At the very least people in business and academic leadership should be adults about things and set an example. Unless we really want to keep sliding into a modern dark ages..
Thanks for sharing. Something I would love to know if the IQ vs impulse control is a constant, or a baseline. In other words, is it possible to start with a low IQ and thus to be prone to more violence, and then improve your impulse control as a self-improvement goal, or are you basically preset to lash out. I would hope it's possible to grow IQ and thus take control over your impulses, but I am not sure that's how nature works either. Do you know?
It's very possible for anyone to improve their behavior with motivation for it. The broad success of programs like alcoholics anonymous proves this for sure (self harm but still illustrates the point of impulse control). With help, we're all able to improve and be better regardless of where you start.
There are definitely biological differences in folks, but honestly you need to be more rigorous when discussing it if you want to avoid pushback. Just in this piece you conflate:
1. IQ and Emotional IQ. The young adult study is about Emotional IQ which isn't the same as IQ in the other studies. Can't mix and match measurements of intelligence like that, they aren't equivalent and the ways of measuring them have very different efficacy.
2. Causation and Correlation. There has long been an established link between poverty and crime, violence. Are people with lower IQs more likely to be poor? Hence, does the biology matter or is it the society the biology operates within? Maybe? We don't know, and hence we don't know if the biological differences are a factor or just a conflating factor.
3. Evidence and Anecdotes. You claim we all see fights at sporting events between less intelligent folks like it's an accepted truth, meanwhile the most violence I have seen in public was from a dude in software engineering with anger control issues.
There is a real discussion here, but if you want to have it then we need to be clear about our claims and our evidence, as well as the conclusions. We can't toss them all in a bowl, mix them up and hope everyone likes the taste.
I appreciate the calm reply believe it or not some people can't do that on the topic of intelligence.
Nothing conflated here I assure you, I just have conviction and think there's more than sufficient evidence for that. I included additional links to show a few types of studies in different settings and intelligence types, which all directionally point to the same pattern. One of them is even in a pretty good setting for this (a prison) where a bunch of other variables are controlled. The Swedish study controls for socioeconomics. Anyway, the link between intelligence (in its many forms) and aggression isn’t new or baseless, it’s been studied extensively across disciplines.
Of course poverty, environment, and social context play roles I mentioned this is multivariate. But so do cognitive and emotional processing abilities, which are, in part, biologically rooted. It’s not about saying low intelligence causes violence in every case, it doesn’t. But the data show that, on average, people with lower cognitive control or processing ability are more likely to exhibit impulsive or aggressive behavior.
I’m not arguing that biology is destiny, only that it contributes to the broader picture. And if we want honest conversations about behavior, policy, or society, we have to be willing to engage with patterns that might be uncomfortable, even as we hold space for complexity and exception.
And not that this test could be run but I'd gamble whatever $ any random person picked engaging in rioting after a football game would be less intelligent (already proven more violent) than the average software engineer (I'm sorry you know an outlier, their rate of violent crime would also def be low).
Yeah, I read the studies you linked to before responding. They don't have a clear answer on it either! The prison study specifically has the conflating factor that people go to prison for a lot of different crimes, and as a result it's not a homogenous population to start from.
Anyway, I'm not debating the overall thesis - biology means we are all different. I'm not tall enough to be an NBA player or small enough to be a jockey. It's just that when we talk about these things we have to be really rigorous and thorough or else it lends itself to fighting over semantics.
Close enough to agreement for me. It's the people who *wholesale reject* genetics and biology that really grind me gears (basically ignoring physical reality)
For me, it's science that ignores normalized violence against children and the collective addiction to violence that generated and maintains the modern nation-state. This whole conversation is so on point, and still needs grounding in what addiction to violence (which all addictions are, including information addiction) functionally is: a configuration that slows learning. Also, the definition of violence needs expanding to include a comprehensive understanding of harm, such as the violent and dissociated denlialistic belief in western medicine that infant nervous systems weren't developed enough to feel pain and practices stemming from that view (which continued until around 1999). This has led to many infant surgeries where infants were given a paralytic without anesthesia so they couldn't even scream when cut into.
The problem with your (GREAT) writing and thoughts is that most of them begin require people to be adults… which is, you know, the biggest problem 😂
At the very least people in business and academic leadership should be adults about things and set an example. Unless we really want to keep sliding into a modern dark ages..
Thanks for sharing. Something I would love to know if the IQ vs impulse control is a constant, or a baseline. In other words, is it possible to start with a low IQ and thus to be prone to more violence, and then improve your impulse control as a self-improvement goal, or are you basically preset to lash out. I would hope it's possible to grow IQ and thus take control over your impulses, but I am not sure that's how nature works either. Do you know?
It's very possible for anyone to improve their behavior with motivation for it. The broad success of programs like alcoholics anonymous proves this for sure (self harm but still illustrates the point of impulse control). With help, we're all able to improve and be better regardless of where you start.
There are definitely biological differences in folks, but honestly you need to be more rigorous when discussing it if you want to avoid pushback. Just in this piece you conflate:
1. IQ and Emotional IQ. The young adult study is about Emotional IQ which isn't the same as IQ in the other studies. Can't mix and match measurements of intelligence like that, they aren't equivalent and the ways of measuring them have very different efficacy.
2. Causation and Correlation. There has long been an established link between poverty and crime, violence. Are people with lower IQs more likely to be poor? Hence, does the biology matter or is it the society the biology operates within? Maybe? We don't know, and hence we don't know if the biological differences are a factor or just a conflating factor.
3. Evidence and Anecdotes. You claim we all see fights at sporting events between less intelligent folks like it's an accepted truth, meanwhile the most violence I have seen in public was from a dude in software engineering with anger control issues.
There is a real discussion here, but if you want to have it then we need to be clear about our claims and our evidence, as well as the conclusions. We can't toss them all in a bowl, mix them up and hope everyone likes the taste.
I appreciate the calm reply believe it or not some people can't do that on the topic of intelligence.
Nothing conflated here I assure you, I just have conviction and think there's more than sufficient evidence for that. I included additional links to show a few types of studies in different settings and intelligence types, which all directionally point to the same pattern. One of them is even in a pretty good setting for this (a prison) where a bunch of other variables are controlled. The Swedish study controls for socioeconomics. Anyway, the link between intelligence (in its many forms) and aggression isn’t new or baseless, it’s been studied extensively across disciplines.
Of course poverty, environment, and social context play roles I mentioned this is multivariate. But so do cognitive and emotional processing abilities, which are, in part, biologically rooted. It’s not about saying low intelligence causes violence in every case, it doesn’t. But the data show that, on average, people with lower cognitive control or processing ability are more likely to exhibit impulsive or aggressive behavior.
I’m not arguing that biology is destiny, only that it contributes to the broader picture. And if we want honest conversations about behavior, policy, or society, we have to be willing to engage with patterns that might be uncomfortable, even as we hold space for complexity and exception.
And not that this test could be run but I'd gamble whatever $ any random person picked engaging in rioting after a football game would be less intelligent (already proven more violent) than the average software engineer (I'm sorry you know an outlier, their rate of violent crime would also def be low).
Yeah, I read the studies you linked to before responding. They don't have a clear answer on it either! The prison study specifically has the conflating factor that people go to prison for a lot of different crimes, and as a result it's not a homogenous population to start from.
Anyway, I'm not debating the overall thesis - biology means we are all different. I'm not tall enough to be an NBA player or small enough to be a jockey. It's just that when we talk about these things we have to be really rigorous and thorough or else it lends itself to fighting over semantics.
Close enough to agreement for me. It's the people who *wholesale reject* genetics and biology that really grind me gears (basically ignoring physical reality)
For me, it's science that ignores normalized violence against children and the collective addiction to violence that generated and maintains the modern nation-state. This whole conversation is so on point, and still needs grounding in what addiction to violence (which all addictions are, including information addiction) functionally is: a configuration that slows learning. Also, the definition of violence needs expanding to include a comprehensive understanding of harm, such as the violent and dissociated denlialistic belief in western medicine that infant nervous systems weren't developed enough to feel pain and practices stemming from that view (which continued until around 1999). This has led to many infant surgeries where infants were given a paralytic without anesthesia so they couldn't even scream when cut into.
This subject is much more nuanced. It is definitely not a binary, but that is how it is presented here. It IS an important subject, so it should be approached a bit more responsibly. Try this: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/06/high-iq-intelligence-myth/683023/
I don't disagree with that, but def not talking about people way on the outlier of intelligence (they would def be strange in other ways)