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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Regarding his brothers, imagine if IQ is like a bunch of switches. TT was born with all his switches flipped 'on' out of some maximum. His brothers were born with most of them flipped on, as were his parents. Having high IQ parents increases the odds of more switches being flipped on, but having all of them flipped is still innate.

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I've struggled to visually conceptualize this sort of occurrence. This helps a lot. Thank you!

Now, to torture the metaphor, how do I flip on the rest of my switches...

You can't (your germ line mutations are fixed, and even if you could change your genes in place your brain has already developed according to the previous genetic code and environment). You can only choose where to direct the output of your already flipped switches.

People on Reddit are taking pills to try and do that. Sometimes you hear about them getting aggressive cancers. Other times you hear about them semi-successfully treating damage they did to their brains with past drug use. Randomized controlled trials never show anything, but if you're being held back from being a genius by one protein that you got a bad gene for, you'd be one of the positive testimonials without showing up above the noise in a trial. Who knows.

Ask again in 2122.

In the meantime, I guess, we all need to learn that our worth as a person is determined by who we are, not what we are.

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