Comment by cutemonster
3 days ago
> they do know something about math ... that it requires a certain "attitude"
Of course. That does not mean that intelligence doesn't play a (big) role.
> Starting from Descartes and his famous "method", continuing with Newton, Einstein, Grothendieck all these guys insisted that they were special because of this "attitude" and not because of what people call "intelligence"
That doesn't make sense. Back when they were active, intelligence, IQ tests and the heritability of intelligence hadn't been well studied. They didn't have enough information, like we do today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates "Various studies have estimated the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States."
And, evolution and genetics weren't these peolpe's domains. Does it make sense to assume they were authorities in genetics and inheritance, because were good at maths and physics?
Sometimes they were wrong about their own domains. Einstein did say "Genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work" (I can understand how it makes sense from his own perspective, although he didn't know enough about this animal species, to say that).
But he also said "God does not play dice" and was wrong about his own domain.
> Why do you bring "kids who fail in school" and "start selling drugs" into this conversation?
It was an example showing that the researchers live in bubbles.
That they're forming their believes about humans, based on small skewed samples of people. There's billions of people out there vastly different from themselves, whom they would have left out, if thinking about about others' abilities to learn.
In fact, now it seems to me that you too live in a bubble, I hope you don't mind.
> Usually, competency in one domain is presumed to make you a bit more qualified than the random person on the internet when it comes to explaining how this domain operates.
1) Maths and 2) evolution, DNA, genetics, intelligence, learning and inheritability are not the same domains.
Anyway, best wishes with the book and I hope it'll be helpful to people who want to study mathematics.
Current estimates of the "heritability" of intelligence are far, far lower than "0.7 or 0.8"; they're probably below 0.1, and that's before digging into what "heritability" means, which is not generally what people think it does.
I'd guess the person you're responding to has thought more carefully about this issue than the median HN commenter has.
> Current estimates of the "heritability" of intelligence are far, far lower than "0.7 or 0.8"; they're probably below 0.1
Sources please, if you have time? I tried to find something supporting what you wrote, but wasn't able to (this far).
Instead I found this from 2015:
Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence, > I'd guess the person you're responding to has thought more carefully about this issue than the median HN commenter has.
Well, in his reply to me, he was sort of name dropping and appealing to (the wrong) authorities, didn't make a good impression on me. Plus writing about himself, but he's a single person. -- I would have preferred links to research on large numbers of people.
> what "heritability" means, which is not generally what people think it does.
That sounds interesting. Can I guess: You mean that people believe that heritability means how likely a trait is to get inherited from parent to child? When in fact it means: (davidbessis
1 day ago
tptacek
16 hours ago
Dear cutemonster,
I know this reply may not suffice to convince you, but unfortunately I won't be able to argue forever.
Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble?
FYI, the concept of innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia. Two of the authors I'm citing in my book (Descartes and Grothendieck) believed that innate talent existed and they both declared they would have loved to be naturally gifted like these or these people they knew.
You're declaring that these incredibly smart people were wrong about their own domains, which is a pretty bold claim to make. What do you have in support of this claim? A fake Einstein quote?
It's a sad fact of life that most quotes attributed to Einstein are fabricated. Next time, please check "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein", compiled by Alice Calaprice.
This may come as a shock to you, but Google page 1 isn't always a reliable resource. Nor is Wikipedia, even though it's quite often correct. As it happens, there's a pretty large "Heritability of IQ" bubble on the internet. It's active and vocal, but it's also quite weak scientifically — the page you're citing is a typical symptom, and it absolutely doesn't reflect the current scientific knowledge.
The IQ heritability claims that you're citing are based on twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS.
It's true that a number of people have been fooled by twin studies, most notably Steven Pinker, in Chapter 19 of the Blank Slate (did you read it?)
You see, Pinker is a linguist and apparently he isn't mathematically equipped to fully comprehend the intrinsic limitations of Bouchard's approach. Did you read Bouchard's 1990 paper on twins reared apart? Do you find it convincing? Are you aware that even The Bell Curve's Charles Murray thinks that this approach, abundantly cited by Pinker, is structurally flawed? Are you aware of the fundamental instability of IQ estimates based on twins reared together? Aren't you concerned that even a mild violation of Equal Environment Assumption, plugged into Falconer's equation, would drastically reduce the estimates?
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, if you've never read the authors and the primary research I'm citing, then it's quite likely that you're the one living in a social media bubble.
If you're interesting in learning more about the actual science of IQ heritability, I recommend using Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/comments-on-no-intel...
Feel free to also subscribe to my own Substack, where I plan to cover these topics in the coming months: https://davidbessis.substack.com
All the best, David.
Some of the stuff on Gusev's substack is pretty startling, and I highly recommend it.
Thank you for taking the time to comment here!