FWIW, the issue with life experience anecdotes is that they don't control for genetic confounding. Most rich kids have both the environment their parent created for them, as well as the genes their parents gave them. So it's impossible to tell which is more important in determining the life outcomes we see.
There is a whole discipline called behavioral genetics that uses twin and adoption studies and, increasingly, genome wide association studies (GWAS) to tease these things apart. Most of these studies seem to point to most outcomes being about half genetic and half random (that is, something other than the environment created by the parents).
Children adopted by wealthy families have huge differences in success rates, so genetic differences are not that stratified. Children of the wealthy still have issues, but they are generally better able to mitigate them.
I don't have a ton of time to go digging, but a cursory search in Google and DDG didn't lead me to anything definitive. I found one study from Sweden which supported your position. But I'm wary of trusting a single study, especially because the nordic countries are kind of oddballs. Do you have any sources you like?
A) facts don’t somehow become invalidated because a subgroup of people wants to use the facts to push an agenda.
B) Taleb is the exact embodiment of the “intelligent, yet idiot” description that he so loves to level against others. He is ridiculed by pretty much every intelligence researcher and behavioral geneticist who is aware of his take on IQ. Recently I witnessed him arguing on Twitter that the Justinian plague was not the Black Death. They’re both caused by the same bacteria, yersinia pestis. Find a better intellectual hero.
3. You can also find various comments on ideas of intellectual superiority in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel.
My bottom line is that I see no reason to believe humans can diverge in terms of intelligence over the span of a few generations. Social darwinism is a ridiculous pseudo-scientific idea that gets traction only with people that think they fall on the right side of the IQ divide.
Btw, could you give some examples of researchers that treat IQ seriously and consider it has a strong genetic component?
"Twin studies of adult individuals have found a heritability of IQ between 57% and 73%[6] with the most recent studies showing heritability for IQ as high as 80%[7] and 86%.[8]. IQ goes from being weakly correlated with genetics, for children, to being strongly correlated with genetics for late teens and adults. The heritability of IQ increases with age and reaches an asymptote at 18–20 years of age and continues at that level well into adulthood. This phenomenon is known as the Wilson Effect.[9] Recent studies suggest that family and parenting characteristics are not significant contributors to variation in IQ scores;[10] however, poor prenatal environment, malnutrition and disease can have deleterious effects."
This is not "some researchers" who hold the opinion that IQ has a strong component, it is literally the entire field of behavioral genetics (basically the only field that seriously studies the genetic basis of human behavior and psychology).
Regarding how long it takes for significant evolution to occur: human generations have historically been about 20 years long, which makes 1000 years about 50 generations. As a point of reference, humans have created entire new breeds of domesticated animals in as short as 50 years (a similar number of generations). Darwin has several examples in The Origin of Species and a Russian scientist bred tame foxes in about the same amount of time. The speed of evolution is dependent on a lot of factors, but on its face, the idea that groups of humans facing different selection pressures would not somehow differentiate is silly (and they clearly have; that's why you can look at someone and have a pretty good idea of what part of the world their ancestors come from). But for a more concrete example of a shorter time period, the Han Chinese have been rice farmers for several thousand years, whereas African pygmies have been foragers and hunter-gatherers during that same time. Both groups would face significantly different selection pressures. Hunting and foraging skills would be essentially useless to rice farmers and a propensity toward uncontrolled violence would likely get them killed by a local ruler trying to maintain peace among his tax base. Hunter-gatherers would have no use for the ability to keep accounting records or a class of women made economically unproductive via the practice of foot binding.
> Most of the document is just a rant, but he does make some quantitative claims, which is good. I investigate the veracity of these claims using real data.
> All the claims from the article that I looked at, that can be interpreted as something specific and tested in a real data set, turned out not to be correct. If Taleb hadn’t blocked everyone who disagrees with him, perhaps he would have found out about this, and not published a post with all these incorrect claims.
That's exactly the point. That should mean their children won't succeed if genetics rather than money are the most important factor. If their children do succeed then money was (probably) more important.
EDIT: If 'being good with money' is an issue, for example if lottery winners don't spend their winnings on their kids, then an alternative would be to look at the successes of children who are adopted in to wealthy families.
There is a whole discipline called behavioral genetics that uses twin and adoption studies and, increasingly, genome wide association studies (GWAS) to tease these things apart. Most of these studies seem to point to most outcomes being about half genetic and half random (that is, something other than the environment created by the parents).