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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

> [in response to the idea that IQ doesn't change over time] Think about how it would it be if it was the other way around; there might actually be some bad outcomes. Because then parents would be able to totally control their kids with bad parenting, and wreck kids’ IQs for the rest of their lives. Governments could have big influences on people’s IQs by enacting different policies toward different sets of people in the country.

I can't quite put my finger on why I find this assertion so loathsome. As though having autonomy over your intelligence is somehow a betrayal to what I imagine is the interviewee's sense of societal "fairness" or "equality".

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One thing that put my eyebrows up is that the claim seems so contradictory to what we actually observe. Governments and parents do have big influences on IQ. Unleaded gasoline is the obvious winner, but there's fairly solid evidence that iodized salt, childhood nutrition, acute childhood stress, and traumatic brain damage all cause substantial changes in IQ.

Far from seeing some kind of discriminatory eugenics from all of this (anywhere, even in dictatorships), we see the Flynn effect. Things have gotten better across the board, and continue to whenever we track down a new way to modify IQ.

The suggestion that "controlling IQ would be horrifying" seems so unsupported that it's purely ideological.

To be fair, the author does make your point regarding nutrition:

>[Note: In the developing world, increasing nutrition — namely through iodine supplements — has done a lot to increase IQ scores. And overall, IQ across the globe is rising. These are good trends, and lend evidence to the idea that bettering a child's environment makes the child smarter.]

What is most distasteful is that, with the belief that IQ is set at birth, it legitimizes the study of race and intelligence, which, if history serves as a guide, is very dangerous.

One of the most horrifying things I ever read was the first(second?) chapter of A Brave New World. The thought of not helping a person is bad. Fysically stunting someones growth makes me sick. To just do it to escape the ethical debate at a later point is horrifying.

I've always held with the claim that BNW is far more interesting and applicable to our world than 1984. Totalitarianism is out there, but it's not absolute and it's largely understood as evil. The sort of glib, "everyone is happy" moralism of BNW presents much deeper questions.

That line of thinking applied by the equality of outcome left leads to this particularly loathsome dystopia:

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

Just a note, an r of 0.54 isn't exactly proof that IQ doesn't change over time; I would argue it indicates bounded changeability. I don't know why the researcher holds that data up as proof that IQ is "static"

He said something along the lines of it having variance within some region which matches up with what you said.

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