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Torchlight_Crimson comments on Genetic "Nature" is cultural too - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 March 2016 02:33PM

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Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 18 March 2016 10:00:52PM 1 point [-]

This can be tested by estimating how much IQ screens off race/gender as a success predictor

Got any good references on that? Googleing these kind of terms doesn't lead to good links.

National average IQ is strongly correlated with national wealth and development indexes

I know, but the way it does so is bizarre (IQ seems to have a much stronger effect between countries than between individuals). Then I add the fact that IQ is very heritable, and also pretty malleable (flynn effect), and I'm still confused.

Now, I'm not going to throw out all I previously believed on heredity and IQ and so on, but the picture just got a lot more complicated. Or "nuanced", if I wanted to use a positive term. Let's go with nuanced.

Comment author: Torchlight_Crimson 18 March 2016 10:44:45PM *  1 point [-]

I know, but the way it does so is bizarre (IQ seems to have a much stronger effect between countries than between individuals).

Why is this bizarre? It simply means that high IQ individuals don't capture all the value they create.

Edit: another possibility is that smart people tend to move to places that were doing well. I believe there was a thread in the comments to SSC a while back where it was discovered that the average IQ of American States correlated with a rather naively constructed measure of "favorable geography", e.g., points for being on the coast and for having navigable rivers.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 21 March 2016 10:23:31AM 3 points [-]

Why is this bizarre? It simply means that high IQ individuals don't capture all the value they create.

Consider that if it had been the opposite - IQ was more a personal benefit than a country benefit - we'd be explaining it as "obviously smart people benefit themselves at the expense of others". Being able to explain something or its opposite isn't explaining, unless we dig deeper.

Comment author: Crownless_Prince 21 March 2016 11:50:39PM 0 points [-]

Consider that if it had been the opposite - IQ was more a personal benefit than a country benefit - we'd be explaining it as "obviously smart people benefit themselves at the expense of others".

Yes, it's called basing your beliefs on the evidence.

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 22 March 2016 11:04:25AM 2 points [-]

No, it's choosing the first plausible rationalisation for the data. People have been suggesting lots of plausible explanations for the effect, and they all sound plausible (and may all the true, to some extent), but we really don't know until we test.

Comment author: The_Bird 23 March 2016 02:34:46AM 3 points [-]

So, why were you calling reality "bizarre" again?

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