Google TechTalks
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2015–2022
1:06:31 · 91K views · Aug 25, 2011
Steve Hsu's 2011 Google Tech Talk reviews psychometric measurement of intelligence and the heritability of adult IQ, then discusses genome-wide association studies seeking the genes behind cognitive ability.
Pointed to as a well-cited hour on IQ and genetics whenever intelligence and heritability come up.
6 comments from Hacker News
It's only bold because there is a large number of people (often state founded, often controlling at least the lower levels of education, often with major influence on media) who strongly feel otherwise -- with no numbers to back them up, of course. --- If you actually do want to get to the bottom of it, I can heartily recommend Ian Deary's "Intelligence: A Short Introduction" as a place to start. [LINK] (Who knows, if you dig around a bit you might even be able to find a PDF, perhaps at Emil Kirkegaard's website.) You can also choose to spend an hour on this talk by Stephen Hsu who does research on IQ and genetics: this video You can read some of Plomin's stuff -- he is very much into genetics: [LINK] There's a paper I can't find at the moment that looks at almost 4000 non-related people, give them an IQ test each + scan their DNA for typical SNPs with a DNA chip. That gives us almost 8,000,000 pairs where we know how similar their IQ score and DNA was. That gives us almost 8,000,000 points we can plot into a 2D coordinate system (and we can of course also throw statistics at them). It turns out that there is a clear correlation between measured IQ and measured SNPs (i.e., the point cloud is denser along a line). In other words, there is a statistical relation between DNA and IQ. This is a result that is extremely hard to explain away if one believes in nurture, SES, microaggressions, racism, ESL difficulties, etc. Since it is such a rhetorically important paper, I hope somebody
Steve Hsu giving a talk @ Google on the topic, with myriad citations: this video Four studies cited on this handy chart: [LINK] It's very well-established science that you could have easily googled, but downvoting unpopular research, pointing and shrieking "eugenics!" is a better argumentation technique, I suppose.
Remapping intelligence to certain cognitive performance parameters, many of which can be measured in a very metrical and objective way, still tends to produce correlations. See Figure 3 of this article: [0] - there is a mix of simple perceptual tasks and more complex reasoning ones, which on the surface appear independent. The paper admits at the end that intelligence isn't one kind of task, but instead many kinds of systems used together. That still doesn't prevent their ability to construct a version of g-factor. And very simple metrics, taken alone, seem to inter-correlate well with IQ scores, like reaction time.[1] This correlation increases with age, suggesting a biological factor in preserving brain integrity that would nullify educational effects of intelligence. If your version of intelligence has nothing to do with cognitive activity I don't know what to tell you. It's true that effectiveness in society might not be correlated with intelligence. That says more about what society rewards and the kind of labor required to get it. And I don't mean to say that society should reward people based off of test scores, that's dumb. Nor should we assortate people based off of pure test scores, also dumb. But I see no real conceptual problems regarding intelligence that doesn't try to conflate intelligence entirely with general effectiveness. There are IQ realists like Steven Hsu that don't do this, placing it on equal importance with conscientiousness [4]. As with height, ther
I recall seeing this Google Tech Talk by Steve Hsu on how they are in the process of finding out basically all the additive genes that contribute to intelligence in China at the BGI research institute: this video They would take roughly a thousand people who are >=3 standard deviations smarter than average and compare their full genomes against people who are of average intelligence. This way they expect to find out all the "easy" genetic determinants of intelligence.
I am growing more disturbed in recent years by how true this statement is in our current society. While not all behavior is hereditary, genetics plays a massive role. I wish it were not taboo to talk about this more openly. While I have found few, at least there are some people attempting to give this subject more consideration: [LINK] this video