Comment by A_D_E_P_T
2 years ago
> If you actually take the percentage, it's like 30-50% more likely to have the worse outcome the worse your adverse background gets.
I realize that this is a taboo subject, but how much of that is nature and how much is nurture?
Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes, and it's not exactly a problem you can fix by throwing money and resources at it.
This is the exact question that this research tries to portray from a data perspective.
The narrative is trying to make a claim that nurture is significant.
The stats of this research essentially says "slicing the data in a way that highlights differing qualities of nurture shows that nurture has an impact".
But it crucially doesn't isolate nurture from nature (which is admittedly very difficult). It doesn't show if the nature side (IQ in this instance) has significant overlaps with the nurture or not.
So ultimately we are left guessing.
I bet if you did, you would see that IQ indeed is also significant, and the narrative can tell a different story. That's the thing about stats and narratives. They tell a story and leave a bunch of stuff out, so you have to evaluate it yourself.
My takeaway is that nurture may play a role, but is not the only thing that determines outcome. Eyeballing the end results, being in the worst category of nurture makes the odds worse for you, not 90/10 worse, but probably closer to 65/35.
Better environments produce a population with a higher IQ.
Maybe but you can't teach a Labrador algebra no matter how many treats you feed it. These are aggregate effects of low IQ genetic traits as they play out over generations in our capitalist society. The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ. And don't call me racist. Ask why there was no IQ test line up amongst all that visualized data
> The trauma is a consequence of poverty and bad parenting which is because of low IQ
You have the primary direction of causality between trauma and IQ reversed. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=childhood+trauma+and+IQ...
Population scale trauma exposure and bad parenting is a result of poverty, social structures, and sometimes wars and conflicts, not something predetermined by genetics.
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Do you have a source for the claim "Low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes"? I've never seen one.
In fact it is EQ - emotional intelligence - and not IQ that predicts positive life outcomes most strongly.
For earnings: https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/36853322/Ben_Pal...
Among many others.
Even in health and longevity: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01...
Besides, low IQ is associated with worse life outcomes even if, as you say, low EQ is most strongly associated with the same. They're not mutually exclusive.