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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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. Naïve 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.
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.
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.
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.
Heritability is used in a commonsense way to talk about parent-child resemblance and heritability is used as an estimate to explain the variation in a trait in terms of genetic variation. The methods that geneticists use account for the fact that there is gene-environment correlations. Toxn seems to be thinking that they take a direct approach and just look at parent-child correlation. Correct me if I'm wrong Toxn.
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.
> 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.
People who estimate intelligence's heritability and people who would estimate languages heritability would know that there would be environment-genetic correlation. They use methods to make sure that heritability is actually not picking up environment-genetic correlation.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Geneticists don't just gormlessly run the numbers to get their heritability estimates for intelligence.
If language heritability was up for debate, they would look at adoption from Language1 family to Language2 family. Does the kid resemble their biological parents in that they speak Language1? No, they don't. We know this is the case. They totally resemble the new parents who speak Language2. So, the geneticists wouldn't estimate heritability of 100%.
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"?
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.
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-
"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.)
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!)
IQ is not useless. Provided it did nothing else...How much would you drink a liquid that lowered your IQ by 100 points for? If IQ is useless, that amount should be small. I think IQ is important. I wouldn't accept $1,000,000 to do that.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Yes, I think that your hypothesis makes sense. IQ would've been less heritable a long time ago and that was one issue I had with Scott's regression toward the mean estimates.
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.
I think this is somewhat analogous to arguing that "Because humans are always the ones claiming they have more intellectual ability than animals, we should cast doubt on this claim until animals start to claim that humans have more intellectual ability than animals."
Is it your position that is not hard evidence that having a low IQ is disadvantage in life? Do you think a 50 IQ person and 150 IQ person live a similar life in terms of quality? What confounders do you have in mind?
Surely you agree that people who are lower in IQ are less inclined to reading studies about IQ. I don't think many people can understand covariance, correlation, factor analysis, ANOVA or principle component analysis. If you can't get a very good understanding of those concepts, you can't evaluate the evidence very well.
I thought we were talking about the importance rather than the heritability estimates. Do you think having low IQ is disadvantageous is what I was wondering.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
( 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.
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).
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.
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.
>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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
How low IQ counts as "low"? For people of significantly below average IQ, expecting them to meaningfully interpret the outputs of studies seems unrealistic.
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).
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.
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.
† 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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't success in other fields also about making connections? It doesn't matter how smart you are if the only people you know are far away (both physically and socially) from the people who run labs and populate review boards.
Depends on the field. In math (to take the opposite extreme), you pretty much don't have to talk to anybody, ever, and still can prove Poincare or something, and get recognized (perhaps years later, but still). And no matter how many great mathematicians you're pals with, you won't even be able to remotely grasp the wind of the proof (not to mention come up with the proof yourself) if you don't have the extreme math abilities _plus_ spend years and years studying the relevant subfields of math.
I agree, and think that this would be a useful calibration against 'softer' sciences where networking may play more of a role. Presumably having family in the maths department would still be very useful for both learning the basics and keeping up with the field.
See my above regarding scaling the field, which for me would put maths closer to a 0.7 or 0.8 on the scale.
Not sure that picking soccer as 1 is the right choice. I have a vague feeling that in egalitarian fields where top performers achieve genuine celebrity status (like soccer), the halo effect from that celebrity status can impede progress for the children of said performers. Basically, having minor celebrity status since birth makes it harder for those kids to develop the grit necessary to achieve greatness, even if they have the genes. Also, male celebrity soccer players are likely to mate with other non-sport celebrities (and female soccer players are much less likely to achieve celebrity status), whereas top scientists (not being true celebrities) are much more likely to reproduce within their own field or at least adjacent fields.
I'd be open to better suggestions. The requirements need to be that success is objectively due to individual talent and skill; that the population of would-be entrants is both large and reflective of the broader population; and that environmental/social effects contributing to success are minimised.
>Basically, having minor celebrity status since birth makes it harder for those kids to develop the grit necessary to achieve greatness, even if they have the genes.
I don't think this really plays a role. Look at Formula 1. Multiple world champions have children that have either gone on to be world champions or be extremely skilled; I'm sure the same could be said for many sports.
My father was an engineer, although more interested in the theory than the usual run (he went on to a PhD). We used to spend time together working on various math problems. My sister was the one who followed him into an engineering degree though. I ended up with math/computer science. None of us ended up in academia.
I suppose my point is that there's genetics as well as interest - and it can be path-dependent.
Yeah, no. There are some occasional Ramanujans, but most of the time, actual connections are super useful to identify what problems are worth working on because other people have made progress on them.
Like, it is often assumed making great discoveries in fundamental physics is more difficult today than 60 years ago and much more difficult than 120 years ago. You wouldn't necessarily get this if only thing you had available is your high school textbooks and physics teachers, then dutifully and study your way through the standard default curriculum of the physics department and then talk to your physics professors about research opportunities. Maybe you would make connections later and pivot. But say, if the hypothetical genius had enough exposure as a teenager to actual sphere of people who engage in science, they might realize that quantum computation or computational genomics or [insert something else] is the field where the exciting stuff is happening a lot before the other one. That teenager would have a head start, so to speak, and while equally brilliant mind, much better chance of making some very important discoveries first (which is the kind of feat that is rewarded with Nobel prize).
Today, the internet might be a equalizer to the extent that books previously were not.
*books **and personal connections** previously were not.
On the other hand, I hear that previously when university professors only got paper mail, they were much more likely to write replies to random people who wrote a letter asking questions.
I mostly agree about physics, which is why I used math as the extreme example. Besides, a lot of the cutting edge physical experiments in the last century or so require prohibitively expensive equipment, and getting access to equipment requires connections. What I'm getting at is that it's a spectrum. In some fields, connections are everything. In some other, they're only very important. Yet in some others, you can get very far without any connections whatsoever.
Ok but some of the examples given of successful families are known for fairly mundane discoveries that you could make if you were just around other mathematicians and studied with them. You might need to be a genius to solve Poincare, but honestly i don't even think you need to be a genius to do what some people in the Darwin family did.
Here's a thought, btw: the pharaoh to soccer scale.
If we assume that dynastic clustering for bronze-age pharaohs is almost entirely because of non-genetic reasons* rather than merit, then it stands to reason that a system that is highly merit-based and has very few geographic or social barriers to success would be a good test system for finding genetic factors. I nominate soccer as the yardstick here.
Very conveniently, Wikipedia keeps a list of association football families (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football_families) to use as a dataset. I'm eyeballing it here instead of using proper statistics, so without being able to say anything definitive there seem to be very few big, extended families that dominate the sport. Most of the football families seem to be either siblings or parent-child. Which, I think, makes this a useful point of comparison.
On a scale of pharaohs (0) to soccer (1), then, I'd say that nobel prize-winning science appears to be something like a 0.4-0.6. Definitely talent-based, but definitely susceptible to social effects and drawn from a comparatively small sample of the population. From this perspective, the level of clustering seems to be more or less what you would expect.
*some of which are small populations of elites creating a small pool to draw from, plus all of the factors you mentioned above.
I don't think that's at all true. I've known people who are successful at a very minor local level in politics, and it most definitely is about way more than connections. There's a form of "political intelligence" that you have to have, a way to easily and naturally connect with people fast, whether individually or in large groups, while at the same time keeping a certain distance so you can use people to your own benefit (which sounds cynical, and mostly is).
I suggest most of the time, the important "connections" you use to get to high office are formed while you're in low office. People go from city councilman to state rep to state senator to US Rep and so forth, and make their key connections along the way. It's certainly true being born to a political family helps, but not if you're a doofus. Jeb Bush hasn't been nearly as successful as his brother or father. The Kennedys after JFK and RFK were pretty disappointing, and disappointed. Conversely, if you're gifted politically -- Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan -- you can come from essentially nowhere and reach the top.
On the political success scale, Jeb Bush ranks higher than perhaps 99.9999% of Floridians and perhaps 99.98% of Floridians who run for office. Quite close to George Bush level in an absolute sense.
I wonder where "Florida Governor" ranks among "most powerful elected officials in the US"? Higher: prez, VP, a handful of senators, a couple of Reps, and Govs of NY, CA, TX? So maybe 12th.
Not seeing how this is a serious counter-example. Surely the difference in power and success between being elected governor, even of a big state, and being twice elected President (once in the case of the father) is enormous. How many governors of Florida (or any other big state) can you name? Now, how many Presidents of the United States can you name? See what I mean? The scale is very, very nonlinear.
In terms of absolute power, very nonlinear, if that's your scale. But other criteria for achievement, such as Olympic athlete, allow many more people to crross the achievement threshold, and if we cast a similarly sized net here, Jeb qualifies. As for Neil, Marvin, and Doro, though...
Well my scale would be "how hard is it to succeed at this?" What I'm saying is that it's much, much harder to succeed at being elected President than governor of a big state -- so the 'success' of Jeb Bush is by that definition quite noticeably lower than that of his brother, which is why I'm OK with including him among my list of "ought to have succeeded more than he did, if it's all about connections." I mean, how much better Presidential-campaign connections can you have than being the son *and* younger brother of a US President?
I think the point of this post was "We know why successful politicians cluster in families, why might successful scientists (and athletes, and...) do so?"
I think it's worth pushing back against the Mike Piazza example, since we have a good source for late bloomers with Football/Soccer. In the UK, there are 4 fully professional leagues, with most of the teams in the 2 tiers below those also professional. There's going to be something like 125+ fully professional teams for aspiring football players to join, and even if you don't make that cut you can just play as an amateur in the 7th, 8th 9th tiers of football and still expect to get picked up by a better team if you're a late bloomer.
Jamie Vardy is a good example; spent his youth with a team in the very low tiers, and was still only in the 5th tier conference by 25, the peak of most players careers. It wasn't until he was 28/29 that he really broke out and became one of the world's best strikers.
Yet Vardys are extremely rare at the upper level. Late bloomers in football are almost always playing at a pretty decent level before going up a notch and you hardly ever see players plucked from non league obscurity at older ages. Even in Piazzas case, I understand there's a pretty decent minor league system in baseball where he could have had a chance. I don't think the connections argument really holds up in sports.
Baseball and Football are pretty different in terms of peak ages due to different skill sets involved, with football players typically starting, ending, and peaking in their careers younger than baseball players. Teenagers are common on champion’s league teams, there might be one or two a year in the MLB.
And due to the closed nature of the baseball system, if Mike Piazza doesn’t get drafted he never gets into the affiliated minor leagues, and almost certainly never makes it.
The differences don't really matter, the point was that in a professional sport with lots of chances for late bloomers to make it and no real barriers to entry, we never really see late bloomers: they are just as rare as Piazza. This suggests that if connections had no influence, nothing would really change and you wouldn't get dozens more Piazzas.
Re: "interesting families I’d missed", I'm suprised that Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) hasn't yet cropped up. Conveniently, from Wikipedia:
"Many of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards's descendants became prominent citizens in the United States, including the third U.S. vice president Aaron Burr and the College Presidents Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Merrill Edwards Gates. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards were also ancestors of Edith Roosevelt, the writer O. Henry, the publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday and the writer Robert Lowell."
That he died in connection with vaccines makes him kind of topical ... :-o ... "Edwards, a strong supporter of smallpox inoculations, decided to get inoculated himself in order to encourage others to do the same. Never having been in robust health, he died as a result of the inoculation on March 22, 1758."
I guess this would have been the old style "give yourself a small dose of smallpox and hope for the best" version, rather than the slightly later "give yourself a dose of cowpox" one.
Re the statistical clustering question, I think you're being overly generous using the whole population of the first world countries when for large swathes of the population they just don't have the opportunity to study things at a more advanced level. However true you think that is now, it was certainly true in the late 19th and early 20th century, where a lot of the more impressive clusters come from.
Let's take Darwin's family as an example:
The numbers of people attending university at the time of Darwin were tiny, and not particularly selected by merit, but mostly children of the aristocracy, scholarships were near nonexistent, and without universal primary and secondary education most people couldn't have gotten them anyway, and even within the (male) elite there were other arbitrary constraints like religion.
UK population was 17.9 million in 1850. Cambridge apparently had 441 matriculated students per year then. https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/history/nineteenth-and-twentieth-centuries. And, depending how you classify there were about 10 universities in the UK. Darwin attended earlier in the century when the numbers would have been even lower.
Based on that it seems reasonable to approximate the population who could have reasonably done the things Darwin's family did as about 100k to one million. That gives a much more reasonable denominator for comparing Darwin's family to.
As a rebuttal to your UK points, university education was not a prerequisite for a brilliant scientific career in XVIII-XIX century Britain. E.g. William Herschel, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. Faraday, in addition, came from extremely humble circumstances, but there was enough of a support system to develop his genius. Primary education was very widespread, especially in countries where Protestantism was strong and there was emphasis on being able to read the Scripture
> The literacy rate in England in the 1640s was around 30 percent for males, rising to 60 percent in the mid-18th century.
and that permitted both early discovery of gifted children and later self-study.
> but for America in the 1940s about 5% of the population had graduated from university, and less than half had graduated high school.
This point is worth much less than the UK one, because, first, high schools at that time were not yet obliged to graduate everyone and could afford to be more selective than American colleges are today - you have probably seen turn-of-the-century high school exam questions that are floating around the internet, with typical comments of either "look how dumb we have become" or "look how bad our schools are", not stopping to consider that only around 5% of the population, selected largely if by no means completely by ability, went on to high school. (Incidentally, in continental Europe "high school" means college.) Second, American society in 1940s was already sufficiently permeable that it is completely inconceivable that at that time the majority of gifted children languished without being able to obtain educations (even if one half languished, it would not affect your ratios much). This contention is supported by the well-known observation of great geographical diversity in founders of companies, scientists etc. Cf. the founders of Intel who came to what became the Silicon Valley from Midwestern sticks.
I wonder if there are "evil success" examples that might have been missed. For example, are there any successful scientists/athletes/musicians/writers/etc who have branches of the family with successful dictators, or crime bosses?
William Bulger and Whitey Bulger were brothers, though I'm not sure that William Bulger was notable enough as an academic, rather than as a politician, to be a clear example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bulger
I strongly disagree with the suggestion that a person's "drive" or "aspiration" are somehow easy to manipulate by good parenting. This neurological trait is mainly controlled by brain chemistry, and I cannot see why it should be less heritable than IQ. You can take stimulants to have a better drive, but in my experience you can't really turn someone into a more driven person by parenting, unless you cure their depression or something. For an example, I had a high drive father and a moderate drive mother, who made great efforts to foster my drive through all my childhood. Well, their genes seemed to have combined in a way that gives me a low-moderate drive, and the childhood drive-fostering efforts were somewhat painful actually. They probably would have had more success had they fed me full of stimulants.
One thing that is often overlooked when debating nature vs. nurture is how a child reacts to the home environment in my opinion: As a way of coping with his childhood home, my father became a high-achieving workaholic. This later on shaped my own childhood environment, leading to me using dissociation ("freeze" response) as a tactic to escape negative emotions. My father using the "flight" response of ceaseless activity shaped his drive while my tactic of hiding surpressed my own drive, even with similiar levels of intelligence. This is different from explicit parenting strategies but more about if the parents (mother primarily) were stable themselves and able to form a strong bond with the child. Depression in young children is treated by treating the parents.
The way children choose coping strategies when growing up in sub-optimal environments has an importance that is often not acknowledged IMHO.
I suspect people make the argument because, when you find a driven competitive person who succeeds -- an Olympic gold-medal winner, say, or tycoon of industry -- and you ask him "Say, what were your parents like?" you never seem to hear the answer "Oh, they were very low-key, laid back people. Never that interested in what I did, never pushed, kind of lazy really if you ask me..."
The Big Five Personality Traits are all heritable, but their heritability is only around 40-50%, compared to maybe 70%-80%+ for IQ.
So while personality is heritable, it is more environmentally malleable. Moreover, personality seems to be trainable - criminality, for instance, is affected strongly by environment. While criminal propensity has a heritability of about 50%, you can halve or double crime rates via cultural changes.
I'm just here to remind people that James Hutton nailed natural selection far before Darwin and the success of Origin of Species had maybe the most to do with the 1890s
Hutton realized that natural selection might serve to create selective pressure within species, but he rejected the idea that evolution could cause speciation.
Darwin was the one who figured that out, which was a very significant accomplishment. He also provided better evidence for his arguments; Hutton's arguments were more philisophical, while Darwin had better evidence that evolution had actually occurred.
I was reading molecular biology papers from the early 2000s earlier that were doomed and now useless due to temporal variations/inputs we know about now and didn't know then-
Sometimes I think success is recognizing where progress can and can't be made. I would like to honor all the hard working scientists who spent years of their life and millions of funding on doomed projects.
I've mentioned to other first gen immigrants and hard working researchers about how quickly one should quit labs and companies that were doomed, vaporware, or false advertising (there's so much bad science in stem cell biology because the foundation of the field is a bed of assumptions on ex vivo modeling you can't make) - and they all sort of give me a shocked "that would look bad on my CV" look and I realize they're thinking about their career and committing to bad projects over literal scientific progress. And the former isn't bad, but it is ubiquitous.
Oh but fun fact- the Italian scientist who specializes in athletic doping is absolute seminal in the field of skeletal muscle biology from the cellular/development level which makes him academically the father of lab meat startups.
"I've mentioned to other first gen immigrants and hard working researchers about how quickly one should quit labs and companies that were doomed, vaporware, or false advertising"
On the topic of investing in stocks, Scott, would you consider writing a quick intro to the hows and whys, for those of us whose reaction is the same as your friend's?
(I'm sure there are such articles out there, but if it's written by Scott then a) I trust it and b) it won't make my eyes glaze over like most financial writing.)
I’m not Scott, but the basic idea is that the stock market has grown on average 10% a year for the past 100 years, which is much faster than most other assets a typical person would put their money in.
There is short term risk (e.g. 2008 crash) of a stock market downturn, as well as longer term risk of the stock market dropping to a lower rate of growth. Even if we account for these risks, you’re likely end up far ahead in the long run by investing in stocks than doing the alternative.
As for how to invest in stocks, the most common advice is to invest in an index fund/etf that matches the entire stock market. Some people advocate trading individual stocks, but this is very risky, and its difficult to beat the index fund approach in the long run using this method.
For someone who truly doesn't understanding investing, I would recommend a target fund, eg Fidelity Target 2050 for someone who's 35 right now and so will probably retire in 2050. This would handle their index fund vs. bond distribution for them and make sure they don't get wiped out if a market crash happens at the wrong time. It's mostly idiotproof as long as you remember *not to sell during a market crash*. Or preferably at all, unless you've reached retirement age or really need the money, but definitely not during a crash.
I guess then the main question would be how much to put in it - I would recommend everything beyond what you need for monthly expenses, plus maybe an emergency fund - but I might be missing something for people in different financial situations than me.
Maybe check out Lifecycle Investing by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres. Their argument is that you should actually use leverage while you are younger in order to lower the amount of risk you're taking earlier in your life. They say that it is actually SAFER to use leverage when you are young and use their plan. So you would hold >100% in stocks. As you get older, you deescalate. Your investment strategy should be relative to your age but the target date funds don't go far enough.
Might be worth looking into. I imagine it has a high expected value to understand financial investments.
I'll mention holding in cash means you are losing money.
You can beat an index by taking on more risk and using leverage which is appropriate depending on where you are in your life. Younger means you can take on more risk and lose big in a crash without being hurt as bad.
First thing is to have cash in case of emergency.
Then look if your employer provides 401(k) if in USA.
If you'd invested in the stock market 100 years ago in Germany, Japan, Argentina, Poland, Hungary, Romania, or China, you'd be singing a different tune; in most of those countries the investors lost 100% of their money.
Touting the US stock market as a great past performer over the last century with the benefit of hindsight (which is what you're doing when you say "on average 10% a year") is the equivalent of touting a hedge fund that's done well over the last 30 years or a cryptocurrency that's done well over the last 30 days.
Even the US stock market hasn't earned 10% a year over the last 100 years. The DJIA 100 years ago was at US$80, and now it's at US$35000, which is 6.3% growth, but most of that is inflation. The inflation-adjusted DJIA number in 01921 was US$1100, which works out to 3.5% growth per year. Dividends make up some of the difference, but not all of it. I'd like to see an index that covers small-cap stocks and includes dividends, but I don't think it would do much better.
So, where does your 10% number come from? Did you just round 6.3% up to 10%?
I agree that index funds are a good idea for basically everybody.
Sure, but in most of those cases, people also lost the value of their cash, lost homes and land (and of course quite a lot of people lost their lives). Not so many cases where there's been a much better choice even in retrospect.
In most of those cases, most people did not lose their homes, except by selling them or being evicted by their landlords. However, nearly all the people who were alive 100 years ago have lost their lives. It's also true that in none of those countries has cash held any significant fraction of its value over the last 100 years; the world moved to essentially universal use of fiat money during that period, and fiat money tends to inflate into worthlessness, sometimes slowly and sometimes very rapidly.
But many families in many of those countries were able to preserve substantial wealth over that period, whether by keeping it in a Swiss bank, holding it in gold, investing it overseas in US or UK stock markets, owning land, fleeing to safer countries when things got bad, or holding specie (gold, silver, etc.) Today cryptocurrency might be an additional option.
The "How" is you go sign up for an account with someone who will invest your money into a broad variety of stocks (e.g. Vanguard.com), you give them your bank account details, and then you use their website to move money from your bank account into an index fund (e.g. the Total Stock Market Index, acronym VTSMX). You are then part of the capital class and get money just for having money.
> Can I open an account if I don't live in the United States or if I work outside of the U.S.?
> You must have a permanent legal residential address in the United States (including D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) to open an account.
> We currently don't support accounts for people who live abroad and work for a non-U.S. employer, or who work outside of the United States, D.C., or U.S. territories for the majority of the year.
I'd be nervous about this because I think there are thousands of commenters here who know more about this than I do (I tend to limit myself to topics where only *hundreds* of you know more than me!)
He talks about investing in preference to leaving 5-figure sums sitting around in cash, which I agree would be a no-brainer, but he doesn't mention the relative merits of investing versus paying down debt, which makes me suspect that this is, after all, something for very rich people who don't have any debt, even mortgage debt. When we have spare money we usually use it to overpay the mortgage, because that's a higher compounded return than most alternatives and is zero risk.
I was hoping for a comparison of when and whether to invest versus overpaying the mortgage (and, if the answer is anything other than "never", whether it's ever sensible to borrow more in order to invest it), and a discussion of how much to leave un-invested in case you need it rather than investing it all and being forced to withdraw it at a loss during a downturn.
A lot of people have mortgages at low interest rates like 3%. For those people, the low-risk 5% or so paid by many investments is probably a better alternative. Also, in countries like the US, you may be able to buy stocks with pre-tax money (with an IRA or 401(k)), only being taxed when you draw from the retirement account after retirement, probably in a lower tax bracket. Depending on what tax bracket you're in and how long you have until retirement, that might be a really good deal, and unfortunately you can't pay down your mortgage or blow insulation into your house walls with your 401(k).
>Then you all write up a proposal saying what you plan to discover and how you'll discover it, along with your bioethics review, environmental impact statement, and diversity plan, and submit it to a government agency's grant solicitation. Then you wait 4 months to hear back from them. Then, if you get an award, you wait another 3 months for the kickoff meeting, at which you discover the contracting officer who gave you the reward has been transferred, and you now work with a contracting officer who isn't interested in your project and wants you to do something else.
He's not exaggerating.
And unfortunately for actual science, these days funding bodies really care about the diversity statements.
> I agree it’s awkward that we can only do these calculations well with Nobels (and maybe Olympic medalists?) A really rigorous attempt at this would try to find some way of quantifying extreme but not Nobel-level talent...
I think there are many other criteria you can look at depending on the area:
* Within academia, how about the h-index? Another option could be to look at a wider range of prizes than just the Nobel. Maybe even include membership in the country's scientific society?
* Within the business/startup world, you can look at income or being the founder or CEO of a successful company.
* For authors, you can at least measure popularity by appearing on bestseller lists, it would be harder to measure aesthetic quality.
* Within popular sports, reaching the professional leagues is exclusive enough, and for for more obscure (and more individualistic) sports you can look at college-level championships winners.
Gunnar and Alva Myrdal aren't the only prolific couples, whose lineage saw great success. Adam & Eve are mostly known for being the world's first sinners. The intermingling of Adam and Eve eventually gave rise to all Twelve tribes of Israel. Their great*6 grandson Noah is a well-known naval engineer. Their great*15 grandson Abraham is known as the spiritual progenitor of 3 major religions. Abraham's great*11 grandson David rose to the tenure of King of the United Monarchy of Israel and Judah, which started a lineage of kings that persisted for another 15 generations. This lineage later produced Jesus (also known as Christ), an eccentric apocalyptic preacher who produced the intellectual substructure to what would become Christianity.
"A really rigorous attempt at this would try to find some way of quantifying extreme but not Nobel-level talent"
I would suggest checking out The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark, which describes research using census records and surnames to trace social mobility over long time periods (e.g, centuries). Clark was initially agnostic about the causes but I think he's swung around to genetics as the most plausible factor (given results from heritability and adoption studies, finding similar correlations between siblings regardless of family size, et cetera.) Recessive genetics plus assortative mating and the law of averages accounts for the paradoxical finding of high social mobility at the individual level within one generation combined with almost no social mobility at the family level across multiple generations.
Re: Phil Getz’s comment that “you can’t just write a note of observation to the royal society anymore’ and the Brownian motion example.
You do seem to be able to post a pure observation to Yourube. I’ve been following the discovery of a new physics phenomenon on YouTube. It’s called the Mould effect, it happens when certain chains are dropping out of a container, the chain’s length rises into the air before it plummets down.
A YouTube named Steve Mould found this and made a video about it, another YouTube responded, they both formed mathematical models and then tested them.
Later on, the Proceedings of the Royal Society published a paper with a description of the phenomenon and a math model.
So, this kind of thing is still possible. No Popper-style papers seem to have been involved in the discovery.
Ironically, the Royal Rociety paper on Mould's chain fountain (doi:10.1098/rspa.2013.0689) and a few other papers on falling chains that I've checked out (doi:10.1119/1.3583481, doi:10.1119/1.3429983, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.134301) closely follow the structure Getz describes.
Jerry Brown’s father Pat Brown was governor before him, and passed “environmental” regulations to make the state dependent on Getty-owned oil leases after receiving bribes from Bill Newsom. Bill Newsom was attorney to J. Paul Getty. His grandson Gavin Newsom is the current governor of California, and Nancy Pelosi’s nephew.
"Nobels are so selective that you can’t just leave desirable character traits on the ground."
No?
I'm reminded of the story of Brian Josephson. He's the "Josephson" from the "Josephson junctions" that modern quantum computers are built out of. Big name if you've ever studied superconductors, not a huge name outside the field.
Anyhow, he has a Nobel for his work. But the actual prediction that he made was just a very simple and straightforward consequence of a theory that had been proposed by someone else. It was so simple a grad student could have figured it out - which we know empirically, because Josephson was a 22 year old grad student when he wrote the paper!
If you think that because Nobel prizes are so selective that Josephson winning one at 22 means that he must be a staggering genius, a paragon of many different necessary character traits, then to you I say... that Josephson has had a mundane career exercising his physics skills since then, and the major other notable fact about them is his firm belief in homeopathy and "water memory."
I'm not saying this to dunk on him. I'm not saying that Josephson is the outlier. I'm saying that the Nobel prize is very selective and yet it's still always like this! Scientists are constantly, constantly looking at things and going "huh, that's funny." And sometimes when you do that, you're looking at the anti-viral proteins of bacteria and you discover CRISPR. And other times, you're looking at the immune proteins of humans and you discover a completely boring paper that gets published in a B-tier journal and then is only of note to the people who work in your exact sub-field. And you don't know ahead of time which it's going to be! Thousands and thousands of scientists are pulling the handle on reality's slot machine each year, and they're almost all very smart and nice people, but we shouldn't confuse the output of the slot machine with a highly selective judgment about their personal characteristics.
Then there are people where you just wonder, like Kary Mullis. Was he briliant but eccentric or just nuts but lucky? (I didn't know the guy myself, which is why I wonder a bit.)
Nobel prizes are voted on through a recommendation system, so if you already have a strong network of scientists you have a huge advantage because that means they know about your work and would recommend it. I'm going to be bold and say that nobel prizes don't really say anything about your abilities relative to others. Especially ones given for softer skills like politics or economics.
> This is true! All my regression-to-the-mean calculations were wrong because of selection bias
Hmm. I didn't read much of the first article because the observation seemed so uninteresting. But if you want to claim that families shouldn't be able to consistently perform at a high level because of regression to the mean, it sounds like you don't understand regression to the mean in the context of heritability.
The Breeder's Equation tells us that the mean value of a trait in one generation is the product of two values calculated over the previous generation:
(1) The heritability of the trait.
(2) The difference between the average value of the trait in the previous generation, and the average value of the trait in the population from which the previous generation was drawn.
So, if you select a bunch of dogs (generation 0) with a mean weight of 0.3 standard deviations above the norm, and you breed them, and the heritability of weight turns out to be 0.7, then the mean weight in generation 1 will be 0.21 "reference standard deviations" above the "reference norm", where the reference values are just the same values for the overall population from which generation 0 was selected.
If you then breed generation 1 to produce generation 2, the mean weight in generation 2 will also be 0.21 reference deviations above the reference norm -- which is to say, it will not regress at all. Generation 1 had a higher mean weight than the general run of dogs. But they didn't come from the general run of dogs, so that's irrelevant. Generation 1 was already at its own mean weight.
You may notice that elite families keep careful track of which other families they intermarry with. This is not a coincidence.
> The Breeder's Equation tells us that the mean value of a trait in one generation is the product of two values calculated over the previous generation
Rather, it tells us that the offset from the mean is the product of these two values. In my example above, value (2) is 0 in generation 1, and thus the mean trait value in generation 2 differs by 0 from the mean trait value in generation 1.)
I'm not really a fan of the current style of scientific writing, but claiming that it prevents science from communicating unexplained observations seems completely false to me. Writing a paper we "with don't know" as the explanation is definitely still possible, although it might need to be phrased as "the observations are inconsistent with any known theoretical model". A lot of scientific communication occurs at conferences instead of in papers, and the standards for presenting at a conference are much laxer than for publishing a paper.
The first example of a recent unexplained scientific observation I can think of is switchbacks in the solar wind measured by Parker Solar Probe. Parker Solar Probe is a spacecraft launched in 2018 to go closer to the sun than any other man-made object. A surprising thing that it frequently saw are "switchbacks": waves where the direction of the magnetic field abruptly changes, but the magnitude of the magnetic field remains almost constant. We don't have a good theoretical explanation, but there have already been hundreds of papers written about them.
The bigger problem with scientific writing norms is that they make science more exclusive, not that they make give priority to theory over experiment. Scientific papers are not designed to be readable by anyone who is not familiar with the field. Writing a scientific paper is even more exclusive because you have to already know enough to write a literature review.
While reading that post, I thought about something I discovered while researching genealogy. It's an example of a family with several highly-accomplished members, even if none of them are household names in the current era.
One of my ancestors lived in the same town as Oliver Ellsworth (born in 1745 in British North America, died 1807 in the United States; he served in Continental Congress, was part of the Constitutional Convention, served in the the U.S. Senate, and served on the U.S. Supreme Court). The family relation between my ancestor(s) and Ellsworth was likely some sort of cousin, but I haven't spent a lot of time trying to piece that out.
Oliver Ellsworth has his own wiki page. Among his 9 children are two who have their own wiki pages. He also has a grand-son who has his own wiki page. These men served as Patent commissioners, Congressmen, governors, mayors, and even presidents of insurance companies.
Oliver was connected by marriage to the relatives of former Colonial governor Roger Wolcott, and one of his children was connected by marriage to the family of Noah Webster.
Is this evidence of a large family increasing the odds of high-IQ-and-high-accomplishment children? Is this evidence that network effects (or Hero License) give certain families an advantage in politics?
I'm not sure.
I also know of a branch of my family tree where one man was an officer in the Colonial militia, and several of his sons rose to the level of officers in the Colonial militia, and several more of his grand-sons rose to the level of officers in the Colonial militia, and a couple of great-grandsons were officers in units that fought in the Revolutionary War. Most of these individuals were also involved in town-politics, and a few were leaders in settling new towns up the river from the current city. One member of that branch of the family built a historic house that still stands.
In both of these cases, arguments could be made for some form of inherited-IQ-advantage, or some form of Hero License, or some form of Network Effect enabling a particular kind of success. (Of note, many of those early-Colonial-America families had six to ten children...so if large family size increases the odds of any of those three happening, then we should expect this kind of Success-in-the-Family-Business to happen often there. But most of these are people who would only be recognized by genealogy nerds, or by historians who specialize in that time and place.)
I can't tell you what conclusion to draw. But I can tell you that this kind of thing happens at lower levels than the Great Families you mentioned in your post.
Ever since then (back in 2013) him and other YouTubers have been trying to explain the effect. There's been published papers on it. There's been a good-natured feud over the past year between two competing theories.
Maybe the urge to do science the Old Way is so high that it's evolving around the Bad New Way.
Man I really need to find some more ambitious people to surround myself with for this reason. (also for less cynical reasons like them being good company)
I'm planning to relocate soon and wondering how highly to weight 'near a decent university' for this reason
You're picking an example which is clearly not genetic and then acting like that is the argument or analogous to the argument. There are good reasons for thinking genes are playing a role. I can also pick an example which is clearly not environmental to mock your position:
My mother has brown eyes and I have brown eyes. Clearly it was the environment. How foolish!
I made the comment in jest but the idea of a monarch (originally) rising to their position due to genes isn't unthinkable.
To get their position, they were either the strongest and most violent, or cleverest and best at broking power. It's likely their children will be similar; if they regress towards the mean too much, their monarchy will be usurped by a challenger.
Re: Phil Getz on Popper. Does anyone know how did scientists earn their living back when this "just publish an observation" kind of thing was possible?
I have a feeling that with the current state of affairs where scientists are usually full-time salaried
(or even tenured) professionals and usually funded by the public at large, this can't ever work - the public will feel like it's wasting its money by paying a bunch of people for essentially being "professional curious guys who ponder interesting questions about life and the world". The current state where publications include lit review, hypotheses, etc at least feel like a "finished good" that the scientists has produced.
I am in a line of work where we do data analysis for commercial clients, and we definitely experience this kind of pressure where the client needs clear-cut answers based on the data they have, and they're absolutely not going to accept us coming back and saying "sorry, this is really complex, we might need another, umm, couple years to pick at this".
SBF: "You're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just have high IQ, but for whom it's highly genetic/inheritable rather than random factors."
Scott: "This is true! All my regression-to-the-mean calculations were wrong because of selection bias - since we’re looking specifically at geniuses who we know had talented families, we should assume their intelligence was more genetic than average."
I think what happened was that geniuses assortatively mated and kept a high genotypic family mean which is what they would regress toward, rather than the population mean. I think that heritability was probably higher in past areas and you can't use the .5 - .8 heritability estimates. Without knowing the heritability or mean, the calculation won't make sense. I don't know what the heritability of intelligence would've been in 1800, but I would think it was lower. When people are adopted from developing nations and come to the USA, they get a boost in IQ. Also there was a the phenomenon of increasing secular IQ scores. Now, we can't really find much to change IQ for the better. I think that in 1800, we could probably find more things.
Francis Galton tried to examine this in his book Hereditary Genius where he examined the difference between boys adopted by popes and sons of eminent men. He found eminence heritable and that eminent men had relatives in different fields which were eminent. This showed that mental ability was general and not specific.
Gregory Clark has examined surnames to look at the preservation of status, wealth and power across generations and finds that it is persistent across hundreds of years. To know the exact numbers, you can see his book The Son Also Rises.
Seems reasonable to me that it might not be entirely intelligence but intelligence is a prerequisite for eminence. There are probably other traits and in an earlier era, the ability to eat better and have exposure to academic things were important. I think environment mattered more in the past and the people who provided the good environment were probably genetically gifted.
While there's all sorts of ways in which Popper is both descriptively and normatively wrong about science, and all sorts of ways in which I think Popper is a baleful influence on the self-conception of scientists, I don't think this particular point being made here is an especially accurate or important one.
Getz is right that Popper is an anti-inductivist, so he thinks it is impossible for observations to support a theory. But Popper does think experiment and empiricism are essential in science - his picture of science involves coming up with a falsifiable theory, in whatever creative way you do, and then proposing an experiment to test it. His emphasis on falsifiability as a criterion of meaningfulness is widely adopted by scientists, and leads them to say things that discount the importance of coming up with alternate metaphysical views that enable theories to be developed in different ways. He's not the proximate influence behind the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, but he is the influence behind everyone who says we shouldn't consider alternatives because the difference between Copenhagen and the alternatives would be unfalsifiable.
The point being described here however is common not just to Popper, but is central to frequentist statistical methodology, and is even accepted to some degree by Bayesians. The point is the same as the one that pre-registration is after. The space of possibly hypotheses is so large that it's always possible to come up with a hypothesis that fits the data after the fact. However, it's more impressive if your hypothesis that you came up with beforehand fits data that it wasn't specifically designed to fit.
As a good example, consider Saussure's development of the "laryngeal hypothesis" in Indo-European (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory). He noticed a pattern in the vowel structure of the reconstructed Indo-European language, that he could explain if there had once been a time when the language had two additional consonants, that affected the development of the vowels, but then at a later generation disappeared before the descendant languages split. This was a nice theory on the basis of the data he had. But the bigger test was a few decades later, when inscriptions in Ancient Hittite were discovered, and decoded, and realized to be another Indo-European language. Intriguingly, the Hittite language had two additional consonants that appeared in exactly the places that Saussure predicted them to occur. This is much stronger evidence for the laryngeal hypothesis than if Saussure had based his theory on the Hittite evidence (because in that latter case it would still leave open the idea that Hittite developed these consonants independently from the proto-Indo-European language).
The same thing goes on with the classic tests of relativity - the fact that the eclipse was measured *after* Einstein had made his predictions about how gravity would lens light made it clearer that he was onto something than it would be if he had proposed his theory in light of that evidence as well as his thought experiments.
Someone else in this thread already pointed out that there are major branches of physics were people publish things closer to pure observations, so that Getz's claim just isn't accurate as a model of how science has been influenced by Popper. The real thing here is just the observation even Bayesians accept - it's more impressive to predict data you didn't know about at the time you made your theory than it is to come up with a theory that fits the data you already have, and this impressiveness lends extra credibility to the hypothesis.
I really don't understand this criticism. It feels to me like you may have greatly mistaken what Getz was saying, or at least you took from it something very different than I did. What I understood him to be saying -- that there is an unhealthy retreat from the primacy of observation, and an unfortunate re-elevation of the importance of a theoretical perspective -- matches very well with my direct experience in science.
And it's a very important point, because it signals an unfortunate retreat from the empirical perspective that has brought us so much success in the past. It *may* have some relevance to why in certain respects forward progress in some of the sciences appears to have slowed considerably in the past 50 years. Nor is he (Getz) or I the first to worry that this is so, and made the criticism. There's a broad streak of people who feel modern physics, at least, pays too much attention to its theoretical perspective and not enough to the primacy of observation.[1]
It may be you are criticizing Getz's assertion that this is all Karl Popper's fault, and with that I would have no difference, since I'm not especially aware of, or interested in, the philosophy of science and couldn't really tell if it was or was not Popper's fault.
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[1] Of course, in HEP's defense, a lot of the observation that would be one's first idea are impossible e.g. without a particle collider with the diameter of the Milky Way. But as I said in that thread, that doesn't totally get physics off the hook -- maybe we are being too defeatist about looking for types of experiments that *are* doable and would give insight into what we want to know. Maybe we turn back to theoretical considerations too easily -- because we are not valuing observation as highly as we should, were we good empiricists. It's not like this is without precedent: through most of human history natural philosophy has preferred arguing over theory instead of coming up with new experiments and focussing on observation. It's a natural human tendency, and it's only by fierce discipline we avoid it.
I think you're wildly overestimating the odds of parent-child Nobels, at least in science, when you assume it ought to be a random selection process. I think what you're missing is that the Nobel is given for a certain and very specific piece of *work* and not as some kind of recognition of a person's broad contributions or ability.
And as it happened there were several examples where parent and child worked on the same, or very similar, problems -- the Braggs, Curies, Thomsons, and Bohrs all fit in that category -- and it was that particular avenue of work that paid off brilliantly, and which was recognized by the Nobel committee (indeed, the Braggs actually shared the 1915 prize).
Anyone in science will tell you, picking the right problem and the right approach is about 90% of recognized success. You don't even have to be *that* brilliant if you pick the right problem. That's not to say that there isn't a form of brilliance in picking the right problem -- there definitely is -- but since it partakes in part of an awareness of what the research world would find especially interesting, there is an aspect of "social intelligence" here which is not precisely what most people mean when they say "boy he's really smart in physics."
More importantly, it is *definitely* the kind of thing that can be transmitted within a family. "Hey, son/daughter, want to work with me on X-ray crystallography / radiation / a new theory of the atom? Let me explain why it's really cool..." It's "access" at the most important possible level: being invited to work on a problem, with an approach, which is sufficiently important and brilliant that *the work* has an excellent chance of coming to the Nobel committee's attention. It's like being J. Random Law Student but your father is a Supreme Court Justice and he invites you to clerk for him. The chance to work on the most challenging and interesting of cases -- would it be any kind of surprise if your odds of winning a Nobel in constitutional law (if there were one) were tremendously boosted, regardless of your individual brilliance?
"I can also see the connection to sports. I got good enough at a sport that a coach wanted me to go for the olympics, but I did it by wrecking my body. I don't think I'm particularly physically gifted, but I was maybe more willing to tear myself apart in pursuit of something that looked like possible greatness."
I know this is a widely-held belief, but I have always been curious about the supposed causation between the training that makes you the best at moving your musculoskeletal system in a certain way and then a later decline. If the training builds your body up, how does it also at the same time contribute to breaking your body down?
I'm not trying to be snarky--I wonder what nuance I'm missing. (Also, I'm not talking about situations where an athlete's body "breaking down" is unrelated to the athlete's training - like when an NFL player breaks a bone or gets a concussion from being tackled. I'm thinking more about something like swimming or running or tennis.
I think the biggest contributor here is progressive injury. When you're training fairly close to the limits of your abilities, occasional injuries are an inevitability. When you're training *very* close to the limits of your abilities, those injuries become frequent. Elite training is kind of a balancing act, where you're trying to work hard enough that competitors don't get an edge on you by working harder, but not overdo it and derail your training via injuries.
Getting a handful of injuries which each push your training schedule back by a month or two might not be that big a deal when you're eighteen, but if you keep that up until you're thirty, continuing to rack up injuries the whole time, eventually they'll start to become a serious imposition on your physical functionality.
Yeah, I can see how "racking up injuries" would mean you end up racking up a lot of recovery time and lost training time, but if you sprain an ankle and it heals and the ankle structure ends up performing better than before the injury (which happens often during the course of training, I think) I just don't see where the progression or the "racking up" is occuring.
A lot of the time you can achieve better performance after an injury, because you've achieved a higher level of fitness or skill, but the injury still has a permanent impact. The burden on your performance becomes greater as the injuries accumulate; your level of fitness can only approach your personal peak, while the effect of injuries is additive.
It's not just neurological damage like football players accumulate from concussions which can be permanent. Muscle scarring, ligament damage etc. can take a lasting toll, and as athletes accumulate damage, it becomes more and more difficult to compensate for it.
I have an injury from about eleven years ago, where the ligament of my left hip joint mostly detached from the bone. Although I've long since gotten back my full range of motion, and because scar tissue doesn't have the same level of suppleness or responsiveness to training, I've never been able to get back the same level of high-kick-supporting stability it used to have.
If you rack up enough injuries like that, it can become difficult, not just to maintain an athletic career, but to sustain the physical activities of everyday living, especially as you age.
Sport seems like a slow but reliable road to disability.
Anecdotal evidence: I know a few guys who played lot of soccer at high school. (Some minor league, I am not sure.) Now in their 40s, they cannot take a long walk, because their legs hurt.
When I was doing a questionnaire for life insurance, one question asked whether I do sport regularly. I was curious, so I asked the insurance agent whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. He said it was a bad thing, because people active at sport get seriously hurt or disabled more often.
I'd say that overall, this is more the case than not, but it depends a lot on the distinction between "sports" and "athletic training." Athletic training continues to have benefits throughout your life, but sports are a special case of athletic training. Not only does sports competition tend to have a much higher accident rate due to chaotic environments than, say, weight lifting, coaches, trainers, etc. don't have a lot of incentive to learn or implement practices such that they'll tell their athletes "Hey, stop doing that, you'll wrech your performance when you're sixty."
Personally, I favor martial arts over most other types of athletics, and one thing that distinguishes martial arts from most athletic disciplines is that plenty of living martial arts have hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years of cultural evolution for practices which maintain athletic functionality throughout the practitioner's lifetime. If you tried to maintain a competitive boxing career for thirty years, you'd probably end up a physical wreck or dead, but people can practice martial arts, including ones where they engage in competitive channels, for much longer than that while remaining in excellent physical condition.
I've trained with one instructor who, in his late sixties, after over fifty years of training, was still training upwards of twenty hours a week and maintained better physical condition than most people reach at any age. His instruction, and that of other martial artists I've trained with, had a level of emphasis on form in a sense of "don't do it like that, or you'll fuck up your joints in twenty years" which I haven't observed from instructors in other competitive sports I've participated in.
You can run machinery at more rpms or volts or %uptime than it was designed to handle at the cost of decreased lifespan. Sometimes this machinery is made out of meat instead of steel.
"You can run machinery at more rpms or volts or %uptime than it was designed to handle at the cost of decreased lifespan."
Yeah, but the human body adapts and gets better when you apply the right amount of stress to it. And it atrophies when you stop applying stress. And there are many ways in which applying certain stresses increases the body's lifespan. So I don't think it's an apt analogy.
Though the body is pretty amazing at adapting overall, that doesn't hold for every kind of tissue.
Muscles work a lot like you say: they get stronger under the right amount of stress, and atrophy if not stressed. If overstressed or injured, they can usually return to 100% with a proper rehab program.
But cartilage and ligaments often don't heal properly if overstressed. As an extreme example, the ACL doesn't heal in any meaningful way, and reconstruction is the only treatment if you tear it. Training at an elite level often exceeds cartilage/ligament's (very limited) ability to adapt, and a lot of wear-and-tear can accumulate over a career.
There's a happy medium where you train enough to get the health benefits, but not so much you incur unnecessary long-term damage. That would be the right choice for amateurs, but professionals have to prioritize their performance over long-term health.
Yeah, I think this is the best take so far. Although I'd still dispute the wear-and-tear hypothesis. A catastrophic tear of a ligament, cartilage, etc., in an area where blood flow makes it difficult to heal, is different from the type of "wear and tear" that happens to, e.g. a car's tires, which cannot regenerate.
I'd agree more with the connections, wealth, opportunity, and world framing that goes into making these things seem possible. Intelligence or whatever is overestimated in my view as the upper ranks of every place I've ever been are filled with incompetent 'scions' of families with loads of connections, wealth, etc. where their starting job is PhD Post-Doc or Executive VP of some department in a family owned company and I'd have to spend 20 very lucky years in a career to even begin to break through where they got to start in life and then I'd only have 10% of what they had.
I recall very clearly on the day I finished my undergrad that I finally felt that I understood enough abut the system to begin and yet I was at the end of the process. Only through dealing with last minute issues did I even know what a 'Dean' was or that I could pursue research opportunities. I was in my final year trying to get the extra lab work to quality for a PhD program that a well informed 1st year would be doing from day 1 and none of the professors would invest time in me as they wanted 3-4 years of free labour instead of the more limited time I had left.
And all this structure and competition was in a lower ranked University which was the best I could do for similar reasons of lacking the structure and family wisdom to advance myself. I always felt the other kids showed up knowing the lay of the land and were able to swing from one rope to another through a labyrinth and obstacle course which I spent my entire 4 years try to figuring out parts of.
I didn't really grasp that any of this was possible for me, often not until the end and then life gets in the way....really life got in the way both before and after each opportunity rendering them unknown or unviable.
I went on to get the missing working/lab experience and spent many years in research labs to the point that I cultivated two clear and distinct opportunities to go for a PhD, one of them with clear support from a very prominent member in the field. And yet I was simply too poor to pursue it and too in debt from my degrees by that time and had to turn it down. So even taking what I learned at 21 years old and trying to fix things to get on the right path just wasn't practical by the time I got there.
The same was true with home ownership, my rent was larger than the monthly payments to rent in my city, but I never had the multipole hundred thousands of dollars to get onto that ladder. I'd be halfway retired from the equity in that place alone if I'd bought instead of rented. But that was just not possible for me to have 8 years worth of pre-tax income on hand at 23 years old with no family backing. This kind of snowball effect is for everything in life where starting higher up the hill matters most.
I simply could not pursue those PhDs unless I'd agree to multiple years of poverty working full time job while doing a full time PhD just to make basic rent. Not to mention the creation of a potential life debt instead of only a large debt - I'd have to risk it all and either win and get lucky after winning vs trapping myself in forever debt just to walk onto the field to give greatness a try.
Also I'd moved countries and would have to give up on all that in order to chase down those opportunities after a PhD. I can say that 100% of the rest of my lab were able to live at home with family for free, relied on a partner to pay the way, or were ridiculously rich. All advantages and forms of wealth I did not have.
One guy had his wife and mom fly in to spend time with him and cook for him from another country and he had to fly home to attend company board meetings for one of the companies his family owned. Meanwhile I'm turning down the same thing while deeply in student debt and already eating from a food bank some days even on a small full time salary in the lowly paid science field because I'm competing with PhD student from wealthy families who are willing to work 6 days a week 10 hours a day for free. Maybe I lacked 'gumption' eh? That or the 40 hours a day I'd need to make it work in my circumstances.
I could have done that and then had a 'ticket' to that big show to see if I could make something out of it, but there were just too many things in the way and too many people with too many advantages around me to feel like I'd ever win. I saw the 100 PhDs to 1 professorship ratio in my field, the total lack of academic freedom, etc. and even winning after yet more hardship looked like losing to me.
Others had that 4 out of 4 Scott talks about and I had like 2 out of 4 at most, being not as 'driven at all costs' or having stubborn family expectations, not to mention their backing or connections or worldview to make 'being a doctor' or 'discovering something important' seem like a reasonable choice to 8 year old me. At that age I was more concerned about getting enough food and not getting molested any more.
I basically had to spend my entire educational and early working years fighting, learning, connecting myself, etc. just to get to open one or two of the doors to a greater path. A path which probably looks like a lesser path to a family dynasty member. My winning path was probably still a 'lesser one', such as Scott 'failing' into psychiatry in his medical doctor family. While others are born to families who have dozens of such doors open and enough resources to not be scared to let their kids throw themselves at several of them.
Intelligence, genetics, etc. probably matter and for more traits than just having a high enough IQ, but the rest of the context seems to matter a lot more. I'd think there could be a trend in the rags to riches stories and from the nobody to famous stories which do not result in family dynasties. I'd guess, just a guess, that those who pull themselves into success from nothing have 15/10 levels of gumption and determination which is a superhuman level while a wealthy and well connected family can have their kids do well with 8/10 gumption.
I've met a few of these types who made it from regular or poor circumstances to high positions and they tend to be nasty anti-social people who are not cultivating their children like good 'old money' who understand aristocracy. I think the 'final boss battle' of success leading to a successful family dynasty of achievement is having that dynastic view from birth.
People who claw their way up the ladder spend huge amounts of time, overcome hurdles others don't face, etc. and it does not lead towards the TLC and investment into their children or the various dynasty level cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. who are also 'of greatness' to pick up the slack when the parent fails due to their single minded determination to advance themselves. No matter how successful they are, they can't be a one person family clan structure, though if they are lucky their achievements will merit them marrying into such a dynastic family to breed scions.
In the 'seeing like a state' version of meta knowledge and the grand old tradition of 'listening to what people say' as for why they do things and what they think is going on in their lives. I'd say there is a big amount of 'confusion' and 'debate' amongst the upper classes about why the poor people don't try to seize opportunities and that there is no 'gate locking them out' and no formal policy to ban people from poor backgrounds from doing xyz....
But if we listen to people who didn't 'see these options' even though the wealthy and privileged can't help but see opportunity everywhere....they will universally say that it is almost entirely about family and lack of opportunity. The rungs of the ladder are invisible to them. Even as the people below are invisible. for Scott to off handedly be semi-surprised that 'some people' might not even think that any level of college is an option is very very strange to me when 70%+ of people today do not attend any form of tertiary education.
I recall a while ago Scott wrote about fashion and trends where you never ever want to be confused for a person who is 1 social class below you, but if you are 2 or more rungs above them then you'll not worry about that. People who are two rungs away from you are basically invisible to you and you'll almost never encounter them in life and never talk to them. The person getting off the yacht in their hobo-chic attire to attend a dynasty family retreat at some country club wing they've rented out for the week....isn't exactly spending time talking to the waiters, valets, and cooks.
I'd say something similar happens across opportunity with class and while the upper class might feel there is debate on this, I have never ever met a single person from the lower classes of educational achievement who did not feel that class barriers were enormous and insurmountable in many ways.
For a lot of these families there is one "tent pole" person and a bunch of successful people. The tent pole person makes the other people seem much more notable. For example Sasha Baron Cohen is a famous actor and comedian. He has a brother and 3 cousins with wikipedia pages. But only one (Simon) has done anything of global note (developing the mind-blindness theory of autism). The rest are really only wikipedia level famous because they are related to Sasha. And its likely Simon's page wouldn't focus so much on his personal life if he wasn't related to Sasha.
How much does this apply to other examples that have been brought up. The Wojcickis were brought up. And one was notable because she was a professor. Thats not very notable to me!
Also, My mother is a professor, my Uncle played for the New England patriots, my cousin is a top junior race car driver. But we are not notable! My mother is a great professor in her niche field. My Uncle played in the 50s and was on the bench. And my cousin is never going to be in NASCAR. But the way I just presented it could be notable to someone and make them think my family fits this pattern.
This whole discussion has done a lot to convince me of the value of having the right kind of friends and family for being productive.
I mean the fact my wife and I are both academics means that plenty of time that might otherwise be spent talking about the latest movies ends up spent talking over the latest interesting ideas or papers. Having friends and family also in eminent areas just increases the effect. It's not only not knowing the connections or being unsure who to talk to but also how much of the time doing emotional bonding and chit-chat is also training you up.
And sure, part of the answer is that there are a lot of people who would have done equally great things if handed the same opportunities but the other side of this is that there are a lot of ppl who wouldn't and these kind of informal networks and knowing that someone is part of a certain social network/enviornment that produced success in the past is a good thing to exploit in the future.
I'm very late to this party, but I'm shocked that neither Scott nor the commenters to the original post mentioned the Penroses. Roger is a mathematician and Nobel prize-winning physicist. Brother Jonathan is a grandmaster (in chess). Other brother Oliver is also a physicist. Sister Shirley Hodgson is a geneticist. I'm not an expert on them, but Wikipedia has a lot of info.
I often think about the probability of a link between the Red Baron and the von Richthofen family in Brazil. The first was a very famous pilot but the Brazilian family became known for the assassination of the parents performed by their daughter Suzane and her boyfriend aided by her boyfriend’s brother. Her mother was a very accomplished psychiatrist and her father was Manfred Albert von Richthofen, a successful german engineer involved in the construction of the Rodoanel roadway in Brazil. He claimed he was a nephew of Manfred von Richthofen - The Red Baron. The german von Richthofen family had also diplomats for the Nazi Germany, geographers, philosophers and political scientists. The shock the crime provoked in Brazilian society is mainly because of the gruesome details and the calculation and planning involved on the murder. During her trial and sentence, Suzane has been described as a highly ingenious person who was capable of seducing Legal members of the justice end fellow prisoners for protection. She married a child murderer in prison because she provided protection for her. The whole thing is full of plot twists and crazy stories but my point is that she’s not an ordinary person, even though she doesn’t have any academic political or economic success. She’s been able to navigate through these quite steady. Her brother who was young at the time of the crime is known for achieving a fairly successful academic life in bio chemistry even though a discrete one.
Only tangentially related but... Can anyone point me to the research on curiosity? Do we have ways of measuring it? How heritable is it? How correlated with IQ.
Seems to me to be something that isn't discussed enough.
Honestly this whole series has been the most baffling and frankly despicable thing I've ever read from SSC/ACX. Yes intelligence is heritable, yes some people have more drive than others. But how can you possibly weigh those factors over the sheer compounding material advantages to a family once one member of it has had some sort of exceptional success?
"Interesting story, though in some ways it seems less like hero licensing than communicating basic information, the same way rich parents teach their kids to invest in stocks and poor parents don’t."
Despite growing up "poor" I was always *told* to invest in stocks by parents who did not themselves own stocks (outside of IRAs, which my dad even managed to mismanage completely) or understand them well. In contrast, the rich people I have met were not told to invest in stocks—they were *given* stocks by parents and grandparents who were financially literate and well-established.
More broadly, it is simply not the case that a rich kid and a poor kid pop out of school at 18 (or 22) with everything equal except for what they learned around the dinner table. In addition to the obvious concerted cultivation, there is the sheer inheritance of social capital (a small number of leading colleges like Amherst are *only now* in 2021 beginning to do away with legacy admissions) and real capital (rich people funding their kids' research or unpaid internships and apartments through, first, undergrad summers while "poor" kids are working to meet their financial aid contribution requirements, and then during the open-ended number of years after graduating when they are living in the city pursuing their arts careers or PhDs). People from families like mine that are not "great" don't get handed these things. And the rich keep these material advantages on the down-low because in America we have a culture of pretending that everything we have is deserved by merit, so rich families are motivated by this convention to conceal just how much support they give their children.
Otto's nephew fled Nazism and moved from Austria to the United States and changed his name to Winant. His son became a prominent sociologist in the US.
I saw in a comment below that this user was banned. Is it actually several accounts with the same username?
Yes, the one banned above is "58540328-paulafox", this one is "58704307-paulafox".
User ID is in the hyperlink for the photo.
They should start auto-ban anyone using this text or linking this domain.
Good catch.
Too bad its more than a full time job staying ahead of bad actors.
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.
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...
"Somebody".
Try "half of Russia's IT industry".
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.
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.
Probably just a coincidence. A lot of Paulas surnamed Fox getting into nude modeling these days. ;)
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?
> 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.
If I ever did click it would be from a Linux VM on some public WiFi.
Just like when I buy kilos of black tar heroin or stolen identity papers on the Dark Web.
I keep banning her and she keeps posting; I'm not sure what's going wrong here.
Maybe she likes being banned.
Different accounts all the time. We're actively working on this, should have a fix soon.
Since you are not a _rationalist_ sex model, you aren't welcome here.
She can come back once she's dropped enough acid to kill a buffalo.
;)
What's up with the curved brackets BTW? (I don't think they can really be called parentheses...)
It's the Russian spelling of ":)".
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.
Everybody believes in IQ when talking about people on the other side of the political divide who aren’t that smart.
They might call them stupid but they might also reject the notion of IQ or that intelligence is one singular thing.
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.
> 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"?
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.
Right. And psyshometricians get different heritability estimates also. But I haven't seen any claims that it was 0.
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.
Language isn't perfectly heritable. There's immigration and adoption and language change and so on.
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. Naïve 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Heritability is used in a commonsense way to talk about parent-child resemblance and heritability is used as an estimate to explain the variation in a trait in terms of genetic variation. The methods that geneticists use account for the fact that there is gene-environment correlations. Toxn seems to be thinking that they take a direct approach and just look at parent-child correlation. Correct me if I'm wrong Toxn.
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.
> 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.
People who estimate intelligence's heritability and people who would estimate languages heritability would know that there would be environment-genetic correlation. They use methods to make sure that heritability is actually not picking up environment-genetic correlation.
It's quite trivial to disprove that language is heritable - you can teach people new languages.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Geneticists don't just gormlessly run the numbers to get their heritability estimates for intelligence.
If language heritability was up for debate, they would look at adoption from Language1 family to Language2 family. Does the kid resemble their biological parents in that they speak Language1? No, they don't. We know this is the case. They totally resemble the new parents who speak Language2. So, the geneticists wouldn't estimate heritability of 100%.
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"?
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.
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
"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.)
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!)
IQ is not useless. Provided it did nothing else...How much would you drink a liquid that lowered your IQ by 100 points for? If IQ is useless, that amount should be small. I think IQ is important. I wouldn't accept $1,000,000 to do that.
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.
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.)
Dang "Cult of Smart" Sorry for screwing up your book title F. DeBoer
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.
When are you publishing on substack :)
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.
How do you know it's not 130+?
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
Yes, I think that your hypothesis makes sense. IQ would've been less heritable a long time ago and that was one issue I had with Scott's regression toward the mean estimates.
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.
Right. Definitely agree.
I think this is somewhat analogous to arguing that "Because humans are always the ones claiming they have more intellectual ability than animals, we should cast doubt on this claim until animals start to claim that humans have more intellectual ability than animals."
Is it your position that is not hard evidence that having a low IQ is disadvantage in life? Do you think a 50 IQ person and 150 IQ person live a similar life in terms of quality? What confounders do you have in mind?
Surely you agree that people who are lower in IQ are less inclined to reading studies about IQ. I don't think many people can understand covariance, correlation, factor analysis, ANOVA or principle component analysis. If you can't get a very good understanding of those concepts, you can't evaluate the evidence very well.
I thought we were talking about the importance rather than the heritability estimates. Do you think having low IQ is disadvantageous is what I was wondering.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It could be the case that all genes related to intelligence reached fixation. I don't think that is the case.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
>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).
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
How low IQ counts as "low"? For people of significantly below average IQ, expecting them to meaningfully interpret the outputs of studies seems unrealistic.
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).
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.
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.
† 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!"
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!
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.
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.
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.
(Mind blown)
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.
Just finished reading Cat’s Cradle. Thanks for the bonus information.
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?
Scott wrote a bit about that here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/01/31/the-parable-of-the-talents/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't success in other fields also about making connections? It doesn't matter how smart you are if the only people you know are far away (both physically and socially) from the people who run labs and populate review boards.
Depends on the field. In math (to take the opposite extreme), you pretty much don't have to talk to anybody, ever, and still can prove Poincare or something, and get recognized (perhaps years later, but still). And no matter how many great mathematicians you're pals with, you won't even be able to remotely grasp the wind of the proof (not to mention come up with the proof yourself) if you don't have the extreme math abilities _plus_ spend years and years studying the relevant subfields of math.
I agree, and think that this would be a useful calibration against 'softer' sciences where networking may play more of a role. Presumably having family in the maths department would still be very useful for both learning the basics and keeping up with the field.
See my above regarding scaling the field, which for me would put maths closer to a 0.7 or 0.8 on the scale.
Not sure that picking soccer as 1 is the right choice. I have a vague feeling that in egalitarian fields where top performers achieve genuine celebrity status (like soccer), the halo effect from that celebrity status can impede progress for the children of said performers. Basically, having minor celebrity status since birth makes it harder for those kids to develop the grit necessary to achieve greatness, even if they have the genes. Also, male celebrity soccer players are likely to mate with other non-sport celebrities (and female soccer players are much less likely to achieve celebrity status), whereas top scientists (not being true celebrities) are much more likely to reproduce within their own field or at least adjacent fields.
I'd be open to better suggestions. The requirements need to be that success is objectively due to individual talent and skill; that the population of would-be entrants is both large and reflective of the broader population; and that environmental/social effects contributing to success are minimised.
>Basically, having minor celebrity status since birth makes it harder for those kids to develop the grit necessary to achieve greatness, even if they have the genes.
I don't think this really plays a role. Look at Formula 1. Multiple world champions have children that have either gone on to be world champions or be extremely skilled; I'm sure the same could be said for many sports.
My father was an engineer, although more interested in the theory than the usual run (he went on to a PhD). We used to spend time together working on various math problems. My sister was the one who followed him into an engineering degree though. I ended up with math/computer science. None of us ended up in academia.
I suppose my point is that there's genetics as well as interest - and it can be path-dependent.
Yeah, no. There are some occasional Ramanujans, but most of the time, actual connections are super useful to identify what problems are worth working on because other people have made progress on them.
Like, it is often assumed making great discoveries in fundamental physics is more difficult today than 60 years ago and much more difficult than 120 years ago. You wouldn't necessarily get this if only thing you had available is your high school textbooks and physics teachers, then dutifully and study your way through the standard default curriculum of the physics department and then talk to your physics professors about research opportunities. Maybe you would make connections later and pivot. But say, if the hypothetical genius had enough exposure as a teenager to actual sphere of people who engage in science, they might realize that quantum computation or computational genomics or [insert something else] is the field where the exciting stuff is happening a lot before the other one. That teenager would have a head start, so to speak, and while equally brilliant mind, much better chance of making some very important discoveries first (which is the kind of feat that is rewarded with Nobel prize).
Today, the internet might be a equalizer to the extent that books previously were not.
*books **and personal connections** previously were not.
On the other hand, I hear that previously when university professors only got paper mail, they were much more likely to write replies to random people who wrote a letter asking questions.
I mostly agree about physics, which is why I used math as the extreme example. Besides, a lot of the cutting edge physical experiments in the last century or so require prohibitively expensive equipment, and getting access to equipment requires connections. What I'm getting at is that it's a spectrum. In some fields, connections are everything. In some other, they're only very important. Yet in some others, you can get very far without any connections whatsoever.
Ok but some of the examples given of successful families are known for fairly mundane discoveries that you could make if you were just around other mathematicians and studied with them. You might need to be a genius to solve Poincare, but honestly i don't even think you need to be a genius to do what some people in the Darwin family did.
Here's a thought, btw: the pharaoh to soccer scale.
If we assume that dynastic clustering for bronze-age pharaohs is almost entirely because of non-genetic reasons* rather than merit, then it stands to reason that a system that is highly merit-based and has very few geographic or social barriers to success would be a good test system for finding genetic factors. I nominate soccer as the yardstick here.
Very conveniently, Wikipedia keeps a list of association football families (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_association_football_families) to use as a dataset. I'm eyeballing it here instead of using proper statistics, so without being able to say anything definitive there seem to be very few big, extended families that dominate the sport. Most of the football families seem to be either siblings or parent-child. Which, I think, makes this a useful point of comparison.
On a scale of pharaohs (0) to soccer (1), then, I'd say that nobel prize-winning science appears to be something like a 0.4-0.6. Definitely talent-based, but definitely susceptible to social effects and drawn from a comparatively small sample of the population. From this perspective, the level of clustering seems to be more or less what you would expect.
*some of which are small populations of elites creating a small pool to draw from, plus all of the factors you mentioned above.
I don't think that's at all true. I've known people who are successful at a very minor local level in politics, and it most definitely is about way more than connections. There's a form of "political intelligence" that you have to have, a way to easily and naturally connect with people fast, whether individually or in large groups, while at the same time keeping a certain distance so you can use people to your own benefit (which sounds cynical, and mostly is).
I suggest most of the time, the important "connections" you use to get to high office are formed while you're in low office. People go from city councilman to state rep to state senator to US Rep and so forth, and make their key connections along the way. It's certainly true being born to a political family helps, but not if you're a doofus. Jeb Bush hasn't been nearly as successful as his brother or father. The Kennedys after JFK and RFK were pretty disappointing, and disappointed. Conversely, if you're gifted politically -- Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan -- you can come from essentially nowhere and reach the top.
On the political success scale, Jeb Bush ranks higher than perhaps 99.9999% of Floridians and perhaps 99.98% of Floridians who run for office. Quite close to George Bush level in an absolute sense.
I wonder where "Florida Governor" ranks among "most powerful elected officials in the US"? Higher: prez, VP, a handful of senators, a couple of Reps, and Govs of NY, CA, TX? So maybe 12th.
Not seeing how this is a serious counter-example. Surely the difference in power and success between being elected governor, even of a big state, and being twice elected President (once in the case of the father) is enormous. How many governors of Florida (or any other big state) can you name? Now, how many Presidents of the United States can you name? See what I mean? The scale is very, very nonlinear.
In terms of absolute power, very nonlinear, if that's your scale. But other criteria for achievement, such as Olympic athlete, allow many more people to crross the achievement threshold, and if we cast a similarly sized net here, Jeb qualifies. As for Neil, Marvin, and Doro, though...
Well my scale would be "how hard is it to succeed at this?" What I'm saying is that it's much, much harder to succeed at being elected President than governor of a big state -- so the 'success' of Jeb Bush is by that definition quite noticeably lower than that of his brother, which is why I'm OK with including him among my list of "ought to have succeeded more than he did, if it's all about connections." I mean, how much better Presidential-campaign connections can you have than being the son *and* younger brother of a US President?
I think the point of this post was "We know why successful politicians cluster in families, why might successful scientists (and athletes, and...) do so?"
It’s worth thinking about.
Try imagining George W Bush being born to, say, a high school English teacher.
What would his chances of becoming president have been?
The guy didn’t hit a home run in life. He was born on third base and scored on someone else’s sac fly.
I think it's worth pushing back against the Mike Piazza example, since we have a good source for late bloomers with Football/Soccer. In the UK, there are 4 fully professional leagues, with most of the teams in the 2 tiers below those also professional. There's going to be something like 125+ fully professional teams for aspiring football players to join, and even if you don't make that cut you can just play as an amateur in the 7th, 8th 9th tiers of football and still expect to get picked up by a better team if you're a late bloomer.
Jamie Vardy is a good example; spent his youth with a team in the very low tiers, and was still only in the 5th tier conference by 25, the peak of most players careers. It wasn't until he was 28/29 that he really broke out and became one of the world's best strikers.
Yet Vardys are extremely rare at the upper level. Late bloomers in football are almost always playing at a pretty decent level before going up a notch and you hardly ever see players plucked from non league obscurity at older ages. Even in Piazzas case, I understand there's a pretty decent minor league system in baseball where he could have had a chance. I don't think the connections argument really holds up in sports.
Baseball and Football are pretty different in terms of peak ages due to different skill sets involved, with football players typically starting, ending, and peaking in their careers younger than baseball players. Teenagers are common on champion’s league teams, there might be one or two a year in the MLB.
And due to the closed nature of the baseball system, if Mike Piazza doesn’t get drafted he never gets into the affiliated minor leagues, and almost certainly never makes it.
The differences don't really matter, the point was that in a professional sport with lots of chances for late bloomers to make it and no real barriers to entry, we never really see late bloomers: they are just as rare as Piazza. This suggests that if connections had no influence, nothing would really change and you wouldn't get dozens more Piazzas.
Re: "interesting families I’d missed", I'm suprised that Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758) hasn't yet cropped up. Conveniently, from Wikipedia:
"Many of Jonathan and Sarah Edwards's descendants became prominent citizens in the United States, including the third U.S. vice president Aaron Burr and the College Presidents Timothy Dwight, Jonathan Edwards Jr. and Merrill Edwards Gates. Jonathan and Sarah Edwards were also ancestors of Edith Roosevelt, the writer O. Henry, the publisher Frank Nelson Doubleday and the writer Robert Lowell."
That he died in connection with vaccines makes him kind of topical ... :-o ... "Edwards, a strong supporter of smallpox inoculations, decided to get inoculated himself in order to encourage others to do the same. Never having been in robust health, he died as a result of the inoculation on March 22, 1758."
I guess this would have been the old style "give yourself a small dose of smallpox and hope for the best" version, rather than the slightly later "give yourself a dose of cowpox" one.
Re the statistical clustering question, I think you're being overly generous using the whole population of the first world countries when for large swathes of the population they just don't have the opportunity to study things at a more advanced level. However true you think that is now, it was certainly true in the late 19th and early 20th century, where a lot of the more impressive clusters come from.
Let's take Darwin's family as an example:
The numbers of people attending university at the time of Darwin were tiny, and not particularly selected by merit, but mostly children of the aristocracy, scholarships were near nonexistent, and without universal primary and secondary education most people couldn't have gotten them anyway, and even within the (male) elite there were other arbitrary constraints like religion.
I can't find good numbers for 19th century England, but for America in the 1940s https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_United_States#/media/File%3AEducational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png about 5% of the population had graduated from university, and less than half had graduated high school. (If anyone can find other numbers let me know)
UK population was 17.9 million in 1850. Cambridge apparently had 441 matriculated students per year then. https://www.cam.ac.uk/about-the-university/history/nineteenth-and-twentieth-centuries. And, depending how you classify there were about 10 universities in the UK. Darwin attended earlier in the century when the numbers would have been even lower.
Based on that it seems reasonable to approximate the population who could have reasonably done the things Darwin's family did as about 100k to one million. That gives a much more reasonable denominator for comparing Darwin's family to.
As a rebuttal to your UK points, university education was not a prerequisite for a brilliant scientific career in XVIII-XIX century Britain. E.g. William Herschel, Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday. Faraday, in addition, came from extremely humble circumstances, but there was enough of a support system to develop his genius. Primary education was very widespread, especially in countries where Protestantism was strong and there was emphasis on being able to read the Scripture
> The literacy rate in England in the 1640s was around 30 percent for males, rising to 60 percent in the mid-18th century.
and that permitted both early discovery of gifted children and later self-study.
> but for America in the 1940s about 5% of the population had graduated from university, and less than half had graduated high school.
This point is worth much less than the UK one, because, first, high schools at that time were not yet obliged to graduate everyone and could afford to be more selective than American colleges are today - you have probably seen turn-of-the-century high school exam questions that are floating around the internet, with typical comments of either "look how dumb we have become" or "look how bad our schools are", not stopping to consider that only around 5% of the population, selected largely if by no means completely by ability, went on to high school. (Incidentally, in continental Europe "high school" means college.) Second, American society in 1940s was already sufficiently permeable that it is completely inconceivable that at that time the majority of gifted children languished without being able to obtain educations (even if one half languished, it would not affect your ratios much). This contention is supported by the well-known observation of great geographical diversity in founders of companies, scientists etc. Cf. the founders of Intel who came to what became the Silicon Valley from Midwestern sticks.
I wonder if there are "evil success" examples that might have been missed. For example, are there any successful scientists/athletes/musicians/writers/etc who have branches of the family with successful dictators, or crime bosses?
William Bulger and Whitey Bulger were brothers, though I'm not sure that William Bulger was notable enough as an academic, rather than as a politician, to be a clear example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Bulger
Weren't the Kennedys involved in selling alcohol during prohibition?
I strongly disagree with the suggestion that a person's "drive" or "aspiration" are somehow easy to manipulate by good parenting. This neurological trait is mainly controlled by brain chemistry, and I cannot see why it should be less heritable than IQ. You can take stimulants to have a better drive, but in my experience you can't really turn someone into a more driven person by parenting, unless you cure their depression or something. For an example, I had a high drive father and a moderate drive mother, who made great efforts to foster my drive through all my childhood. Well, their genes seemed to have combined in a way that gives me a low-moderate drive, and the childhood drive-fostering efforts were somewhat painful actually. They probably would have had more success had they fed me full of stimulants.
One thing that is often overlooked when debating nature vs. nurture is how a child reacts to the home environment in my opinion: As a way of coping with his childhood home, my father became a high-achieving workaholic. This later on shaped my own childhood environment, leading to me using dissociation ("freeze" response) as a tactic to escape negative emotions. My father using the "flight" response of ceaseless activity shaped his drive while my tactic of hiding surpressed my own drive, even with similiar levels of intelligence. This is different from explicit parenting strategies but more about if the parents (mother primarily) were stable themselves and able to form a strong bond with the child. Depression in young children is treated by treating the parents.
The way children choose coping strategies when growing up in sub-optimal environments has an importance that is often not acknowledged IMHO.
Well N = 1 et cetera.
I suspect people make the argument because, when you find a driven competitive person who succeeds -- an Olympic gold-medal winner, say, or tycoon of industry -- and you ask him "Say, what were your parents like?" you never seem to hear the answer "Oh, they were very low-key, laid back people. Never that interested in what I did, never pushed, kind of lazy really if you ask me..."
The Big Five Personality Traits are all heritable, but their heritability is only around 40-50%, compared to maybe 70%-80%+ for IQ.
So while personality is heritable, it is more environmentally malleable. Moreover, personality seems to be trainable - criminality, for instance, is affected strongly by environment. While criminal propensity has a heritability of about 50%, you can halve or double crime rates via cultural changes.
I'm just here to remind people that James Hutton nailed natural selection far before Darwin and the success of Origin of Species had maybe the most to do with the 1890s
Huh. Remarkable. Thanks for the tip.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hutton#Evolution
Hutton realized that natural selection might serve to create selective pressure within species, but he rejected the idea that evolution could cause speciation.
Darwin was the one who figured that out, which was a very significant accomplishment. He also provided better evidence for his arguments; Hutton's arguments were more philisophical, while Darwin had better evidence that evolution had actually occurred.
I was reading molecular biology papers from the early 2000s earlier that were doomed and now useless due to temporal variations/inputs we know about now and didn't know then-
Sometimes I think success is recognizing where progress can and can't be made. I would like to honor all the hard working scientists who spent years of their life and millions of funding on doomed projects.
I've mentioned to other first gen immigrants and hard working researchers about how quickly one should quit labs and companies that were doomed, vaporware, or false advertising (there's so much bad science in stem cell biology because the foundation of the field is a bed of assumptions on ex vivo modeling you can't make) - and they all sort of give me a shocked "that would look bad on my CV" look and I realize they're thinking about their career and committing to bad projects over literal scientific progress. And the former isn't bad, but it is ubiquitous.
Oh but fun fact- the Italian scientist who specializes in athletic doping is absolute seminal in the field of skeletal muscle biology from the cellular/development level which makes him academically the father of lab meat startups.
Do tell me more.
UPDATE I HAD THE WRONG FERRARI, discount everything I've ever said
Congtratulations! Most people live their entire lives without a legitimate opportunity to exclaim, "I had the wrong Ferrari!"
"I've mentioned to other first gen immigrants and hard working researchers about how quickly one should quit labs and companies that were doomed, vaporware, or false advertising"
Hmm. That sounds like good advice.
I mean, the traditional way to find a new job is to keep your old one and to apply for new ones.
My general impression is that people don't mind if you're mercenary.
On the topic of investing in stocks, Scott, would you consider writing a quick intro to the hows and whys, for those of us whose reaction is the same as your friend's?
(I'm sure there are such articles out there, but if it's written by Scott then a) I trust it and b) it won't make my eyes glaze over like most financial writing.)
I’m not Scott, but the basic idea is that the stock market has grown on average 10% a year for the past 100 years, which is much faster than most other assets a typical person would put their money in.
There is short term risk (e.g. 2008 crash) of a stock market downturn, as well as longer term risk of the stock market dropping to a lower rate of growth. Even if we account for these risks, you’re likely end up far ahead in the long run by investing in stocks than doing the alternative.
As for how to invest in stocks, the most common advice is to invest in an index fund/etf that matches the entire stock market. Some people advocate trading individual stocks, but this is very risky, and its difficult to beat the index fund approach in the long run using this method.
For someone who truly doesn't understanding investing, I would recommend a target fund, eg Fidelity Target 2050 for someone who's 35 right now and so will probably retire in 2050. This would handle their index fund vs. bond distribution for them and make sure they don't get wiped out if a market crash happens at the wrong time. It's mostly idiotproof as long as you remember *not to sell during a market crash*. Or preferably at all, unless you've reached retirement age or really need the money, but definitely not during a crash.
I guess then the main question would be how much to put in it - I would recommend everything beyond what you need for monthly expenses, plus maybe an emergency fund - but I might be missing something for people in different financial situations than me.
Maybe check out Lifecycle Investing by Barry Nalebuff and Ian Ayres. Their argument is that you should actually use leverage while you are younger in order to lower the amount of risk you're taking earlier in your life. They say that it is actually SAFER to use leverage when you are young and use their plan. So you would hold >100% in stocks. As you get older, you deescalate. Your investment strategy should be relative to your age but the target date funds don't go far enough.
Might be worth looking into. I imagine it has a high expected value to understand financial investments.
*lower the mount of risk you're taking across your whole life.
Good advice.
I'll mention holding in cash means you are losing money.
You can beat an index by taking on more risk and using leverage which is appropriate depending on where you are in your life. Younger means you can take on more risk and lose big in a crash without being hurt as bad.
First thing is to have cash in case of emergency.
Then look if your employer provides 401(k) if in USA.
If you'd invested in the stock market 100 years ago in Germany, Japan, Argentina, Poland, Hungary, Romania, or China, you'd be singing a different tune; in most of those countries the investors lost 100% of their money.
Touting the US stock market as a great past performer over the last century with the benefit of hindsight (which is what you're doing when you say "on average 10% a year") is the equivalent of touting a hedge fund that's done well over the last 30 years or a cryptocurrency that's done well over the last 30 days.
Even the US stock market hasn't earned 10% a year over the last 100 years. The DJIA 100 years ago was at US$80, and now it's at US$35000, which is 6.3% growth, but most of that is inflation. The inflation-adjusted DJIA number in 01921 was US$1100, which works out to 3.5% growth per year. Dividends make up some of the difference, but not all of it. I'd like to see an index that covers small-cap stocks and includes dividends, but I don't think it would do much better.
So, where does your 10% number come from? Did you just round 6.3% up to 10%?
I agree that index funds are a good idea for basically everybody.
Sure, but in most of those cases, people also lost the value of their cash, lost homes and land (and of course quite a lot of people lost their lives). Not so many cases where there's been a much better choice even in retrospect.
In most of those cases, most people did not lose their homes, except by selling them or being evicted by their landlords. However, nearly all the people who were alive 100 years ago have lost their lives. It's also true that in none of those countries has cash held any significant fraction of its value over the last 100 years; the world moved to essentially universal use of fiat money during that period, and fiat money tends to inflate into worthlessness, sometimes slowly and sometimes very rapidly.
But many families in many of those countries were able to preserve substantial wealth over that period, whether by keeping it in a Swiss bank, holding it in gold, investing it overseas in US or UK stock markets, owning land, fleeing to safer countries when things got bad, or holding specie (gold, silver, etc.) Today cryptocurrency might be an additional option.
The "How" is you go sign up for an account with someone who will invest your money into a broad variety of stocks (e.g. Vanguard.com), you give them your bank account details, and then you use their website to move money from your bank account into an index fund (e.g. the Total Stock Market Index, acronym VTSMX). You are then part of the capital class and get money just for having money.
I do mine through the bank itself.
Information from Vanguard website:
> Can I open an account if I don't live in the United States or if I work outside of the U.S.?
> You must have a permanent legal residential address in the United States (including D.C., Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands) to open an account.
> We currently don't support accounts for people who live abroad and work for a non-U.S. employer, or who work outside of the United States, D.C., or U.S. territories for the majority of the year.
I'd be nervous about this because I think there are thousands of commenters here who know more about this than I do (I tend to limit myself to topics where only *hundreds* of you know more than me!)
Jacob Falkovich, another rationalist blogger, has written a version of this at https://putanumonit.com/2017/02/10/get-rich-slowly/
Thanks very much!
He talks about investing in preference to leaving 5-figure sums sitting around in cash, which I agree would be a no-brainer, but he doesn't mention the relative merits of investing versus paying down debt, which makes me suspect that this is, after all, something for very rich people who don't have any debt, even mortgage debt. When we have spare money we usually use it to overpay the mortgage, because that's a higher compounded return than most alternatives and is zero risk.
I was hoping for a comparison of when and whether to invest versus overpaying the mortgage (and, if the answer is anything other than "never", whether it's ever sensible to borrow more in order to invest it), and a discussion of how much to leave un-invested in case you need it rather than investing it all and being forced to withdraw it at a loss during a downturn.
A lot of people have mortgages at low interest rates like 3%. For those people, the low-risk 5% or so paid by many investments is probably a better alternative. Also, in countries like the US, you may be able to buy stocks with pre-tax money (with an IRA or 401(k)), only being taxed when you draw from the retirement account after retirement, probably in a lower tax bracket. Depending on what tax bracket you're in and how long you have until retirement, that might be a really good deal, and unfortunately you can't pay down your mortgage or blow insulation into your house walls with your 401(k).
>Then you all write up a proposal saying what you plan to discover and how you'll discover it, along with your bioethics review, environmental impact statement, and diversity plan, and submit it to a government agency's grant solicitation. Then you wait 4 months to hear back from them. Then, if you get an award, you wait another 3 months for the kickoff meeting, at which you discover the contracting officer who gave you the reward has been transferred, and you now work with a contracting officer who isn't interested in your project and wants you to do something else.
He's not exaggerating.
And unfortunately for actual science, these days funding bodies really care about the diversity statements.
> I agree it’s awkward that we can only do these calculations well with Nobels (and maybe Olympic medalists?) A really rigorous attempt at this would try to find some way of quantifying extreme but not Nobel-level talent...
I think there are many other criteria you can look at depending on the area:
* Within academia, how about the h-index? Another option could be to look at a wider range of prizes than just the Nobel. Maybe even include membership in the country's scientific society?
* Within the business/startup world, you can look at income or being the founder or CEO of a successful company.
* For authors, you can at least measure popularity by appearing on bestseller lists, it would be harder to measure aesthetic quality.
* Within popular sports, reaching the professional leagues is exclusive enough, and for for more obscure (and more individualistic) sports you can look at college-level championships winners.
Gunnar and Alva Myrdal aren't the only prolific couples, whose lineage saw great success. Adam & Eve are mostly known for being the world's first sinners. The intermingling of Adam and Eve eventually gave rise to all Twelve tribes of Israel. Their great*6 grandson Noah is a well-known naval engineer. Their great*15 grandson Abraham is known as the spiritual progenitor of 3 major religions. Abraham's great*11 grandson David rose to the tenure of King of the United Monarchy of Israel and Judah, which started a lineage of kings that persisted for another 15 generations. This lineage later produced Jesus (also known as Christ), an eccentric apocalyptic preacher who produced the intellectual substructure to what would become Christianity.
This is excellent. Thanks
"A really rigorous attempt at this would try to find some way of quantifying extreme but not Nobel-level talent"
I would suggest checking out The Son Also Rises by Gregory Clark, which describes research using census records and surnames to trace social mobility over long time periods (e.g, centuries). Clark was initially agnostic about the causes but I think he's swung around to genetics as the most plausible factor (given results from heritability and adoption studies, finding similar correlations between siblings regardless of family size, et cetera.) Recessive genetics plus assortative mating and the law of averages accounts for the paradoxical finding of high social mobility at the individual level within one generation combined with almost no social mobility at the family level across multiple generations.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691162546/the-son-also-rises
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Son_Also_Rises_(book)
Re: Phil Getz’s comment that “you can’t just write a note of observation to the royal society anymore’ and the Brownian motion example.
You do seem to be able to post a pure observation to Yourube. I’ve been following the discovery of a new physics phenomenon on YouTube. It’s called the Mould effect, it happens when certain chains are dropping out of a container, the chain’s length rises into the air before it plummets down.
A YouTube named Steve Mould found this and made a video about it, another YouTube responded, they both formed mathematical models and then tested them.
Later on, the Proceedings of the Royal Society published a paper with a description of the phenomenon and a math model.
So, this kind of thing is still possible. No Popper-style papers seem to have been involved in the discovery.
A Video by original discoverer Steve Mould
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTLR7FwXUU4
Video about royal society paper
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eEi7fO0_O0
Ironically, the Royal Rociety paper on Mould's chain fountain (doi:10.1098/rspa.2013.0689) and a few other papers on falling chains that I've checked out (doi:10.1119/1.3583481, doi:10.1119/1.3429983, doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.134301) closely follow the structure Getz describes.
How much is from nepotism?
Jerry Brown’s father Pat Brown was governor before him, and passed “environmental” regulations to make the state dependent on Getty-owned oil leases after receiving bribes from Bill Newsom. Bill Newsom was attorney to J. Paul Getty. His grandson Gavin Newsom is the current governor of California, and Nancy Pelosi’s nephew.
https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/01/gavin-newsoms-keeping-it-all-in-the-family/
"Nobels are so selective that you can’t just leave desirable character traits on the ground."
No?
I'm reminded of the story of Brian Josephson. He's the "Josephson" from the "Josephson junctions" that modern quantum computers are built out of. Big name if you've ever studied superconductors, not a huge name outside the field.
Anyhow, he has a Nobel for his work. But the actual prediction that he made was just a very simple and straightforward consequence of a theory that had been proposed by someone else. It was so simple a grad student could have figured it out - which we know empirically, because Josephson was a 22 year old grad student when he wrote the paper!
If you think that because Nobel prizes are so selective that Josephson winning one at 22 means that he must be a staggering genius, a paragon of many different necessary character traits, then to you I say... that Josephson has had a mundane career exercising his physics skills since then, and the major other notable fact about them is his firm belief in homeopathy and "water memory."
I'm not saying this to dunk on him. I'm not saying that Josephson is the outlier. I'm saying that the Nobel prize is very selective and yet it's still always like this! Scientists are constantly, constantly looking at things and going "huh, that's funny." And sometimes when you do that, you're looking at the anti-viral proteins of bacteria and you discover CRISPR. And other times, you're looking at the immune proteins of humans and you discover a completely boring paper that gets published in a B-tier journal and then is only of note to the people who work in your exact sub-field. And you don't know ahead of time which it's going to be! Thousands and thousands of scientists are pulling the handle on reality's slot machine each year, and they're almost all very smart and nice people, but we shouldn't confuse the output of the slot machine with a highly selective judgment about their personal characteristics.
Fair point, I suppose. Being a massive outlier with respect to luck could be as impactful as being a massive outlier with respect to talent.
Then there are people where you just wonder, like Kary Mullis. Was he briliant but eccentric or just nuts but lucky? (I didn't know the guy myself, which is why I wonder a bit.)
Nobel prizes are voted on through a recommendation system, so if you already have a strong network of scientists you have a huge advantage because that means they know about your work and would recommend it. I'm going to be bold and say that nobel prizes don't really say anything about your abilities relative to others. Especially ones given for softer skills like politics or economics.
> This is true! All my regression-to-the-mean calculations were wrong because of selection bias
Hmm. I didn't read much of the first article because the observation seemed so uninteresting. But if you want to claim that families shouldn't be able to consistently perform at a high level because of regression to the mean, it sounds like you don't understand regression to the mean in the context of heritability.
The Breeder's Equation tells us that the mean value of a trait in one generation is the product of two values calculated over the previous generation:
(1) The heritability of the trait.
(2) The difference between the average value of the trait in the previous generation, and the average value of the trait in the population from which the previous generation was drawn.
So, if you select a bunch of dogs (generation 0) with a mean weight of 0.3 standard deviations above the norm, and you breed them, and the heritability of weight turns out to be 0.7, then the mean weight in generation 1 will be 0.21 "reference standard deviations" above the "reference norm", where the reference values are just the same values for the overall population from which generation 0 was selected.
If you then breed generation 1 to produce generation 2, the mean weight in generation 2 will also be 0.21 reference deviations above the reference norm -- which is to say, it will not regress at all. Generation 1 had a higher mean weight than the general run of dogs. But they didn't come from the general run of dogs, so that's irrelevant. Generation 1 was already at its own mean weight.
You may notice that elite families keep careful track of which other families they intermarry with. This is not a coincidence.
(A small correction:
> The Breeder's Equation tells us that the mean value of a trait in one generation is the product of two values calculated over the previous generation
Rather, it tells us that the offset from the mean is the product of these two values. In my example above, value (2) is 0 in generation 1, and thus the mean trait value in generation 2 differs by 0 from the mean trait value in generation 1.)
Very important point about the generation prior. I think this gets overlooked at times.
I'm not really a fan of the current style of scientific writing, but claiming that it prevents science from communicating unexplained observations seems completely false to me. Writing a paper we "with don't know" as the explanation is definitely still possible, although it might need to be phrased as "the observations are inconsistent with any known theoretical model". A lot of scientific communication occurs at conferences instead of in papers, and the standards for presenting at a conference are much laxer than for publishing a paper.
The first example of a recent unexplained scientific observation I can think of is switchbacks in the solar wind measured by Parker Solar Probe. Parker Solar Probe is a spacecraft launched in 2018 to go closer to the sun than any other man-made object. A surprising thing that it frequently saw are "switchbacks": waves where the direction of the magnetic field abruptly changes, but the magnitude of the magnetic field remains almost constant. We don't have a good theoretical explanation, but there have already been hundreds of papers written about them.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2021/switchbacks-science-explaining-parker-solar-probe-s-magnetic-puzzle
The bigger problem with scientific writing norms is that they make science more exclusive, not that they make give priority to theory over experiment. Scientific papers are not designed to be readable by anyone who is not familiar with the field. Writing a scientific paper is even more exclusive because you have to already know enough to write a literature review.
While reading that post, I thought about something I discovered while researching genealogy. It's an example of a family with several highly-accomplished members, even if none of them are household names in the current era.
One of my ancestors lived in the same town as Oliver Ellsworth (born in 1745 in British North America, died 1807 in the United States; he served in Continental Congress, was part of the Constitutional Convention, served in the the U.S. Senate, and served on the U.S. Supreme Court). The family relation between my ancestor(s) and Ellsworth was likely some sort of cousin, but I haven't spent a lot of time trying to piece that out.
Oliver Ellsworth has his own wiki page. Among his 9 children are two who have their own wiki pages. He also has a grand-son who has his own wiki page. These men served as Patent commissioners, Congressmen, governors, mayors, and even presidents of insurance companies.
Oliver was connected by marriage to the relatives of former Colonial governor Roger Wolcott, and one of his children was connected by marriage to the family of Noah Webster.
Is this evidence of a large family increasing the odds of high-IQ-and-high-accomplishment children? Is this evidence that network effects (or Hero License) give certain families an advantage in politics?
I'm not sure.
I also know of a branch of my family tree where one man was an officer in the Colonial militia, and several of his sons rose to the level of officers in the Colonial militia, and several more of his grand-sons rose to the level of officers in the Colonial militia, and a couple of great-grandsons were officers in units that fought in the Revolutionary War. Most of these individuals were also involved in town-politics, and a few were leaders in settling new towns up the river from the current city. One member of that branch of the family built a historic house that still stands.
In both of these cases, arguments could be made for some form of inherited-IQ-advantage, or some form of Hero License, or some form of Network Effect enabling a particular kind of success. (Of note, many of those early-Colonial-America families had six to ten children...so if large family size increases the odds of any of those three happening, then we should expect this kind of Success-in-the-Family-Business to happen often there. But most of these are people who would only be recognized by genealogy nerds, or by historians who specialize in that time and place.)
I can't tell you what conclusion to draw. But I can tell you that this kind of thing happens at lower levels than the Great Families you mentioned in your post.
> You're not allowed to do that today. If you notice something funny, you can't just write a note to the Royal Society describing it.
What I thought about when reading the Phil Getz quote was the YouTuber Steve Mould.
He does science videos and he noticed something weird called the Chain Fountain and he made a video about it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dQJBBklpQQ
Ever since then (back in 2013) him and other YouTubers have been trying to explain the effect. There's been published papers on it. There's been a good-natured feud over the past year between two competing theories.
Maybe the urge to do science the Old Way is so high that it's evolving around the Bad New Way.
Man I really need to find some more ambitious people to surround myself with for this reason. (also for less cynical reasons like them being good company)
I'm planning to relocate soon and wondering how highly to weight 'near a decent university' for this reason
Not sure you’d care for the climate but there are three more than decent universities plus a law school within walking distance of my home.
If you are willing to get on a bicycle there are a couple more within a half hour or so.
Winters do kinda suck until you acclimate though.
Prince William's mother is Queen Elizabeth.
Her father was George VI.
His father was George V.
His father was Edward VII.
His mother was Queen Victoria.
Her grandfather was George III.
All famous for being in ruling positions in major countries, and having a large effect on the state of the world today.
Has such an unexplainable, unexpected grouping of talent in one family been seen before?
It must be genetic transmission of IQ!
> Prince William's mother is Queen Elizabeth
Ew! Did Diana know?
Haha! Whoops, entirely skipped an entire generation there.
You're picking an example which is clearly not genetic and then acting like that is the argument or analogous to the argument. There are good reasons for thinking genes are playing a role. I can also pick an example which is clearly not environmental to mock your position:
My mother has brown eyes and I have brown eyes. Clearly it was the environment. How foolish!
I made the comment in jest but the idea of a monarch (originally) rising to their position due to genes isn't unthinkable.
To get their position, they were either the strongest and most violent, or cleverest and best at broking power. It's likely their children will be similar; if they regress towards the mean too much, their monarchy will be usurped by a challenger.
Re: Phil Getz on Popper. Does anyone know how did scientists earn their living back when this "just publish an observation" kind of thing was possible?
I have a feeling that with the current state of affairs where scientists are usually full-time salaried
(or even tenured) professionals and usually funded by the public at large, this can't ever work - the public will feel like it's wasting its money by paying a bunch of people for essentially being "professional curious guys who ponder interesting questions about life and the world". The current state where publications include lit review, hypotheses, etc at least feel like a "finished good" that the scientists has produced.
I am in a line of work where we do data analysis for commercial clients, and we definitely experience this kind of pressure where the client needs clear-cut answers based on the data they have, and they're absolutely not going to accept us coming back and saying "sorry, this is really complex, we might need another, umm, couple years to pick at this".
Many of them were clergy or gentry.
SBF: "You're not taking all successful people at random, you're selecting for people who have successful families -- so you're probably selecting for people who don't just have high IQ, but for whom it's highly genetic/inheritable rather than random factors."
Scott: "This is true! All my regression-to-the-mean calculations were wrong because of selection bias - since we’re looking specifically at geniuses who we know had talented families, we should assume their intelligence was more genetic than average."
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I think what happened was that geniuses assortatively mated and kept a high genotypic family mean which is what they would regress toward, rather than the population mean. I think that heritability was probably higher in past areas and you can't use the .5 - .8 heritability estimates. Without knowing the heritability or mean, the calculation won't make sense. I don't know what the heritability of intelligence would've been in 1800, but I would think it was lower. When people are adopted from developing nations and come to the USA, they get a boost in IQ. Also there was a the phenomenon of increasing secular IQ scores. Now, we can't really find much to change IQ for the better. I think that in 1800, we could probably find more things.
Francis Galton tried to examine this in his book Hereditary Genius where he examined the difference between boys adopted by popes and sons of eminent men. He found eminence heritable and that eminent men had relatives in different fields which were eminent. This showed that mental ability was general and not specific.
Gregory Clark has examined surnames to look at the preservation of status, wealth and power across generations and finds that it is persistent across hundreds of years. To know the exact numbers, you can see his book The Son Also Rises.
Seems reasonable to me that it might not be entirely intelligence but intelligence is a prerequisite for eminence. There are probably other traits and in an earlier era, the ability to eat better and have exposure to academic things were important. I think environment mattered more in the past and the people who provided the good environment were probably genetically gifted.
While there's all sorts of ways in which Popper is both descriptively and normatively wrong about science, and all sorts of ways in which I think Popper is a baleful influence on the self-conception of scientists, I don't think this particular point being made here is an especially accurate or important one.
Getz is right that Popper is an anti-inductivist, so he thinks it is impossible for observations to support a theory. But Popper does think experiment and empiricism are essential in science - his picture of science involves coming up with a falsifiable theory, in whatever creative way you do, and then proposing an experiment to test it. His emphasis on falsifiability as a criterion of meaningfulness is widely adopted by scientists, and leads them to say things that discount the importance of coming up with alternate metaphysical views that enable theories to be developed in different ways. He's not the proximate influence behind the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, but he is the influence behind everyone who says we shouldn't consider alternatives because the difference between Copenhagen and the alternatives would be unfalsifiable.
The point being described here however is common not just to Popper, but is central to frequentist statistical methodology, and is even accepted to some degree by Bayesians. The point is the same as the one that pre-registration is after. The space of possibly hypotheses is so large that it's always possible to come up with a hypothesis that fits the data after the fact. However, it's more impressive if your hypothesis that you came up with beforehand fits data that it wasn't specifically designed to fit.
As a good example, consider Saussure's development of the "laryngeal hypothesis" in Indo-European (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laryngeal_theory). He noticed a pattern in the vowel structure of the reconstructed Indo-European language, that he could explain if there had once been a time when the language had two additional consonants, that affected the development of the vowels, but then at a later generation disappeared before the descendant languages split. This was a nice theory on the basis of the data he had. But the bigger test was a few decades later, when inscriptions in Ancient Hittite were discovered, and decoded, and realized to be another Indo-European language. Intriguingly, the Hittite language had two additional consonants that appeared in exactly the places that Saussure predicted them to occur. This is much stronger evidence for the laryngeal hypothesis than if Saussure had based his theory on the Hittite evidence (because in that latter case it would still leave open the idea that Hittite developed these consonants independently from the proto-Indo-European language).
The same thing goes on with the classic tests of relativity - the fact that the eclipse was measured *after* Einstein had made his predictions about how gravity would lens light made it clearer that he was onto something than it would be if he had proposed his theory in light of that evidence as well as his thought experiments.
Someone else in this thread already pointed out that there are major branches of physics were people publish things closer to pure observations, so that Getz's claim just isn't accurate as a model of how science has been influenced by Popper. The real thing here is just the observation even Bayesians accept - it's more impressive to predict data you didn't know about at the time you made your theory than it is to come up with a theory that fits the data you already have, and this impressiveness lends extra credibility to the hypothesis.
I really don't understand this criticism. It feels to me like you may have greatly mistaken what Getz was saying, or at least you took from it something very different than I did. What I understood him to be saying -- that there is an unhealthy retreat from the primacy of observation, and an unfortunate re-elevation of the importance of a theoretical perspective -- matches very well with my direct experience in science.
And it's a very important point, because it signals an unfortunate retreat from the empirical perspective that has brought us so much success in the past. It *may* have some relevance to why in certain respects forward progress in some of the sciences appears to have slowed considerably in the past 50 years. Nor is he (Getz) or I the first to worry that this is so, and made the criticism. There's a broad streak of people who feel modern physics, at least, pays too much attention to its theoretical perspective and not enough to the primacy of observation.[1]
It may be you are criticizing Getz's assertion that this is all Karl Popper's fault, and with that I would have no difference, since I'm not especially aware of, or interested in, the philosophy of science and couldn't really tell if it was or was not Popper's fault.
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[1] Of course, in HEP's defense, a lot of the observation that would be one's first idea are impossible e.g. without a particle collider with the diameter of the Milky Way. But as I said in that thread, that doesn't totally get physics off the hook -- maybe we are being too defeatist about looking for types of experiments that *are* doable and would give insight into what we want to know. Maybe we turn back to theoretical considerations too easily -- because we are not valuing observation as highly as we should, were we good empiricists. It's not like this is without precedent: through most of human history natural philosophy has preferred arguing over theory instead of coming up with new experiments and focussing on observation. It's a natural human tendency, and it's only by fierce discipline we avoid it.
I think you're wildly overestimating the odds of parent-child Nobels, at least in science, when you assume it ought to be a random selection process. I think what you're missing is that the Nobel is given for a certain and very specific piece of *work* and not as some kind of recognition of a person's broad contributions or ability.
And as it happened there were several examples where parent and child worked on the same, or very similar, problems -- the Braggs, Curies, Thomsons, and Bohrs all fit in that category -- and it was that particular avenue of work that paid off brilliantly, and which was recognized by the Nobel committee (indeed, the Braggs actually shared the 1915 prize).
Anyone in science will tell you, picking the right problem and the right approach is about 90% of recognized success. You don't even have to be *that* brilliant if you pick the right problem. That's not to say that there isn't a form of brilliance in picking the right problem -- there definitely is -- but since it partakes in part of an awareness of what the research world would find especially interesting, there is an aspect of "social intelligence" here which is not precisely what most people mean when they say "boy he's really smart in physics."
More importantly, it is *definitely* the kind of thing that can be transmitted within a family. "Hey, son/daughter, want to work with me on X-ray crystallography / radiation / a new theory of the atom? Let me explain why it's really cool..." It's "access" at the most important possible level: being invited to work on a problem, with an approach, which is sufficiently important and brilliant that *the work* has an excellent chance of coming to the Nobel committee's attention. It's like being J. Random Law Student but your father is a Supreme Court Justice and he invites you to clerk for him. The chance to work on the most challenging and interesting of cases -- would it be any kind of surprise if your odds of winning a Nobel in constitutional law (if there were one) were tremendously boosted, regardless of your individual brilliance?
Sorry, meant wildly *underestimating* in the first sentence.
"I can also see the connection to sports. I got good enough at a sport that a coach wanted me to go for the olympics, but I did it by wrecking my body. I don't think I'm particularly physically gifted, but I was maybe more willing to tear myself apart in pursuit of something that looked like possible greatness."
I know this is a widely-held belief, but I have always been curious about the supposed causation between the training that makes you the best at moving your musculoskeletal system in a certain way and then a later decline. If the training builds your body up, how does it also at the same time contribute to breaking your body down?
I'm not trying to be snarky--I wonder what nuance I'm missing. (Also, I'm not talking about situations where an athlete's body "breaking down" is unrelated to the athlete's training - like when an NFL player breaks a bone or gets a concussion from being tackled. I'm thinking more about something like swimming or running or tennis.
I think the biggest contributor here is progressive injury. When you're training fairly close to the limits of your abilities, occasional injuries are an inevitability. When you're training *very* close to the limits of your abilities, those injuries become frequent. Elite training is kind of a balancing act, where you're trying to work hard enough that competitors don't get an edge on you by working harder, but not overdo it and derail your training via injuries.
Getting a handful of injuries which each push your training schedule back by a month or two might not be that big a deal when you're eighteen, but if you keep that up until you're thirty, continuing to rack up injuries the whole time, eventually they'll start to become a serious imposition on your physical functionality.
Yeah, I can see how "racking up injuries" would mean you end up racking up a lot of recovery time and lost training time, but if you sprain an ankle and it heals and the ankle structure ends up performing better than before the injury (which happens often during the course of training, I think) I just don't see where the progression or the "racking up" is occuring.
A lot of the time you can achieve better performance after an injury, because you've achieved a higher level of fitness or skill, but the injury still has a permanent impact. The burden on your performance becomes greater as the injuries accumulate; your level of fitness can only approach your personal peak, while the effect of injuries is additive.
It's not just neurological damage like football players accumulate from concussions which can be permanent. Muscle scarring, ligament damage etc. can take a lasting toll, and as athletes accumulate damage, it becomes more and more difficult to compensate for it.
I have an injury from about eleven years ago, where the ligament of my left hip joint mostly detached from the bone. Although I've long since gotten back my full range of motion, and because scar tissue doesn't have the same level of suppleness or responsiveness to training, I've never been able to get back the same level of high-kick-supporting stability it used to have.
If you rack up enough injuries like that, it can become difficult, not just to maintain an athletic career, but to sustain the physical activities of everyday living, especially as you age.
Sport seems like a slow but reliable road to disability.
Anecdotal evidence: I know a few guys who played lot of soccer at high school. (Some minor league, I am not sure.) Now in their 40s, they cannot take a long walk, because their legs hurt.
When I was doing a questionnaire for life insurance, one question asked whether I do sport regularly. I was curious, so I asked the insurance agent whether that is a good thing or a bad thing. He said it was a bad thing, because people active at sport get seriously hurt or disabled more often.
I'd say that overall, this is more the case than not, but it depends a lot on the distinction between "sports" and "athletic training." Athletic training continues to have benefits throughout your life, but sports are a special case of athletic training. Not only does sports competition tend to have a much higher accident rate due to chaotic environments than, say, weight lifting, coaches, trainers, etc. don't have a lot of incentive to learn or implement practices such that they'll tell their athletes "Hey, stop doing that, you'll wrech your performance when you're sixty."
Personally, I favor martial arts over most other types of athletics, and one thing that distinguishes martial arts from most athletic disciplines is that plenty of living martial arts have hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years of cultural evolution for practices which maintain athletic functionality throughout the practitioner's lifetime. If you tried to maintain a competitive boxing career for thirty years, you'd probably end up a physical wreck or dead, but people can practice martial arts, including ones where they engage in competitive channels, for much longer than that while remaining in excellent physical condition.
I've trained with one instructor who, in his late sixties, after over fifty years of training, was still training upwards of twenty hours a week and maintained better physical condition than most people reach at any age. His instruction, and that of other martial artists I've trained with, had a level of emphasis on form in a sense of "don't do it like that, or you'll fuck up your joints in twenty years" which I haven't observed from instructors in other competitive sports I've participated in.
You can run machinery at more rpms or volts or %uptime than it was designed to handle at the cost of decreased lifespan. Sometimes this machinery is made out of meat instead of steel.
"You can run machinery at more rpms or volts or %uptime than it was designed to handle at the cost of decreased lifespan."
Yeah, but the human body adapts and gets better when you apply the right amount of stress to it. And it atrophies when you stop applying stress. And there are many ways in which applying certain stresses increases the body's lifespan. So I don't think it's an apt analogy.
Though the body is pretty amazing at adapting overall, that doesn't hold for every kind of tissue.
Muscles work a lot like you say: they get stronger under the right amount of stress, and atrophy if not stressed. If overstressed or injured, they can usually return to 100% with a proper rehab program.
But cartilage and ligaments often don't heal properly if overstressed. As an extreme example, the ACL doesn't heal in any meaningful way, and reconstruction is the only treatment if you tear it. Training at an elite level often exceeds cartilage/ligament's (very limited) ability to adapt, and a lot of wear-and-tear can accumulate over a career.
There's a happy medium where you train enough to get the health benefits, but not so much you incur unnecessary long-term damage. That would be the right choice for amateurs, but professionals have to prioritize their performance over long-term health.
Yeah, I think this is the best take so far. Although I'd still dispute the wear-and-tear hypothesis. A catastrophic tear of a ligament, cartilage, etc., in an area where blood flow makes it difficult to heal, is different from the type of "wear and tear" that happens to, e.g. a car's tires, which cannot regenerate.
I'd agree more with the connections, wealth, opportunity, and world framing that goes into making these things seem possible. Intelligence or whatever is overestimated in my view as the upper ranks of every place I've ever been are filled with incompetent 'scions' of families with loads of connections, wealth, etc. where their starting job is PhD Post-Doc or Executive VP of some department in a family owned company and I'd have to spend 20 very lucky years in a career to even begin to break through where they got to start in life and then I'd only have 10% of what they had.
I recall very clearly on the day I finished my undergrad that I finally felt that I understood enough abut the system to begin and yet I was at the end of the process. Only through dealing with last minute issues did I even know what a 'Dean' was or that I could pursue research opportunities. I was in my final year trying to get the extra lab work to quality for a PhD program that a well informed 1st year would be doing from day 1 and none of the professors would invest time in me as they wanted 3-4 years of free labour instead of the more limited time I had left.
And all this structure and competition was in a lower ranked University which was the best I could do for similar reasons of lacking the structure and family wisdom to advance myself. I always felt the other kids showed up knowing the lay of the land and were able to swing from one rope to another through a labyrinth and obstacle course which I spent my entire 4 years try to figuring out parts of.
I didn't really grasp that any of this was possible for me, often not until the end and then life gets in the way....really life got in the way both before and after each opportunity rendering them unknown or unviable.
I went on to get the missing working/lab experience and spent many years in research labs to the point that I cultivated two clear and distinct opportunities to go for a PhD, one of them with clear support from a very prominent member in the field. And yet I was simply too poor to pursue it and too in debt from my degrees by that time and had to turn it down. So even taking what I learned at 21 years old and trying to fix things to get on the right path just wasn't practical by the time I got there.
The same was true with home ownership, my rent was larger than the monthly payments to rent in my city, but I never had the multipole hundred thousands of dollars to get onto that ladder. I'd be halfway retired from the equity in that place alone if I'd bought instead of rented. But that was just not possible for me to have 8 years worth of pre-tax income on hand at 23 years old with no family backing. This kind of snowball effect is for everything in life where starting higher up the hill matters most.
I simply could not pursue those PhDs unless I'd agree to multiple years of poverty working full time job while doing a full time PhD just to make basic rent. Not to mention the creation of a potential life debt instead of only a large debt - I'd have to risk it all and either win and get lucky after winning vs trapping myself in forever debt just to walk onto the field to give greatness a try.
Also I'd moved countries and would have to give up on all that in order to chase down those opportunities after a PhD. I can say that 100% of the rest of my lab were able to live at home with family for free, relied on a partner to pay the way, or were ridiculously rich. All advantages and forms of wealth I did not have.
One guy had his wife and mom fly in to spend time with him and cook for him from another country and he had to fly home to attend company board meetings for one of the companies his family owned. Meanwhile I'm turning down the same thing while deeply in student debt and already eating from a food bank some days even on a small full time salary in the lowly paid science field because I'm competing with PhD student from wealthy families who are willing to work 6 days a week 10 hours a day for free. Maybe I lacked 'gumption' eh? That or the 40 hours a day I'd need to make it work in my circumstances.
I could have done that and then had a 'ticket' to that big show to see if I could make something out of it, but there were just too many things in the way and too many people with too many advantages around me to feel like I'd ever win. I saw the 100 PhDs to 1 professorship ratio in my field, the total lack of academic freedom, etc. and even winning after yet more hardship looked like losing to me.
Others had that 4 out of 4 Scott talks about and I had like 2 out of 4 at most, being not as 'driven at all costs' or having stubborn family expectations, not to mention their backing or connections or worldview to make 'being a doctor' or 'discovering something important' seem like a reasonable choice to 8 year old me. At that age I was more concerned about getting enough food and not getting molested any more.
I basically had to spend my entire educational and early working years fighting, learning, connecting myself, etc. just to get to open one or two of the doors to a greater path. A path which probably looks like a lesser path to a family dynasty member. My winning path was probably still a 'lesser one', such as Scott 'failing' into psychiatry in his medical doctor family. While others are born to families who have dozens of such doors open and enough resources to not be scared to let their kids throw themselves at several of them.
Intelligence, genetics, etc. probably matter and for more traits than just having a high enough IQ, but the rest of the context seems to matter a lot more. I'd think there could be a trend in the rags to riches stories and from the nobody to famous stories which do not result in family dynasties. I'd guess, just a guess, that those who pull themselves into success from nothing have 15/10 levels of gumption and determination which is a superhuman level while a wealthy and well connected family can have their kids do well with 8/10 gumption.
I've met a few of these types who made it from regular or poor circumstances to high positions and they tend to be nasty anti-social people who are not cultivating their children like good 'old money' who understand aristocracy. I think the 'final boss battle' of success leading to a successful family dynasty of achievement is having that dynastic view from birth.
People who claw their way up the ladder spend huge amounts of time, overcome hurdles others don't face, etc. and it does not lead towards the TLC and investment into their children or the various dynasty level cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. who are also 'of greatness' to pick up the slack when the parent fails due to their single minded determination to advance themselves. No matter how successful they are, they can't be a one person family clan structure, though if they are lucky their achievements will merit them marrying into such a dynastic family to breed scions.
In the 'seeing like a state' version of meta knowledge and the grand old tradition of 'listening to what people say' as for why they do things and what they think is going on in their lives. I'd say there is a big amount of 'confusion' and 'debate' amongst the upper classes about why the poor people don't try to seize opportunities and that there is no 'gate locking them out' and no formal policy to ban people from poor backgrounds from doing xyz....
But if we listen to people who didn't 'see these options' even though the wealthy and privileged can't help but see opportunity everywhere....they will universally say that it is almost entirely about family and lack of opportunity. The rungs of the ladder are invisible to them. Even as the people below are invisible. for Scott to off handedly be semi-surprised that 'some people' might not even think that any level of college is an option is very very strange to me when 70%+ of people today do not attend any form of tertiary education.
I recall a while ago Scott wrote about fashion and trends where you never ever want to be confused for a person who is 1 social class below you, but if you are 2 or more rungs above them then you'll not worry about that. People who are two rungs away from you are basically invisible to you and you'll almost never encounter them in life and never talk to them. The person getting off the yacht in their hobo-chic attire to attend a dynasty family retreat at some country club wing they've rented out for the week....isn't exactly spending time talking to the waiters, valets, and cooks.
I'd say something similar happens across opportunity with class and while the upper class might feel there is debate on this, I have never ever met a single person from the lower classes of educational achievement who did not feel that class barriers were enormous and insurmountable in many ways.
For a lot of these families there is one "tent pole" person and a bunch of successful people. The tent pole person makes the other people seem much more notable. For example Sasha Baron Cohen is a famous actor and comedian. He has a brother and 3 cousins with wikipedia pages. But only one (Simon) has done anything of global note (developing the mind-blindness theory of autism). The rest are really only wikipedia level famous because they are related to Sasha. And its likely Simon's page wouldn't focus so much on his personal life if he wasn't related to Sasha.
How much does this apply to other examples that have been brought up. The Wojcickis were brought up. And one was notable because she was a professor. Thats not very notable to me!
Also, My mother is a professor, my Uncle played for the New England patriots, my cousin is a top junior race car driver. But we are not notable! My mother is a great professor in her niche field. My Uncle played in the 50s and was on the bench. And my cousin is never going to be in NASCAR. But the way I just presented it could be notable to someone and make them think my family fits this pattern.
This could be an interesting experiment: get a Nobel price, and see how many of your family members get their Wikipedia pages afterwards. ;)
This whole discussion has done a lot to convince me of the value of having the right kind of friends and family for being productive.
I mean the fact my wife and I are both academics means that plenty of time that might otherwise be spent talking about the latest movies ends up spent talking over the latest interesting ideas or papers. Having friends and family also in eminent areas just increases the effect. It's not only not knowing the connections or being unsure who to talk to but also how much of the time doing emotional bonding and chit-chat is also training you up.
And sure, part of the answer is that there are a lot of people who would have done equally great things if handed the same opportunities but the other side of this is that there are a lot of ppl who wouldn't and these kind of informal networks and knowing that someone is part of a certain social network/enviornment that produced success in the past is a good thing to exploit in the future.
100% this.
Afternoon clubs for kids may have a similar effect; they help create friendships among people having the same interest.
Also, Scott's observation about the super-fecundity of some of these families plays a role here. The right kind of sibling rivalry.
I'm very late to this party, but I'm shocked that neither Scott nor the commenters to the original post mentioned the Penroses. Roger is a mathematician and Nobel prize-winning physicist. Brother Jonathan is a grandmaster (in chess). Other brother Oliver is also a physicist. Sister Shirley Hodgson is a geneticist. I'm not an expert on them, but Wikipedia has a lot of info.
re: unexpectedly opened doors via tenuous ties
seems to me this is at least in part an effect of what sociology knows as strength of weak ties (Granovetter 1973)
(anyone know what are latest views on this? does it still replicate? at least it was still taught in sociology 201 ~10 years ago)
if one were to make more calculations on the randomness of these clusters, this seems a hugely relevant aspect.
I often think about the probability of a link between the Red Baron and the von Richthofen family in Brazil. The first was a very famous pilot but the Brazilian family became known for the assassination of the parents performed by their daughter Suzane and her boyfriend aided by her boyfriend’s brother. Her mother was a very accomplished psychiatrist and her father was Manfred Albert von Richthofen, a successful german engineer involved in the construction of the Rodoanel roadway in Brazil. He claimed he was a nephew of Manfred von Richthofen - The Red Baron. The german von Richthofen family had also diplomats for the Nazi Germany, geographers, philosophers and political scientists. The shock the crime provoked in Brazilian society is mainly because of the gruesome details and the calculation and planning involved on the murder. During her trial and sentence, Suzane has been described as a highly ingenious person who was capable of seducing Legal members of the justice end fellow prisoners for protection. She married a child murderer in prison because she provided protection for her. The whole thing is full of plot twists and crazy stories but my point is that she’s not an ordinary person, even though she doesn’t have any academic political or economic success. She’s been able to navigate through these quite steady. Her brother who was young at the time of the crime is known for achieving a fairly successful academic life in bio chemistry even though a discrete one.
Only tangentially related but... Can anyone point me to the research on curiosity? Do we have ways of measuring it? How heritable is it? How correlated with IQ.
Seems to me to be something that isn't discussed enough.
Honestly this whole series has been the most baffling and frankly despicable thing I've ever read from SSC/ACX. Yes intelligence is heritable, yes some people have more drive than others. But how can you possibly weigh those factors over the sheer compounding material advantages to a family once one member of it has had some sort of exceptional success?
"Interesting story, though in some ways it seems less like hero licensing than communicating basic information, the same way rich parents teach their kids to invest in stocks and poor parents don’t."
Despite growing up "poor" I was always *told* to invest in stocks by parents who did not themselves own stocks (outside of IRAs, which my dad even managed to mismanage completely) or understand them well. In contrast, the rich people I have met were not told to invest in stocks—they were *given* stocks by parents and grandparents who were financially literate and well-established.
More broadly, it is simply not the case that a rich kid and a poor kid pop out of school at 18 (or 22) with everything equal except for what they learned around the dinner table. In addition to the obvious concerted cultivation, there is the sheer inheritance of social capital (a small number of leading colleges like Amherst are *only now* in 2021 beginning to do away with legacy admissions) and real capital (rich people funding their kids' research or unpaid internships and apartments through, first, undergrad summers while "poor" kids are working to meet their financial aid contribution requirements, and then during the open-ended number of years after graduating when they are living in the city pursuing their arts careers or PhDs). People from families like mine that are not "great" don't get handed these things. And the rich keep these material advantages on the down-low because in America we have a culture of pretending that everything we have is deserved by merit, so rich families are motivated by this convention to conceal just how much support they give their children.
I missed the discussion the first time around, but I'd like to draw attention to another Ashkenazi family with numerous talented people:
First, we have the philosopher Otto Weininger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Weininger
Otto's nephew fled Nazism and moved from Austria to the United States and changed his name to Winant. His son became a prominent sociologist in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Winant
Howard Winant's 3 children each found success in respective domains:
Carmen Winant as a visual artist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Winant
Gabriel Winant as a historian: https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/gabriel-winant
Johanna Winant as a writer: https://english.wvu.edu/faculty-and-staff/faculty-directory/johanna-winant
Howard's sister is a philosopher: https://csufresno.academia.edu/TerryWinant