
The IQ trap: how the study of genetics could transform education - gadders
https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/04/iq-trap-how-study-genetics-could-transform-education
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OscarCunningham
What exactly can genetics determine that can't be determined by direct tests
of ability? I can understand that genetic tests of intelligence are relevant
to the debate about eugenics, since genetic tests could be done in advance and
used to determine which children get born.

But by the time the child comes to be educated, it seems that you could get
the same information more accurately by directly testing the child's ability.
You don't need to test the genetics, because you have access to the actual
child. Genetic tests could give us a measure of how well a child will do in
life, but in fact we already have this measure just by looking at their
schoolwork. The genetics don't add anything.

~~~
jasode
_> What exactly can genetics determine that can't be determined by direct
tests of ability?_

The article says[1] it can help determine an early intervention or optimal
method of teaching _before_ the ability is tested. By the time you test the
child, it may be too late.

I'm not agreeing/disagreeing with the article. I'm just trying to extract the
part of the article that seems relevant to your question.

[1] half way down the article: _“At the moment we are detecting ‘problems’
only when they are visible, and at that point they can be detrimental for the
child and hard to treat,” says Smith-Woolley. “Genetics offers the potential
for predicting and preventing. For example, from birth we might be able to
tell if a child has many genetic variants associated with having dyslexia. So
why not intervene straight away, with proven strategies, before a problem
emerges?” Whether such a scheme could work for more subtle aspects of
intelligence and learning – whether we could realistically and reliably use
genes alone to predict them, and then tailor learning strategies to have an
impact – remains far from clear._

~~~
OscarCunningham
That seems reasonable. I imagine colour blindness would also be very useful to
detect early.

It sort of argues against the position that genetics determines intelligence
though. If intelligence was determined by genetics then you wouldn't think
that intervening in a dyslexic child's education a couple of years earlier
could make a large difference.

~~~
DonaldFisk
For example, assuming dyslexia has a strong genetic component, and that
dyxlexic children have less trouble learning Italian than learning French, you
could ensure that they're put in the Italian class and not the French class.

~~~
iguy
I'm unconvinced.

Color blindness is easy to test for, as soon as it matters. We can do the
tests where figures pop out with baby chimps right? What would change if you
knew this earlier?

Are we even sure that dyslexia is something more than a catch-all term for
kids who have more difficulty learning to read? And either way, do we know
that starting earlier, or later, would be an effective intervention? The error
bars on our knowledge of such things (even for the largest samples, all kids)
seem huge.

~~~
Robin_Message
Dyslexia is specifically related to difficulty processing sequences; the
symptoms are fairly specific, and have an obvious underlying mechanism, even
if we don't understand what that mechanism is yet. It's not just difficulty
learning to read.

~~~
iguy
OK, don't know too much about it, don't mean to open another can of worms!

But we seem to have difficulty even discerning the best ways to teach normal
kids to read. Hence my skepticism that our interventions for something
specific could be so well-understood that starting the intervention when we
had the genetic test (rather than waiting for the classroom) would matter.

~~~
Robin_Message
That is a very fair point.

Teaching in the UK at least seems quite faddish. At the moment, pre-teen
children are taught extensive vocabulary to talk about how English is
constructed.

They are taught terms like "split diagraph", which sound liguistic, but aren't
terms actually used by linguists!

~~~
iguy
Right! And don't they try to teach them to read at 4, while the Finns wait
until 7, or something? The state of knowledge about what works best seems
pretty poor.

------
jimhefferon
I'm a working (college) educator. I see every day that success depends on many
things.

For sure there are people who seem to take to subjects, to have a natural
ability at it; for instance, I took to math. But hard work plays a very big
role, a critical role, as well as things such as ability to focus, or whether
you struggle with a problem such as an addiction or have bad luck and get in
an accident or come down with a disease.

Intelligence, whatever that is, is necessary but nowhere near sufficient to
succeed. We do the best we can when we help people work on what they can
change rather than telling them they have a certain amount of _g_ and that's
it.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
For most of the population, intelligence is hardly the limiting factor in
their education or professional achievement.

Blaming genetics for the results of collective political and economic
underachievement is one stop short of blaming individuals for "poor breeding."

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iovrthoughtthis
> All the same, Asbury avers that genetic assessment will only ever be an
> accessory to, and not a replacement for, existing methods of teaching and
> evaluation.

Now it is easy to measure GPS and given that it will get easier in the future
we'll probably see less standardized testing. I wonder if in optimizing for
GPS we might fall afoul of Goodhart's Law.

Someone things worries me is, if we tell children that 50% of the probability
of their educational success is "determined" by their genes they will behave
differently.

Students who believe their intelligence could be developed (growth mindset)
out performed students who believe their intelligence is fixed (fixed
mindset). Will focus on heritable intelligence shift more people towards the
fixed mind set?

[https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/carol-dweck-
re...](https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/09/23/carol-dweck-revisits-the-
growth-mindset.html)

~~~
John_KZ
I disagree. I fully support using GPS to sterilize inferior people.

Here's the full process:

-Sequence the genome of everyone

-Identify eugenics supporters

-Select a set of GPS parameters such as the eugenics supporters score below the threshold

-Eugenics supporters are now sterilized

-Problem solved (after all it's just PC and a liberal deception to say eugenics support doesn't have a genetic origin, man isn't _tabula rasa_ after all, eh?)

~~~
dexen
I don't support eugenics. The sarcastic idea presented in GP gave me a good
chuckle nonetheless.

In similar vein: plan on having the _morally handicapped_ as the admins of the
project... that'll not only make it viable, but also will take them out of
other projects that need _moral_ leaders.

------
samirillian
The elephant in the room here is ethnicity. Which is what eugenics usually
equates to.

Sure, I'm wary of the determinism, but I'm more wary of the prejudgement of a
person based on their ethnicity, and the scientific pretense that could be
stacked onto that prejudice.

> They surveyed almost 2,000 primary school teachers and parents about their
> perceptions of genetic influence on a number of traits, including
> intelligence, and found that on the whole, both teachers and parents rated
> genetics as being just as important as the environment

This is precisely the kind of "begging the question" that makes me doubt the
whole enterprise. What do grade school teachers know of the scientific
literature? Isn't it more likely that they just see a minority kid in the
class underperforming and think, "well, that's minorities for you"? And isn't
it possible that a more rarefied form of this commonsensical stupidity is
getting fed into such purely statistical pursuits as genetic research?

~~~
Symmetry
Because I think that the work being done on the genetic basis of IQ is good
science and because I don't think that there are substantial genetic IQ
differences I believe that research will serve to provide evidence against
racism.

Intelligence is pretty much always better unlike stuff like height or
agreeableness. It's governed by a huge number of genes in complex ways. Humans
went through a genetic choke-point not too long ago and we're very genetically
homogeneous compared to most species. There are some important genetic racial
difference but they all seem to be simple stuff involving single proteins,
melanin production levels being a prime example.

~~~
iguy
I'm not so sure. For example, the Tibetan adaptations to altitude are much
better than those in the Andes... and when last I checked it was thought that
this might come from Neanderthal or Denisovan ancestors.

Or last week's news about adaptations to diving -- one tiny niche which
happens to be relatively easy to study:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883566](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16883566)

~~~
Symmetry
And I was very surprised by the diving adaptation story last week until I got
to the part where they found that the adaptation was just a single gene.

And I wouldn't be surprised that some environmental adaptations might be
better than others given that relatively little evolutionary time has passed
and the barriers for the transfer of altitude adaptations from one high
altitude region to another. But there are no such barriers to the transfer of
IQ enhancing alleles, those will help you everywhere.

~~~
iguy
OK, single gene effects are the easy ones to find, so we find them first. We
know height is massively polygenetic though.

The point of the Tibetan story is that they (may) benefit from > 200k years of
adaptation to that geography, via these ancestral humans. Whereas the Andean
people had < 10k years.

Re transfer of IQ, why is it always beneficial? There are always trade-offs --
more blood to the brain is going to make it harder to survive famines, for
instance. Some monkey species are dumber than others because it was not
profitable in their niche. Domesticated herbivores are dumb too. It could be
that this doesn't apply to us, e.g. if we are the result of some recent
breakthrough.

~~~
Symmetry
There are certainly tradeoffs with IQ. There one allele that raises your IQ a
bunch but has a good chance of causing you to die early. And if you had a
domesticated species of human I'd expect that that might hurt intelligence.
But given that humans' primary competition has been other humans and given
that this is true the world over I expect that IQ would be roughly equally
valuable everywhere and so we shouldn't see big differences, genetically,
between populations like you do with adaptations to other sorts of particular
environments.

~~~
iguy
In the western word, today's environment seems to select against IQ -- number
of children anti-correlates. This wasn't true 200, 300 years ago. So that's
one example of two environments which value this trait very differently. Sure,
one of them is highly unusual...

The flores island hobbits are another example, where it seems that humaniods
evolved quite dramatically smaller brains. But islands are also unusual,
obviously.

------
nabla9
>In Plomin’s study, the young person with the second-highest GPS for
intelligence achieved results only slightly above average. That’s not
surprising, though: environmental factors still play an important role.

The effect can also be nonlinear.

As far as I know correlation between wide polygenic score (GPS) and
intelligence is linear (r ≈ 0.30) only because linear correlation is measured?
It would be interesting to see the effect of wide polygenic score to different
extremes, very high and low g.

I would hypothesize that genes are more important factor in low intelligence
scores than they are in high IQ. Environmental factors seem to work the same
way.

There is some evidence that there is a right skew to the IQ distribution and
it's not perfectly normal.

~~~
OscarCunningham
The IQ distribution is normal by definition. Test scores are normalised to put
them exactly on that curve. In order to say that the distribution is skewed
you have to choose some other way of normalizing it that you think is
"objective". (If you actually did this though, I think you would be correct.
The best scientists and mathematicians aren't just twice as good as everyone
else, they're hundreds of times as good. So the high intelligence tail is
_heavy_ , in some sense.)

~~~
nabla9
Intelligence researchers don't use normalized IQ for anything serious (they
are not comparable across countries, for example). They use raw test data to
generate the real distribution.

I tried to avoid using the 'IQ' and use g-factor or intelligence, but I
slipped at the end. I'm sorry about that.

>. So the high intelligence tail is heavy

Yes. Intelligence seems to have fat tails on both directions and it's also
right skewed.

------
austincheney
IQ is a weak measure of anything remotely important.

For one reason IQ tests are typically convergent in that they typically test a
central way of doing things against a single most correct answer that often
excludes creativity. A divergent test, however, examines creativity by looking
for the quantity and diversity of answers to questions by a participant.

Secondly, IQ is mostly not an earned quality. Intelligence is generally an
inherited quality, but it can be modified by practicing a specific skill that
is directly tested for in IQ tests. The ability to improve IQ by practicing a
skill is a measure of behavior rather than intelligence.

A far more important quality is the behavior by which skills are learned.
Qualities like persistence, determination, focus, criticality, objectivity,
and so forth do more to influence perceptions of intelligence than there mere
speed of learning, which is what intelligence actually is. That said
measurements of speed of learning or raw information processing are weak
indicators of potential to excel where those qualities are important.

------
Communitivity
I don't think the problem of poor education is going to be solved through
genetics. Other commenters noted that testing can determine anything needed to
tailor education, and I agree. I think the root of the problem is cultural,
and three fold.

We have communities of many types that prioritize other things (money, hard
work, toughness, etc.) above education. We need to educate people that a good
education is the cornerstone of success, and should be prioritized perhaps
second, after health. I think we shouldn't expect real results for 3
generations. This is a long term problem that will require major cultural
shift, and thus a long term solution.

Defining the concept of 'a good education' is a complex topic. I don't think
it should have to include colleges though. My dad was a self-taught successful
writer, who didn't go to college. I'm a successful software engineer with only
two years of college (I'm defining successful in my case as job I like,
working with good people, and a decent 6-figure salary). I am not an expert on
education, but I have three ideas I think might work if done together.

First, a massive investment in free basic computers in every house and free
online education.

Second, a resurrection of the master-apprentice system, not just for jobs like
electricians but for all jobs.

Third, an overhaul of colleges to make them state-run, not-profitable, and
ideally free. If necessary you could charge a same cost fee for all colleges
of something like 10% of your income for 10 years after college. Or, perhaps,
colleges could make money off of research performed there, though that might
be a rabbit hole not to go down.

These changes though would require an immense shift in the way we perceive
education and being educated, and that is going to be a steep uphill battle.

------
tzm
Reminded of Polgár..

"Psychologist László Polgár theorized that any child could become a genius in
a chosen field with early training. As an experiment, he trained his daughters
in chess from age 4. All three went on to become chess prodigies, and the
youngest, Judit, is considered the best female player in history."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r)

~~~
OscarCunningham
This seems like evidence both ways. For nurture, because the training was
successful, and for nature, because Polgár was himself good at chess.

~~~
nicolashahn
If he really wanted to prove his point, he'd raise _someone else 's kid_ to be
good at chess, not his own. I don't think what he did is evidence for nurture
> nature.

------
kukx
A good lecture that regards IQ:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSo5v5t4OQM)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0)

------
jonnybgood
The only predictive thing of people with high IQs is that they’re going to
really like board games. That’s about it.

~~~
Anderkent
Not really, no? There's a lot of things that IQ predicts; we just take them
for granted as just 'being smart'.

You'll find a lot more high-iq than low-iq people at top jobs, for example.
I'd be very surprised to meet a google/facebook/amazon/etc senior developer
with IQ of 85 or less; and while those companies are big enough that maybe
some such people exist, it's immediately obvious that iq correlates with
success at such jobs.

~~~
analog31
What I wonder is, if genetics predicts IQ, and IQ predicts your occupation,
then why not dispense with IQ and say that genetics predicts your occupation?
Perhaps we are only keeping IQ as an idea because it's traditional, or because
we like to form our own beliefs about what predicts IQ and what IQ predicts.
Likewise, we stopped believing that certain families had "fate" when we
learned about genetics.

~~~
gadders
>>What I wonder is, if genetics predicts IQ, and IQ predicts your occupation

I don't think it says that, it says that IQ determines the level you could
likely get to in an intellectually rigorous occupation. i.e. Top, world-
renowned surgeons have a higher IQ than mediocre surgeons, top lawyers tend to
have a higher IQ than mediocre lawyers etc.

~~~
Anderkent
Actually there's an interesting statistical phenomena where at the _very_ top
of a hierarchy, the correlation between success and the factor that generally
drives success becomes low.

For example if you look at NBA players, you'll see that they're on average
quite tall, but also that height only has a weak correlation with 'basketball
ability' in that sample. That's because those people were already heavily
selected on height; and all the not-that-tall people in the sample compensate
with the other things that make them good at basketball.

So if you want to look at how useful IQ is, you should be looking at the
average IQ of successful people vs average IQ of unsuccessful people, and not
how successful people are in a relatively high IQ subsample (i.e. all
surgeons).

------
nukeop
Yes, the IQ is a great if not the best predictor of broadly understood
intelligence and achievement. It's also correlated with reproductive failure.

However, the article is extremely politically charged and filled with identity
politics that should have no place on this website.

~~~
AQuantized
Terming it reproductive failure betrays a one dimensional perspective on
childlessness.

~~~
toasterlovin
I’m guessing the OP is taking a genetic point of view. Natural selection
doesn’t really care about the particulars of _why_ reproduction failed to take
place, just _that_ it failed to take place.

------
kome
I want to share this as well: The Globalization of the IQ Wars
[https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/race-iq-charles-murray-
gl...](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/04/race-iq-charles-murray-global-bell-
curve)

Please don't believe that IQ related studies are mainstream in social and
psychological literature: they are very contested. That said, citizens and
policy makers should decide if trusting them or not.

~~~
gwilkes
Contested yes, it seems they are downright detested. No one wants to talk
about this. In the west because of how political anything related to IQ is, I
doubt much will happen here. It's more likely China will take the lead in the
area of research.

~~~
Quarrelsome
Go to Stormfront. They discuss IQ to death. If we wanna talk about education
we should talk about stuff we CAN change like fast-tracking talent, project
based education and smashing the absurd social structures we allow to fester
due to age-segregation. There's tons we can do as opposed to wasting time on
stuff we cant like change genetics.

~~~
toasterlovin
But one day, in the not too distant future, we will be able to change
genetics. And when that day comes, if we have taken the time to understand the
relationship between intelligence and genetics, then we can finally take
permanent measures to equalize humanity by giving everybody as much
intelligence as possible.

