In light of your acceptance of intelligence having a significant genetic component, I wanted to re-evaluate the discussion from the top. You pushed back on my attempts to discuss genetics and made strong claims about training being important for intelligence, and now you’re making strong claims about genetics being important. I don’t know where that leaves us. My original point, recall, was that genetic variation doesn’t support the popular high-IQ narrative of so called super geniuses. Genetics cannot explain your claim of 100x difference in intelligence, and the only thing we’ve talked about that does explain it is training, which is not genetic, and, we both agree, boring.

We are finally getting somewhere, it’s too bad this got too deep before finding a basis for productive conversation. The paper you linked is very interesting, I would just note that your strong claim with the qualifier “largely” in your statement is not supported by the paper. The paper does not demonstrate musical skills are primarily or ‘largely’ genetic, it only suggests there may be some heritability of music perception. At least some of genes it mentions are nothing more than hearing anatomy, so of course they affect music, but they also affect basic speed and any audio. It’d be wise to not overstate what that paper is saying.

Perhaps I did mean to say child prodigies are evidence of the heritability of intelligence; that it suggests intelligence has a large, possibly majority, genetic component, if kids are outliers without much training.

Okay, so you’ve been objecting to ‘physical traits’ but agree with ‘genetic’… What is the difference in your mind between those? I see them as, broadly speaking, the same thing. Physical traits are phenotypes, no? Genetics is the biological component I’ve been talking about all along, and heritability is defined as that which is genetic, i.e., not explained by the environment or chance, i.e., not due to training.

Knitting, bull riding, and playing piano are neither intelligence, nor are they physical attributes. They are learned skills. It seems some people may have genes that may help them learn these skills faster than other people, but these are not ‘physical traits’ in any way shape or form, and your commentary on that term isn’t making sense to me right now. If you think piano playing is a ‘physical trait’, that could explain much of the miscommunication in this thread.

BTW I'm not the one repeatedly bringing up the 20% thing, I'm trying to drop it.

You are arguing that intelligence is primarily trained and not primarily a physical trait, no? You did make a claim about a two orders of magnitude intelligence difference between IQs of 180 and 100, right? You seem to agree that "intelligence" is a combination of genetics and training, is that correct? And you believe the variance in IQ scores is mostly due to training and not genetics, or what?

This is somewhat going in circles now. I've agreed multiple times that IQ scores are somewhat trainable, and you're ignoring the facts that 1) it's only a little bit trainable not a lot, and 2) that people generally tend to have a stable IQ measurement over their lifetime (adults moreso than kids), and 3) that the goal of IQ tests is to try to factor out training to some degree, which is why it used to divide by age and now measures only rank. Cultural bias was a huge a valid criticism of earlier IQ tests, and they've taken steps to avoid relying on knowledge.

I'd certainly love to hear a more interesting argument or any evidence at all for you two orders of magnitude claim, but I can accept you're telling me your opinion and not something defensible. What we have agreed on is that IQ doesn't measure intelligence, it measures rank. One way or another, that fact could fully explain the outcome of the article we're commenting on.

> Child prodigies beat adults at chess, at maths, at programming, you name it.

FWIW, that's not really true in any meaningful way, and to some degree it contradicts what you're saying about training intelligence. The child outliers are not beating the adult outliers. Some children can outperform the average adult, but what has that got to do with anything? Some adults can also outperform the average adult. If children are outperforming adults, and they've had less training time, then how do you explain the superior performance? What is a naturally gifted child prodigy, if not evidence of physical traits?

Well, being at the top of the org chart in the first place is naturally insulating. But since HN is a forum attached to a startup fund, I wanted to put two cents in for how this happens even when there’s no incompetence.

Before I do that, I’ll be clear that I’ve personally seen incompetent execs make massive mistakes and survive. Working for a game studio acquired by Disney for a decade, we had a new one every 2 or 3 years and they’d shut down studios on a whim just to make their Excel sheets look good. One closed our small research division one day because he didn’t see revenue. He got reamed by the board for it and whined the reaming had been the worst day of his career. Boo hoo. But didn’t get fired. Disney tried to shut down the studio on the heels of a billion dollars in profit from this studio because they couldn’t figure out how to make a sequel or think of a new game, and because there were was some big tax incentive to getting the hundred or so people off the payroll. It seemed short sighted in the extreme.

Anyway, the complete answer to your question also needs to acknowledge that planning business is difficult, and whole companies and departments both fail all the time. As a worker, we don’t always see how the sausage is made and where the income is coming from, but management can be pretty messy, it’s not clockwork and people can’t predict the future. There are a lot of reasons that departments or companies can be closed for no fault by anyone, worker or manager. And, while there are plenty of incompetent decisions made, it’s also true that sometimes best effort managing still results in people losing jobs. In those cases, it’s possible and occasionally the right thing to do to keep a manager who tried hard to save things, even if they couldn’t. And there’s a gray area, and a lot of narrative, in between competence and incompetence too. I have no doubt in your case there was incompetence, but whether the disaster was self-inflicted or was even a disaster is viewed differently from the top. They might be talking about it as having averted a larger disaster.

Human head size reaches 80% by age two. IQ tests for 7 years olds are completely different tests and even different scales than IQ tests for adults. (See WPPSI vs WISC vs WAIS) The IQ scoring formula originally divided ‘mental age’ by chronological age to adjust (this is the Q in IQ), because it’s well known that a 10 year old knows more things and has a better memory than a 7 year old.

Child geniuses are a much bigger problem for your argument than mine. If IQ measured the innate biological component of intelligence, then it’d be no surprise at all that you can find young outliers. But if intelligence is trained, then child geniuses would be meaningless. If intelligence is entirely trained, that means it’s entirely acquired during life, and so then everyone can become a “genius” with effort, and IQ would only be measuring motivation and not intelligence.

Hahaha, buddy, this is very funny. Lack of effort is what caused your problem in the first place. I’m super surprised you’re digging in your heels on this. If it was me, I’d drop it, since it’s not a good look, but suit yourself. You got something wrong. So what? Own it. Fix it. It isn’t my responsibility to correct you, it’s yours. You did indeed waste a tiny little bit of time by arguing and jumping to conclusions before reading carefully. ;) And that’s okay, which is why I ignored it. I’ve wasted time making mistakes too. There’s nothing wrong with making mistakes. How you deal with mistakes is revealing though, and blaming others for your mistakes isn’t typically very productive here, even if some politicians seem to get away with it. :P I do honestly appreciate that your previous comment tried to de-escalate a bit. Asking what I meant was a positive step, and asking that earlier would have saved you some time. Always assuming good faith and making sure you read carefully and understood everything is a good thing to learn to do on HN, that’s what the guidelines are trying to hint at. I have learned this lesson myself the hard way, multiple times, FWIW.

> Intelligence is not, because it’s not a physical attribute

Well okay this is our core problem. We have been talking about different things. And, I need to concede on this point that you are right. If I google “is intelligence a physical trait” the results I get say: no. In my defense, I thought I was careful to qualify that what I was talking about earlier as the biological component of intelligence, but I’m okay admitting I’ve made some mistakes here.

It is worth noting that “Intelligence is one of the most heritable behavioural traits” and that “studies have consistently shown that genetic influence on individual differences in intelligence is substantial”. https://www.nature.com/articles/mp2014105

> A person with IQ 180 is likely two orders of magnitude more intelligent in absolute terms than someone with IQ 100.

There is zero scientific basis for that claim. This is exactly what I was talking about from the top. This popular interpretation of extremely high IQ scores substantially overstates what can legitimately be inferred from the numerical scores. That’s why I call it a misconception. IQ only directly measures how unusual someone’s intelligence is, not how good it is. IQ is at best only moderately good at predicting cognitive performance on some tasks, and whether it predicts anything is highly dependent on the type of task. And after reading about it more, I’m going to correct myself and agree that IQ does not predict cognitive brain capacity, and we don’t yet have anything that does. But scientists are looking for that.

Anyway, this belief you have that 180 IQ vs 100 IQ is 100x more intelligent - whatever more intelligent actually means - is extremely extreme!! Why do you believe this, and what evidence is there of your claim? You’re absolutely right that I disagree with you there. But I will read and consider any supporting links or data you can provide, and I am open to changing my mind if the data is compelling. There’s a reason that IQ is considered outdated now, that scientists do not accept that intelligence is 1-dimensional, and that cognitive scientists now talk about multiple intelligences, and use g instead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics)

> As far as I know, neither brain size nor the number of neurons nor synapses is correlated with IQ.

Human brain size does correlate with IQ somewhat. Now you know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Intelligence

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7440690/

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-brain-size-m...

Great question. My primary point was that the IQ scale and absolute intelligence aren’t the same things, and people often assume they are (this article’s premise, for example), or even worse many people assume that absolute intelligence goes up exponentially along with the rarity of the IQ ranking. Height was simply an example of how there’s an obvious discrepancy between standard deviations and the underlying absolute metric; the rarity of one person’s height says literally nothing about how tall they are, and yet people assume without any justification whatsoever that the rarity of someone’s IQ score does say something about how smart they are. All human physical characteristics have a relatively narrow range, and they don’t increase exponentially. Running is another example - Usain Bolt can run faster than 99.9999% of people, and yet he’s only 10% faster than the average competitive sprinter and maybe ~50% faster than the average person not trained in running. You’ll see similar distributions with weight lifting. The number of brain cells doesn’t grow without bound - we all have similar amounts. The construction of the brain cells and the structure of the brain isn’t wildly different from person to person. Most skulls are approximately the same size. Most eyeballs and ears and arms and legs all vary by about the same amount height and head size varies. So, there really is good reason to start with the hypothesis that raw biological cognitive capacity and speed don’t vary by a lot more than height does, and - importantly - that they all top out at the upper end of the distribution.

> Did you mean to imply the ratio between intelligence of someone with IQ of 100 and IQ 180 is smaller than a factor of 1.8, or did you mean something else?

I meant that from the start, assuming the factor is 1.8 is a very bad assumption. That’s simply not how standard deviations work. Yes, please consider the possibility that the cognitive capacity of IQ 180 is less than 1.8 times more than that of IQ 100. If intelligence has a similar distribution to other physical characteristics, then difference between the mean and the first standard deviations is much larger than the difference between the first and second standard deviations. Translation: the jump from 130 to 160 is probably much smaller than the jump from 100 to 130. And going from 160 to 190 IQ, there is likely a negligible, unmeasurable difference in absolute intelligence. This is the opposite of the popular conceptions of IQ, right?

> The evidence that intelligence can be trained is that every metric of intelligence ever invented is consistently going up

Again, you are confusing raw intelligence with psychometric tests. Yes you can train for an IQ test. No, you cannot train intelligence. ‘Intelligence’ in this context, the kind we are discussing, is defined as the biological component of cognitive capacity that cannot be trained. Intelligence and skill are two different things, go ahead and google that question. The fact that IQ tests are not currently able to differentiate between intelligence and skill is a well known shortcoming of IQ tests, and that relates directly to my initial point: IQ is not a great measure and assuming that IQ score and happiness would have a correlation anywhere near 1 is a very bad assumption.

> Sure, you can always claim that all of those are skills separate from intelligence

Yes, yes I can, since it’s true. Therefore, given that fact, the question you asked is one for you to ponder and answer. What is the source of the claim that being better at one “automatically makes you better at all the others”? Does taking IQ tests give you more brain cells or increase your cognitive speed? You’re hand-waving this training argument and ignoring the fact that people who train for IQ tests still top out and hit a wall regardless of the amount of practice, they don’t increase their scores indefinitely. If intelligence could be trained, why isn’t everyone a so-called high IQ genius?

> Why didn’t you correct me back then?

Hehe I don’t need to argue every wrong thing you say, and doing so doesn’t make for good conversation. Your assumptions only reflect on you, not me. I assumed you’d eventually re-read the comment you replied to and figure out that using 20% in your argument was straw man given that I actually gave an example of a 50% variance in height in that same comment, and that I only used height as an analogy, not a claim about intelligence. When people seem to misunderstand my comments, whether it’s a mistake or intentional, I prefer to try to clarify my broader intent and not nitpick every word. Rebutting every single thing tends to escalate arguments and send the impression that you’re reflexively arguing rather than thinking, and seeking disagreement rather than agreement. I try to follow the HN guidelines, and I’m by no means always perfect, but they are pretty good guidelines, right?

There’s a rational explanation here: IQ is not an absolute or proportional scale, and the happiness data actually is reflecting the true absolute difference in intelligence, which is smaller than the authors and many people assume.

IQ is a ranking measure, not a proportional measure of intelligence. A high IQ does not imply high intelligence on an absolute scale. The IQ scale is just standard deviations. If we measured height in standard deviations, this becomes clear, but somehow people don’t understand what IQ is, and it has become essentially a popular misconception.

Let’s measure height using HQ, where the mean is 100 and 1 stddev is 15 HQ. Then a 30 year old male who’s 5’9” has an HQ of 100. A 30 year old male who’s 6 feet tall has an HQ of over 115. That’s a 15% increase in HQ score for a 4% increase in height. Someone who’s 7 feet tall would have an HQ of 175 - a score some people label as supergenius, or in the “profoundly gifted range” on the IQ scale - yet they’re only 20% taller than the average male. (IQ doesn’t even work reliably above 160 anyway). And the HQ distribution stops at 8’11” (HQ of ~195, tallest person to ever live, ~50% taller than average), humans don’t ever grow taller than that.

There are good reasons to assume IQ works the same way - score ratios exaggerate intelligence differences, and the highest IQs are only moderately more intelligent than the median. This fully explains the result above - higher IQ does make someone happier, but only in proportion to actual intelligence, not in proportion to IQ.

Uh, that is not what the article you linked is saying. Natural units don’t make speed dimensionless, nor allow you to use the same unit for length and time. Natural units remove the conversion constants, not the units or dimensions.

If you understand and accept the reciprocal intent of the golden rule, via the above mentioned reasonable assumptions, not to mention the hundreds of years of examples and explanations, then it doesn’t really have a “failure state”. And, again, this so-called rule is not law, isn’t specific, and doesn’t cover all situations or all behaviors. It seems very silly to be nit picking this aphorism to death like this. It’s very simply a good faith suggestion to be kind.

The notion of fairness and reciprocity is not a religious idea, it’s common sense.

Dimensionless, sure, but what do you mean here? Radians and degrees are units, are they not?

How can you trust the system? What are you even asking? We have laws, a lot of them, and the golden rule is not one of them. But if you don’t hurt others, and others don’t hurt you, we’re off to a good start. Use whatever definition of ‘hurt’ you’d like, it doesn’t matter if it’s reciprocal.

No, that’s not what the Golden Rule said. It says to treat people the way you want other people to treat you. How you treat yourself is your own business.

There’s also a certain amount of making reasonable assumptions here. Obviously the intent is to get people to treat each other fair & well, not to set a logic trap and interpret this aphorism literally to mean you should hurt people if you’re okay with being hurt, even when you know other people don’t want to be hurt. Most people don’t want to be hurt. Obviously.