Sociopath Community

Oh, my point with "Do you believe that someone can become more intelligent than they already are?" was genuinely to see if you thought so or not.

I think that people can do things that make them a little bit better at taking IQ tests. Like doing a lot of math will probably make you better at recognizing numeric sequences. Video games might make people a little better at solving spatial matrices. You can increase cortical thickness in some areas with meditation, and the additional focus will give you a cognitive boost. So I think the things we experience matter, and that they can demonstrate some benefits on an IQ score.

But I don't think people can deviate from what they essentially are. Some people are just naturals at speaking or humor, and even if you gave others all the practice in the world, they still wouldn't compare. No memory techniques are going to make me compare to someone who has natural synesthesia. This goes for intelligence too. People can train at certain tasks, and they can thicken certain pathways through effort. But they can't change their genes that code for their myelin sheath coating conductivity. They have almost no control over their Brodmann area morphology, or how many axons are going to be in their corpus callosum. So I don't really buy that environment can make people more intelligent. It only stops people from getting dumber by preventing damage, or it can make people score a little better on IQ tests from "training".

Tryptamine said: 

You acknowledge that genes are largely responsible for outcomes, just not with the conclusion that race (which is defined by clusters of genetic similarity) is a major factor.

Or maybe I am reading between the lines too much there? Millenia of different selective pressures and genetic drift within isolated populations are what makes races what they are, in a literal sense.

I don't see the supposed flaws and advantages as locked in. With enough generations of trends against those tendencies you'll begin to see them weaken. In that sense I'd moreso focus on what's present in their region and see the people as a byproduct of that, rather than the region being a byproduct of them. 

I'm not saying that going forward, each race or ethnic group has traits that are set in stone. But I am saying that it would be naive to think races are just simply visually distinct, and that the internals are not as different as the physiogomy.

If it's not set in stone, then wouldn't racial quotas be how to have advantageous traits become more gregarious for future generations? 

I kind of figured it was why so much media began to try to portray black people as inventors post-2000, to try to push them in that direction.

Tryptamine said: 

Oh, my point with "Do you believe that someone can become more intelligent than they already are?" was genuinely to see if you thought so or not.

I think that people can do things that make them a little bit better at taking IQ tests. Like doing a lot of math will probably make you better at recognizing numeric sequences. Video games might make people a little better at solving spatial matrices. You can increase cortical thickness in some areas with meditation, and the additional focus will give you a cognitive boost. So I think the things we experience matter, and that they can demonstrate some benefits on an IQ score.

But I don't think people can deviate from what they essentially are. Some people are just naturals at speaking or humor, and even if you gave others all the practice in the world, they still wouldn't compare. No memory techniques are going to make me compare to someone who has natural synesthesia. This goes for intelligence too. People can train at certain tasks, and they can thicken certain pathways through effort. But they can't change their genes that code for their myelin sheath coating conductivity. They have almost no control over their Brodmann area morphology, or how many axons are going to be in their corpus callosum. So I don't really buy that environment can make people more intelligent. It only stops people from getting dumber by preventing damage, or it can make people score a little better on IQ tests from "training".

Potential really is ingrained in the person, as a matter of individual psychology it's moreover finding where a person fits with their skillset rather than miraculously reshaping them into someone with a higher IQ, but when viewed as a Sociological model ala Darwin then there's still ways to shift things around. 

If those with a higher IQ have more children from being in a society that values IQ hard enough, then those when they grow up will be who have children with others within similar constraints. The problem is a matter of environment, as if those in an environment continue to value how things already are then nothing will change. 

It's less about how things are now, and more about the trajectory it could take if the environment caters to the right traits for a long enough time (generations). For that to happen though there has to be a period of letting that cultivate, rather than expecting it to happen immediately. Even something as simple as being the first member of a family line to get a college education for example can set the standard for all children after them, increasing the odds of pairings that are also educated and, therefor, more successful. 

Since we're anyway going off topic I might as well go with the flow...

Depending on how you define intelligence, there's almost certainly a component to intelligence that can be trained. If you took your 14 year old self and put them in a room with today's you, you'd almost certainly think they're the dumbest person on Earth.

But IQ is not malleable. What CPU you run on isn't going to change, even if you have a hyper specialized RAM and lookup tables. I can make an old laptop from the 1990s solve a problem more efficiently than your most recent gaming computer if I do it in a smart way. But if you had to bet which competitor is going to win a hacker honestly where one person has an old IBM laptop that gives you electric shocks and another has Google's supercomputers in their arsenal, I'd bet for the Google computer.

Whether or not IQ is the end all goal or not for intelligence is another question. Saying it is is oversimplifying matters. I've seen things like initiative, interest, dedication, and excitement trump intelligence again and again.

Jada said: 

Depending on how you define intelligence, there's almost certainly a component to intelligence that can be trained. If you took your 14 year old self and put them in a room with today's you, you'd almost certainly think they're the dumbest person on Earth.

14, that'd be the 9th grade right? 

I was moreso cringe than dumb personally. When I look at the academics I've gone through as per the required curriculum I'd say I didn't pick up that much more knowledge from then until the end of college save for a few specialized areas. 

But IQ is not malleable.

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you. 

Most of what you pick up is fundamentals that you reuse until you're capable of articulating your own philosophy. I've personally trained my brain to become smarter, but I'm sure it didn't make my brain bigger.

So do you think most of the racial differences in IQ are down to genetics if you were to analyse the question in isolation? There was an interesting study in Minnesota where they found out that black people adopted into white families outperformed Asian kids on IQ tests. I thought that was pretty surprising.

Jada said: 

Most of what you pick up is fundamentals that you reuse until you're capable of articulating your own philosophy. I've personally trained my brain to become smarter, but I'm sure it didn't make my brain bigger.

So do you think most of the racial differences in IQ are down to genetics if you were to analyse the question in isolation?

They fit the needs of their environment, and it takes generations to fix ala Darwinian principles of offspring. 

There was an interesting study in Minnesota where they found out that black people adopted into white families outperformed Asian kids on IQ tests. I thought that was pretty surprising.

Being somewhere with enough income to feed, clothe, and comfortably allow someone to rest can show increased results. Those things can be harder to secure when it comes to lower income regions, and reflects on their likelihoods of success. A lot of values are handed down from both the parents and the environment the child's raised in, so changing that would change the child. 

That being said I'm surprised it'd show results that quickly, I'm curious over the study. While that would be a notable change to their environment I'd still figure that the study would show some proclivities towards the traits that succeeded in their parents' environment, similarly to how country people tend to show different success traits compared to urban ones. 

Where were the children adopted from, what income range were the original parents? 

It's this study

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption_Study

Oh... I got it wrong. The black kids scored the same as the rest of the population. The mixed kids didn't, even if they believed that their parents were black and identified as black.

Ok that pretty much convinces me it's genetic.

Jada said: 

The black kids scored the same as the rest of the population. The mixed kids didn't, even if they believed that their parents were black and identified as black.

Mixed life can be rough depending on where you grow up. If the school is racially segregating for their communities, it gives them a pressure to try to be a part of either one or both as an 'outsider'. I've seen a lot walk away with a yearning to feel like they belong to something bigger than themselves as a result of how society had treated them.