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Nov 18, 2021
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I saw in a comment below that this user was banned. Is it actually several accounts with the same username?

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Yes, the one banned above is "58540328-paulafox", this one is "58704307-paulafox".

User ID is in the hyperlink for the photo.

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They should start auto-ban anyone using this text or linking this domain.

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Good catch.

Too bad its more than a full time job staying ahead of bad actors.

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It doesn't have to be. This is totally made for modern pattern-recognition (a.k.a. "AI") techniques, and if they pulled their head out of the self-driving cars and automatic diagnosis of cancer clouds for little bit they could do something genuinely useful, like produce far more robust spam-posting and spam-calling software. Bah.

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Er...I meant spam-posting and spam-calling *blocking* software, although alas I suppose the latter implies the former, and *somebody* will be tempted to the dark side...

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"Somebody".

Try "half of Russia's IT industry".

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I think they tried, and found that when it fails then it fails in publicly embarrassing ways. For example twitter (I think it was them) has AI to try and auto-ban child pornography, and it auto-banned that picture of a naked child running from a napalm attack in Vietnam. Cue public humiliation and talk about why we shouldn't be using "algorithms" for important stuff.

The other 99.9% of the time when the algorithm does its job, you don't hear about it, of course.

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Spam-filtering text is a billion times easier than spam-filtering images, though.

This isn't even particularly clever spam, it's a short string, the same every time, and explicitly talking about nude photos instead of something more generic like "please look at my blog." Websites have known how to filter stuff like that for decades.

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Probably just a coincidence. A lot of Paulas surnamed Fox getting into nude modeling these days. ;)

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Nov 18, 2021
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Nov 18, 2021
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She can come back once she's dropped enough acid to kill a buffalo.

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Paula, one of these times I suppose I’m going to break down and click on your link.

But geez, at my age looking at naked pictures of a 24 year old female feels like some sort of statutory lechery

Really, can’t you spam some other blog for a while?

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> I suppose I’m going to break down and click on your link

Note that it will likely have no photos but plenty of attempts to steal your money or install malware on your computer.

Unless spammers got more honest than in past and there will be some stolen images.

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If I ever did click it would be from a Linux VM on some public WiFi.

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Just like when I buy kilos of black tar heroin or stolen identity papers on the Dark Web.

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I keep banning her and she keeps posting; I'm not sure what's going wrong here.

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Maybe she likes being banned.

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Different accounts all the time. We're actively working on this, should have a fix soon.

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What's up with the curved brackets BTW? (I don't think they can really be called parentheses...)

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It's the Russian spelling of ":)".

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Nov 18, 2021
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Nov 18, 2021
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The sporadic exhortations against IQ seem out of place in this otherwise very interesting post. Sure, it's a very high-level description; but from a genetic standpoint, so is height, and that doesn't mean it's not useful. I've noticed that most people who trash IQ tend to be the ones who have it. A person with a -1 standard deviation IQ wouldn't be able to read such a post, let alone write it.

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Everybody believes in IQ when talking about people on the other side of the political divide who aren’t that smart.

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I'm sorry but I don't see how this is even a debate. No one would even think to deny the genetic heritability and "clustering" in families of something like height. Why does there need to be a debate on familial clustering of IQ, which is so obviously just as heritable? I find it borderline unbelievable that anyone would seriously take the position that intelligence isn't genetically heritable. If anyone truly claims to hold that position, I'd have a hard time believing that they really believe it and aren't just advancing it as a moral posture that reflects their values and preferences, rather than a solid belief they'd place risk on.

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Nov 18, 2021
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> Because clearly genetics can result in things going quite wrong indeed.

Isn't this the same as saying "clearly the effect of genetics is very large"?

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Right, so you don't actually believe that genetics are unrelated to intelligence. You're just not sure what the relative proportion is between genetics and other influences. That's of course something quite arguable, but to think genetics have NO relation is a really out-there belief and I doubt most people who say they "believe" it would be willing to risk anything substantial betting on that belief.

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As pointed out elsewhere on this thread, being a dynastic ruler/elite is also strongly clustered, but I think you'd struggle to make an argument that the reason for that is principally down to genetic inheritance of genes for rulership. I'd also chip in the inevitable point that language is perfectly heritable, but candidate genes for French versus German are in short supply.

To my mind, the debate is less about whether there is a heritable genetic element to intelligence and more about how much of an effect that element has versus environment and interaction.

If you're of the view that a most of one's accomplishments are due to environment (womb environment, good childhood nutrition, avoiding brain-damaging diseases and toxins, a stable upbringing, access to physical and social resources, and networking amongst equally-advantaged peers), then the clustering makes perfect sense without having to invoke the idea of genetically superior dynasties moving amongst us.

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Language isn't perfectly heritable. There's immigration and adoption and language change and so on.

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It more or less is, at least in the sense that children who grow up in a household with two English speakers are invariably English speakers themselves. Conversely, the number of children who spontaneously grow up unable to speak their parent's language, but able to speak a foreign language, is statistically nil. NaĂ¯ve application of heritability estimation thus makes language completely heritable (ie: h^2 = 1, or as near as).

The point of the example is that heritability only works if you've fulfilled the underlying assumptions that make it work as a statistical tool. Fail to do that, and it loses its usefulness.

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Nov 18, 2021
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Nov 18, 2021
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If the heritability of language were 1, most Jamaican DNA would be English, and most Turkish DNA would be Turkic, and most Hungarian DNA would be Uralic, and I would have the same main language as my parents, and my hypothetical future children would have the same main language as me, and so on, none of which is the case.

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Exactly. Plus, it's quite trivial to prove that it is not heritable by simply teaching people new languages.

We have tried to train people to improve their intelligence and it hasn't worked, but we teach people new skills like speaking languages quite easy.

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What are you talking about? The heritability of native language/mother tongue is basically 0. Are identical twins more likely to speak the same language as non-identical twins? Are biological siblings more likely to have the same language as siblings adopted in the same family at birth? No.

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This. I think Toxn has a slightly borked understanding of what heritability means in the pop-gen sense and how it's studied, though I will mention that the verbal component of IQ is highly heritable despite language being, in some sense, an entirely cultural construct.

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If you're born and raised in a country whose language is different from your parents' mother tongue, you're almost certain to learn your birth country's language much better. In this sense, the heritability of language from parents to children is quite low. Language is mainly inherited from your peers.

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> If you're born and raised in a country whose language is different from your parents' mother tongue, you're almost certain to learn your birth country's language much better.

No, that's wrong in basically every respect.

> Language is mainly inherited from your peers.

But this isn't wrong. Whoever your peers are, you will be able to speak to them. You will also be able to speak to your parents, assuming you grew up with exposure to them. If your peers and your parents don't overlap, you'll be able to speak at least one language from each group with fluency. If your peers and parents don't overlap with your country, you are unlikely to be able to speak your country's language. Consider that Cleopatra was, in the tenth generation of her dynasty, the first one able to speak Egyptian.

The idea that you might learn your country's language *better* than your parents' language(s) comes from the fact that young children will attempt to force their parents to communicate in whatever the child feels is the local language. If the parents give in, the children will forget their parents' language. If not, not.

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It's quite trivial to disprove that language is heritable - you can teach people new languages.

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More fundamentally, people of Korean or Nigerian descent who grow up in the US from a very young age speak American English exactly like native speakers.

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> I'd also chip in the inevitable point that language is perfectly heritable, but candidate genes for French versus German are in short supply.

Well, that's obviously false. Candidate genes aren't in short supply at all; it's not difficult to distinguish French speakers from German speakers by looking at their genes.

It just happens that in this case we know by other means that the genes aren't affecting the phenotype.

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Finally, someone gets it. We know that what language you speak isn't heritable in a pop-gen sense because we know that it can't be genetic.

It's only if you ignore common sense and assume that it is that the trouble starts - because it looks very heritable indeed if you just gormlessly run the numbers. Which is why the heritability of what language you speak is used as an example to teach students about one of the classic mistakes.

So the next question becomes: why do you think that a trait obviously is or isn't genetic?

Moving to your other point: being 'French' versus 'German' is obviously a trait that you could assign to genetics, because almost any group of people can be arbitrarily separated into two populations according to an arbitrary (but measurable) trait. These populations will then inevitably have some statistically different genetic differences between them. But does "French population having a statistically greater proportion of {random SNP} then German population" actually mean anything in a causative sense?

That's one of the prime problems with population genetics as a discipline, and one that some very smart people have expended a lot of effort trying to untangle. And, unfortunately, most of the solutions are completely impossible to use when looking at human populations.

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I should also mention that I meant "candidate genes for encoding French or German into the brain" versus "candidate genes for being French versus German" but that's how you interpreted it so we'll run with that.

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Toxn, it seems apparent that something related to problem solving and learning has genetic components and is heritable. For the sake of argument lets call it IQ. However, even if two different (racial?) groups have identical distributions of IQ, 70% of "their" population will still be smarter than 30% of "your" population.

Is it really worth getting upset that maybe it's 72%(or 68%) of "theirs" that are smarter(or dumber) than 30% of "yours"?

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I don’t get that either. Every so often the kind of people who believe in IQ differences in population give Ireland a lower score than the U.K. I’m Irish and this has no effect on my well being whatsoever.

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I have no idea what my IQ is and the discussion is pretty inane - but I can tell you that our brains are a mass of cells* that develop in a carefully choreographed timed manner and then all those cells talk to each other super specifically and what is heritable is genetics behind neurodevelopment and signaling

Also, we should change the conversation from what is heritable to like what CAN be heritable idk because I presume future parents are going to want Bobby to be an edited super computer. But what about ethics! Like 20% of the adult female population are on hormonal contraception that interferes with learning and bioethics kinda died in this country at Fort Pitt.

Eg I have to actively suppress how well I remember things because I inherited two copies of protein that can only be transcribed as a specific isoform that always stabilizes this kinase involved in presynaptic facilitation so that my memory, which is already advantaged from being female, is such that I used a dating app once in Seattle years ago and now know the names, hobbies, jobs, and backgrounds of at least 30% of strangers I see in stores and streets. (I think maybe because human data is interesting). I was locked out of work once and recognized a guy from another lab from Tinder and pretended to know him to go in and get my badge. Entire credit card numbers from 2008, protocol deviations, Erma Bombeck passages, bus advertisements in Dublin in 2001 etc

Being a grouch in certain aspects (PMDD etc) is heritable - a certain valine on a BDNF receptor means BDNF binding won't recruit E2F and EZH2 to make sure the right transcriptional targets are efficiently turned on. Schizophrenia is heritable. Auto-immune narcolepsy is heritable. Non autoimmune narcolepsy where your body has a diminished capacity to accurately sense concentrations of molecules that accumulate during waking hours is also heritable.

Contactins are heritable. Sex chromosomes are heritable and those are hugely impactful to what your cerebellum is doing. Certain facets of verbal intelligence are heritable.

IQ is relatively (relatively) useless- Toni Morrison was never going to be Craig Venter and the "great" scientists are usually just products of their time and technology. Great music, great literature - heavy input from zeitgeist. I could play the harp for one cancer patient or I could go do basic research to help out a bunch more. Or I could do nothing while hurtling back into oblivion after being a brief infinitesimal blip on the cosmological timescale.

Do what interests you unabashedly and focus on actual progress, actual learning in whatever. Forcing yourself to read the latest Malcolm Gladwell book is just going to make you cringe in twenty years. (Scott's work is actually useful/deductive AND SO PEDANTIC IT'S GREAT not just airport pop science, it's kind of rude of me to use the comparison at all tbh)

The last however many thousands of years of epistemology have given us a scientific culture where my friends dread having their research scooped when it should be celebrated as establishing reproducibility. So like, ornithology, paleontology, ichthyology, speleology, virology, PALEOVIROLOGY, all potentially more worthwhile endeavors-

*and like way more nonsense

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Nov 18, 2021
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Not disagreeing. I think kugel was suggesting that IQ is unimportant relative to other traits, and I just wasn't clear on where they got that impression from.

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"Like 20% of the adult female population are on hormonal contraception that interferes with learning and bioethics kinda died in this country at Fort Pitt"

What is the relevance of Fort Pitt here, out of curiosity? This doesn't seem to be hurting women in education, in any case, including at college level.

"IQ is relatively (relatively) useless- Toni Morrison was never going to be Craig Venter and the "great" scientists are usually just products of their time and technology."

I don't know what this statement is supposed to mean, given that IQ is literally the most predictive thing in all of psychology and the social sciences by about a factor of 3. Top scientists all have high IQs, even if not every high IQ person becomes a top scientist (or a top anything.)

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I also think its worth noting that this seems to suggest Toni Morrison does not have high IQ and why would we think that? Apparently, despite her family's upbringing she went to Howard University and "was on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club", reading a lot of Tolstoy as a child (which I cant even do now!)

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Have you read Scott's review of "The Cult of the Smart"? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-cult-of-smart

Skip down to part ii and read 'the part about race'. There is something about IQ and genetics that makes many liberal heads explode. And they will bend over backwards to avoid the subject. My reading of that section is that even Scott's head can't handle it yet. What if most of "The Bell Curve" is correct? (I read the Bell Curve.. bleech.. long and depressing. I would recommend "Coming Apart" by Murray. More tightly written with the same ideas, and nothing on race.)

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Dang "Cult of Smart" Sorry for screwing up your book title F. DeBoer

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Yeah I can see that it seems to make some people nervous, but that still seems weird to me. Why wouldn't they just cast it on the pile of all the other unfair things in life and unearned privileges/detriments they like to point to? Skin color, parental income, body shape, sex, etc?

I mean, isn't it *worse* if slow/unintelligent people could be said to deserve it because they had control over it? Like it's their fault if they didn't do whatever it is they were supposed to do to not be in that situation? If one can change one's IQ and control it, then what excuse do dumb people have? If that was the case, then everyone else would have moral authority to look down on them for their bad choices. But I don't think anyone actually thinks that way, which is why this seems like an imaginary argument. Maybe it is just made out of some very misguided sense of hope that with enough effort, everyone could be an engineer or scientist, which is very silly. Even most smart people can't do those things.

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I don't know what my IQ is, but I'm a poli-sci major and the average for poli-sci majors is 115. That is admittedly a very tenuous basis for estimating my IQ, but I can tell you my IQ is not 130+. That being said I find the evidence about IQ and heritability being fairly high convincing.

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Nov 18, 2021
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Can't you see I'm jumping to unfounded conclusions about my IQ? I wouldn't do that if I was 130+ :)

No but I know a few people who are members of Mensa where minimum acceptance is in the 130 neighborhood, and there's a noticeable chasm between them and myself particularly in mathematical ability.

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> There's not much information there. It's expected behavior.

I would expect most of the high IQ folks to insist that their success is a result of *hard work*.

> Now show me a low IQ person that looks at all the studies and says...

I guess most of the difficulty is with this part of the sentence already.

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> I would expect most of the high IQ folks to insist that their success is a result of *hard work*.

I think smart people are often proud of being smart. (See this community.) In more public settings though I agree that it's more socially rewarding, at least in the US, to present a story of one's success that emphasizes the things you had to work for.

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Are you implying that being "proud of being smart" means they think they achieved or earned their intelligence? I don't think that's the case. I think most smart people realize they did nothing to earn their intelligence and were just born that way. However, if by "being proud" you mean emotionally attached to it, or glad of it, that is different. And one could be proud of what they've used their intelligence to achieve, assuming it's something valuable and not something like using their intelligence to mastermind bank robberies or ponzi schemes. I also think that asserting one's intelligence and using the tools one has available to one's advantage would constitute pride, it would just be doing what everyone does with whatever their gifts are.

I am taller than average and smarter than average and I don't consider either of those things to be earned or anything but genetic luck in who my (tall, smart) parents are. But I certainly *enjoy* and feel lucky for those privileges, and wouldn't want to give them up. But I also don't see the point in pretending that either of those things aren't true, any more than denying my genetic detriments. I don't think that constitutes pride.

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Well, perhaps it's a semantic issue. I often use the word "proud" to encompass qualities that one didn't necessarily work for, but just admires about oneself. For example, one can also be proud of being Irish (which is not the same as being proud of the accomplishments of the Irish).

That being said, having thought about this specific question a bit more, maybe it's true that people who were born with high intelligence wouldn't be actively trying to convince people that IQ is genetic. They might think so, from personal experience, but it's not as much in their interests as convincing people that IQ is *real*, i.e. that intelligence, wherever it came from, is both variable in the population and important. This is an important case to make if they want their skills to be valued.

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For what it's worth, Scott wrote this piece - https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/ in response to the people who *do* look at all the studies and conclude that they're doomed to be in the intellectual dumpster *relative to the people they're comparing themselves against*, albeit not relative to the population average.

Of course, there is an obvious confounder here, that low-IQ people are less likely to look at studies in the first place, and less likely to be able to make sense of them if they try.

And given the whole 'liberals are on average smarter than conservatives' thing, it wouldn't surprise me if the people arguing for an all-environmental explanation were on average as smart as those arguing for a part-hereditarian explanation (even if the tiny handful of people who actually study the subject for a living are probably smarter than the average liberal and also mostly support a part-hereditarian explanation)

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Note that *g*, the general intelligence factor that IQ measures, was discovered before we found out that it was heritable. *g* was discovered by observation - we observed that students showed strong correlation in grades/performance across all subject matters, and IQ was developed to measure *g*.

As such, there was no expectation when *g* was developed that it would be heritable, though it is indeed HIGHLY heritable - possibly north of 80% in developed countries these days.

One thing that is worth noting is that it is likely that *g* was more heritable amongst high income families than low income families prior to the 20th century, because high income families would feed and stimulate their children adequately while low-income families were less likely to do so. Indeed, *g* was likely suppressed amongst many in the lower classes due to stunting due to inadequate nutrition (people got significantly taller as nutrition improved until the mid-to-late 20th century, when people got adequate nutrition across the board and height stopped going up).

This probably resulted in the pool of smart people being much more restricted back then, even more than would be expected, because fewer poor people were well fed than rich people, and there were also fewer rich people in general.

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Nov 18, 2021
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Well, it's actually worse than that. Regression towards the mean doesn't even work that way. They should regress towards the mean of their parents' intelligence, not of the general population.

Moreover, it's likely that a lot of the environmental factors there are highly non-random; having smart intellectual parents and other role models probably is a positive factor that these people would all have in common, which is a decidedly non-random factor in their favor. Likewise, all being well-nourished is a non-random bonus in their favor.

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It would be very strange indeed if, of all the characteristics of human beings, intelligence was the one thing that did NOT have a component derived from genes. So I would say the proposition that intelligence comes from some other source needs to be defended, as this is the strange new hypothesis.

And it's first big big test is going to be: if human intelligence is *not* in some part the result of our genes, why are we clearly more intelligent than horses or dogs? If it's *all* about education, say, why can't we teach algebra to a horse?

And why is it that we can clearly breed *animals* for intelligence, if intelligence has no significant genetic component? Are we not animals, too?

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Nov 18, 2021
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I think your first paragraph assumes that there are only a limited number of ways to *measure* intelligence, and if a person lacks the "language skills," so to speak, necessary to accomplish the test, you'll assign them the wrong intelligence. It's like the old "Ebonics" argument that blacks do more poorly on the SAT because they are reared using a different dialect of English and therefore it's as you were giving a test written in Latin to someone raised Greek.

Whether that is true or not is kind of an operational question, but I'm dubious, precisely because we *can* measure the intelligence of animals, who can't talk at all, and aren't trained in human modes of communication. To be sure, it's a lot harder than if you can teach someone English and have him take a multiple choice test. But I think in general you may be overestimating the difficulty of measuring intelligence. You don't *have* to do it using written language, indeed the IQ of very young children is measured (reliably) in different ways, e.g. visual puzzle solving. I vaguely recall reading somewhere that the best diagnostic of intelligence at a young age is the ability to mentally rotate the picture of a 3D object, and imagine accurately what it would look like from another angle.

I certainly agree intelligence is a force multiplier, that's kind of its definition, actually, since there are no problems in the real world that can be solved *just* by thinking -- you always have to act on your thoughts in some way, so here comes strength, speed, skill, communication, et cetera. And it seems very reasonable deficits in these can be made up for by IQ. I dunno if this is the accepted reason why poor eyesight is well correlated with intelligence.

But I'm not sure how this relates to the size of its genetic component. Can you explain what you mean a bit?

I'm also not sure why you say there is so much variance. I would have said there is remarkably *little* variance in human intelligence. I mean, if you compare us to chimps, say, the difference between species utterly dwarfs the variation among humans. Almost none of us fails to acquire reasonably sophisticated language, or cannot master elementary math, and yet at the other end almost none of us acquires *many* sophisticated languages, or is able to produce original thoughts in math. If I imagine what humans look like to a hypothetical dog anthropologist, or conversely a hyperintelligent Martian xenobiologist, I can readily imagine either basically assigning all humans an IQ of 100 +/- some noise which doesn't really matter.

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Nov 18, 2021
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The best evidence (besides the obvious, twin studies) is that IQ doesn't vary much over lifespan. If it was so environmentally influenced, you would see kids that seemed smart at age 7 or 17 being dumb at 37 or 57, and vice versa, depending on lifestyle and choices. But that really doesn't happen. People who are identifiably smart as kids are generally still identifiably smart as adults and same goes for people who are slower or average. I can remember who the fast readers and obviously smart kids were in my elementary school and look them up on Facebook now in my 40s to see where they ended up in life and what level of education they completed and none of it is surprising -- the kids smart in 3rd grade are the ones who have high-education and high intelligence required professions as adults. Most of the outcomes were pretty predictable in 3rd grade. And I don't think class explains it because where I grew up everyone was solidly and truly middle class...there weren't either poor or rich kids, almost everyone's parents worked in government jobs of some sort (teachers, police, various administrators, etc.). The difference is their native intelligence.

How weird would it be if there *wasn't* an intelligence lottery? Everything else is a lottery...where and when you're born and who your parents are and what you look like and how healthy you are and literally everything else that is random and arbitrary and unearned. Some kind of existential intelligence socialism where everyone was the same and born endowed with the same genetic opportunity would be profoundly bizarre, absent human interference and genetic engineering. I just can't wrap my head around anyone thinking that would be the natural default state.

Also, when you say it would be "heavily selected for", do you mean survival selection or sexual selection? You don't have to be very smart to simply survive and reproduce. You would certainly think there would be sexual selection and thus assortative mating, which should result in the variations we in fact see. In which case, if someone is upset about their poor luck in the lottery, I guess they can blame their parents for their choice of mate.

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Nov 18, 2021
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Oh I can think of lots of negatives.

Say I've got three knobs,

Speed

Introspection/

Play into adult hood.

Well speed costs energy... you can't fuel the rest of the body

Introspection, means you're lost in thought as the tiger comes up and eats you.

And play into adult hood, means later entry into the breeding population... less kids.

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Ah I see. Well...are you sure about that? My impression is that being of unusually high intelligence *is* a drawback, in a species like ours, where so much of your success (reproductive in the case of evolutionary pressure) depends on your social interaction. Most extremely intelligent people I know are at least a bit out of step socially, and have some additional difficulty with finding mates and propagating. I don't find it all that unlikely that high intelligence, past a certain point, actually is a drawback and reduces reproductive fitness.

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Nov 19, 2021
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Social interaction is one of the things intelligence is good for. Quite possibly, social interaction is the thing intelligence was *invented* for. There's a common misconception that "smart" means "nerdy" means "socially inept", but that only applies to about 20% of the world's smart people. The other 80%, are really smart about how to interact with people, and generally quite successful.

And other things, sometimes including nerdy STEM things.

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I've got two silly/ simple models for IQ; one is clock speed... maybe some people think faster, and second is amount of time looking outwards and looking inwards... more introspection. Good for the artist, maybe bad for hunter/ gatherer.

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Well, you could test the first, by just seeing whether lower-IQ people had the same quality of ideas as higher-IQ people, but just much slower. Doesn't really feel right to me. I know there are people who are smarter than me, and it feels like they can do stuff I can just never ever do, no matter how much time I spend on it. There's some qualitative difference.

Conversely, I know I'm smarter than some other people, and I can kind of feel the difference, like I can just "see" stuff that they can't. If it's just a question of following some deductive reasoning to its end, they (or me in comparison to smarter person) can just doggedly apply time and effort and get to the same place. But when it comes to induction, to discovering a brand-new synthetic outlook -- it doesn't work. No amount of thrashing around ever seem to produce the necessary flash of insight -- more's the pity.

I have no clue what intelligence looks like, aside from Justice Potter's observation that I know it when I see it. The best I can do is say it kind of looks like the ability to see ghosts. You can see things other people can't. Holes in arguments that look solid to others. Assumptions other people don't realize are there. Implications other people miss. Connections linking this to that. It doesn't feel like the usual way it's described, where you kind of have this big structure of some field or other, and the roof is obviously missing, so the smar tperson comes along and puts on the roof. It feels more like the house *looks* perfectly sound, but then the smart person comes along and says hey you've run a pair of conductors from the street to every single lightbulb and socket independently, hundreds of independent wires, which is why the walls are so thick -- but this is totally unnecessary, you could just run one pair of wires everywhere and link each bulb with a short connector to the main pair. And we all slap our foreheads and say Jesus Christ, he's right, why didn't we think of that? That, to me, is what intelligence looks like.

But *how* it's done -- I have absolutely no idea. It honestly feels like something physically impossible, if you consider the brain to be just a big mess of circuits running some very complicated but deterministic algorithm. How can you programa *anything* to see the never seen? Beats me.

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Thanks for the long reply. The speed thing might explain the sports connection. Pele or Michael Jordan, besides everything else, are just thinking faster too. Re: where do new ideas come from. Yeah there is a part of intelligence that is magical. But the engineering part of my brain wants to imagine a bunch of knobs that I can adjust. I think there is also a part of intelligence, that is staying young... continuing to play into adulthood. (That's my excuse for play anyway.) There is also a big nurture component (the point of the post.) Put a bunch of smart people together and it's good for all of them.

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Hmm maybe. It's a question of whether if you slowed the game down some, they would not fare as much better as other people do. That would be an interesting experiment to run. I guess also I feel we need to distinguish speed as a consequence of raw CPU clock time, and speed as a result of better chip design. Maybe Jordan comes up with the right solution faster not so much because his neurons are ticking over faster, but because they run down fewer blind alleys. To me that feels like a qualitatively different thing than just raw speed -- not sure if this would be ecompassed by what you mean.

In this I'm reminded of human v. machine chess. For some time humans kept ahead of machines even though they necessarily did many, many times fewer computations. They were just more efficient about it, somehow -- they had to mentally work through far fewer moves, because they were able to dispose of the really dumb ones much earlier.

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I took an IQ test that broke down the overall score by a lot of sub-scores on different dimensions (object rotation, verbal, etc.), and processing speed is one of the dimensions. My score came back high on every dimension *except for* processing speed, which was totally average and dragged down the overall score. Which I guess must mean I almost all the answers right, it just took me a long time. Anyway, my mediocre processing time dragged the overall score down a few points, but not that much. So I think processing speed is a factor but only a small one among many.

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Oh so in my model everyone gets a different set of knob settings. Are you any good at sports? I'm above average IQ, but by maybe 1 SD (and dropping as I age... the Flynn effect) I loved some sports, soccer and basketball... fast reaction to the other player was the fun of it to me.

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Ha, no, I am literally comically bad at sports, particularly if they involve fast reaction times like not getting hit in the face by the ball flying in my direction. ;) I'm fine at sports that involve some problem-solving, like indoor climbing. But am otherwise a pretty stereotypical nerd who no one would pick to be on any sports team!

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Oh good... no offense meant. :^) It would be a data point against my speed knob.

My only IQ measure is SAT tests from ~1976. High math 750 and average vocabulary 550. I love reading but my communication skills lack. I'm jealous of people who can write well.

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My crackpot hypothesis for the nature of g is almost completely orthogonal to both of those: working memory size (cache), the whole 7 +/- 2 thing. Someone who can keep 9 chunks of information active will think circles around someone who can only keep 5.

Inspiration: observing my coworkers (mostly devs at a FAANG) unable to grok my points once the complexity of a situation crossed some threshold when they had no difficulty with a similar situation only slightly less complex.

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Yeah memory size should be another knob for sure.

( I do know a few genius types with big heads... is head size and IQ a forbidden topic?)

I'm not sure what inspiration is. But to understand something I have to have a model of it in my brain. Maybe big model size goes along with memory size? I can imagine saying that some problem is too big for me to hold the parts in my brain at the same time... so I'm missing some solution space.

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Brain size correlates positively with IQ to about 0.3 to 0.4 according to MRI studies.

Interestingly, the size of the brains of various groups are what you'd expect in terms of ordering if the differences between the groups were driven by brain size.

However, there are two major rubs:

1) If brain size was the only cause for group differences, group differences would be significantly smaller than what we actually observe.

2) Women have significantly smaller brains than men on average, but don't appear to be any less intelligent on average, and the difference in distribution is small (men do have more variability, but that is probably due to being XY rather than XX).

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Something of a counterexample: I have a pretty average digit span of 6, but competed at a national level in math in my school days. Though I did feel like one of the slower thinkers at my level.

I think "working memory" is definitely a factor of intelligence, alongside "speed" and "efficiency", but I also suspect it's not as important as other factors.

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This is assuming all chunks are of equal size. However, someone who has bigger "chunks" has a big advantage over someone with smaller "chunks". The number of "chunks" you keep in memory isn't the only variable; it's also a question of chunking efficiency.

Moreover, as you get better at doing stuff, you get better at chunking; when something is fresh and new, your chunks suck, but when you get used to it, you get way better at it.

The rate at which you improve your chunking efficiency is also an important variable.

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>It would be very strange indeed if, of all the characteristics of human beings, intelligence was the one thing that did NOT have a component derived from genes. So I would say the proposition that intelligence comes from some other source needs to be defended, as this is the strange new hypothesis.

The plausibility of a proposition is not the main determinant of whether it's the one that needs defending (not that this is how I'd prefer things are).

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According to whom? It is to me. The stranger and more novel the claim, the more evidence I need to consider it. Others are of course perfectly free to have their own criteria, but I'd say mine is pretty mainstream here. The proposition that the Moon regolith is x meters deep is at a different level than the proposition that it's made of cheese

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Mainstream "here", sure. But the foremost reason that IQ (and the race-IQ relationship in particular) is commonly discussed *here* is because the predominant opinion is at odds with the predominant opinion in most places not here. On this topic especially, many people outside of here put more weight on the (perceived) effects of establishing one or the other proposition as more likely to be true (eg, believing that IQ is mostly inherited means exacerbating racism), and thus put the "needs to be defended" burden on the hereditarian side. So I'd say that flipping this burden to better match this community's greater emphasis on truth vs the effects of "truth" only serves to make it easier to "win" a debate on ACX. On the other hand, if you ever want the discussion to yield anything, even if tiny, that might help convince someone of the hereditarian side, it's better to conduct the discussion under the assumption that the genetic basis of intelligence needs to be defended.

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Huh, my limited understanding is that the genetic piece of IQ is pretty well established. (But being the third rail of liberal politics, no one in their right mind touches it.) If you ask for sources, I'm going to find some by C. Murray ("Coming Apart"). Do you reject C. Murray as a source?

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No, and efforts to persuade me would be redundant seeing as I'm already of the view that intelligence is mostly genetic.

>Huh, my limited understanding is that the genetic piece of IQ is pretty well established.

Your perception may vary based on the company you keep, but in my experience most people of the "politically informed but not insane enough to sniff out wrongthink and form mobs on social media" variety (ie, most people) are very resistant to the notion that intelligence is genetic. For example, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument that such a relationship doesn't even make sense because intelligence can't be defined.

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Oh OK got it, thanks for clarifying. Probably good advice for others. For me it's of no use, because I don't care about persuading other people about the nature of intelligence. I'm pretty convinced at this point that beliefs on this subject are for the most part not amenable to argument or persuasion no matter what, because it has become yet another of those weird tribal totems we have accumulated, where you are required to hold Opinion X on Subject Y in order to be accepted as a member in good standing of Tribe Z.

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How low IQ counts as "low"? For people of significantly below average IQ, expecting them to meaningfully interpret the outputs of studies seems unrealistic.

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Realistically speaking only about 1 in 6 people in developed countries like the US are capable of understanding the output of studies in terms of raw literacy level, and half of those are probably not actually capable of that for other reasons (lack of adequate science training, for instance).

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If anything, I think it's probably fewer than that.

https://www.wyliecomm.com/2021/08/whats-the-latest-u-s-literacy-rate/

I'm not sure whether "able to meaningfully parse the content of a scientific journal article" strictly tracks any of the literacy levels outlined here, but I'd suspect it's more demanding from a literacy standpoint, putting aside scientific knowledge, than the 12% bracket outlined here.

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I've seen this happen quite a few times, and iirc Scott has written about it at times when was trying to explain that, if you accept the strong evidence for IQ as a powerful predictor for success and a variety of desirable life outcomes, accepting the strong heritability is actually the most charitable option.† I've also seen posts about it over on LessWrong.

Both had mentions of people who looked into the research about a) how good a predictor for success in various areas IQ is and b) that it can be changed very little by external factors and interventions, and then asked the respective communities things like:

"I've only got an IQ of 110. Does that really mean that I basically don't have a chance of making any significant contribution to [very cognitively demanding and challenging discipline, like AI alignment and other difficult technical fields]?"

Granted, 110 isn't exactly a "low" IQ, but neither is it high, and if you're looking at these kinds of disciplines than "normal" might really not cut it.

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† Rough outline of my reconstruction of the general argument by Scott for why the "hereditarian left" position allows

The strong heritability of IQ within rich Western countries is very firmly established. If you deny this dominating hereditary factor influencing intelligence, and focus on environmental factors - then even if you manage to raise all children in perfect, enriching, stimulating environments with great parenting and teachers etc, you will still end up with huge variation in intelligence, because the heritable component is so strong - in fact, when you give everyone a perfectly enriching upbringing with great nutrition in an unpolluted environment, the heritability is going to go up to 100% from those 70-80 at adulthood most western countries currently have.

But if you then keep the view that heritability plays no major role, you get into a kind of "blank slate" + "equality of opportunity" trap, like when people say (I'm going to use the German system to keep things simple, as we have negligible tuition fees - if any - and there are government issued student loans that are enough for basic costs of student living in all but the most expensive university cities (Munich, Frankfurt), of which only half need to be paid back, and only up to a certain amount, and only once you have income.):

"Every child and young person can work their way to a good position in our society!

They all have the option to work hard in school, get good grades from primary to secondary school, work to get amazing grades on their high school diploma, which will allow them to study anything at any university in the country they choose. If they don't, they simply don't want it enough and aren't sufficiently motivated."

If you grant strong heritable variations in IQ, the differences in performance aren't based on personal merit, so we should a) tell those people that it's *not* their fault that they can't compete with the winners of the lottery, and b) structure society in a way that while we still get the necessary competent people in positions where they are needed and useful, we also make sure that the losers in the lottery don't fall into a destitute life - especially not one that they then blame themselves for. Or for some, worse, blame women, immigrants, or "international financial elites *nudge**wink*".

The reprehensible platonic version of this might be when some silicon valley bro type says about eg a truckdriver who's worried he's about to be laid off because of automated trucks (bad example with the current supply chaing issues), or even about a homeless person in SF that they could "just learn to code! anyone could do that!"

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That Popper story is wild! Phil Getz or anyone else, you have more detail on that, or any primary sources, so I can look into it more? Thanks!

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I can think of several families in the arts where you have more than one really famous person. The Holbeins. The Brueghels. The Bachs. The Brontes, of course. The Wolstonecrafts. The Rossettis. Father and son Dumas. Father and son Renoir. The Pissarros. Sigmund Freud and grandson are the most famous of the many successful Freuds. Father and son Amis. AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble.

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Also, let's not forget Kurt Vonnegut's brother is Bernard Vonnegut!! An American atmospheric scientist credited with discovering that silver iodide could be used effectively in cloud seeding to produce snow and rain.

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My partner was recently at a chemistry conference where someone was talking about the many different crystalline structures H2O adopts at different points in the phase diagram (I believe they are called Ice I through Ice VI) and mentioned that Kurt Vonnegut's brother was involved in classifying several of these, so that Ice IX in Cat's Cradle is directly based on scientific work being done contemporaneously in his family.

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(Mind blown)

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Oh that's interesting. I always wondered where he came up with that. There actually is an ice IX, although of course it doesn't have any of the properties Vonnegut attributed to it, in particular it is not stable with respect to ice I at normal pressures...a quick check confirms it's only stable between 200 and 400 MPa and below 140K.

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Just finished reading Cat’s Cradle. Thanks for the bonus information.

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Btw Scott, you yourself as a blogger and your brother the jazz pianist are no slouches either! There’s no straightforward ‘nobel prizes’ for either blogging or piano playing, but for both I’d intuitively call it fair to rank you ‘world class’.

Soooo… What would your personal experiences/explanations be, anything beyond stereotipical (ahkenazi) jewish upbringing?

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At least in physics, Phil Getz is completely wrong. There are observational papers written on particle detectors, and astronomical observations, and then there are separate numerical modeling or theoretical papers written to explain them.

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Agreed (and this is in fact a different Josh). People publish peer-reviewed articles saying "this is an interesting observation" throughout physics and astronomy, and I believe also in biology and materials science. There is likely a greater expectation than in the past that in the paper you try to grapple with possible explanations of the result, replicate it (if feasible), and maybe put it into context. But you can absolutely conduct a new experiment or observation, find an interesting result, and publish it without embedding it within theory.

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The problem is a paucity of interesting observations more than anything. If you can make a replicable observation that defies current theoretical understanding in basically any field you can get it published by itself. It's just super difficult to find any such theory-defying observations without having some understanding of where such observations might lie in the first place (and thus a need for an understanding of the shortcomings of a particular theoretical framework, etc.) The Popper method of writing papers is stilted and a bit unnecessary, but the general loop of theory -> experiment -> theory is broadly self-creating for any well-understood field.

As an example, consider the possibility of discovering life on Europa or Enceladus. It is almost certainly the case that a mere description of some element of the biology of these lifeforms would be one of the most read papers in the last decade, despite the total lack of any attempt to provide a theory of how this alien biochemistry works.

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Definitely true. But considering observations of Europa, the range of observations that would be publishable is broader than just discovery of life or not. Particular chemical signatures seen in spectroscopic observations that have not previously been seen would certainly be publishable, as would a new geyser or plume, or albedo changes, a new analysis of surface features, or similar observations. There is a ton of public archival data available from old and recent missions throughout planetary science and astrophysics, as well as lots of telescopes and instruments. It's not trivial to obtain or discover new or interesting observations, but it doesn't require paradigm-shifting results to publish.

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No, he's not completely wrong. I'd say he's mostly right. Yes, there are observational papers, but a great bulk follows the structure he described. Open a few random papers from Phys. Rev. A, B, C, ... and see for yourself. Even papers with very observational-looking titles like "Single-neutron removal from 14,15,16C near 240 MeV/nucleon" approximate the structure. The same situation almost certainly obtains in journals devoted to more narrow fields, such as fusion.

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George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il, Kim Jong-un.

I am not trying to troll, just pointing out that similar reasons, i.e. being an elite, may have played a role in some other cases as well. Say, Darwins. A percentage of population that had enough wealth to devote their entire time to science must have been miniscule in XIX. century. Assuming some variation in the family culture (e.g. fox-hunting vs. learning) and the number of relatives, which grows exponentially with every further level of relatedness and I am not at all surprised that some of the high-achievers were mutually related.

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This is my feeling as well.

I think better discussion of heritability and gene-environment interaction would also help cut through the clutter on this topic.

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Since you're not trying to troll: success in politics is almost all about making connections, so being born or marrying into a well-connected family is a huge part of it. It's also purely positional: all you have to do to become the president of the United States is to get more votes (connect with more people) than the other contenders. Nearly all other fields actually require you to achieve something concrete, and in a lot of cases you don't even have to communicate with anyone (or almost anyone) to do that.

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