191–200 of 282 posts
About this: " This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in. " Since "standardized test scores" tends to measure IQ, it seems this can be re-phrased as "those who did well on the will-power test did not nec…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because IQ is a very specific thing. It doesn't mean you know a lot or are good at high school maths. IIRC an ideal IQ test would be something you could take even if you can't read and haven't learned maths and it will tell you something about your general problem solving skills. And as we all know, people can be excellent problem solvers without being very athletic at all, so mixing that into the score would actuall…
You don't need to know how to read or know math to shoot a basketball and the problem is well defined. Put ball through hoop.
A good AQ test would hopefully control for this? Though my understanding is that IQ doesn't control very well for practice either. It's a hard problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Motor skills and muscle memory vs brain thinkings stuff (logic, analysis, problem solving, etc). I don't know what the difference is between the two in terms of how much brain activity and ability they require, but it seems like there would be a difference.
Motor skills and muscle memory both originate from the brain, just a different area than brain thinkings stuff. I would assume shooting a ball would require more brain activity than solving a math problem because more senses are involved.
Nor could it, using only this experiment. Even if a correlation is found, correlation does not imply causation. One could equally suspect that delay gratification leads to affluence (assuming parent-child similarity, whether by nature or nurture), or a third factor affecting both, etc.
[1]: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797618761661
Number of books? Seriously? This is the stupidest...
Almost all the books in my childhood home belonged to me. My parents and one of my brothers never read for fun, and and my other brother only rarely. One of my friends was similar, his siblings didn't read almost at all (though I think he got most of his books from the library, so there were few in the house).
Counting just the number of books tells you almost nothing about any given individual family member.
Someone, please, tell me this journalist is incorrectly simplifying the actual standard practice...
> evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence Number of books? Seriously? This is the stupidest... Almost all the books in my childhood home belonged to me. My parents and one of my brothers never read for fun, and and my other brother only rarely. O…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> Is that a valid thing to do? If "will power" was a strongly inherited trait, and the theory is that will power leads to increase household income in adult life, then this controlling would remove most of the signal. Exactly. The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children. Then it would be ok to control…
> The way to control for the income of a child's household while not filtering out a possible inherited trait, would be to do the test with only adopted children. It's truisms like this that make me cut psychologists and economists slack when results fail to reproduce. If experiments are prohibitively expensive or impossible to recruit large enough populations, the right answer isn't to just toss hands up, but to do…
And you can perform twin studies for problems like this. I don't think most people understand how these work - you don't need separated twins living in different areas or anything crazy like that. The whole 'trick' is that identical twins are more genetically much more similar than fraternal or non-identical twins. If the results between identicals in something is closer than it is between non-identicals, then there is probably a strong genetic link to the thing being studied. It's just a handy way of automatically controlling for environmental variables, so much as possible.
Of course twin studies can also be misleading, but that's another issue.
> evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence Number of books? Seriously? This is the stupidest... Almost all the books in my childhood home belonged to me. My parents and one of my brothers never read for fun, and and my other brother only rarely. O…
It does if the number is zero (which is actually the case in one branch of my family).
> evaluated according to a standard research measure that notes, for instance, the number of books that researchers observed in the home and how responsive mothers were to their children in the researchers’ presence Number of books? Seriously? This is the stupidest... Almost all the books in my childhood home belonged to me. My parents and one of my brothers never read for fun, and and my other brother only rarely. O…
> Counting just the number of books tells you almost nothing about any given individual family member. It does if the number is zero (which is actually the case in one branch of my family).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Counting just the number of books tells you almost nothing about any given individual family member. It does if the number is zero (which is actually the case in one branch of my family).
Not if there's a decent public library nearby...