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Comment by TeaDrunk | Hacker News Reader

This rhetoric in commenting on venture capital and tech implies that whites and asians are more likely to fall into some biological distributions optimal for being in tech or being a venture capitalist.

could you explain what they are? Genuine question.

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It's a matter of whether or not you believe IQ test results.

(Personally, I don't have a position, not being familiar with the literature brandished by either side of the debate. I am, however, aware of the debate's existence — hence this clarifying comment.)

You don't need IQ test results. The SAT measures actual performance at solving math problems.

https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-percentile...

SAT measures your ability to complete the SAT, not your ability to solve math problems. If you are nervous in a testing environment or need to take your time with math problems or write them out beyond the scraps of paper they give you, you will have a bad time on the SAT. Even when I took the GRE for grad school, I ran out of time on the math section. It wasn't difficult, it was just trigonometry and very basic algebra, but I ran out of time anyway. I still got into grad school, so it turned out none of this testing stress mattered at all.

IQ results are meaningful, but there's nothing 'biological' about them. Variation in IQ is heavily influenced by all sorts of social factors, and variation across social groups even comes with difficulties in measurement. The meme that 'IQ is biological' is just that, a baseless urban legend.

Don't be ridiculous. Performance on IQ tests is highly heritable and is also severely affected by metabolic disorders, childhood iodine deficiency, and sleep deprivation. That's biological.

It's funny when people are so uniformly wrong but write with such confident language. Most estimates based on twin and sibling studies place 60-80% of variance in intelligence as genetically heritable, with a single-digit percentage of adult IQ attributable to known environmental factors.

Twins-vs.-siblings studies are irrelevant to variation across large social groups. There's no way anyone can "write with confident language" about any of that variation being biological in nature, given that the social milieus are so starkly different.

Twin vs sibling studies aim at quantifying what effect genetics has on IQ rather than environmental conditions. If there are hereditary components to it, then they most certainly can be mapped to some extent across population groups, as have a lot of other "traits". There are only so many ways to slice this, but it is unfortunately a delicate topic.

Question, are the studies telling us IQ is heritable or telling us a dumb person can't have smart kids?

IQ tests aren’t biological the way height is, thus my confusion. Additionally, we can’t know that tech/VC have significantly higher IQs. My inquiry is genuinely asking if this persons rhetoric had any merit whatsoever since on its face it looks dumb

Well, at least we got over phrenology... right?

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