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Trump State Department official has called for mass sterilization of ‘low-IQ trash’
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 27 May 2025
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Wait, do people actually study for IQ tests? Why? Language makes sense, if I tried doing one in German I would fail because I barely speak it at an A2 level, if that.
I reckon general intellect does matter. In a world where your job might not exist in 5 years because lol AI, it's best to be able to adapt fast. Specialize, yes, but one day your specialization will be useless. Best case scenario, it's after you've retired.
And going back to heritability, there's definitely some heritability there, but the problem with twin studies is that twins tend to have the same socioeconomic backgrounds too. Still, just malnutrition, environmental pollution, etc, are big enough factors that taking care of those on a nationwide scale (since we're talking about a particular nation here), would be much more significant than eugenics. Then we get to education - again, this same particular nation has a lot of gaps in the availability of good quality education.
The same reason mensa is a thing. People like to toot their own horn.
To a certain extent yes, but no one can be an expert at everything. There just isn't enough time, and expertise is really what society rewards people for at the end of the day.
I would say that would be incredibly hard to empirically prove due to the problems you mentioned. At best we could speculate that heritability may be an influence, but that influence is vastly overshadowed by environmental factors.
Fair enough, I've also at one point been 13 and done a bunch of useless online IQ tests. Never studied for them, they seemed like mostly simple pattern recognition and general logic questions, which I've never really thought you could even study for.
Absolutely. But general intellect, as far as I can tell (and maybe my understanding of it is wrong), is what influences your ability to shift to a new field and gain expertise in that. Years alone don't cut it. In my own field, I've seen software engineers who can't program for shit, let alone make any architectural decisions after a decade - and ones that are pretty competent after 2-3 years. Now imagine you're 10 years into a career and it starts becoming less and less relevant due to changes in society. If you're naturally intelligent, you're both 1) more likely to have learned more from your 10 years than others have, so more valuable for longer, and 2) more likely to be able to switch to an unrelated or semi-related career path and become useful in a shorter amount of time.
Of course it gets more complex than that because general intellect doesn't span ALL skills. In fact, it's more like ranges of aptitudes. I have great aptitude for STEM, pretty decent aptitude for languages, and absolutely none for arts. No drawing, no singing, etc. No matter how much practice I get and how much practice I got in my childhood. There's just skills I won't learn in 10 years of practice, and skills I pick up rapidly, and it's been that way since childhood.
Hell, maybe general intellect isn't a thing after all.
I think IQ in particular unfairly prioritizes understanding of language and logic, over artful skills and, e.g emotional intelligence (which is measured by EQ I guess). It's a pointless measure. My main point that I wanted to make was that some people are naturally more gifted, and just faster learners, than others. There's people from good families who have never suffered from malnutrition or emotional abuse and went to good schools, who aren't all that smart, and people from far worse backgrounds who are geniuses. Something must be contributing to that. If not genetics, then what? At the same time, yes, people from emotionally healthy families with no financial issues, are more likely to be successful in school as well as life in general.
There are a few different tests that are supposed to clinically measure IQ. Most of them are more complex than pattern recognition and most all of them are administered by some sort of clinician, which can also influence outcomes.
I would say that the ability to gain expertise is generally hard to differentiate with the motivation to gain expertise. What we can empirically prove is that time spent practicing a skill is how we gain expertise in most any skill.
It could be that you just perceive yourself being at being better at stem because you enjoy practicing the skills required for stem. People generally gain experience faster in skill sets they enjoy or skills they perceive thems to excel at.
Again, this could be self fulfilling process. If you don't think you will excel at something you may not fully engage in the process, or even self sabotage the process.
I think for this to be true your claim would have to be that emotional intellect is devoid of logic or language.....which seems fairly self evidently incorrect.
Or people are better at learning things they are self motivated to learn about, and that society influences what skills we find valuable or "intellectual".
In short, what we can empirically prove about intellect is usually environmental in nature, and what we can only theorize about heritability cannot be differentiated from other variabilities that may correlate with that theory.
One reason people study for IQ tests is to learn to what extent studying for an IQ test affects the result.