I read a large part of this article. While it appears to be really serious notably by the vocabulary used, like other articles trying to "debunk" genetic intelligence it pushes too hard its narrative.
In particular, two semantic tricks are used. First, the fact that current genetic markers aren't a good prediction for IQ heritability is used as an argument against it. The other likely explanation that our understanding of those markers is widely incomplete is not explored.
Second, is the more common "IQ isn't intelligence" trick. Sure, the measure doesn't encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.
It just seems strange to me that, like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything. At a certain point, you have to wonder if something other than genetics accounts for the observed heritability.
We're looking at cause here not 'cure' or treatment.
Regardless schizophrenic individuals probably would do better with being treated with kindness, respect, compassion, and love than with derision and rejection. At least observational that has been my experience.
I'm not sure the distinction is meaningful at a high level. That which can be implemented in hardware can be emulated in software.
It may be significant with respect to a specific implementation. Do you mean to imply that the current crop of LLMs hallucinate only due to some flaw in the hardware they run on?
There is no software at all, it is all hardware. These are mere abstractions because the reality offers some guarantees which allows one to transfer one system onto another as if the underlying system didn't matter. Those guarantees allows one to speak of commonalities between one stuff and another.
In that vein, there is no hardware either. It too is just an abstraction. However, that is not particularly meaningful. We draw lines around those abstractions and are able to compartmentalize them when discussing them.
Once someone's lost touch with reality, maybe not. In the earliest stages? Maybe, yeah:
> McFarlane believes that psychosis can be prevented with a range of surprisingly low-tech interventions, almost all of which are designed to reduce stress in the family of the young person who is starting to show symptoms.
> McFarlane cites research done at UCLA suggesting that certain kinds of family dynamics — families that don't communicate well, or are overly critical — can make things worse for a young person at risk of schizophrenia.
I can believe it. Not smoking is a great way to prevent certain types of lung cancer. However, if you have lung cancer, quitting smoking won't cure it.
This argument is genuinely horrible. Many times we have two “dogs”, same litter, same love and care, and one will be depressed and the other won’t be. Still think it’s just a software issue now hmmm?
Seriously, can you not just comprehend that it’s a complex issue and there is no singular source you can blame? If your kid committed suicide should I levy child abuse charges against you? And where does someone “learn” depression or schizophrenia anyway, especially if their parents are not acting the same way?
>like in the case of mental illnesses such as depression or Schizophrenia, scientists insist on looking for genes or even GWAS correlations and just aren't finding anything
Source? Wikipedia says:
>A central point of debate on GWA studies has been that most of the SNP variations found by GWA studies are associated with only a small increased risk of the disease, and have only a small predictive value. The median odds ratio is 1.33 per risk-SNP, with only a few showing odds ratios above 3.0.[1][46] These magnitudes are considered small because they do not explain much of the heritable variation. This heritable variation is estimated from heritability studies based on monozygotic twins.[47] For example, it is known that 40% of variance in depression can be explained by hereditary differences, but GWA studies only account for a minority of this variance.[47]
which admittedly isn't airtight proof for "depression is 100% genetic!!1", but isn't exactly "just aren't finding anything" either.
It is a bit more nuanced than that. An incorrect unstated assumption here is that schizophrenia or depression is a singular disease rather than a group of observable symptoms where any two cases may or may not have the same underlying cause.
There are certain types of schizophrenia that are highly heritable and others that are more sporadic. Highly pathogenic variants tend to be very rare because those regions of the genome are under evolutionary constraint.
GWAS are used is to figure out which genes may be involved in the pathology. So we are essentially looking at rare cases of inherited disease to figure out which genes might play a role in more common non inherited versions.
Environmental factors are certainly a part of those. I heard a story of someone being stranded at a lighthouse alone for many months, and he had a break from reality which affected him the rest of his life. It's always seemed interesting that the brain can be damaged by stress rather than physical injury – or that perhaps stress causes physical injury.
> but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.
How does one find a definition of intelligence that allows us to correlate it to anything? My understanding is an IQ is defined and intelligence is not.
Psychometric intelligence ("g") is defined correlationally viz. cognitive tasks; that is, the definition is itself a correlation. But it's robust in the sense that it correlates beyond the correlations used in its definition, e.g.: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/1997whygmatt...
"g" is a measure of narrow set of skills and job performance outcomes that favor western developed society. It's not an observable, it's an inferred value. It makes sense that people good at math and reading are going to perform well in jobs that involve math and reading. And people without access to good schooling or even textbooks are going to have worse performance.
I don't think it's appropriate to measure intelligence as a correlation between the few things a statistician cares about, personally. It would be a naively meritocratic view to think performing well at the highest paying jobs is a decent measure for intelligence.
I am not sure if my 'g' is high enough that psychologist will allow me to express my opinions on the topic, but I have found the argument in the blog I linked to be quite interesting.
It's a classic post-modern 'we cannot define intelligence even when we see it'. IQ is such a bad proxy for intelligence! There's no gene for IQ! Regardless, let's keep digging in genes because that's the established science and grants are coming our way. This is the best available study to date!
If that's not a great example of looking in a wrong place, I am not sure what is.
I've often wondered if IQ is in protected state in the field of psychology.
What I mean: Psychology cannot afford for IQ to be disproven or invalidated. Doing so would completely undermine a significant portion of field. It would be like if evolution was disproven in biology -- absolutely gutting. (Just an analogy, don't kill me).
I see this when people bring up Lewis Terman's studies on giftedness or Richard Feynman's IQ score of ~124 -- especially the latter.
People come rushing out of the woodworks with statements like, "Well, Feynman was probably goofing off," "Feynman's result cannot be accurate -- he was a Putnam Award winner in high school," "Test were different back then," etc..
Sure, all of those could be right, but we only can operate off of what we know. The actual cold truth? We will never know.
However, like a knife through the heart, people refuse to even accept Feynman's score as a possibility. Feynman was an exceptional person. Exceptional people are outliers -- perhaps in more than one way.
Personally, I think it crushes people's souls to know that a famous theoretical physicist scored lower on an IQ score than expected, but still accomplished more in life than they did.
That is why I personally believe life is the one true IQ test. You get one shot. One's true intelligence is what you do with it. But hey, maybe my IQ is too low?
> Lol, who ran a correlation analysis between intelligence and IQ to convince you that the "correlation" between the two is high?
Well you can ridicule this statement if you like, but I can suggest a good-faith approach to this question. For example you can trying coming up with a few definitions of what intelligence could be and then look for correlation between this definitions and IQ.
I can go first: intelligence can be reasonably defined as "knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income". This definition of intelligence strongly correlate with IQ. There are other possible approaches but all the ones I can think of (e.g. results in math tests) have at least some correlation with IQ.
Now how do you see intelligence? Does it correlate with IQ?
I go in more detail in my other comment but I would imagine this is a definition most people can't get behind.
> intelligence can be reasonably defined as "knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income"
I think it just crumbles under light scrutiny. People have higher income for all kinds of observable reasons that don't have to do with intelligence. I have higher income than other employees at the same level just based on where I live.
Intelligence is something that is defined by academics. Surprise surprise that it it measures how people perform in a narrow set of academic skills.
So someone born in Sub-Saharan Africa is almost definitionally "less intelligent" than anyone born in the US by this definition? I would say that this does not correlate well with "intelligence" at all.
No, because many people in Africa have higher-than-average salary in their region. If you adjust the definition to be "higher-than-median", it will be exactly 50%.
It's not "vibes" but it is a moral perspective, not an opinion informed by data. In particular the total absence of any scientific definition of intelligence makes any "data" meaningless, which is why my comment was a semi-joke, and certainly not an "opinion." When I say Mensa members are dumb I mean it in the same way that Trump voters are dumb. I am not making a comment about overall cognitive ability.
You have to be ignorant and closed-minded to even consider being a member of Mensa - this is fine for a teenager but not for a real adult. I understand some people are not neurotypical and have trouble finding community (I have schizophrenia, trust me, I get it). But anyone who actually takes Mensa's membership criteria seriously is an idiot, by which I mean "utterly lacking in intellectual curiosity and proudly ignorant about science," even if they're (supposedly) good at trivial puzzles.
Mensa is mostly just a club for people who are disproportionately cultural outsiders. A lot of them have the same interests that are harder to come across in regular day to day life.
It's not so much a circle jerk of "we are so smart" as it is a circle jerk of "no one else wants to play SET! with me".
I was a gifted child and in the 1980s before the internet it gave me a community of adults who had a life of the mind and were for the most part professionals, whose experiences I really benefited from a lot from as a 12 year old.
I don’t know if the IQ test (Advanced Raven Matrices) was a useful bar — there were lots of smart people who weren’t in Mensa — but there were enough smart people in it that I found a community of like minded folks. It’s not easy for kid to find a community like that but I did.
Most people think Mensa is full of self aggrandizing nerds but that wasn’t my experience (it varies by chapter).
Mensa probably doesn’t have a purpose today but pre Internet it did, even if by accident. I don’t think IQ is a useful membership criterion due to sheer arbitrariness but sometimes arbitrary groupings of people can work.
I would also say that people who have a knee jerk negative reaction against Mensa are no more likeable than the socially inept segment of the Mensa membership they disparage. They have the same kind of puffed up pride that they dislike.
In particular, two semantic tricks are used. First, the fact that current genetic markers aren't a good prediction for IQ heritability is used as an argument against it. The other likely explanation that our understanding of those markers is widely incomplete is not explored.
Second, is the more common "IQ isn't intelligence" trick. Sure, the measure doesn't encompass everything that is making intelligence, but it is still a somewhat interesting proxy as there is a high correlation between intelligence and IQ.