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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28848 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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This fundamentally is why it's almost impossible to escape poverty no matter how talented you are or how hard you work

The today's poor are rich compared to poor people at 1900.

You have to invest in failure to increase your probability of success.

Person does not have to be extra rich in order to diversify their investments. 80 IQ person would have difficulties to diversify investment.

To your point about IQ, there's actually a respectable body of literature that shows that there is no causal relationship between IQ and wealth; and although there 'is' a correlation between IQ and annual income, the correlation is pretty small and flat. The truth is rich people aren't actually that much smarter than poor people. Once you control for factors like 'being raised in a wealthy household', there's no statistically significant correlation between IQ and wealth. The simple fact is, luck actually produces most of peoples fortunes.

That is like saying "Sex has no difference to hand-to-hand fighting ability after height, bone mass, muscle strength were controlled for".

You want your opponents to show that IQ produces income, but somehow that IQ produces income only, without any other effects that go with high IQ

People who had divorced once had about $9600 less wealth on average than their never-divorced counterparts. And those who smoked heavily had an $11,000 reduction in net worth. These external factors – rather than IQ – could explain the differences in wealth, Zagorsky suggests.

These factors aren't indepedent of IQ. High IQ people are less likely to divorce and less likely to smoke. Smoking can't be such causal factor, just several decades ago smoking has socially desirable and rich and smart people smoked more than the poor. 1950 equivalent of Zagorsky would have reasoned that people earn more BECAUSE they smoke.

If you measure individual's 20 parameters and run linear regression on them, you can explain income better than IQ, but same linear regression can get individual's IQ estimate from these 20 parameters. So by the moment you collected 20 parameters, the linear regression already knows person's IQ and adding it doesn't change much, because linear regression already knows it. If you likewise "control" for 20 parameters without parents' wealth, and then add parents' wealth as 21 parameter, it explains nothing, then you say "see, I have proven parents' wealth has no effect on person's income". The very fact that you need to collect multiple parameters to overcome explanatory power of IQ is evidence that IQ is the most important parameter.

Luck matters, and matters a lot, but you simply pushing points based statistical illiteracy.

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