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Comment by wycs | Hacker News Reader

It is startling how ineffective basically all educational interventions are. I remember reading a quote to this effect in the introduction to the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

“Teaching is a skill we have not yet mastered, save for to those happy people for whom it is almost superfluous.”

We have known intelligence is heritable for a long time. Anyone who has lived for a great length of time in a small town has seen this in their neighbours.

We have had twin studies basically confirming it for ages; and soon cognitive genomics will confirm it beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt.

It is a testament to what epistemic hacks humans are that we allowed these extreme priors to be overwhelmed by empty political fashion.

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I would say it has already been confirmed. There have been three studies now using genes to predict educational attainment (easier to measure in large data than IQ, but very similar, as it turns out). We can now predict about 10% of the variation in educational attainment from your genes. This might not sound a lot, but if you look at the difference between the top and the bottom genetic scores, it is substantial. (Like, top quintile: 50% go to college, bottom quintile, 10% go to college.)

These are not just correlations. By looking within families, we get an unbiased estimate of the true causal effects of these genetic variants (because DNA is randomly assigned among siblings by the "lottery of meiosis"). Effect sizes are smaller than if we look across different families, but still significant and large.

Lee, J.J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, M., Nguyen-Viet, T.A., Bowers, P., Sidorenko, J., Linnér, R.K. and Fontana, M.A., 2018. Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature genetics, 50(8), p.1112.

That cite is already outdated! The EDU SOTA is now 16%: "Genomic prediction of cognitive traits in childhood and adolescence" https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/09/17/418210 , Allegrini et al 2018. (It uses some tricks to boost the statistical power of Lee et al 2018 - GWASes in general waste a lot of predictive power by not using multiple traits, realistic priors etc. So it's easy to do better.)

Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local solid and dependable farm family, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.

The political 'fashion' is perhaps more about not pigeonholing people by fallible means, and more about giving them a chance regardless?

You have answered your own question with the word "exceptional". This individual is truly, as you say, an exception to the rule.

I fear we understand genetics only relatively better than we understand phrenology...

In fact a little worse, right now: we can predict about 20% of the variance in IQ from brain shape [1] but only 10% from genes [2].

[1] https://authors.library.caltech.edu/87270/

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3

> Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local solid and dependable farm family, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.

Why do you associate farmer with lesser intellect?

Change it to:

> Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local family of village idiots, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.

Now that'd be surprising.

Agreed. These days, running a farm of any size requires a great deal of financial planning and a strong work ethic.

I know lots of “farmers”, and I can’t think of any that I would consider to be of below average intelligence.

Oh be reasonable. I used the euphemism to not have to say it out loud.

And in fact, its not a hypothetical case. I know the family; I know the young man. My wife helped him apply to Auburn.

shrug

I come from a family of idiots yet both myself and later my my sister got college degrees in STEM fields. And I'm not talking about a little dimwitted, my parents are really, really dumb and lack any form of self awareness or critical thinking skills.

I don't see it as particularly surprising.

My grandparents on my dad's side aren't particularly dumb, my mom's parents are though.

> It is startling how ineffective basically all educational interventions are

People learn quite a bit from the educational system, from reading and math to history and philosophy to chemistry and physics.

"Ineffective" doesn't necessarily mean "having zero effect". A system can be ineffective even when it has a positive effect, if the effect is too small considering the resources spent.

Reading, writing, basic math... those are things our education is quite good at teaching.

Anything else is forgotten by most students soon after they pass the exams. Those who remember are usually the ones who are interested in the topic; they often independently read more about the topic in their free time.

The system would be improved if those who forget the stuff wouldn't have to study all of it; and those who remember the stuff would be given opportunity to study it from books and have conversations about those books afterwards.

> empty political fashion

Look around this HN thread and similar discussions. What is the current fashion? It looks like it is the genetic determinism, and disregard for human liberty and self-determination. It's trendy to disregard the latter and engage with these ideas, in the political realm from nationalists to fascists - a large political trend around the world now - to the social realm with genetic determinism. It's no coincidence that the trendy political ideology has found science to cover it - it's exactly what happened in the 20th century with both Nazism and Communism.

The outcomes of these trends, if successful, are predictable; it would take ignorance, not a genetic defect, not to know what the consequences are. What do we lose when we sacrifice individual freedom and self-determination? Who gets to choose, if not the individual for themself?

Part of what maintains the current fashion is this assertion that knowing certain facts might turn us into monsters. It’s unclear to me why so many people not only believe this, but think it so obvious as to require no justification.

Note that the two monstrous systems you cite had almost exactly opposite views on the matter. Nazism as everyone knows glorified what you call genetic determinism, but Communism was strongly against such things, for both humans and wheat. They were going to sculpt the new soviet man, remember, by fixing his environment, and they failed at this. Isn’t the existence of evil on both sides of a question evidence against the idea that one side is obviously evil?

Both regimes were pretty keen on sacrifice, and not so keen on individual freedom. On the other hand, I’m pretty keen on freedom and self-determination. I’m also keen on knowing stuff about how the world, I don’t see how keeping ourselves in the dark will lead to better decisions.

It is interesting how "it's 100% genes" and "it's 100% environment" can both be 100% against the individual. In either case your fate is determined by your genes/environment, and there is nothing YOU can do about it. It is government's job to either select the worthy ones and purge the unworthy ones, or brainwash everyone into the desired shape (and purge those who somehow resist the brainwashing).

This is true, but "no real opinion" can also be 100% against the individual. Look at the Saudis for instance, anyone think they have bothered to have a strong position on this? They care about royal blood lines obviously... but that's different.

The problem isn't the science or anti-science. The problem is absolute power, which is all too easy to use for evil.

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