DNA isn’t all that matters, but it matters more than everything else put together.
Perhaps today, maybe not tomorrow.
Great point! If we're lucky!
How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
51–60 of 128 posts
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#52Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you. Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently. So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this…
But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you bother reading it? “Historically, many studies have involved the easiest people to recruit, who tend to be people who come from advantaged environments. If we don’t make efforts to recruit diverse pools of participants, we almost always end up with children and adults who come from high-income, high-education environments,” Gabrieli says. “Until recently, we did not realize that principles of brain developmen…
I stopped reading at >They were told that for each correct guess, they would earn an extra dollar, and for each incorrect guess, they would lose 50 cents. Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game). Probably only second to people not considering SES even when they are studing SES. I am more inter…
> Its been proven time and again that these meaningless level rewards are pointless in studies and often even distort/bias the data (people treat it like a board game).
Do you have one or two references for this I could take a look at?
I'm as wary of bias and mistakes in research as "the next person" but if they are measuring brain activity it gets more interesting. To establish that there isn't some validity to this experiment then one would have to show that the brain's reward center can respond while receiving a reward while playing a game but not respond when receiving a reward in a different "non-game" context.
If such research exists or it's been established as fact that this is true, that would seem like a glaring omission from this study. I'd be interested to see that.
Secondarily, you avoided addressing the race question entirely :) I'll assume it is safe to say there is some bias there as well then.
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unfortunately the field of observational statistics called "psychometrics" which has "proved" this using "twin studies" is largely bunk. The premise of those studies is linear additive effects from each causal factor, which is almost certainly false; and in general, there is no way of establishing causation without interventional experiments. If the effects were plausibly non-linear, we would need 1 trillion+ data po…
> The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data. When and where we are born definitely has an effect on personality, irrespective of family, in most cases. Astrological star data is a proxy for the when and where, and while thus would not be causative, would often be correlative. So it makes sense to do PCA on it as you'll identify a lot of good correlations.
You are correct that star positions are proxies. The problem in the case of psychometrics is that the claim is that the stars (here: genes) arent proxies, but bonafide causes.
So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes).
In the vast vast majority of observational genetic studies genes are just proxies, in the the same way the star signs are. In other cases, they're mere correlations.
In the case of IQ (and basically all social genetic studies) it is highly likely that any correlated genes are merely proxies for geographic-historical distributions of peoples over time and it was the long-time-scale geographic and historical effects (culture, education, wealth, famine, poverty, war...) that we see in attainment.
(Setting aside that IQ tests aren't valid above average IQ and have extremely bad properties both at the individual and population level for most of the measured range. )
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The whole thing is little more than principle component analysis on astrological star data. When and where we are born definitely has an effect on personality, irrespective of family, in most cases. Astrological star data is a proxy for the when and where, and while thus would not be causative, would often be correlative. So it makes sense to do PCA on it as you'll identify a lot of good correlations.
You are correct that star positions are proxies. The problem in the case of psychometrics is that the claim is that the stars (here: genes) arent proxies, but bonafide causes. So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes). In the v…
We do know that genes are a cause of IQ (we can see this comparing our nearest non-Homo relatives. But yes, we are far away from saying which genes do cause it, much less how they cause it, and how they interact with the environment and other genes to cause it.
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#56fMRI results show that children from lower-SES backgrounds are less stimulated by monetary rewards. "The findings suggest that lower SES circumstances may prompt the brain to adapt to the environment..." Wow! How did they control for the possibility that a heritable reward-focus in the parents leads to the SES results? Or that other factors, such as higher engagement or game-competence, might have led to this result?…
This was my thought too, ofc. it's not a popular idea these days that genetics and heredity might have some bearing on success, but it does seem worthwhile looking into..
Anecdote time, I identified the reward-seeking behaviour in my peers in early childhood and didn't understand it, I felt they were acting like dogs, being overtly manipulated to do what the grownups wanted, and I felt disgusted with the idea. (I was not an easy child, but then again, I grew up to be a rather disagreeable adult)
I come from a fairly normal lower middle-class family, but was consistently rewarded, except my response to praise and reward was mostly negative, and to some degree still is. I'm pretty sure my father was the same way, he'd do stuff for their own sake and his own sake, not because someone rewarded him for it. Unsurprisingly, taking into account how much potential I've been told I have, I'm a relatively low achiever, I'm simply not attracted to reward or winning very much, except maybe winning for its own sake, which just seems dumb.
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#57Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you. Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently. So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this…
But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.
intermittent reinforcement is focused on providing motivation when the person needs it - based on some intrinsic understanding of the effort's stressors - instead of rewarding the effort itself.
poorer background kids tend get rewards at random intervals not intermittent intervals.
this is - as a contrasting example - what pushes them to "hustle" culture instead which does reward effort and in addition has intermittent reinforcement with bigger rewards from people who are entrenched in the culture and see a performer who needs motivation.
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#58Probably because when you are poor you learn that reward is not going to be consistent. Your parents may love you as much as possible, but they don't have the resources to consistently reward you. Your teachers might be the most caring education professionals ever, but in your poor district, there's no much they can do consistently. So, basically your brain probably says to you: Don't get over-excited with this, this…
But we learn in Psychology 101 that intermittent reward is actually the most motivating, and produces the best results for mice and pigeons and dogs and humans. So this theory would make the poor kids more successful.
“Best” as most addictive. Intermittent reward might meant that the world and their cues are not reliable.
Children are slightly more intelligent than doves, so expecting us to behave like winged rats is both reductionist and insulting
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#59So put plainly, hire people who come from low income families because they appreciate rewards more, and stay hungry for longer.
No. 1. Don’t play with people. 2. Be honest and fair. 3. Hire people who follow those points.
I’m a fan of Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards
Re: How the brain responds to reward is linked to socioeconomic background
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are correct that star positions are proxies. The problem in the case of psychometrics is that the claim is that the stars (here: genes) arent proxies, but bonafide causes. So in the case of astrological analysis we would, if we wished to change population personalities change, say where people were born -- in the case of psychometrics we're told that we have no control over the causes whatsoever (genes). In the v…
We do know that genes are a cause of IQ (we can see this comparing our nearest non-Homo relatives. But yes, we are far away from saying which genes do cause it, much less how they cause it, and how they interact with the environment and other genes to cause it.
IQ is a test, it isnt intelligence and isnt even a measure of intelligence. It is valid only for establishing certain sorts of mental retardation in a human population.
To say that "genes cause IQ" is several levels of confusion. The claim has nothing to do with whether genes determine the physiological body structure, the claim is whether relevant aspects of human intelligence are a product of the at-birth or developmental structure -- or of that acquired from the environemnt, ie., neural plasticity / brain structure / etc.
Almost all evidence we have is that relevant aspects of human intelligence are environmental, ie., acquired. There is little evidence of the alternative because the experiments needed to establish it are large impossible or unethical. So it might be true, but we have no evidence of it.
Insofar as any claims are made about genes and IQ they amount to associating markers of geographical-historical migration (ie., breeding across time) with a very bad proxy measure of abstract reasoning which, at best, only detects deficits with any reliabiliy.
So we have proxies on top of correlations on top of terrible measures of anything with zero reliability in the range of interest. This whole thing is operating nearly at fraudulent levels of "research".
There's very very little this field can say scientifically, since there arent any experiments. It's all pseudoscientific uses of stats.
To simplify matters, suppose that we know for sure that all above-average differences in IQ are 100% environmental/acquired-during-lifetime. Now, so what do twin studies show, on this assumption?
They show that genes must be correlating with these environmental measures, and twin studies give us an 'effect size' for geographical-historical patterns of reporduction.
So twin studies, even if they were valid (and their assumption of linearity renders them invalid), do not decide the matter. You need indpednent evidence of causal mechanisms from experiments, which doesnt exist.