Comment by davidbessis
1 day 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.
> Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble?
You're wrong about that, but you couldn't have know. I've lived in far more different places with more different people, than most people you've met.
> innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia
That's why I wrote it hadn't been well studied, not that it hadn't been studied at all.
> You're declaring that
Of course not. I'm not the source.
> 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?
That's from a letter Einstein wrote 1926 to Bohr. He wrote in German, that quote is a paraphrase in English.
Look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohr%E2%80%93Einstein_debates, And, about him being mistaken, quoting that article:
"As mentioned above, Einstein's position underwent significant modifications over the course of the years. In the first stage, Einstein refused to accept quantum indeterminism [...]" -- indicating that, at some points, he had the wrong beliefs, right.
Here's the quote explained further: https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/5937/why-did-einstei...
> 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 ... Bouchard's 1990 ... The Bell Curve's Charles Murray ... thinks ... structurally flawed
No, didn't read that book. Continuing in another comment.
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!
> > twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS.
Here's a twin study from 2015, newer than the books (Clean Slate etc) and papers you (David) mentioned.
"Thinking positively: The genetics of high intelligence" https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4286575/
Figure 3 indicates that intelligence is pretty strongly inherited, and they arrive at 0.44.
Now you're saying that that doesn't matter because of GWAS? Sounds a bit hand-wavy to me.
> > Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com
Blog post looks biased. So there's a controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_heritability_problem
And there's two camps:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/the-missing-heritabilit...
(I like that article!)
And the two of you (Davind and Thomas) seem to be in the "The DNA Proponents" camp. The other is "The Twin Study Advocates" camp.
I guess now I'm in "The middle ground" camp, no longer in the "Twin Study Advocates".
Thanks for that. Maybe I'll check back in 10 years later and see what has happened.
I don't think there are really warring camps here††. There are inferences drawn from twin studies, and they have not held up in GWAS studies, especially modern GWAS studies that actually try to "deconfound" indirect genetic effects. Basically: you start out with twin study inferences that give relatively high heritability numbers for complex behavioral traits; the first round of GWAS work cuts those numbers maybe in ~half; direct contribution studies (like intrafamily GWAS) cut them basically down to zero.
(For an intuition on things like intrafamily GWAS and IGE vs. DGE, consider assortive mating: tall people tend to marry tall people [that's an empirically verifiable statement]; that means they're more likely to pass down "real tall-people genes", but also that they're likely to pass down "fake tall-people genes" that they just happen to have but have nothing to do with height. If you don't correct for this --- and early GWAS EA studies didn't! --- you end up inflating genetic contribution to height by factoring in the "fake" genes --- also by increasing the likelihood of inheriting shared environmental factors. Those effects† explains something like 10% of height's h2, but most of educational attainment.)
You might get something out of Gusev's review of Turkheimer's book, also on his substack. Turkheimer is also a very interesting source for this stuff, particularly if you want to go a step past whether the h2 numbers we have are holding up (they aren't), stipulating them, and then seeing how little even that means.
"Blog post looks biased" is not a good way to address this unless you actually practice in the space, like the author does, and are in conversation with other practitioners in the space, like the author is.
† Really, effects _like_ this --- I'm terribly oversimplifying, in part because I'm several steps past the frontier of my understanding of this research.
†† Greenberg thinks there are, but who are the twin-studies researchers rejecting GWAS results?