- davidbessis parentOf course IQ is heritable to a certain degree. Why do you pretend to see blank slatism where there is none?
- What you call name-dropping is justified by the need to clarify the stakes and be transparent about where the criticism is coming from. If the article is too long for you & you're already familiar with the notion of heritability, you can go directly to the "The Dog Eat My Control Group" section near the end.
- No-one is denying heritability here. The only question is where the heritability figure lies, and how reliable are the estimates that have been put forward in the past. I don't see how anyone's "personal experience" could be a valid methodology for deciding whether the heritability of IQ is 30% or 80%. As for the "extreme ideological indoctrination" slander, it'd be great if you could just withdraw it.
- As for this snide comment that you posted behind your flagged comment:
"I don't care if you find it fair. If you can't accept that genetics determines the entire organism (stress: entire) and does not stop at the neck, then you'd perceive my later criticisms as much worse than - gasp! oh great heavens! my pearls! - unfair. It is a bitter pill to swallow that some people were simply born with better hardware than yourself, one you are obviously railing against. Now, rush on and down vote this comment as well to lighten the burden of your cognitive dissonance. I'm also finding it difficult to reconcile your use of the flag/report on the parent comment versus the rules dictating and describing what is disallowed content. Disagreement is not against the rules. Perceived "fairness" is not in the rules."
Sorry to inform you that you don't understand the meaning of the verb "determine", as "genetics determines the entire organism" is scientifically wrong for obvious reasons: "influences", yes; "encodes proteins for", yes; but "determines", no.
And, no, I'm not railing against anyone's hardware as I'm pretty satisfied with mine.
- For full clarity: I didn't flag your comment (at least, not intentionally, as I never even thought about doing that)
Now the substance:
"The alleged “suppressed control group” does not turn the result into “no heritability”."
=> Of course not, did anyone claim there was no heritability? But
1/ It's not "alleged", it's printed black on white in the paper.
2/ There is no excuse for suppressing control group data (it's like suppressing the placebo arm of a drug study).
3/ It does turn the result into "junk", and it does establish a definite case of scientific malpractice among people arguing that IQ heritability is 0.70.
As for later analyses, they weren't the topic of my post, but that doesn't mean they're casher.
- Which exact passage of my piece triggered this bizarre interpretation? What made you jump from "someone criticizes a 1990 paper in Science for withholding critical control group data" to "this person is subject to magical thinking"?
As it happens, I often run into trouble due to my conceptualist views on the foundations of mathematics (that is, I'm a hardcore physicalist & anti-Platonist cognitivist, which is quite rare among mathematicians), so I find your criticism particularly unfair.
- Great to see you're making progress!
A few posts ago you were alluding to heritability in the 0.7-0.8 range, as a reason to dismiss the writings of Einstein, Newton, Descartes and Grothendieck.
Now you're at 0.44. If you discount for a mild EEA violation correction, you'd easily get to 0.3 or below — a figure which I personally find believable.
Just FYI, I don't belong to any "camp". These aren't camps but techniques and models. Intra-family GWAS provide underestimated lower bounds, twin studies provide wildly overestimated upper bounds. I don't care about the exact value, as long at it doesn't serve as a distraction from the (much more interesting!) story of how one can develop one's ability for mathematics.
In any case, IQ is a pretty boring construct, especially on the higher end where it's clearly uncalibrated. And it's a deep misunderstanding of mathematics to overestimate the role of "computational ability / short term memory / whatever" vs the particular psychological attitude and mental actions that are key to becoming better at math.
Now that the smoke screen has evaporated, can we please return to the main topic?
- I was alluding to the quote relevant to the current debate: "Genius is 1% talent and 99% hard work" — which you incorrectly attributed to Einstein.
- Dear cutemonster,
I know this reply may not suffice to convince you, but unfortunately I won't be able to argue forever.
Did you ever consider the possibility that you might be the one living in a bubble?
FYI, the concept of innate talent predated IQ tests and twin studies by many millenia. Two of the authors I'm citing in my book (Descartes and Grothendieck) believed that innate talent existed and they both declared they would have loved to be naturally gifted like these or these people they knew.
You're declaring that these incredibly smart people were wrong about their own domains, which is a pretty bold claim to make. What do you have in support of this claim? A fake Einstein quote?
It's a sad fact of life that most quotes attributed to Einstein are fabricated. Next time, please check "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein", compiled by Alice Calaprice.
This may come as a shock to you, but Google page 1 isn't always a reliable resource. Nor is Wikipedia, even though it's quite often correct. As it happens, there's a pretty large "Heritability of IQ" bubble on the internet. It's active and vocal, but it's also quite weak scientifically — the page you're citing is a typical symptom, and it absolutely doesn't reflect the current scientific knowledge.
The IQ heritability claims that you're citing are based on twin studies and they have taken in serious beating in the past decade, especially in light of GWAS.
It's true that a number of people have been fooled by twin studies, most notably Steven Pinker, in Chapter 19 of the Blank Slate (did you read it?)
You see, Pinker is a linguist and apparently he isn't mathematically equipped to fully comprehend the intrinsic limitations of Bouchard's approach. Did you read Bouchard's 1990 paper on twins reared apart? Do you find it convincing? Are you aware that even The Bell Curve's Charles Murray thinks that this approach, abundantly cited by Pinker, is structurally flawed? Are you aware of the fundamental instability of IQ estimates based on twins reared together? Aren't you concerned that even a mild violation of Equal Environment Assumption, plugged into Falconer's equation, would drastically reduce the estimates?
If you don't understand what I'm talking about, if you've never read the authors and the primary research I'm citing, then it's quite likely that you're the one living in a social media bubble.
If you're interesting in learning more about the actual science of IQ heritability, I recommend using Sasha Gusev's Substack as an entry point: https://theinfinitesimal.substack.com/p/comments-on-no-intel...
Feel free to also subscribe to my own Substack, where I plan to cover these topics in the coming months: https://davidbessis.substack.com
All the best, David.
- > Sounds like people mostly living in different bubbles? What do they know about the world?
Well, they do know something about math — in particular that it requires a certain "attitude", something that no-one told them about in school and they felt they only discovered by chance.
Starting from Descartes and his famous "method", continuing with Newton, Einstein, Grothendieck all these guys insisted that they were special because of this "attitude" and not because of what people call "intelligence". They viewed intelligence as a by-product of their method, not the other way around. They even wrote books as an attempt to share this method (which is quite hard to achieve, for reasons I explain in my book.)
Why do you bring "kids who fail in school" and "start selling drugs" into this conversation? What does it have to do with whether math genius is driven by genetics or idiosyncratic cognitive development?
And why would a mathematician be disqualified from discussing the specifics of math just because they're not hanging out with lost kids? Are you better qualified? Did you sequence the DNA of those kids and identified the genes responsible for their learning difficulties?
>> [they] don't think it's because of their genes
> Do you think someone would tell you, if he/she thought it was?
Well, an example I know quite well is mine. I was certainly "gifted" in math — something like in the top 1% of my generation, but not much above and definitely nowhere near the IMO gold medallists whom I met early in my studies.
A number of random events happened to me, including the chance discovery of certain ways to mentally engage with mathematical objects. This propelled me onto an entirely different trajectory, and I ended up solving tough conjectures & publishing in Inventiones & Annals of Math (an entirely different planet from the top 1% I started from)
My relative position wrt my peer group went through a series of well-delineated spikes from 17yo (when I started as an undergrad) to 35yo (when I quit academia), associated with specific methodological & psychological breakthroughs. I'm pretty confident that my genes stayed the same during this entire period.
And as to why I was initially "gifted", I do have some very plausible non-genetic factors that might be the explanation.
I don't claim this proves anything. But I see no reason why my account should be disqualified on the grounds that I'm good at math.
Usually, competency in one domain is presumed to make you a bit more qualified than the random person on the internet when it comes to explaining how this domain operates. Why should math be the exception?
- Indeed, it does involve redefining genius as a "state", or "flow", or "trajectory".
When I say it's not primarily genetic, many people wrongly assume there's an entirely explainable and replicable way of accessing this state. There isn't.
The 20,000 hours rule is a bit misleading, because who gets to invest 20,000 hours into something? How do you create this drive, this trajectory? You must have a good hope that it'll yield something worth the effort.
This is why the injunction to "work harder" so often misses the mark.
However, even if only a tiny fraction of the population will end up becoming a "genius", it's very important to debunk the myth, because the real story has valuable lessons for everyone: it gives concrete and pragmatic indications on what one should be on lookout for.
It's not fully teachable up to genius level, but the directionality is teachable and extremely valuable.
- I think you really are confused. You are mistakenly equating "non-primarily genetic" with "easily teachable".
The story is much more complex than "if it's not genetic then everybody should get it". It's quite cruel to assume that if you don't get math today you'll never get it, and there are tons of documented counter-examples of kids who didn't get it at all who end up becoming way above average.
If you think that Descartes, Newton, Einstein, Feynman, Grothendieck (to just cite a few) are all equally misled on their own account because of Simpson's Paradox, which statistical result will to bring to the table to justify that YOU are right?
By the way, Stanislas Dehaene, one of the leading researchers on the neuroscience of mathematical cognition, is also on my side.
- Great to see so many reactions to my interview, thanks!
I see that many people are confused by the interview's title, and also by my take that math talent isn't primarily a matter of genes. It may sound like naive egalitarianism, but it's not. It's a statement about the nature of math as a cognitive activity.
For the sake of clarity, let me repost my reply to someone who had objected that my take was "clickbait".
This person's comment began with a nice metaphor: 'I cannot agree. It's just "feel-good thinking." "Everybody can do everything." Well, that's simply not true. I'm fairly sure you (yes, you in particular) can't run the 100m in less than 10s, no matter how hard you trained. And the biological underpinning of our capabilities doesn't magically stop at the brain-blood barrier. We all do have different brains.'
Here was my reply (copy-pasted from my post buried somewhere deep in the discussion):
I'm the author of what you've just described as clickbait.
Interestingly, the 100m metaphor is extensively discussed in my book, where I explain why it should rather lead to the exact opposite of your conclusion.
The situation with math isn't that there's a bunch of people who run under 10s. It's more like the best people run in 1 nanosecond, while the majority of the population never gets to the finish line.
Highly-heritable polygenic traits like height follow a Gaussian distribution because this is what you get through linear expression of many random variations. There is no genetic pathway to Pareto-like distribution like what we see in math — they're always obtained through iterated stochastic draws where one capitalizes on past successes (Yule process).
When I claim everyone is capable of doing math, I'm not making a naive egalitarian claim.
As a pure mathematician who's been exposed to insane levels of math "genius" , I'm acutely aware of the breadth of the math talent gap. As explained in the interview, I don't think "normal people" can catch up with people like Grothendieck or Thurston, who started in early childhood. But I do think that the extreme talent of these "geniuses" is a testimonial to the gigantic margin of progression that lies in each of us.
In other words: you'll never run in a nanosecond, but you can become 1000x better at math than you thought was your limit.
There are actual techniques that career mathematicians know about. These techniques are hard to teach because they’re hard to communicate: it's all about adopting the right mental attitude, performing the right "unseen actions" in your head.
I know this sounds like clickbait, but it's not. My book is a serious attempt to document the secret "oral tradition" of top mathematicians, what they all know and discuss behind closed doors.
Feel free to dismiss my ideas with a shrug, but just be aware that they are fairly consensual among elite mathematicians.
A good number of Abel prize winners & Fields medallists have read my book and found it important and accurate. It's been blurbed by Steve Strogatz and Terry Tao.
In other words: the people who run the mathematical 100m in under a second don't think it's because of their genes. They may have a hard time putting words to it, but they all have a very clear memory of how they got there.
- I'm the author of what you've just described as clickbait.
Interestingly, the 100m metaphor is extensively discussed in my book, where I explain why it should rather lead to the exact opposite of your conclusion.
The situation with math isn't that there's a bunch of people who run under 10s. It's more like the best people run in 1 nanosecond, while the majority of the population never gets to the finish line.
Highly-heritable polygenic traits like height follow a Gaussian distribution because this is what you get through linear expression of many random variations. There is no genetic pathway to Pareto-like distribution like what we see in math — they're always obtained through iterated stochastic draws where one capitalizes on past successes (Yule process).
When I claim everyone is capable of doing math, I'm not making a naive egalitarian claim.
As a pure mathematician who's been exposed to insane levels of math "genius" , I'm acutely aware of the breadth of the math talent gap. As explained in the interview, I don't think "normal people" can catch up with people like Grothendieck or Thurston, who started in early childhood. But I do think that the extreme talent of these "geniuses" is a testimonial to the gigantic margin of progression that lies in each of us.
In other words: you'll never run in a nanosecond, but you can become 1000x better at math than you thought was your limit.
There are actual techniques that career mathematicians know about. These techniques are hard to teach because they’re hard to communicate: it's all about adopting the right mental attitude, performing the right "unseen actions" in your head.
I know this sounds like clickbait, but it's not. My book is a serious attempt to document the secret "oral tradition" of top mathematicians, what they all know and discuss behind closed doors.
Feel free to dismiss my ideas with a shrug, but just be aware that they are fairly consensual among elite mathematicians.
A good number of Abel prize winners & Fields medallists have read my book and found it important and accurate. It's been blurbed by Steve Strogatz and Terry Tao.
In other words: the people who run the mathematical 100m in under a second don't think it's because of their genes. They may have a hard time putting words to it, but they all have a very clear memory of how they got there.