Robert Haier says basically that education accounts for ~10% of student success and the rest is some kind of “talent” (with a biological basis) but there has to be something deeply wrong with that statement and it’s easy to prove:<br><br>1. Either you account for a rise of IQ values (and thus G) with time, like it’s done now, we assume that people are “getting smarter” with each year (at least it was thought so years ago), and we account for that by shifting the average score of 100 as time goes by.<br><br>Or<br><br>2. You say that education doesn’t play a role AT ALL. <br><br>What is the reason for statement 1 then? If it’s just genetics (or even epigenetics), there is NO WAY people evolved such strongly in such a small time frame. —  What is it then? Better nutrition? Can’t be, we eat more but we eat like shit in todays world (way too less ionide, too much lead, other toxins, food without much nutritional content, too much refined sugar, too much vegetable oil, way too less good protein sources, or even enough protein at all, more vegans with B12/B9 deficiencies etc etc), so it can be food to a certain degree, but not completely, that can’t be. — Then more sports? We move less than we used to. - Also: we have more old people, this should automatically stunt the average value by at least some points because of the cognitive decline with aging. — This is thus a case of doublethink: both things can’t be true at the same time. — I for myself think that it has a big genetic role (more than 50% at least) and that we didn’t get much smarter in a hundred years. It’s just not that logical. Education HAS to play a role, at least in maximizing natures potential (just like in modern sports training when you look a athletes now and a 100 years ago). — But I also don’t think G is the whole picture, that’s too easy and one can easily get an intuition for that with a small but simple anecdote: Many (physics) Nobel prize winners had an ~ slightly above average IQ (there was even some guy with ~100) notably is Feynman (he tested it many times) but they still did stellar and highly complicated and almost humanly impossible work. Many “gifted” high IQ (&gt;130) people don’t even achieve a fraction of that, even if they have the opportunities. This is an empirical fact even. No debate needed. — There is a hypothesis floating around this topic: When the IQ gets to high, people get unfocused, because skills can be learned more easily but perfection is always hard and needs a really strong commitment. — Einstein had to have some kind of ADHD, hyper focusing in physics but being complete impulsive and uninterested in other tasks (also his strong commitment for nicotine is an indicator), some people say he was autistic but that doesn’t make so much sense with his highly divergent and impulsive/creative reasoning (autists are most of the time really good at convergent thinking, a good example of a probably autistic physicist would be Paul Dirac) — So to summarize, I don’t think we are even close at understanding human intelligence, it is to multifaceted. I have a masters in theoretical physics but was as a kid assumed by teachers (!! So yes, Lex is right, giving up on students because you “know the truth” is a really really bad idea) to be below average when in reality I was just kinda ADHD/difficult to learn with. Because of my studies in physics, which is a highly complicated field, I saw many many different kind of intelligences, each coping with their own shortcomings. — Robert Haier is a smart guy and I really liked his perspective and this podcast, but I have to admit, he is a hardliner and it would be good if questions from Lex would be taken more seriously in the intelligence research community, since he saw the shortcomings really fast (even by being not proficient in the literature). — Also, psychometrics has to be deeply flawed. The exact mechanism I’m not sure of, but all the faulty research speaks for itself (just like mapping everything into G). <br><br>The brain is non-linear and this should be understood by now ffs.