Cosma Shalizi (2007): ...In Different Voices: "Q: How would you react to the idea that a psychological trait, one intimately linked to the higher mental functions, is highly heritable? A: With suspicion and unease, naturally. Q: It's strongly correlated with educational achievement, class and race. A: Worse and worse. Q: Basically nothing that happens after early adolescence makes an impact on it; before that it's also correlated with diet. A: Do you work at the Heritage Foundation? Such things cannot be. Q: What if I told you the trait was accent? A: I'm sorry? Q (in a transparently fake California accent): When you, like, say words differently than other people? who speak, like, the same language? because that's how you, you know, learned to say them from people around you?...
...Accent, which transparently is not innate and is plastic, has all these features; therefore those features do not, reliably, point to innateness, or point away from plasticity. Therefore, even if IQ scores have these features, it does not, by that token, mean that they reflect some kind of unalterable trait of the organism.
Q: Would you care to push the analogy further? A: By all means.... Q: So the analogy suggests that IQ scores are...? A: A proxy for the skills and habits encouraged by a bureaucratic society; skills and habits which can be at once highly heritable (because of strong transmission through family and neighbors) and highly learned (within the scope of what it is biologically possible for humans to learn and internalize). Innate ability needn't enter into it at all. The implications for democracy would be nearly nil. Q: And the famous g? A: Is a statistical artifact, or better yet a myth; but that is another story for another time. ...
#noted #reasoning
