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Comment by tkyjonathan | Hacker News Reader

I have a feeling that this is going to include things like IQ and then we will get into a big racist mess.

It almost certainly is explained in good part via IQ. IQ is strongly heritable and explains quite a bit of earnings variance.

Not sure what's racist about that though. It's just reality, facts about humans.

While IQ isn’t inherently racist, the data is racially biased. If you correlate IQ to race, you may find minority Y has a lower average IQ (true) which may falsely imply that the cause for X is being of race Y.

Discussions about IQ (which isn’t a particularly useful metric anyway, for various reasons) tend to veer into racist territory because people end up associating wealth and success with IQ, and since a disproportionate amount of wealth in America is controlled by whites people, and since minorities are more likely to live in poverty, this causes some people to suggest that those specific minorities have lower IQs or something. Basically, it brings up old racial stereotypes of non-whites not being as intelligent as whites, which is a very old, racist canard.

"because people end up associating wealth and success with IQ, and since a disproportionate amount of wealth in America is controlled by whites people, and since minorities are more likely to live in poverty, this causes some people to suggest that those specific minorities have lower IQs or something"

This is really not how IQ testing is done. Rather than guessing about correlations in the environment to IQ and working backwards to come up with an estimate for IQ, generally IQ tests are administered.

But notoriously with cultural bias. Questions about 'which of these tea-service items goes with the other?' and so on.

It isn't true that IQ tests contain questions about tea-service items or yachting or other culturally biased questions.

Raven's Progressive Matrices [1] is an example of a test that doesn't depend upon knowledge of tea service items.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven%27s_Progressive_Matrices

Presuming of course that test-taking, geometric drawings, mathematical concepts are not cultural either...

Which is why it's hard to understand how the study suggests environment plays such an insignificant role.

If you're born into a very poor home, and to use your example, a poor black home in the US, I'm not convinced my IQ would overcome my environmental handicap.

How many times out of 10 would you expect to make it to college and earn a high paying job while growing up black in some of the rougher city's and neighborhoods of the US?

Strong disagree that IQ is gonna be an explanatory variable here. Not to get political here, but DJTs children, none are “outliers” as far as intelligence goes but all will inherit their fathers (outlier WRT income) income generation capacity within an order of magnitude.

He himself inherited it.

This study found no correlation between environment and earnings when genes were accounted for. So you have a gene part and a random part, but parenting and such doesn't matter.

Of course it might not apply to a few special cases like if you inherited a billion dollars, but for 99% of us that is not the case.

>but DJTs children, none are “outliers” as far as intelligence goes

How on earth could you possibly know this?

https://twitter.com/ndrew_lawrence/status/118972249081948160...

> Actually just said by Donald Trump Jr: "I wish my name was Hunter Biden. I could go abroad and make millions off my father's presidency. I'd be a really rich guy"

You can probably make some reasonable intelligence estimates off that sort of statement.

He's been threatened over meetings etc but Biden's kid outright goes into corruption using his dad's name and the media is carrying water for them.

Makes complete sense to me.

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