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Trump State Department official has called for mass sterilization of ‘low-IQ trash’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Intelligence isn't genetic. Its determined by large set of environmental factors as well as societal ones
It's genetic and environmental (I'd argue that societal is a subset of environment - the society you live in is part of your environment).
IQ is far from a perfect measure for intelligence, but it has a high degree of inheritability - up to 80%.
However
As soon as malnutrition comes into play, IQ is automatically severely diminished. Add in all the other environmental factors too, and - it turns out we do have a lot more we can do to increase peoples intelligence, before resorting to eugenics.
I mean, the validity of IQ tests in general should be questioned when the largest variability in scoring is if you've previously studied for an IQ test followed by what language you speak.
Philosophically I don't really think there's a uniform agreement on what exactly defines general intellect, or if that general intellect even matters considering were a species that relies on specialization.
As far as heritability, I imagine that would be a horribly difficult topic to actually get enough research to rule out variables like socioeconomics and cultural differences. I mean I doubt there's that many twin studies to establish the efficacy any particular theory.
As I recall, studying for an IQ test is able to improve your result by around 7%. That's honestly a pretty impressively low %, indicates to me some level of validity just based on that. What other variables are considered? And can you link me to the language thing? When I look up language, I'm just seeing correlation between language proficiency and IQ, which shouldn't be surprising -- I would imagine that people who measure a higher IQ are better at learning languages.
There is great interest in studying IQ, and people do study that quite seriously.
Agreed, and the person you're replying to said essentially the same thing. IQ itself has correlations with other things, and that alone makes it interesting.
This article does a pretty decent job pointing out some of the variabilities that make IQ test unreliable. Tbh I think the concept of IQ is fruit from the poisoned tree. There are so many people that stake their positions and identities on the efficacy of IQ that the whole data pool is kinda poisoned. For every study that makes a claim, there are other studies rebutting it.
I would have to search for it, i originally read about it when I was in college over a decade ago. Basically the claim was that the vast majority of the tests originate or are interpreted from English or another western language. When certain aspects of the test are interpreted to a different language the sentence structure is modified in a way where it adds an additional barrier for the test taker.
This may be somewhat solved by the different language speakers creating their own test, but that may not overcome the problem due to the need for global standardization, orit may be a barrier to language speakers who's cultures haven't invested the time or resources to the idea of IQ to begin with.
Ah, right. Yeah, there are some age-old criticisisms of IQ test like translating into a different language can skew the result, or relying on concepts that are cultural but not obviously cultural (like the way buildings are shaped) can skew the result. I'm not generally interested in comparing IQ results between countries or even for people of differing first language though so these don't especially concern me so long as I can be sure a study averts the issue.
From the paper you linked:
Hard agree. IQ cannot be said to measure intelligence. But for instance, it correlates well with success (level of education (eventually) reached, or $ in a capitalist society) and I'd be surprised to find any major journal publishing a paper which disputes that.
My point is the variability between test groups calls into question the reliability of IQ as a concept as a whole. If IQ is an innate measurement of intellect for humans in general, then the reliability of the test shouldn't be culturally constrained.
Yes, but I could make the same claim about a plethora of other correlations with more confidence like having wealthy parents.
IQ is not a measurement of human intellect in general. Also, the fact that the test is flawed does not mean it is not useful in some contexts.
Regarding correlation with success, I should have specified that the correlation still exists even when controlling for birth environment.
I don't think there's a scientific consensus of what IQ really measures.
I would say that would be extremely difficult to definitively prove. IQ is more of a social study than a hard science, typically this kinda data is more suggestive than it is definite.
There may not be scientific consensus on what IQ measures, but IQ=intellect is widely considered pseudoscience.
What exactly are you claiming? That it's not a test to measure intellect? That IQ is pseudoscience? Or that it's not specifically generalized intellect?
It's polite etiquette to mention what you're quoting.
It's obviously a common definition of IQ...... It doesn't really matter where it's from as it shows that general definitions of IQ claim it's a test of generalized intellect.
Your quote doesn't really refute my argument, or clarify what claim you are making?
I was quoting the same page you were quoting.
I'd say IQ is an attempt at concretizing a notion of intelligence. There's little consensus on what intelligence really means, so there's not much more to say than that. In other words, IQ is just a number. More relevant is what IQ can be found to correlate with.
Wait, do people actually study for IQ tests? Why? Language makes sense, if I tried doing one in German I would fail because I barely speak it at an A2 level, if that.
I reckon general intellect does matter. In a world where your job might not exist in 5 years because lol AI, it's best to be able to adapt fast. Specialize, yes, but one day your specialization will be useless. Best case scenario, it's after you've retired.
And going back to heritability, there's definitely some heritability there, but the problem with twin studies is that twins tend to have the same socioeconomic backgrounds too. Still, just malnutrition, environmental pollution, etc, are big enough factors that taking care of those on a nationwide scale (since we're talking about a particular nation here), would be much more significant than eugenics. Then we get to education - again, this same particular nation has a lot of gaps in the availability of good quality education.
The same reason mensa is a thing. People like to toot their own horn.
To a certain extent yes, but no one can be an expert at everything. There just isn't enough time, and expertise is really what society rewards people for at the end of the day.
I would say that would be incredibly hard to empirically prove due to the problems you mentioned. At best we could speculate that heritability may be an influence, but that influence is vastly overshadowed by environmental factors.
Fair enough, I've also at one point been 13 and done a bunch of useless online IQ tests. Never studied for them, they seemed like mostly simple pattern recognition and general logic questions, which I've never really thought you could even study for.
Absolutely. But general intellect, as far as I can tell (and maybe my understanding of it is wrong), is what influences your ability to shift to a new field and gain expertise in that. Years alone don't cut it. In my own field, I've seen software engineers who can't program for shit, let alone make any architectural decisions after a decade - and ones that are pretty competent after 2-3 years. Now imagine you're 10 years into a career and it starts becoming less and less relevant due to changes in society. If you're naturally intelligent, you're both 1) more likely to have learned more from your 10 years than others have, so more valuable for longer, and 2) more likely to be able to switch to an unrelated or semi-related career path and become useful in a shorter amount of time.
Of course it gets more complex than that because general intellect doesn't span ALL skills. In fact, it's more like ranges of aptitudes. I have great aptitude for STEM, pretty decent aptitude for languages, and absolutely none for arts. No drawing, no singing, etc. No matter how much practice I get and how much practice I got in my childhood. There's just skills I won't learn in 10 years of practice, and skills I pick up rapidly, and it's been that way since childhood.
Hell, maybe general intellect isn't a thing after all.
I think IQ in particular unfairly prioritizes understanding of language and logic, over artful skills and, e.g emotional intelligence (which is measured by EQ I guess). It's a pointless measure. My main point that I wanted to make was that some people are naturally more gifted, and just faster learners, than others. There's people from good families who have never suffered from malnutrition or emotional abuse and went to good schools, who aren't all that smart, and people from far worse backgrounds who are geniuses. Something must be contributing to that. If not genetics, then what? At the same time, yes, people from emotionally healthy families with no financial issues, are more likely to be successful in school as well as life in general.
There are a few different tests that are supposed to clinically measure IQ. Most of them are more complex than pattern recognition and most all of them are administered by some sort of clinician, which can also influence outcomes.
I would say that the ability to gain expertise is generally hard to differentiate with the motivation to gain expertise. What we can empirically prove is that time spent practicing a skill is how we gain expertise in most any skill.
It could be that you just perceive yourself being at being better at stem because you enjoy practicing the skills required for stem. People generally gain experience faster in skill sets they enjoy or skills they perceive thems to excel at.
Again, this could be self fulfilling process. If you don't think you will excel at something you may not fully engage in the process, or even self sabotage the process.
I think for this to be true your claim would have to be that emotional intellect is devoid of logic or language.....which seems fairly self evidently incorrect.
Or people are better at learning things they are self motivated to learn about, and that society influences what skills we find valuable or "intellectual".
In short, what we can empirically prove about intellect is usually environmental in nature, and what we can only theorize about heritability cannot be differentiated from other variabilities that may correlate with that theory.
One reason people study for IQ tests is to learn to what extent studying for an IQ test affects the result.
There's no evidence it's generic at all. It's very difficult to access 'intelligence' or make usable data about intelligence. You really can't test how intelligent people are, most of what we can test with repeatable results is skills, which famously can be improved over time reliably. To the point there's time estimates on how long it takes to be a skilled person in one ability or another. I work with special needs kids, and let me tell you, you learn real quick working with these kids that there's close to zero differences between them and their same age peers. People are very similar, and even people you'd consider rather foolish on a lot of metrics interacting with them, can be quite brilliant at what they are interested in and skilled in.
I don't know about intelligence, but it's well-known that IQ results are partially heritable genetically. (Yes, even when controlling for environment one is raised in.) Did you actually research this or did you make that up because it sounded nice?
That's not true at all. No biologist will agree that IQ tests produce usable data that shows anything of the sort, IQ tests are a skills test and the biggest skills it tests are studying for an IQ test and speaking English fluently.
I don't know if you know this, but Eugenics was bunk science and it's been shown to be nothing more than academic racism that holds no validity
You're misinformed about eugenics (with a lower-case e, if you don't mind). Easily-measurable traits like height and weight are well known to have heritable components, as do diseases. Eugenics is an effective way to prevent genetic diseases. You probably don't realize that eugenics is a wider subject than the racist and ableist practices of nazis and other ethno-supremacists. You only think eugenics is bad because when people say "eugenics," what the nazis did is what comes to mind, rather than important and good technologies like IVF and selecting against zygotes with alleles associated with negative traits. (And yes, negative traits and positive traits are both heritable, though I'll freely admit that what makes a trait positive or negative is subjective.) See this discussion elsewhere in this thread.
I have a hypothesis that there are three camps of people: (1) those who generally get the science and limitations of IQ; (2) those who are racist bigots and use IQ to justify genocide; (3) those who assume that any attempt to measure intelligence is inherently racist and so IQ must be pseudoscience. (2) and (3) both assume that anyone purporting to be in camp (1) must actually be in camp (3)/(2) respectively.
Getting rid of negative traits gets out of control really fast. I would say more than AI.
How does AI factor into this? Also I'm interested to hear your scenario in which voluntarily getting rid of negative traits gets out of control. It's certainly plausible that we might have some kind of runaway evolution. Still, I think it's imperative we prevent genetic diseases.
Read like any sci-fi novel ever...
How about Brave New World off the top of my head? GATTACA as well.
I love GATTACA -- obviously a terrifying dystopian world. Cautionary tales exist to tell you to proceed with caution, not to avoid proceeding at all.
AI is a modern problem, getting rid of negative traits is a potential problem. Getting rid of negative traits incur that something about the person or being is a disorder. That could be schizophrenia or autism, that are more considered like problems, even though these are problems that are at the core of society, not problems with the people themselves. Getting rid of these might seem logical, but they also meddle with what a person is at its core. Now moving on to things that are more accepted by the literature as non deviant genetic 'traits' would be homosexuality and transness. What if this defiant and deviant mode of living was to be erased by genetic modification? I'm sure the parents would be proud, but you just got rid of something that is at the core of what that person is. That is against diversity by itself. Genetic modification in the sense of eugenics or getting rid of negative traits is the same as eliminating diversity and difference, which is why Hitler picked at it so much.
I'll elaborate even more: Arjun Appadurai implies at his "Fear of Small Numbers" that at the core of eliminating difference there is a deep desire for oneness. That those who are different are such small steps away from complete oneness and national identity. That is, I exist in the society which I identify as real, and anything against that is so close to inexistant that I could just wipe them out and be in my happy place. So close to it, but not quite. Something that Appadurai calls the state of "incompleteness".
It does not seem obvious to me that we should get rid of autism. I don't know any studies that suggest that people with autism have a lower quality of life. Autism is a form of being different -- neurodivergent. There may be disadvantages to being autistic, but there are likely advantages too. That is different from other more severe disorders that are genetic. (Is autism even genetic?)
Similarly, being LGBTQ+ is not a disadvantage in a sane society. In fact, being bisexual is an advantage I would argue. Regardless, it's not genetic, so why even bring that up?
But there are genetic disorders nearly everyone agrees should be eradicated.
I'm not really sure it matters what you think when history has shown again and again that there are people more than willing to use technology like this for evil, racist, etc. ends.
literally every technology can be used by evil racist ends. You've merely grouped two things into the same category, "eugenics" and called it a bad thing. If instead you had different words for these two things, it wouldn't occur to you to say they are both usable for evil ends. Why not just say "medicine" or "science" will be used for evil ends, as the Nazis did?
Stop calling it a choice: Biological factors drive homosexuality
Woah woah, I didn't call it a choice. I said it's not genetic. Guess I'm wrong -- there is a genetic component it appears. But twin studies prove it's not purely genetic.
Genetics are only a small fraction of what makes up intelligence. Is far more important as other commenters pointed out to have enough nutrition and the right type of education the right type of social environment.
That's why I said partially.
It's also known by the MIT that race can be identified on X-rays using AI, and that doesn't mean much, does it?
I am clueless about what you're trying to imply. Are you saying that because one heritable thing which has a test for it is unimportant, that means all heritable things that can be measured are unimportant? I think that is what you're saying.
The importance of IQ isn't even what I was arguing over; I was just rebutting top-level comment that IQ is heritable. (I am aware they referred to intelligence, not IQ; but thread is about IQ.)
If there is no proper definition for what IQ is, it's just another fallacy for normative thought. I mean by this that going through classical logic seamlessly does not incur into intelligence, even though it might incur into intellectual fitness. And then it's all again why we have a certain model of thought of what is considered normal. This needs to exist if we are to assert "Intellectual Quality".
Now, if we assert what is "normal" we also have to assert what is a "disorder" or "deviance", which is what's treated as "dumbness" here. If it is a desired "heritable" quality, that means to be included or fit to the current intellectual state.
Next to relate as to why I have compared this to the AI results. AI could predict race based on X-rays - but that means as much as IQ being heritable. A normative study for normative thought with no valid conclusions using formal logic as an excuse.
There is no proper definition for what intelligence is. IQ is well-defined -- it's the number that comes out of an IQ test. This number correlates with many concretely measurable things, such as success (income and/or education level). I don't desire kids, but if I did have kids, I would do what I could to increase their expected IQ, such as through genetics, since that correlates with success and ease of living. These are valid conclusions. Formal logic is not used, only statistics.