Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4c0d3r | Hacker News Reader

Assuming all humans and populations of humans are interchangeable parts. We are not. Not so much "race" - which is a fairly idiotic concept as it's applied -- but hereditarianism is very much a real thing. IQ equates with life outcomes and is highly heritable. How people migrate (or are forced to migrate) can help you understand a population and population differences. Nigerians who immigrate to the U.S. now do far better than populations that were brought over during chattel slavery. Likely those who were captured by their neighbors and sold to European slavers had to lose battles of some variety. Selection effect. There are also documented differences between native populations in regions. Things like the harsh winter hypothesis pose that harsher environments lead to higher IQs. Otherwise, why doesn't every country look like Japan? If we don't diagnose the real problems societal interventions will fail to help anyone in a lasting/meaningful way.

View on HN

The "harsh winter hypothesis" is self-evidently risible. You have to ignore huge chunks of human history, during which the hot-weather civilizations did stuff like invent algebra while the cold-weather civilizations were barely worthy of the label "civilized", in order to take it seriously.

It's really weird that it ever became a serious talking point!

to be fair to the spirit of the idea, hot weather can be just as oppressive. Maybe adversarial conditions is more the point?

Right, that's my point. The hypothesis is specific to cold climates; it's a just-so story about why southern "races" are less intelligent, and it falls apart instantly on first inspection, unless you think evolution just started to happen 200 years ago.

Do you have alternative hypotheses for observed differences in civilization outcomes and average intelligence between groups? I think this is important to take seriously and investigate as poverty rates seem to line up with population's IQ, which lines up with rates of violent crime. At least here in US based on FBI crime stats/Federal data on poverty rates.

We could attempt to argue that all groups of people have identical capabilities (IQ bell curves), and only environmental factors (lead in paint/poor early nutrition, etc) are the cause of all observed differences/life outcomes. But that would just ignore real world observations and 50+ years of failed interventions to normalize all groups in the U.S.

Also: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-i... We can quibble on the accuracy of all the data, but generally we should likely take it as directionally correct.

It will be interesting to see if China maintains it lead with it's likely on going demographic collapse and how heavily the one child policy skewed abortion rates in parts of the population/pushed high degrees of educational investment.

Also likely won't matter too long now that we've begun outsourcing our thinking, battlefield decision-making, math, science and coding to LLMs. Doubt most of us will recognize what a "human" looks like in 100-200 years of genetic interventions/merging with machines/etc - should anything identifiable as a human last that long. Or some may, but they won’t be where the action is in economic/scientific terms. So no worries if noticing differences between populations conflicts with your moral belief structure. Give it time.

Wait, hold on, I don't need an "alternative" to a hypothesis that is facially comically flawed. Unless evolution only started just a couple hundred years ago, or science, mathematics, and literature aren't g-loaded, it can't possibly be the case that human intelligence is primarily (or even significantly) selected by cold winters.

Anything else could be happening. But the burden of extraordinary proof for cold winters is on anybody arguing that it's a real phenomenon.

Futher: you just linked to a site based in one part on Lynn's fraudulent "IQ & The Wealth Of Nations" data sets and in another on self-reported online surveys, and then said "we could quibble on the accuracy of the data". Quibble, you say!

Okay, I'll play one last round.

Why would the cold weather hypothesis be a theory that only goes back 200 hundred years as you claim? Just looked at some of the papers on the topic and it's tracking the human migration out of Africa and tracking when the first tools of various types were found and when. In more modern time the Norman invasion of France is about 1000 years ago, followed by England, not to mention the harsh conditions the Mongols were under (-40c degree winters) for about 3k years before conquering China - seems that led to a good bit of genetic spread.

Seems you're arguing that there are no differences between IQ in populations regardless of immigration patterns/conflict/harshness of the environment? If that's your claim please state it. My claim is that there are observable differences in populations of people, that are observable in the prosperity of regions and cultures, that are visible between nations and cultures, and that IQ distribution is highly likely to be root cause - or as close as we'll come to measuring the driving cause successfully. Evolutionary forces likely drove those observable differences.

It is simply an area that is taboo to research in depth because of how uncomfortable it makes folks whose morality is tied up in some form of cosmic equality/equity.

More over, I think it's imperative we study this vigorously and find truths no matter how uncomfortable that is for segments of society - particularly if we want to find interventions that work to better everyone's lot in society. Otherwise you'll spend lives and treasure to make no meaningful improvements to the conditions of people country/culture.

There aren't many Ashkenazi Jewish sprinters in the Olympics, is it so far fetched to believe that there might be more than sprinting ability differences between populations? Should these differences not be studied to better understand and improve society?

The "200 years" thing is a way of mocking the fact that cold-winter civilizations have not generally outcompeted temperate, warm, and arid civilizations over the span of human history. Since I think that's pretty clear from what I've written, I don't think we need to keep trying to hash this out; we're clearly talking past each other.

This is obviously not an area that is "taboo to research". You just don't follow the fields that research it. The website you cited in your last comment was a pretty powerful clue towards that!

> during which the hot-weather civilizations did stuff like invent algebra

When algebra was invented the Fertile Crescent was significantly wetter and cooler than it is now.

Uh huh. Mesopotamia and Egypt might as well have been Norway. And clearly writing itself originated in Siberia, so the theory survives.

The claim is that severe winter conditions select for intelligence, not that intelligence grades continuously with average temperature!

Intelligence and progress are not the same thing. You claimed alegbra was invented in a hot weather place, which is simply not true. To paraphrase Lee Kuan Yew, if not for air conditioning, Singapore would still be a backwater.

No, I said that there are long stretches of history where hot-weather civilizations outcompeted cold-weather civilizations, and that implied (correctly) that algebra was not the product of adaptations to harsh winters, which is what the cold winter hypothesis argues (generally, about selection for intelligence).

That 1500 BC Babylon was neither a cold-weather clime nor an arid clime is evidence against the cold winter hypothesis.

(To your point about intelligence vs. progress, it's suggestive evidence, not dispositive evidence, but the amount of suggestive evidence over the course of human history makes the cold winter hypothesis pretty funny.)

You changed your statement from "during which the hot-weather civilizations did stuff like invent algebra" to "there are long stretches of history where hot-weather civilizations outcompeted cold-weather civilizations". I am only contesting the original statement.

I don't know, maybe I'm being imprecise? It doesn't much matter because the cold-winter hypothesis is specific, and we're just arguing over the specific shape the countervailing evidence takes. It's hard to find support for it in human history. It really does feel like it's based on a notion of evolution only starting 200 years ago.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com