Counter point: does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic.

>>> They then hypothesized a general factor, “g,” to explain this pattern.

>> what's the point of all the intervention in the form of teaching/parenting styles and whatnot, if g factor is nature and immutable by large? What's the logic of the educators here?

> does not nutrition and education help some people more than others? That’s the g factor which is mainly genetic.

Yes, if you ignore or compensate everithing else, it's mainly genetic.

That is correct. The null hypothesis tested is: if you compensate for everything the result is the same for everyone, given that genetics have no effects on g. Hence, the null hypothesis is rejected. Thus, mainly genetic factors underlie the g factor.

We are limited by our biology. A dog can't play the harmonica.

That doesn't sound like a deep insight, to be honest.

Just to clarify: the prevailing notion in many context were that genetics does not matter and thus given the necessary social and educational interventions every human would prosper. Sadly, this is not the case. We are limited by our biology AND the extend we and our environment manages us to fulfill our potential.

But we are not limited by our biology. With tools and technology we can change our limits. From pharmaceutical tools like adderal to neurolink style brain implants to ai assistants to genetic engineering, the limitations in our cognitive capacity are becoming less salient every day. The importance of g in the future asymptotically approaches 0 the farther out you go, at least in terms of economic outcomes. It will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded. But I would guess that openness to experience and/or conscientiousness will eventually displace g as predictors of economic success, if they haven’t already. G is useful when everyone does paperwork in offices, but when everyone is on UBI and/or living in government camps g won’t matter as much, again aside from the capacity for moral reasoning but that can be offset with a stricter and more draconian legal system.

“It [g] will always be important for moral reasoning as I’m frequently reminded.”

Excellent quote! Unfortunately not all high g people engage in moral reasoning, and I fear that they will tend to exploit lower g people, rather than to help them utilize AI to compensate. There is a real opportunity to help individuals with cognitive impairments enhance their abilities with AI. The question is how, and how they collectively feel about it.

I think everyone is using a different definition of the g factor.

One is certainly not, unless one is not well read. The g-factor is one of the most stable findings in psychology. It is well established and well defined.

If you're calling g-factor "that which remains after you have eliminated all environmental factors", then you're not using the common definition. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics). To challenge your other assertion, I'll quote the article:

> The measured value of this construct depends on the cognitive tasks that are used, and little is known about the underlying causes of the observed correlations.

(We've had a lot of discussions of IQ on Hacker News. My observations suggest that everyone who supports it in more than 3 comments in the same thread is a scientific racist with a poor understanding of the research on IQ.)

Working in psychometrics I’m in the somewhat conservative “g is simply shared variance of many tests measuring human abilities”-camp.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1412107?origin=crossref&seq=1

I’m not subscribing to the notion that g should be controlled for environment, quite the contrary, but if you do, what is left is the part of g which is genetics.

EDIT: The bit of knowledge I have comes from being published in psychiatric epidemiology on the topic of cognitive impairment and substance use.

That's not the claim you were making earlier. (Although, strictly-speaking, it's still wrong: many factors other than genetics are involved in producing a newborn infant, famously epigenetics. If you classify these all as "genetic factors", then yes, the claim is tautologically true by way of redefining words.)

I'd be interested to see how you'd go about controlling for those other things: so far, I haven't seen anyone manage it.