it and manually take it away?
The idea that the genetic component of intelligence is "a number of independent, additive alleles" is surprising to me. I would have assumed that genetic intelligence is the result of many alleles interacting in complex ways (i.e. nonlinear).
If the IQ of the children is similar to the parents, how are people with high IQ born? Are they abnormalities? Also from what I gather on the whole the average IQ of the world is increasing, how is that explained?
>Also from what I gather on the whole the average IQ of the world is increasing, how is that explained?
Lots of factors impact IQ besides genetics. Education, nutrition, and environment are huge factors.
If you take two newborns and lock one in a dark cage, and raise the other with everything the world has to offer, you will see differences on IQ tests.
This isn't evidence that IQ doesn't exist. IQ is just one measure of applied thought and reasoning so you would expect it to track anything that affects those attributes.
It's random, with a mean that is correlated to the parents IQ. Just like height or any other number of other genetic traits.
> Are they abnormalities?
Yes.
> the average IQ of the world is increasing, how is that explained?
There are many different explanations. The biggest is that environmental factors that lower IQ such as malnourishment are decreasing. Another is that IQ is now more highly valued making high IQ individuals more fit to reproduce.
It would be amazing to me if it couldn't be summarized in a broadly useful way by a single number. That's not to say a single number captures every nuance of intelligence, but it seems weird to think that's it's not possible to make any blurring of that detail into a single number that has utility.
I recall reading an article about two high IQ and talented parents... both professors in very hard academic fields talking about their child and how they were trying to push their child into roles with high IQ.
The parents were from China too so you can imagine the intensity of this of this pressure.
Then one day the father realized that his child did not inherit the high IQ of both him and his wife. It wasn't a matter of not working hard or being lazy.
He realized the error of his ways... that the intense pressure he put on his daughter was wrong.
I can't seem to find that article anymore. But being Asian myself it really got me thinking and curious whether their are other parents out their who experienced something similar and what's it like for the parent or the child?
Like how does Micheal Jordan react to the fact that his son will never have the abilities he had no matter how much his son tries or how much pressure he puts on him?
I can answer this. As a parent of two girls, I used to put a lot of pressure on them to boost their development. However, it took me a while to realize that they were just normal, gifted children who were experiencing too much stress, which was not helping their IQ. I stopped putting pressure on them and now simply love them for who they are. I try to support them as much as I can and avoid the mistake of pushing them too hard. I have explained to them that I want to give them tools to survive in this world, and that I will never be disappointed in them if they can't use these tools.
There's also indication that "nurture" doesn't matter beyond the basics. The foundation is laid from day zero, and it's just an archive extracting itself into what it is. As long as negative stuff doesn't harm that process, it's as good as it's gonna get.
I didn't lie to them. They are my world. As soon as I discovered the stress that pressure was causing them, I stopped pushing it. As far as I know, excessive stress decreases mental capabilities rather than improving them.
Why should I be disappointed in them? It's like being angry at the weather for not suiting you. There are only about 1% of people on Earth with an IQ higher than 145, and even fewer of them realize their potential. However, there are no statistics on how many of these individuals are happy. I would like to do everything possible to make my daughters happy, which is a much more challenging task. They do not need to participate in a rat-race to achieve happiness though.
Lebron recently spoke briefly about his journey with his oldest son and balancing the desire to play with him in the NBA with respecting his sons wishes and being a good parent. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuNP3QaNpZ0
> The study, led by the University of York, found that parents' socioeconomic status and children's inherited DNA differences are powerful predictors of educational achievement.
> However, the research suggests that having the genes for school success is not as beneficial as having parents who are highly educated and wealthy. Only 47% of children in the study sample with a high genetic propensity for education but a poorer background made it to university, compared with 62% with a low genetic propensity but parents that are more affluent.
> The researchers found that children with a high genetic propensity for education who were also from wealthy and well-educated family backgrounds had the greatest advantage with 77% going to University. Meanwhile, only 21% of children from families with low socioeconomic status and low genetic propensity carried on into higher education.
So I can't speak to this specifically but I think it's well known reading to children when they're young improves their IQ. And that sounds pretty believable to me. In the formative years if you give the brain good info it's going to learn how to operate well. I know this is hand wavy, but I think wealth can be a proxy measure for a good home life in the formative years. So sorry I have no citations, but I find it pretty believable.
One-on-one tutoring by an expert is well known to be almost embarrassingly effective compared to classroom education[1]. It's also extremely expensive.
So not too long ago I think I figured out why people read fiction. I couldn't understand it, why would you want to know stories that weren't true? I think it's all about the social intelligence. True stories are what they are whether they're good or not. Fiction stories can be whatever the author wants them to be, so they can craft them for maximum drama. Hence why they might be good for diving into social and emotional intelligence.
So if you read fiction stories to a child you might have a lot to work with to teach them how to read people and how to interpret their emotions.
I think that you're significantly over-analyzing this. People read fiction because it's enjoyable, they like to have their imagination tickled, and it doesn't have to be tuned for maximum drama. This is like saying that you now understand why people would watch a movie which wasn't a documentary.
People, in general, implicitly learn how to read people and their emotions without coaching -- it's a natural part of being human for most. Autistic people, of course, are the exception here.
Anything that is engaging for THEM, and captures their imagination - although a lot of that rests with the person reading to them to bring it to life...
Just observe what makes them glow with excitement or intrigue and give them more of that...
Then perhaps steer them in the direction of their strengths - not yours.
Remember, it's their life and future not yours. Nurture them for in the direction of their own development...
Regardless of whether they stick with it, support them even when they switch to something else, the objective is the same.
what does that question even mean? anyone who has read almost anything (i except stuff like the marquis de sade) to kids must know that it is good for them, without worrying about whether the source is "considered good".
Elementary school teachers would read to their classes in the 80s.
They always picked books like that Shel Silvertein shit whose message
appealed more to adults than children. I remember being bored into fits
of rage and thinking "This is making me dumber. I want to go outside."
I understand work ethic to be a better predictor of wealth than intelligence. You can imagine a lots of smart slacker not living up to their potential.
I'm sure there is a combination of factors. Work ethic without intelligence probably limits your earning potential. Intelligence without work ethic also does.
An interesting study would be: is work ethic inherited (either genetically or culturally). It would be another confounder here, I think.
To work ethic without intelligence: yes I agree. The way I look at it is: Your intelligence puts a ceiling on what types of success you can have, your work ethic determines how far you will go with your chosen path.
Probably not everything, but I believe it could be correlated with testosterone. I'm sure that has a genetic, diet, and environmental component to it. So right away I can say: yes.
That's certainly a possibility and worthy of testing as a hypothesis. Income and IQ hold a positive correlation for the vast majority of the population. (I think the same is true of wealth, given the highly positive correlation for most of the population between income and wealth.)
White people are _not_ more intelligent than black people. And it is both factually incorrect and racist to believe so.
- "I never said white people were mo--" Sure, but that is nevertheless the belief held by 99% of the people who think that some ethnicities are inherently more intelligent than others. It's a reasonable assumption that that is what you think.
At no point did they say anything remotely related to race. You choose to make it about that.
If you take two people of the same race and one of them happens to have better genetics that lead to them being smarter, they are more likely to grasp the information provided to them and succeed in life.
I’m not going to pretend that there aren’t racist people in the world who believe what you were saying. I won’t pretend that there aren’t massive systematic issues in the western world that lead to non-white people having a harder lot in life.
I won’t pretend that you aren‘t trying to pour gasoline on the fire when it wasn’t even necessary. They made a polite comment and you just raged at them for no good reason. Calm down.
You might want to look at the GP's name.
Yes, they didn't mention it explicitly. In the context of being named "theclansman" though, it's very likely to be the line of thinking the user had.
The logical implications of genetics determining IQ is obvious.
If genetics can determine physical appearance and genetics groups many certain physical aspects into a collection of common features for a race then if genetics determines intelligence, by what black magic does this grouping suddenly stop at intelligence?
Are we saying genetics can make Asians all have black hair, brown eyes, a tendency of a smaller size and suddenly zero effect on intelligence? Doesn't seem logical.
Thus when someone brings up intelligence and genetics it is by inescapable logic that they are also saying something about race.
Hair and eye color are simple epigenetical traits, and very easily measurable. As for size, I don't know if you've traveled to East Asia recently, but the young generations are just as tall as we Westerners. I follow a number of Asian bodybuilders and they aren't any smaller than your average white bodybuilder. The stereotype is likely the product of a historically poor nutrition, but that has changed, and Asians born in the last 30-40 years are proof.
Intelligence, on the other hand, is far more complex to define, measure and test than eye color or height.
Average size is still smaller according to data. Google the stats according to age range. The results still point to the generality that Asians are smaller.
One metric for intelligence is IQ. If you don't think IQ is a good measure of intelligence then let's not talk about things with vague definitions. Replace every usage of the word "intelligence" in my post with "IQ". Now we can talk on more exact terms.
I love how straight forward you are, seriously, let's not beat around the bush this is basically what the conversation is gonna come down to.
IQ might be a completely useless number (as it has been pointed out, it doesn't predict success or anything like that), but denying that it's related to genetics is absurd too.
Agreed, if genetics didn’t have a factor then it’s like saying you can’t prove a human is smarter than a dog (the difference of course between species stems from genetics - similarly as between humans).
IQ is only a slight predictor of individual of individual success there are many other factors that are superior to IQ for predicting individual success.
However the paradox is that while IQ is not a good predictor of individual success, the economic success of a country correlates heavily with the average IQ of the people in that country.
It is a paradox. One cannot simply say that IQ doesn't "predict" success. From the data, the answer seems much more complicated.
IQ is a much better predictor, controlling for other known contributors, of success for individuals within, say, the United States, than it is for countries.
Sure, IQ “correlates strongly” with national economic success, but that’s because of other causal relationships, like that economic success predicts environmental conditions which are known contributors to IQ.
First off IQ only has a slight correlation with individual success past a certain point (someone with below 60 IQ is obviously going to have a hard time succeeding). The data shows that for high IQ and average IQ there is only a slight correlation with success.
Second what you said is patently false. We do not know if there is a causal relationship because a casual experiment is nearly impossible to conduct. This is very different from saying there is "no causal relationship." A correlation points to a possibility of causative relationships. Literally. You make a statement as if it was true, tell me the exact causal experiment you used to determine your statement about "no causal relationship".
Third. The correlation between economic success and IQ is much much stronger then the correlation between individual success and IQ.
Makes sense. If you're a genius in a country of people who make worse decisions (IQ/culture/other), you may ne worse off than an average person in a country with an average average decision making level
Even if ethnicities correlate with IQ, clumping them together into "white" and "black" buckets would just average out any differences because both "white" and especially "black" people are so genetically diverse.
But Ashkenazi Jews are undoubtedly more intelligent than both. They also end up with a disproportionate amount of over-performers across the arts, sciences, finance, media, and entrepreneurship.
Can't their success be more attributed to a culture that favors learning and education, as well as the relative financial prosperity of Ashkenazi Jews compared to other groups? That the children of successful artists, scientists, or financiers become successful artists, scientists and financiers themselves is least surprising.
I highly doubt it. For example in New York City there were historically immigrants from lots of different backgrounds all living in the same place working in the same industries. Is it just a coincidence that the most intelligent of them also became the most successful across every metric (on average)?
Of course. This is obvious. Anyone who disagrees is wrong. Just look at animal IQ.
Clearly human intelligence is determined genetically.
However, although human intelligence is clearly genetic and superior to most other animal intelligences there could be enough variability within the boundaries of human level intelligence such that variation in intelligence between humans could be influenced more heavily by other factors.
I always find it interesting when people attack the genetic aspect of IQ as nonexistent. Given the heritability of almost literally everything else in our body, why is it such a stretch that intelligence, the most complicated of all, is also heridible?
If that were the case, I'd love to know EXACTLY what Bill Gates's parents did growing up differently than mine. I read all the time, had a normal childhood, good food available, etc, yet am nowhere near his level of intelligence. Was it the cereal he ate? The weather? The arguments break down immediately when a simple (and proven) solution makes much more sense... it's his genes!