Or are smarter people better able to regulate their food intake? (Either innately, or because society gives them other privileges which makes them less likely to overeat)
I would say, that on the whole, this has to do with habituated impulse control and self-restraint.
Classical writers speak of this as well, things like how inordinate and undisciplined appetites (not just for food, mind you; sex, too, and undue acquisitiveness of all sorts, for instance) darken the mind. What is inordinate and undisciplined is not proportioned or directed by reason. So, such character traits are rooted in fidelity to reason which means that not only do they avoid the aforementioned darkening of the mind by moderation of appetite, but the very character strength of being able to do so enables rational existence in other things.
Innate intelligence doesn't secure discipline. Indeed, it gives the person a bigger footgun and allows for more elaborate rationalizations of vice.
Which then begs the question, what is IQ actually measuring - something more like innate intelligence, or a fairly big slice of learned, habituated test-taking ability?
Regardless of what underlying trait it's actually measuring, the habituation factory is a big component of its supposed bias - that is, has your background taught you the kind of problem-solving habits that will help you to post the best possible score?
> Which then begs the question, what is IQ actually measuring - something more like innate intelligence, or a fairly big slice of learned, habituated test-taking ability?
> "It is a variable that summarizes positive correlations among different cognitive tasks, reflecting the assertion that an individual's performance on one type of cognitive task tends to be comparable to that person's performance on other kinds of cognitive tasks."
In other words people who are good at these tests are also good at real world tasks. Meaning IQ measures much more than one's ability to pass an IQ test. There are of course many examples of poorly structured IQ tests (including people re-taking the same IQ test and doing better at it the second time around). However a well-structured IQ test presenting novel questions (absent popular culture references and trivia) provides a very good approximation of the g factor in almost all cases. This means high IQ is highly correlated with things like income, unemployment, crime, homelessness, addiction, divorce, and many other objectively measurable life outcomes.
There is room for a philosophical debate about what g factor is, but it is beyond contest at this stage that g factor is real, and IQ almost always does a very good job of measuring it.
It's beyond contest that the g factor is real in part because it's a statistical inevitability in any series of related tests, be they for intelligence or product/market fit in automobiles. It's an exploratory statistic, a hint at underlying causality; it is not a dispositive revelation about the structure of human thought.
Sure: there's a battery of general cognitive tests, and if you smush data sets together a dominant factor will emerge. And?
This is exactly my point. It's tautological to argue that IQ isn't correlated with intelligence. It is, definitionally. You seem to acknowledge this so perhaps I don't understand your original comment.
(I misread your original comment --- no, it's not tautological. It's tautological to say that IQ isn't correlated with IQ test results. "g" has nothing to do with "intelligence" as a construct.)
If IQ tests measure one's ability to do most other cognitively demanding tasks then it's measuring more than the test itself. Whatever you want to call that thing is irrelevant. In sociology and psychology we call that the g factor. The vast majority of people call that intelligence.
That's the tautological argument! Note that I'm not even really engaging with the validity of IQ tests, just the surface logic that you're using. You literally just argued, in effect, that IQ tests measure intelligence because people call them intelligence tests!
That's a semantic point you're making, and I'm not contesting it. To repeat myself, you can call the correlation anything you like. I'm merely explaining that the correlation exists and is incredibly material.
We agree the correlation exists. The incredible materiality of it is what's in dispute. The obvious problem with these arguments is that people point to the correlation and say "see, I'm right about the materiality!".
It may be helpful here to think about, at what point does a sense of self, of varying degrees, become evolutionarily advantageous?
An animal that doesn't have some kind of pair bond or social arrangement, and doesn't raise its young, has a lot less need for some of this emotional hardware than we do.
Whereas K-selected species that raise their kids have broadly the same need for it as humans.
That doesn't categorically mean it evolved with the first pair-bonding K-reproducer, or that birds have parallel-evolved emotional hardware like ours, but there's plenty of behavioural evidence there - the last common ancestor of birds and humans was small-brained and primitive, but investing in individual children probably evolved around the time of amniote eggs, just because they were so much more biologically expensive to produce than amphibian or fish eggs.
Maybe you live somewhere that's possible, or not too far from such a somewhere. Rare to find such places within 50 miles of a big city though, unless you're in Germany and have the autobahn.
I suspect most premium cars get to spend a tiny fraction of their mileage doing the kind of driving where they'd measurably beat a mid-market model.
How far are you running total, both per run and per week?
Running will absolutely help your health, but on its own it's unlikely to get you thin. It's hard to burn enough to make a big difference without it chewing your body up in other ways - especially if you're overweight and out of condition to begin with, and so a bit more susceptible to injury than skinny runner types.
Thinking of it as a calories in/out equation is counterproductive for most people, if it boosts your cardio health, gets you more active and maybe converts a bit of body fat to leg muscle, that on its own is a win.
Certainly no harm in having a swig of Gatorade every couple of km if it helps you go further, anyhow.
It doesn't take much. If an elite burns 1500-2000 kcal running a marathon, even ignoring glycogen and exogenous carb, that's only ~195-260g of body fat (~7.7 kcal/g). Even at an extremely lean 4% body fat, Kejelcha would have 2360g of body fat available. (He's probably in the slightly higher 5-10% range.)
(And obviously, the majority of those 1500-2000 kcal are coming from stored glycogen rather than fat.)
If we're only talking about the marginal difference between 90 and 120 g/hr of exogenous carb, then that's 60g over two hours or 240 kcal -- equating to 31g of stored body fat. That's nothing.
The brain is a dynamic system, and a poorly understood one at that. It relies on active processes in order to not degenerate (likely the main reason why sleep deprivation is eventually fatal). Science is still some way from cataloguing all the processes involved, never mind fully understanding their workings.
Alzheimer's isn't a single-point-of-failure disease, more like a dysregulation of maintenance. So there are lots of things that can tip the odds one way or another, and we may get a lot better at prevention - to the point of reducing incidence maybe five-fold, or delaying its symptomatic onset to beyond the relevant lifespan - but the idea that there might be a single "cure" seems like wishful thinking.
It may also prove to be that, like a spinning-top, once things start to go off-axis it may be very difficult to restore the original stable state, and at most we can just slow it down a bit.
Perhaps more uncomfortable, if most of the effective interventions, risk-reduction-wise, are social/lifestyle related, that has implications for whether people have the agency to access those things.
(Time/energy/facilities/resources for exercise/active lifestyle being an obvious case in point, which is already well known to have a moderate protective effect).
And as with a lot of cancers, it seems to be perturbation of a dynamic system rather than a single, mechanistic cause.
Think of it like brushfire in an ecosystem, or species population imbalances leading to catastrophic breakdown. These are better understood in terms of system state and preconditions, as opposed to a trigger event.
Infectious disease, at least in the classic acute form (whether that's bacterial and fast - cholera - or viral and slow - HIV), is a more mechanistic process which can be halted by blocking a single step in its pathway.
Systems that remain healthy and balanced via dynamic processes are harder to reason about and fix, because the root cause of a disease state can be dozens of little things adding up to the system losing its ability to maintain homeostasis.
That's normalising clean-ness (i.e. the state of being free of all psychoactive chemicals) perhaps too much.
The original humans adapted to a wide range of diets across the world (one reason why we're such a successful species), but most groups seem to consume mild psychoactives a lot (it's hard not to, so many wild plants have some level of activity) and seek out more powerful ones occasionally and for specific situations.
Our civilization does not depend on aviation very much, it's a specialized service. If all planes disappeared tomorrow, we will weather it pretty well. Cars are a completely different animal: they are ubiquitous and don't really have an alternative in many cases.
Yeah we red-queens-raced ourselves into a position where now we have to have private cars, because if we don't we're screwed. Turned cheap 25-minute bike commutes into expensive 25-minute car commutes that can't safely or practically be biked, and shoved everything so far apart on account of giant parking lots and big highways cuttings straight through cities that the nearest bus stop is a half-mile away and that 25-minute car commute would take ninety minutes by bus, so now we have to have cars.
There's no quick fix at this point, it'd be a century-long project to undo the damage now, but a hypothetical world where we'd harnessed only the good parts of cars and not let them completely reshape the places we live down to the neighborhood level would sure be a lot nicer.
I'd argue that's /because/ we regulated aviation (and also some annoying physics limitations), so we never had the option of becoming fully dependent in the way lots of places have on cars.
Less than a century ago, so within living memory (albeit only just), literally nowhere on Earth was car dependent.
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