<p>" If you are poor, you have little to no access to education; if you are rich, you may be able to even hire a private tutor that will provide you with individualized, special attention."</p>
<p>These are pretty much the extremes, and the former just doesn’t exist in large part in America. The idea that socioeconomic status (within America, subtract the bottom and top 1% from the scale) is a greater factor than genetics is ridiculous. I agree, socioeconomic status can and does affect IQ, but not to the degree that genetics does. </p>
<p>If you’re trying to claim on a world scale that socioeconomic status is a greater factor than genetics, while this may be true, is irrelevant. Someone in America isn’t going to commonly be comparing their IQ to someone in Africa.</p>
<p>Ok, Qwerty, I want to make sure I understand what you’re trying to say here. You’re saying that success (and let’s just say that we define success as relative to highest form of education) is more impacted by genetics than socioeconomic status? Is that correct?</p>
<p>I’m not exactly sure what work you are referring to, but probably the most popular work that pushes the ‘IQ is everything’ idea, The Bell Curve, has been heavily criticized. If you are relying on that work alone to make your point, this issue isn’t as cut and dry as you think.</p>
<p>Accusing the other side of wishful thinking probably isn’t the smartest thing to do here either—you could easily tar the ‘IQ is everything’ crowd as being a group that uses this idea as an excuse for bigotry.</p>
<p>“Ok, Qwerty, I want to make sure I understand what you’re trying to say here. You’re saying that success (and let’s just say that we define success as relative to highest form of education) is more impacted by genetics than socioeconomic status? Is that correct”</p>
<p>No, IQ score is more impacted by genetics than by socioeconomic status. I’m not trying to make any claim about success, however defined, at all, unless success is defined solely as having a high IQ score.</p>
<p>^ Out of curiosity, why is that true? That is, why is IQ more impacted by genetics than by socioeconomic status? In other words, what evidence do you have to demonstrate this? I’m just curious and tend to think that what you say is true but if you have a source I’d love to give it a glancing over.</p>
<p>Actually, the source I quoted actually does make this argument, and it actually is true that a lot of the early proponents of the IQ score had ulterior motives, particularly racial motives.</p>
<p>I would also argue that, while IQ is certainly genetic, it is impacted just as much by socioeconomic status as genetics are, or at least access to education, which has a strong correlation with socioeconomic status. If IQ tests had a way to test actual intelligence that didn’t reflect in any way a person’s prior experiences, then yes, I would say they are not biased and not affected by any socioeconomic issues, but as it stands now, try as they might, IQ tests do have biases towards the educated and therefore do not really accurately portray some innate trait we call intelligence, and more accurately represent a mix of this intelligence with education.</p>
<p>There is a reason that the average IQ scores at inner city public schools are generally lower than at private academies - or even suburban public schools - and that reason is not genetic or racial or anything else like that, it is socioeconomic. If IQ was truly measuring pure, innate intelligence, then it would not have such biases.</p>
<h1>1, requires we assume blacks have more similar genetics to each other than whites, and so on for every two sets of races. You replace the races with something like “genetic group X.” Even then, I suppose I can’t cross-quantify socioeconomic status and genetics, but it’s seems to indicate such.</h1>
<p>I don’t know of a study which shows the IQ breakdown for race directly controlled for socioeconomic status. Can’t seem to find any charts or tables, just people’s interpretations of them, which in general I don’t trust.</p>
<p>I don’t have any similar study on socioeconomic status vs IQ (I don’t know how one could be conducted anyway… controlling for genetics?), so again, I can’t directly compare the effect of them.</p>
<p>So nothing perfect or definitive, but pretty reasonable to draw those conclusions.</p>
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<p>Why do you say that? By that I mean, why do you say genetics is not a factor?</p>
<p>Well Genetics could be a factor to a small degree but if it was the overriding factor there, it would imply that only unintelligent people live in poor places, and that simply isn’t the case. For genetics to be the biggest factor in why inner city schools do so poorly means that the kids have low IQs, their parents had low IQs, their grandparents had low IQs and so on with few outliers. These same kids, when given the opportunity, can excel.</p>
<p>For example, Harvard offers full tuition to any student whose income is below a certain line to help normalize for socioeconmic status, and those students don’t fail out at any higher rate than the rest. If they were genetically predisposed to low intelligence, they would presumably have a statistically significant higher rate of failure fo academic reasons.</p>
<p>I realize that is not. Perfect example, but it is the best I have right now while at work. It still is an example of equal performance when given an equal playing field.</p>
<p>Intelligence, if defined as one’s innate capacity to learn and reason, is almost certainly genetic and wouldn’t be affected by IQ socioeconomic status. As it stands now, though, IQ testing does not measure pure intelligence. It measures some blend of pure intelligence and educational opportunity. What the exact percentage of each is measured is certainly debatable, but I bet it’s a lot closer to 50/50, than the earlier claim about it being mainly genetic would imply.</p>
<p>The fact that a few do excel coming from poor backgrounds doesn’t imply that all of those from poor backgrounds can excel. I’d argue that the reasoning you showed for arguing that genetics is the biggest factor is true, and the ones who do excel are these outliers. </p>
<p>For the Harvard example, Harvard is already selecting those who are the outliers. The average person doesn’t go to Harvard. Poor people can be just as smart as rich people, but that doesn’t mean the average poor person is just as smart as the average rich person.</p>
<p>The explanation I’ve previously heard of IQ before was something along the lines of…</p>
<p>IQ does a good job of measuring someone’s cognitive ability at the time of their taking the test. Factors which can effect someone’s cognitive ability are whether or not they have to use the restroom, whether it’s rainy or sunny out, if they’re really craving White Castle, if they have a stuffy nose, etc. Other factors can include things like natural intelligence (arguably ~70% of this comes form genetics), previous education, and nutrition/diet. The goal of different tests is to try to make that natural intelligence most prominent factor, and suppress all the other factors as much as possible, which is to say they try to focus on that single factor of cognitive ability, since that is the one which is most likely to be held constant through time. </p>
<p>Well I did say it was an imperfect example, and that was because Harvard is already selecting outliers (for the most part).</p>
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<p>I would, in general, agree with that description, and I have no doubt that these days, the makers of IQ tests strive to do just that. However, I also don’t believe that, even with their best efforts, they will ever truly be able to measure such an abstract concept with a single number without at least a semi-significant bias due to other factors.</p>
<p>In my mind, it is like trying to put a single number on how attractive a person is. Sure, guys will sit down and say “Oh, she’s a 9” but does it really mean anything? Is it scientific? No. People have tried to quantify these things, such as using face symmetry and other more quantitative measures, but it still can’t account for the more abstract portions of human attraction. With an IQ test, you will measure innate cognitive ability, but you will never be able to truly eliminate all the noise and all the other factors that would show up, even with the most objective of tests currently imaginable.</p>
<p>That is fine, because we have enough of these bull$@!& “which major is the hardest” threads anyway. There is no correct answer, and the kind of pretentiousness that rears its head in these threads is amazing sometimes. That is why some of us have pledged to derail any similar threads, usually by talking about ice cream.</p>
<p>I hate these generic responses. Yes there is a difference in difficulty. At Georgia Tech industrial engineering is basically and intro to every engineering major. ISYE gets their toes wet in each pond but never takes a swim.</p>
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