Brimstone Lark

I’ve been stuck on a conversation that I had with a friend about intelligence for a long time. Is intelligence based on your genetics or is it based off of your environment? I think the reason I’m so stuck on this is because I don’t want to be a eugenicist nor do I want to be the kind of parent who tells their kid “you can do anything you set your mind to!”, blindly ignoring their particular aptitudes and setting them up for a world of disappointment.

My friend’s perspective is that after you solve for all the negative impacts to intelligence (abuse, neglect, etc.) there isn’t much that can be done to boost IQ further. He believes that by being realistic with ones expectations based on ones intelligence and the level of effort that it would require to achieve something, people can avoid the self hatred of not reaching some hypothetical peak. Further, he thinks that denying the importance of intelligence in predicting outcomes is actually cruel because it places the all the blame for not succeeding on the individual.

A few things that I’m NOT disputing:

• There are heritable and non-heritable impacts to intelligence
• Environment can negatively impact intelligence
• Setting realistic goals for oneself can limit pain
• Placing all the blame of not achieving something on the individual is myopic and wrong

All the above said, I think that looking at the full spectrum of possibilities, eliminating a bunch of them based on your intelligence, and then considering that trimmed down set of options as the things that you should ‘reasonably’ hope to achieve feels icky. It’s icky because how should you look at the stuff which got trimmed? “I can’t do that I’m not intelligent enough for that”, “My genetics make achieving that thing impossible”.

I think my friend would say “its not that I’m forbidden to dream about those things because of my IQ. But I should consider an accurate estimation of what it would take for me to achieve those things given what I know about myself.” That seems reasonable and honestly, I should probably spend more time considering what I can ‘reasonably’ achieve.

One issue I have with the idea of using intelligence to estimate a cap on what you can achieve in your lifetime is that it takes a certain type of smarts to even figure out what within the set of things you can achieve would be best for YOU. My fullest potential doesn’t look like Elon Musk because A) it would take me way more time and effort than I have given my intelligence and B) working 120 hour weeks on high pressure problems doesn’t align with my definition of fulfillment at all.

So we have two types of limitations when it comes to success: the first type (in A above) is my intelligence (or aptitude), and the second type (in B above) is an understanding of what MY success looks like. On the one hand there is “what I can achieve within a human lifetime” – this looks like a wide array of possible lives, some are more likely than others given what my brain can do. On the other hand is “what success looks like to me” – that wide array of possible lives have some paths lit up more than others based on how deeply they resonate with me.

A lack of self knowledge and a murky view of what fulfillment means to you means you’re taking a shot in the dark no matter what your IQ is. In fact, the more options which you can reasonably hope achieve, the more important it is that something fundamental guides your path.

My gut tells me that the types of smarts needed to have an understanding of what MY particular fulfillment looks like is more environmental rather than heritable, but just looking at the data apparently shows that happiness is positively correlated with IQ. In any case, I don’t think I’ll be the kind of parent who tells their kid “you can do anything you set your mind to!”. Instead I’ll say “you can do almost anything you set your mind to if you work at it, but if you don’t know yourself really well, then it won’t matter what you achieve because it might not make you happy.”