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> I know the utopian liberal vision is "we're all created equal," but it simply is not true with the scientific consensus being that IQ is 50-70% heritable [3].

"heritable" does not mean "genetic", please stop reading fake science and slatestarcodex comments. Children exist in the same environment and have the same nutrition as their parents.

Besides that, most published scientific results are false, so why are you believing anything about IQ when you haven't personally sat the people you're claiming are inferior down and had them take a test?



  "Children exist in the same environment."
Wrong. There are twin studies that establish this.

But I get it, you are only pro-science when you happen to agree with the conclusions already.


How'd you get those twins to be born to mothers in different places and to have different prenatal nutrition and epigenetics?


If you meant unborn children or fetuses you should've said that, because the most obvious interpretation of your original words is that you meant postnatal children. That is typically how the word "Child" is defined: "A person between birth and puberty"[1] - not a person before birth.

Nevertheless, what you cited and attacked is uncontroversial. IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination. You then turned such a scientifically uncontroversial statement into an emotional straw-man attack.

[1] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Child


All children start off as fetuses and inherit things that affected them before they were children.

> IQ is heritable, whether it's due to genetics or prenatal nutrition or some combination.

Yes, and I said it wasn't genetic. A "heritable" effect can only last one generation - all you have to do is invest in lead abatement.

In fact, even if it is genetic it can still be treated. Phenylketonurics have a "genetic condition that reduces intelligence" that affects them when they drink Coke, and the treatment is to not do that.

People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this - what they want is to have secret knowledge that society won't acknowledge that says they're morally superior to Mexicans so they can complain about immigration.


> All children start off as fetuses and inherit things

Right, but you said "Children exist in the same environment", which is present-tense. If you said "Children existed in the same environment", then it would've come across as you intended.

> I said it wasn't genetic

Source/rationale? That's a rather strong claim.

> even if it is genetic it can still be treated.

Potentially correct, but it doesn't mean it can be treated well given current knowledge. There's lots of genetic problems where our treatments currently suck, and you can't claim to know when/if those treatments will get better for some specific genetic problem.

> People who discuss this in SSC and marginalrevolution comments don't care about this

Who would argue against lead abatement resulting in higher IQ levels? Who would argue that prenatal nutrition isn't part of the picture? I mean sure, you can find one nutjob in the comments section anywhere. But that's hardly an argument against anything.


Heritable doesn't imply genetic determinism. It's not a strong claim, it's just not what that word means


Of course not, this is a strawman. I was disputing the positive claim that it isn't genetic, I was not claiming that heritability implies genetic determinism.


Twin studies are bull. Twins don't even have the same genome


Irrelevant (because the assignment of twins to particular environments is mostly blinded to mutation differences) and pedantic (because the differences are trivial).


Wrong, and wrong. Keep pace with the literature. Differences can manifest as early as embryogenesis and have far reaching outcomes, e.g. there have been reports of different covid severity outcomes within a twin pair.

Hell, you do know that the cells in your own body don't all have the same genome, right?


As I said, it's irrelevant since assignment is mostly random at birth. The law of large numbers takes care of trivial differences since those differences are largely randomized.




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