I created https://elliottemple.com

I particularly like the header image I made which depicts the intellectual traditions I care most about:

I also created https://elliottemple.com/reason-and-morality

It had an outline of philosophy with tons of links to learn more details.

If I were president I'd cancel most of the meetings, travel, etc, etc, and make some forums which are publicly readable.

There'd be a forum where all the countries have an account with write access. And one where all US politicians have write access. And one with a lot of media and intellectuals.

I think forum discussions are actually the best thing the US president could do.

Imagine if all the politicians, media personalities, etc., with bad ideas had to actually write about them on the record on a daily basis? Imagine if you just kept following up on discussions. What would they do? What most people do currently with me is just stop responding to things, which they can get away with socially because I have low prestige. But just refusing to answer forever wouldn't be a viable answer to the president's forum, and arguments/questions from the president and his staff. That'd look really bad to the world: Nancy Pelosi has been asked the same question for 5 days in a row and just won't answer at all.

But if they did answer they'd get pinned down.

They'd have to do evasive tactics: missing the point, playing dumb, trying to create confusion, saying unclear things, trying to make the discussion go in circles, etc. All that stuff can be called out, pointed out, and basically made to look as foolish as it is. People get away with that stuff in verbal formats with little followup, and behind closed doors, but not against the best debaters over a period of weeks with every word of it in the record. None of the bad guys have any method of dealing with that level of intellectual scrutiny.

They can lie, but the lies can be documented and the canonical links documenting lies can be repetitively posted every single time a lie is repeated. Staff can be hired to do that. That would cost a hell of a lot less than a wide variety of current, unimportant government departments. It's very easy by government standards.

And how do you deal with media questions? Press briefings are so incomplete that it's hard for people to see who's right and why. What if all the bullshit the press kept bugging Trump about was on a forum where some staff members replied with canonical links over and over so everything was getting answered? How would the media continue to ignore the main points, which they currently ignore, if it was being linked in reply to them every time they talked?

I've added a new Podcast link on the top left sidebar.

I recently added: Helping The Best People or The Masses?

Today I did: Environmentalism

You can submit questions for the podcast in the comments below.

Jack Murphy wrote good tweets about Social Justice Warriors in the workplace:

We read about SJW insanity everywhere but somehow it still doesn't seem real. I began new day job recently which brought it all home to me.

On the first day they gave me the organizational goals for the year. One of them was: "Rid the org of bias through implicit bias training."

They made everyone take the implicit bias test online and then dedicated a required two-day retreat to reprogramming all the employees.

There were working groups which produced new goals such "reduce the number of white people." and "rid org of white supremacy bias."

They circulated pre-work reading materials with such titles as "Finding White Supremacy at work" and "How white culture creates injustice."

Apparently, insisting on promptness for meetings is now considered white supremacy.

What's interesting is that these ideas are bubbling up from the staffer level, + forcing management to respond. It's ground up not top down

Management said they hoped hiring me would help break the org of the mind virus. I'm not sure they know exactly what they're getting w/ me.

Some things which are now white supremacist: Objectivity. Individualism. "Worship of the written word." Sense of urgency. Perfectionism.

I walked into a room that had "too many white people" written on the white board. The culture war seems unreal until you see that at work.

I wouldn't ordinarily subject myself to this stuff, but a) the work itself is fascinating and I'm expert and b) it's like being undercover

I'm getting an inside look at shit I thought only existed in paranoid alt-right delusions. It's intriguing to see the mind virus at work.

I suspect at some point after the book comes out, my two worlds will collide. That'll be something. Maybe I'll get fired for truth.

If I get fired from the job for writing, that'll be good for the book. I'll cause a shit storm and the word will spread farther.

And until then, the pay is good, the work is even better, and I get real world confirmation of the culture war at work. Personal experience.

I'll keep cataloging the SJW craziness. If they fire me, I'll have a comprehensive list of EEO violations and file a civil rights case.

Plus, it's great fodder for the current book and future work. They're paying me to get a valuable dose of culture war reality.

I've resisted accepting the culture war as real. I don't want to think along gender divides or racial ones. But they leave me no choice.

I wrote this months ago and now I'm living it today:

For more content like this, make sure you buy my forthcoming book: #DemocratToDeplorable Sign up here for more!

These are replies to Ed Powell discussing IQ. This follows up on my previous posts: IQ and IQ 2.

Thanks for writing a reasonable reply to someone you disagree with. My most important comments are at the bottom and concern a methodology that could be used to make progress in the discussion.

I think we both have the right idea of "heritable." Lots of things are strongly heritable without being genetic.

OK, cool. Is there a single written work – which agrees “heritable” doesn’t imply genetic – which you think adequately expresses the argument today for genetic degrees of intelligence? It’d be fine if it’s a broad piece discussing lots of arguments with research citations that it’s willing to bet its claims on, or if it focuses on one single unanswerable point.

I think you take my analogy of a brain with a computer too far.

It's not an analogy, brains are literally computers. A computer is basically something that performs arbitrary computations, like 2+3 or reversing the letters in a word. That’s not nearly enough for intelligence, but it’s a building block intelligence requires. Computation and information flow are a big part of physics now, and if you try to avoid them you're stuck with alternatives like souls and magic.

I don't pretend to understand your argument above, and so I won't spend time debating it, but you surely realize that human intelligence evolved gradually over the last 5 or so million years (since our progenitors split from the branch that became chimps), and that this evolution did not consist of a mutant ADD Gate gene and another mutant NOT Gate gene.

There are lots of different ways to build computers. I don't think brains are made out of a big pile of NAND gates. But computers with totally different designs can all be universal – able to compute all the same things.

Indeed, if intelligence is properly defined as "the ability to learn", then plenty of animals have some level of intelligence. Certain my cats are pretty smart, and one can, among the thousands of cute cat videos on the internet, find examples of cats reasoning through options to open doors or get from one place to another. Dogs are even more intelligent. Even Peikoff changed his mind on Rand's pronouncement that animals and man are in different distinct classes of beings (animals obey instinct, man has no instinct and thinks) when he got a dog. Who knew that first hand experience with something might illuminate a philosophical issue?

I agree with Rand and I can also reach the same conclusion with independent, Popperian reasons.

I've actually had several dogs and cats. So I'm not disagreeing from lack of first hand experience.

What I would ask if I lacked that experience – and this is relevant anyway – is if you could point out one thing I'm missing (due to lack of experience, or for any other reason). What fact was learned from experience with animals that I don't know, and which contradicts my view?

I think you're not being precise enough about learning, and that with your approach you'd have to conclude that some video game characters also learn and are pretty smart. Whatever examples you provide about animal behaviors, I’ll be happy to provide parallel software examples – which I absolutely don’t think constitute human-like intelligence (maybe you do?).

Rand's belief in the distinct separation between man and animals when it comes to intellect is pretty contrary to the idea that man evolved gradually,

The jump to universality argument provides a way that gradual evolution could create something so distinct.

in the next few years the genetic basis of intelligence will in fact be found and we will no longer have anything to argue about. I don't think there's any real point arguing over this idea.

Rather than argue, would you prefer to bet on whether the genetic basis higher intelligence will be found within the next 5 years? I'd love to bet $10,000 on that issue.

In any case, even if there was such a finding, there’d still be plenty to argue about. It wouldn’t automatically and straightforwardly settle the issues regarding the right epistemology, theory of computation, way to understand universality, etc.

We all know a bunch of really smart people who are in some ways either socially inept or completely nuts.

Yes, but there are cultural explanations for why that would be, and I don't think genes can control social skill (what exactly could the entire mechanism be, in hypothetical-but-rigorous detail?).

I know a number of people smarter than myself who have developed some form of mental illness, and it's fairly clear that these things are not unrelated.

Tangent: I consider the idea of "mental illness" a means of excusing and legitimizing the initiation of force. It's used to subvert the rule of law – both by imprisoning persons without trial and by keeping some criminals out of jail.

Link: Thomas Szasz Manifesto.

The point of IQ tests is to determine (on average) whether an individual will do well in school or work, and the correspondence between test results and success in school and work is too close to dismiss the tests as invalid, even if you don't believe in g or don't believe in intelligence at all.

Sure. As I said, I think IQ tests should be used more.

The tests are excellent predictors, especially in the +/- 3 SD area

Yes. I agree the tests do worse with outliers, but working well for over 99% of people is still useful!

The government has banned IQ tests from being used as discriminators for job fitness;

That's an awful attack on freedom and reason!

Take four or five internet IQ tests. I guarantee you the answers will be in a small range (+/- 5ish), even though they are all different. Clearly they measure something! And that something is correlated with success in school and work (for large enough groups).

I agree.

My one experience with Deutsch was his two interviews on Sam Harris's podcast

For Popper and Deutsch, I'd advise against starting with anything other than Deutsch's two books.

FYI Deutsch is a fan of Ayn Rand, an opponent of global warming, strongly in favor of capitalism, a huge supporter of Israel, and totally opposed to cultural and moral relativism (thinks Western culture is objectively and morally better, etc.).

I have some (basically Objectivist) criticism of Deutsch's interviews which will interest people here. In short, he's recently started sucking up to lefty intellectuals, kinda like ARI. But his flawed approach to dealing with the public doesn't prevent some of his technical ideas about physics, computation and epistemology from being true.

But if one doesn't believe g exists,

I think g is a statistical construct best forgotten.

or that IQ tests measure anything real,

I agree that they do, and that the thing measured is hard to change. Many people equate genetic with hard to change, and non-genetic with easy to change, but I don't. There are actual academic papers in this field which say, more or less, "Even if it's not genetic, we may as well count it as genetic because it's hard to change."

or that IQ test results don't correlate with scholastics or job success across large groups, then there's really nothing to discuss.

I agree that they do. I am in favor of more widespread use of IQ testing.

As I said, I think IQ tests measure a mix of intelligence, culture and background knowledge. I think these are all real, important, and hard to change. (Some types of culture and background knowledge are easy to change, but some other types are very hard to change, and IQ tests focus primarily on measuring the hard to change stuff, which is mostly developed in early childhood.)

Of course intelligence, culture and knowledge all correlate with job and school success.

Finally, I don't think agreement is possible on this issue, because much of your argument depends upon epistemological ideas of Pooper/Deutsch and yourself, and I have read none of the source material. [...] I don't see how a discussion can proceed though on this IQ issue--or really any other issue--with you coming from such an alien (to me) perspective on epistemology that I have absolutely no insight into. I can't argue one way or the other about cultural memes since I have no idea what they are and what scientific basis for them exists. So I won't. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying I won't argue about something I know nothing about.

I'd be thrilled to find a substantial view on an interesting topic that I didn't already know about, that implied I was wrong about something important. Especially if it had some living representative(s) willing to respond to questions and arguments. I've done this (investigated ideas) many times, and currently have no high priority backlog. E.g. I know of no outstanding arguments against my views on epistemology or computation to address, nor any substantial rivals which aren't already refuted by an existing argument that I know of.

I've written a lot about methods for dealing with rival ideas. I call my approach Paths Forward. The basic idea is that it's rational to act so that:

1. If I'm mistaken
2. And someone knows it (and they're willing to share their knowledge)
3. Then there's some reasonable way that I can find out and correct my mistake.

This way I don't actively prevent fixing my mistakes and making intellectual progress.

There are a variety of methods that can be used to achieve this, and also a variety of common methods which fail to achieve this. I consider the Paths-Forward-compatible methods rational, and the others irrational.

The rational methods vary greatly on how much time they take. There are ways to study things in depth, and also faster methods available when desired. Here's a fairly minimal rational method you could use in this situation:

Read until you find one mistake. Then stop and criticize.

You’ll find the first mistake early on unless the material is actually good. (BTW you're allowed to criticize meta mistakes, such as that the author failing to say why his stuff matters, rather than only criticizing internal or factual errors. You can also stop reading at your first question, instead of criticism.)

Your first criticism (or question) will often be met with dumb replies that you can evaluate using knowledge you already have about argument, logic, etc. Most people with bad ideas will make utter fools of themselves in answer to your first criticism or question. OK, done. Rather than ignore them, you've actually addressed their position, and their position now has an outstanding criticism (or unanswered question), and there is a path forward available (they could, one day, wise up and address the issue).

Sometimes the first criticism will be met with a quality reply which addresses the issue or refers you to a source which addresses it. In that case, you can continue reading until you find one more mistake. Keep repeating this process. If you end up spending a bunch of time learning the whole thing, it's because you can't find any unaddressed mistakes in it (it's actually great)!

A crucial part of this method is actually saying your criticism or question. A lot of people read until the first thing they think is a mistake, then stop with no opportunity for a counter-argument. By staying silent, they're also giving the author (and his fans) no information to use to change their minds. Silence prevents progress regardless of which side is mistaken. Refusing to give even one argument leaves the other guy's position unrefuted, and leaves your position as not part of the public debate.

Another important method is to cite some pre-existing criticism of a work. You must be willing to take responsibility for what you cite, since you're using it to speak for you. It can be your own past arguments, or someone else's. The point is, the same bad idea doesn't need to be refuted twice – one canonical, reusable refutation is adequate. And by intentionally writing reusable material throughout your life, you'll develop a large stockpile which addresses common ideas you disagree with.

Rational methods aren't always fast, even when the other guy is mistaken. The less you know about the issues, the longer it can take. However, learning more about issues you don't know about is worthwhile. And once you learn enough important broad ideas – particularly philosophy – you can use it to argue about most ideas in most fields, even without much field-specific knowledge. Philosophy is that powerful! Especially when combined with a moderate amount of knowledge of the most important other fields.

Given limited time and many things worth learning, there are options about prioritization. One reasonable thing to do, which many people are completely unwilling to do, is to talk about one's interests and priorities, and actually think them through in writing and then expose one's reasoning to public criticism. That way there's a path forward for one's priorities themselves.

To conclude, I think a diversion into methodology could allow us to get the genetic intelligence discussion unstuck. I also believe that such methodology (epistemology) issues are a super important topic in their own right.

These are replies to Ed Powell discussing IQ. This follows up on my previous post.

I believe I understand that you’re fed up with various bad counter-arguments about IQ, and why, and I sympathize with that. I think we can have a friendly and productive discussion, if you’re interested, and if you either already have sophisticated knowledge of the field or you’re willing to learn some of it (and if, perhaps as an additional qualification, you have an IQ over 130). As I emphasized, I think we have some major points of agreement on these issues, including rejecting some PC beliefs. I’m not going to smear you as a racist!

Each of these assertions is contrary to the data.

My claims are contrary to certain interpretations of the data, which is different than contradicting the data itself. I’m contradicting some people regarding some of their arguments, but that’s different than contradicting facts.

Just look around at the people you know: some are a lot smarter than others, some are average smart, and some are utter morons.

I agree. I disagree about the details of the underlying mechanism. I don’t think smart vs. moron is due to a single underlying thing. I think it’s due to multiple underlying things.

This also explains reversion to the mean

Reversion to the mean can also be explained by smarter parents not being much better parents in some crucial ways. (And dumber parents not being much worse parents in some crucial ways.)

Every piece of "circumstantial evidence" points to genes

No piece of evidence that fails to contradict my position can point to genes over my position.

assertion that there exists a thing called g

A quote about g:

Back to quoting Ed:

I just read an article the other day where researchers have identified a large number of genes thought to influence intelligence.

I’ve read many primary source articles. That kind of correlation research doesn’t refute what I’m saying.

What do you think psychometricians have been doing for the last 100 years?

Remaining ignorant of philosophy, particularly epistemology, as well as the theory of computation.

It is certainly true that one can create culturally biased IQ test questions. This issue has been studied to death, and such questions have been ruthlessly removed from IQ tests.

They haven’t been removed from the version of the Wonderlic IQ test you chose to link, which I took my example from.

I think there’s an important issue here. I think you believe there are other IQ tests which are better. But you also believe the Wonderlic is pretty good and gets the roughly same results as the better tests for lots of people. Why, given the flawed question I pointed out (which had a lot more wrong with it than cultural bias), would the Wonderlic results be similar to the results of some better IQ test? If one is flawed and one isn’t flawed, why would they get similar results?

My opinion is as before: IQ tests don’t have to avoid cultural bias (and some other things) to be useful, because culture matters to things like job performance, university success, and how much crime an immigrant commits.

I don't use the term "genetic" because I don't mean "genetic", I mean "heritable," because the evidence supports the term "heritable."

The word "heritable" is a huge source of confusion. A technical meaning of "heritable" has been defined which is dramatically different than the standard English meaning. E.g. accent is highly "heritable" in the terminology of heritability research.

The technical meaning of “heritable” is basically: “Variance in this trait is correlated with changes in genes, in the environment we did the study in, via some mechanism of some sort. We have no idea how much of the trait is controlled by what, and we have no idea what environmental changes or other interventions would affect the trait in what ways.” When researchers know more than that, it’s knowledge of something other than “heritability”. More on this below.

I have not read the articles you reference on epistemology, but intelligence has nothing to do with epistemology, just as a computer's hardware has nothing to do with what operating system or applications you run on it.

Surely you accept that ideas (software) have some role in who is smart and who is a moron? And so epistemology is relevant. If one uses bad methods of thinking, one will make mistakes and look dumb.

Epistemology also tells us how knowledge can and can’t be created, and knowledge creation is a part of intelligent thinking.

OF COURSE INTELLIGENCE IS BASED ON GENES, because humans are smarter than chimpanzees.

I have a position on this matter which is complicated. I will briefly give you some of the outline. If you are interested, we can discuss more details.

First, one has to know about universality, which is best approached via the theory of computation. Universal classical computers are well understood. The repertoire of a classical computer is the set of all computations it can compute. A universal classical computer can do any computation which any other classical computer can do. For evaluating a computer’s repertoire, it’s allowed unlimited time and data storage.

Examples of universal classical computers are Macs, PCs, iPhones and Android phones (any of them, not just specific models). Human brains are also universal classical computers, and so are the brains of animals like dogs, cows, cats and horses. “Classical” is specified to omit quantum computers, which use aspects of quantum physics to do computations that classical computers can’t do.

Computational universality sounds very fancy and advanced, but it’s actually cheap and easy. It turns out it’s difficult to avoid computational universality while designing a useful classical computer. For example, the binary logic operations NOT and AND (plus some control flow and input/output details) are enough for computational universality. That means they can be used to calculate division, Fibonacci numbers, optimal chess moves, etc.

There’s a jump to universality. Take a very limited thing, and add one new feature, and all of a sudden it gains universality! E.g. our previous computer was trivial with only NOT, and universal when we added AND. The same new feature which allowed it to perform addition also allowed it to perform trigonometry, calculus, and matrix math.

There are different types of universality, e.g. universal number systems (systems capable of representing any number which any other number system can represent) and universal constructors. Some things, such as the jump to universality, apply to multiple types of universality. The jump has to do with universality itself rather than with computation specifically.

Healthy human minds are universal knowledge creators. Animal minds aren’t. This means humans can create any knowledge which is possible to create (they have a universal repertoire). This is the difference between being intelligent or not intelligent. Genes control this difference (with the usual caveats, e.g. that a fetal environment with poison could cause birth defects).

Among humans, there are also degrees of intelligence. E.g. a smart person vs. an idiot. Animals are simply unintelligent and don’t have degrees of intelligence at all. Why do animals appear somewhat intelligent? Because their genes contain evolved knowledge and code for algorithms to control animal behavior. But that’s a fundamentally different thing than human intelligence, which can create new knowledge rather than relying on previously evolved knowledge present in genes.

Because of the jump to universality, there are no people or animals which can create 20%, 50%, 80% or 99% of all knowledge. Nothing exists with that kind of partial knowledge creation repertoire. It’s only 100% (universal) or approximately zero. If you have a conversation with someone and determine they can create a variety of knowledge (a very low bar for human beings, though no animal can meet it), then you can infer they have the capability to do universal knowledge creation.

Universal knowledge creation (intelligence) is a crucial capability our genes give us. From there, it’s up to us to decide what to do with it. The difference between a moron and a genius is how they use their capability.

Differences in degrees of human intelligence, among healthy people (with e.g. adequate food) are due to approximately 100% ideas, not genes. Some of the main factors in early childhood idea development are:

• Your culture’s anti-rational memes.
• The behavior of your parents.
• The behavior of other members of your culture that you interact with.
• Sources of cultural information such as YouTube.
• Your own choices, including mental choices about what to think.

The relevant ideas for intelligence are mostly unconscious and involve lots of methodology. They’re very hard for adults in our culture to change.

This is not the only important argument on this topic, but it’s enough for now.

This isn’t refuted in The Bell Curve, which doesn’t discuss universality. The concept of universal knowledge creators was first published in 2011. (FYI this book is by my colleague, and I contributed to the writing process).

Below I provide some comments on The Bell Curve, primarily about how it misunderstands heritability research.

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There is a most absurd and audacious Method of reasoning avowed by some Bigots and Enthusiasts, and through Fear assented to by some wiser and better Men; it is this. They argue against a fair Discussion of popular Prejudices, because, say they, tho’ they would be found without any reasonable Support, yet the Discovery might be productive of the most dangerous Consequences. Absurd and blasphemous Notion! As if all Happiness was not connected with the Practice of Virtue, which necessarily depends upon the Knowledge of Truth.
EDMUND BURKE A Vindication of Natural Society

This is a side note, but I don’t think the authors realize Burke was being ironic and was attacking the position stated in this quote. The whole work, called a vindication of natural society (anarchy), is an ironic attack, not actually a vindication.

Heritability, in other words, is a ratio that ranges between 0 and 1 and measures the relative contribution of genes to the variation observed in a trait.

This is incomplete because it omits the simplifying assumptions being made. From Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ:

Note that the word “associated” in the quote refers to correlation, not to causality. Whereas the authors of The Bell Curve use the word “contribution” instead, which doesn’t mean “correlation” and is therefore wrong.

Here’s another source on the same point, Genetics and Reductionism:

You can also read some primary source research in the field (as I have) and see what sort of “heritability” it does and doesn’t study, and what sort of limitations it has. If you disagree, feel free to provide a counter example (primary source research, not meta or summary), which you’ve read, which studies a different sort of IQ “heritability” than my two quotes talk about.

What happens when one understands “heritable” incorrectly?

Then one of us, Richard Herrnstein, an experimental psychologist at Harvard, strayed into forbidden territory with an article in the September 1971 Atlantic Monthly. Herrnstein barely mentioned race, but he did talk about heritability of IQ. His proposition, put in the form of a syllogism, was that because IQ is substantially heritable, because economic success in life depends in part on the talents measured by IQ tests, and because social standing depends in part on economic success, it follows that social standing is bound to be based to some extent on inherited differences.

This is incorrect because it treats “heritable” (as measured in the research) as meaning “inherited”.

How Much Is IQ a Matter Genes?

In fact, IQ is substantially heritable. [...] The most unambiguous direct estimates, based on identical twins raised apart, produce some of the highest estimates of heritability.

This incorrectly suggests that IQ is substantially a matter of genes because it’s “heritable” (as determined by twin studies).

Specialists have come up with dozens of procedures for estimating heritability. Nonspecialists need not concern themselves with nuts and bolts, but they may need to be reassured on a few basic points. First, the heritability of any trait can be estimated as long as its variation in a population can be measured. IQ meets that criterion handily. There are, in fact, no other human traits—physical or psychological—that provide as many good data for the estimation of heritability as the IQ. Second, heritability describes something about a population of people, not an individual. It makes no more sense to talk about the heritability of an individual’s IQ than it does to talk about his birthrate. A given individual’s IQ may have been greatly affected by his special circumstances even though IQ is substantially heritable in the population as a whole. Third, the heritability of a trait may change when the conditions producing variation change. If, one hundred years ago, the variations in exposure to education were greater than they are now (as is no doubt the case), and if education is one source of variation in IQ, then, other things equal, the heritability of IQ was lower then than it is now.

...

Now for the answer to the question, How much is IQ a matter of genes? Heritability is estimated from data on people with varying amounts of genetic overlap and varying amounts of shared environment. Broadly speaking, the estimates may be characterized as direct or indirect. Direct estimates are based on samples of blood relatives who were raised apart. Their genetic overlap can be estimated from basic genetic considerations. The direct methods assume that the correlations between them are due to the shared genes rather than shared environments because they do not, in fact, share environments, an assumption that is more or less plausible, given the particular conditions of the study. The purest of the direct comparisons is based on identical (monozygotic, MZ) twins reared apart, often not knowing of each other’s existence. Identical twins share all their genes, and if they have been raised apart since birth, then the only environment they shared was that in the womb. Except for the effects on their IQs of the shared uterine environment, their IQ correlation directly estimates heritability. The most modern study of identical twins reared in separate homes suggests a heritability for general intelligence between .75 and .80, a value near the top of the range found in the contemporary technical literature. Other direct estimates use data on ordinary siblings who were raised apart or on parents and their adopted-away children. Usually, the heritability estimates from such data are lower but rarely below .4.

This is largely correct if you read “heritability” with the correct, technical meaning. But the assumption that people raised apart don’t share environment is utterly false. People raised apart – e.g. in different cities in the U.S. – share tons of cultural environment. For example, many ideas about parenting practices are shared between parents in different cities.

Despite my awareness of these huge problems with IQ research, I still agree with some things you’re saying and believe I know how to defend them correctly. In short, genetic inferiority is no good (and contradicts Ayn Rand, btw), but cultural inferiority is a major world issue (and correlates with race, which has led to lots of confusion).

As a concrete reminder of what we’re discussing, I’ll leave you with an IQ test question to ponder:

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Read my followup post: IQ 3

This is a reply to Ed Powell writing about IQ.

I believe IQ tests measure a mix of intelligence, culture and background knowledge.

That's useful! Suppose I'm screening employees to hire. Is a smart employee the only thing I care about? No. I also want him to fit in culturally and be knowledgable. Same thing with immigrants.

The culture and background knowledge measured by IQ tests isn't superficial. It's largely learned in early childhood and is hard to change. It is possible to change. I would expect assimilating to raise IQ scores on many IQ tests, just as learning arithmetic raises scores on many IQ tests for people who didn't know it before.

Many IQ test questions are flawed. They have ambiguities. But this doesn't make IQ tests useless. It just makes them less accurate, especially for people who are smarter than the test creators. Besides, task assignments from your teacher or boss contain ambiguities too, and you're routinely expected to know what they mean anyway. So it matters whether you can understand communications in a culturally normal way.

Here's a typical example of a flawed IQ test question. We could discuss the flaws if people are interested in talking about it. And I'm curious what people think the answer is supposed to be.

IQ tests don't give perfect foresight about an individual's future. So what? You don't need perfectly accurate screening for hiring, college admissions or immigration. Generally you want pretty good screening which is cheap. If someone comes up with a better approach, more power to them.

Would it be "unfair" to some individual that they aren't hired for a job they'd be great at because IQ tests aren't perfect? Sure, sorta. That sucks. The world is full of things going wrong. Pick yourself up and keep trying – you can still have a great life. You have no right to be treated "fairly". The business does have a right to decide who to hire or not. There's no way to making hiring perfect. If you know how to do hiring better, sell them the method. But don't get mad at hiring managers for lacking omniscience. (BTW hiring is already unfair and stupid in lots of ways. They should use more work sample tests and less social metaphysics. But the problems are largely due to ignorance and error, not conscious malice.)

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Ed Powell writes:

Since between 60% and 80% of IQ is heritable, it means that their kids won't be able to read either. Jordan Peterson in one of his videos claims that studies show there are no jobs at all in the US/Canadian economies for anyone with an IQ below about 83. That means 85% of the Somalian immigrants (and their children!) are essentially unemployable. No immigration policy of the US should ignore this fact.

I've watched most of Jordan Peterson's videos. And I know, e.g., that the first video YouTube sandboxed in their new censorship campaign was about race and IQ.

I agree that it's unrealistic for a bunch of low IQ Somalians to come here and be productive in U.S. jobs. I think we agree on lots of conclusions.

But I don't think IQ is heritable in the normal sense of the word "heritable", meaning that it's controlled by genes passed on by parents. (There's also a technical definition of "heritable", which basically means correlation.) For arguments, see: Yet More on the Heritability and Malleability of IQ.

I don't think intelligence is genetic. The studies claiming it's (partly) genetic basically leave open the possibility that it's a gene-environment interaction of some kind, which leaves open the possibility that intelligence is basically due to memes. Suppose parents in our culture give worse treatment to babies with black skin, and this causes lower intelligence. That's a gene-environment interaction. In this scenario, would you say that the gene for black skin is a gene for low intelligence? Even partly? I wouldn't. I'd say genes aren't controlling intelligence in this scenario, culture is (and, yes, our culture has some opinions about some genetic traits like skin color).

When people claim intelligence (or other things) are due to ideas, they usually mean it's easy to change. Just use some willpower and change your mind! But memetic traits can actually be harder to change than genetic traits. Memes evolve faster than genes, and some old memes are very highly adapted to prevent themselves from being changed. Meanwhile, it's pretty easy to intervene to change your genetic hair color with dye.

I think intelligence is a primarily memetic issue, and the memes are normally entrenched in early childhood, and people largely don't know how to change them later. So while the mechanism is different, the conclusions are still similar to if it were genetic. One difference is that I'm hopeful that dramatically improved parenting practices will make a large difference in the world, including by raising people's intelligence.

Also, if memes are crucial, then current IQ score correlations may fall apart if there's a big cultural shift of the right kind. IQ test research only holds within some range of cultures, not in all imaginable cultures. But so what? It's not as if we're going to wake up in a dramatically different culture tomorrow...

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I don't believe that IQ tests measure general intelligence – which I don't think exists as a single, well-defined thing. I have epistemological reasons for this which are complicated and differ from Objectivism on some points. I do think that some people are smarter than others. I do think there are mental skills, which fall under the imprecise term "intelligence", and have significant amounts of generality.

Because of arguments about universality (which we can discuss if there's interest), I think all healthy people are theoretically capable of learning anything that can be learned. But that doesn't mean they will! What stops them isn't their genes, it's their ideas. They have anti-rational memes from early childhood which are very strongly entrenched. (I also think people have free will, but often choose to evade, rationalize, breach their integrity, etc.)

Some people have better ideas and memes than others. So I share a conclusion with you: some people are dumber than others in important very-hard-to-change ways (even if it's not genetic), and IQ test scores do represent some of this (imperfectly, but meaningfully).

For info about memes and universality, see The Beginning of Infinity.

And, btw, of course there are cultural and memetic differences correlated with e.g. race, religion and nationality. For example, on average, if you teach your kids not to "act white" then they're going to turn out dumber.

So, while I disagree about many of the details regarding IQ, I'm fine with a statement like "criminality is mainly concentrated in the 80-90 IQ range". And I think IQ tests could improve immigration screening.

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Read my followup post: IQ 2

Matt Dioguardi owns a Facebook group with around 5000 members. The membership believes it's an open discussion forum with relaxed rules (just post all you want that's related to Popper "in some manner"), because that's what it publicly states, in writing.

However, I was banned because I didn't like some of Matt's friends' comments and blocked them on Facebook to stop seeing their messages. I don't need toxic people in my life.

I would never dream of banning someone from the Fallible Ideas forum because they set up a mail rule to block posts by my friends Justin and Alan. Some of Matt's friends, like Justin and Alan, were moderators – so what?

Prior to that I had some posts blocked for reasons like mentioning Ayn Rand (in addition to Popper) or mentioning parenting and education (from a Popperian perspective, and in addition to talking about how to spread Critical Rationalist ideas). Discussing the moderation had been unproductive (they refused to answer clarifying questions about the policies or update the stated rules to the actual rules). Some of the forum discussions had also been unproductive (e.g. I repeatedly asked some flamers to stop harassing me, and they did the passive-aggressive version of telling me to go fuck myself – then redoubled their efforts to harrass me). I didn't flame anyone.

So I decided it was time to stop engaging with the toxic people. I knew I was at risk of being banned if I did some further action that wasn't appreciated and there was no problem-solving discussion to address it. I decided to risk this because I thought talking with the toxic people wouldn't solve problems and could actually cause problems. But they wouldn't just leave me alone. For my decision to refocus on productive discussion, and ignore everything else, I was banned. (Dioguardi stated the reason for the ban, it's not speculation.)

Some of them clearly didn't like me (e.g. one of the moderators was also one of the repeat flamers) and wanted an excuse to get rid of me. But what kind of excuse is this? Nothing was wrong with anything I posted, and they banned me anyway!

Update: They also banned anyone from posting a link to anything I wrote.