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Comment by myersj

5 days ago

> poor and uneducated people can be quite smart about navigating poverty without education.

What does this mean? That they're able to scratch through existence on a minimum wage salary (or whatever) may be "quite smart" or it may be "meager survival". I don't think there's any inherent connection to anything, here, and it feels hand-wavy.

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myersj

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coldtea  4 days ago

It means you can be very intelligent (a genetic trait) and poor/uneducated (a life circumstance).

Even some of the most intelligent people by IQ had "Mac jobs" and/or died poor. William James Sidis for example died in poverty working some desk jobs. Hey, even Ramanujan did manual labor at some port, and if he wasn't "adopted" by Hardy he'd had continued to.

  • tptacek  4 days ago

    "Very intelligent" is not simply "a genetic trait" and the extent to which it's genetically determined at all is heavily disputed in at least three mainstream science fields (psychometrics/quantitive psych, molecular genomics, and behavioral genetics).