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Comment by napsec | Hacker News Reader

I'm not convinced most people disagree with these.

Some of those are definitely in the realm of "if you agree, it's often wiser not to say so".

People weren't amused at all when James Watson said that intelligence is heritable, and that like basically all other heritable attributes there is a difference between the average of different "races". [1]

1: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-46856779

Yep, that was the only "controversial" opinion in this piece. Oh, intelligence is heritable due to genetics? Certain genetic groups have more incidence of Sickle Cell Anemia? Let's put those together...

The problem is that once you say that something has a strong genetic component, two different genetic groups having the exact same distribution of that attribute would be really surprising.

But while we are fine with different genetic groups having different incidences for hair color, nose shapes or skin pigmentation, and are slowly coming to grips with different genetic groups having different incidences of various illnesses, and sometimes different reactions to them, the idea that different genetic groups could have statistically significant intelligence differences feels wrong.

>But while we are fine with different genetic groups having different incidences for hair color, nose shapes or skin pigmentation,

For most people differences among different groups stop at the brain ;)

It feels wrong, yes. But it's something that needs to be answered one way or another. One issue is that even conducting research into the question is anathema, so all we're going to do is argue about it based on a handful of pre-2000 studies with questionable methodologies.

The reason it's important to know, regardless of what the answer is, is that policy should be informed by reality. If we find that general intelligence is 80% genetic, or 40% genetic, or 0% genetic, this would have starkly different impacts on how we choose to educate our children, how we choose to recognize and/or compensate success, etc.

It is actively studied. There's a reason you're only ever seeing the questionable studies on message boards. What's being pursued in these conversations isn't science; it's something else.

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