Rather than acknowledging the high heritability and lack of malleability of cognitive ability, many people have taken the more socially desirable approach of emphasizing the importance of education and advocating for more spending or more time in school.
When you’re coercing millions of people (kids are people) into doing something for years and years and spending trillions of dollars, the burden is on you to demonstrate the benefits exceed the costs.
The stigmatization of eugenics and cognitive ability has been extraordinarily harmful. If even a size-able fraction of the money spent on education was spent on research into gene editing, IVG, GWAS on cognitive ability, etc. the children of today would be much much smarter and we wouldn’t need to waste years of their life.
>> I think this error of reasoning is another example of the deductivist fallacy
I call it the limits of analogical thinking. When Turkheimer says that "chopstick usage is +90% heritable" that is true. But how applicable is the analogy of chopsticks heritability or good vision heritability to intelligence heritability in modern America? We see lots of evidence for failure to increase IQ but and lots of evidence that people can be trained to use chopsticks and have their vision corrected. An analogy is only as good as its applicability.
I'm saying that I wish real world institutions worked on the logic you propose, of requiring justifications for large spends and sprawling bureaucracies. Instead, large spends and sprawling bureaucracies create their own 'justification' through lobbying, entitlement effects, and the like.
Those arguing for social interventions, which is almost everyone who matters, should propose novel interventions for kids. Like eating a can of sardines every day, or sunbathing, or pushups, or never wearing polyester. If enough places tried a wide variety of things, maybe they'd stumble on something that worked.
Now I will annoy your libertarian and alt-right readers. (Yes, I know those are different. Opposed in many ways, even.)
This is an argument for a stronger welfare state (particularly if you don't start from rightish priors that take hierarchy as a given or desirable). Since so much of the deficit is genetic in nature, the less able are not to blame for their lack of success. Furthermore, given that the precise talents may differ from period to period (logical-mathematical intelligence is a lot more valuable than it used to be), many human beings could easily wind up at the bottom of the heap.
Thus, at the minimum, we should have a higher minimum wage and national health insurance to ensure people who wind up at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain through poor genetics that are no fault of their own can have decent lives. Also, given that some people will always be in the employee class, we need strong labor unions to ensure that workers receive a reasonable share of the economy's surplus.
(This is not an argument for socialism, i.e. state control of means of production. They tried that in China and the USSR, didn't work well.)
Besides, if you don't, you have a large, immiserated underclass that's prone to manipulation by demagogues of the left and right.
Greg Cochran has taken the position that just because schooling doesn't matter much for IQ now, doesn't mean that's the case by necessity. It could be that every educator has been ignorant of how to actually educate! He's also fond of pointing out that medicine was both widespread and worse than useless up until the 20th century. Of course, most education reformers don't take the position that what we've been doing is a waste and someone armed with science that takes IQ seriously needs to throw everything out to start over again.
What's the best argument against this view? The only one I can think of is that heritability for g might not be that high. Philosophically, however, I can't find a flaw. Ipso facto, in a rational world one would surely expect determining heritability to be the final frontier. Of course it won't be because the same types of arguments will crop up: "the PGS for EA is picking up structural inequalities". Would be good to see a post of those types of arguments.
Rather than acknowledging the high heritability and lack of malleability of cognitive ability, many people have taken the more socially desirable approach of emphasizing the importance of education and advocating for more spending or more time in school.
When you’re coercing millions of people (kids are people) into doing something for years and years and spending trillions of dollars, the burden is on you to demonstrate the benefits exceed the costs.
The stigmatization of eugenics and cognitive ability has been extraordinarily harmful. If even a size-able fraction of the money spent on education was spent on research into gene editing, IVG, GWAS on cognitive ability, etc. the children of today would be much much smarter and we wouldn’t need to waste years of their life.
>> I think this error of reasoning is another example of the deductivist fallacy
I call it the limits of analogical thinking. When Turkheimer says that "chopstick usage is +90% heritable" that is true. But how applicable is the analogy of chopsticks heritability or good vision heritability to intelligence heritability in modern America? We see lots of evidence for failure to increase IQ but and lots of evidence that people can be trained to use chopsticks and have their vision corrected. An analogy is only as good as its applicability.
I'm saying that I wish real world institutions worked on the logic you propose, of requiring justifications for large spends and sprawling bureaucracies. Instead, large spends and sprawling bureaucracies create their own 'justification' through lobbying, entitlement effects, and the like.
Those arguing for social interventions, which is almost everyone who matters, should propose novel interventions for kids. Like eating a can of sardines every day, or sunbathing, or pushups, or never wearing polyester. If enough places tried a wide variety of things, maybe they'd stumble on something that worked.
Now I will annoy your libertarian and alt-right readers. (Yes, I know those are different. Opposed in many ways, even.)
This is an argument for a stronger welfare state (particularly if you don't start from rightish priors that take hierarchy as a given or desirable). Since so much of the deficit is genetic in nature, the less able are not to blame for their lack of success. Furthermore, given that the precise talents may differ from period to period (logical-mathematical intelligence is a lot more valuable than it used to be), many human beings could easily wind up at the bottom of the heap.
Thus, at the minimum, we should have a higher minimum wage and national health insurance to ensure people who wind up at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain through poor genetics that are no fault of their own can have decent lives. Also, given that some people will always be in the employee class, we need strong labor unions to ensure that workers receive a reasonable share of the economy's surplus.
(This is not an argument for socialism, i.e. state control of means of production. They tried that in China and the USSR, didn't work well.)
Besides, if you don't, you have a large, immiserated underclass that's prone to manipulation by demagogues of the left and right.
Greg Cochran has taken the position that just because schooling doesn't matter much for IQ now, doesn't mean that's the case by necessity. It could be that every educator has been ignorant of how to actually educate! He's also fond of pointing out that medicine was both widespread and worse than useless up until the 20th century. Of course, most education reformers don't take the position that what we've been doing is a waste and someone armed with science that takes IQ seriously needs to throw everything out to start over again.
What if british royal family adopt one of twin massai or zulu children? After we should measure their adult IQ. We need extreme intervetion like this.
Is this reasoning also true in the other direction? Does talent management have a raison d'être nowadays?
What's the best argument against this view? The only one I can think of is that heritability for g might not be that high. Philosophically, however, I can't find a flaw. Ipso facto, in a rational world one would surely expect determining heritability to be the final frontier. Of course it won't be because the same types of arguments will crop up: "the PGS for EA is picking up structural inequalities". Would be good to see a post of those types of arguments.