Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

slate.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 292 posts

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#101

Post by waveman2 »

Alex3917 wrote: post #9
pg wrote: post #5

I don't know whether this is true, but it feels true, and I've been operating as if it were.

C.f. the cited book by Hart & Risley, Meaningful Differences In The Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. "The more parents talked to their children, the faster the children's vocabularies were growing and the higher children's IQ test scores at age 3 and later. [...] [By age 4], an average child in a professional family would have the accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, an average child i…

The studies seem to be confusing causation and correlation. They seem to assuming that there must be an environmental cause for the differences in people's IQs. This may seem like a stupid assumption to make, but a lot of people in the social sciences take this as a given, even though the weight of evidence is strongly against it.

Perhaps I have missed something, but I would expect that, if they did not have ideological blinkers on they would be saying things like:

"We are taking particular care to separate environmental and genetic factors here by including adopted children, [identical] twins reared separately, other children raised by other than biological relatives".

But I see none of this at all here.

You may be interested to read "The Nurture Assumption" for a detailed analysis of the effect of parents on their children. The basic conclusion is that if you do not seriously abuse your children you don't affect them much one way or the other. Steve Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" is also relevant.

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#103

Post by nitrogen »

smtddr wrote: post #26
zizee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's weird how people are happy to say genetics plays a hand in the limits of human abilities, but when it comes to talk about intelligence, there are so many people in denial. Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.

What you call "denial", I call reasonable doubt. And by that, I mean we don't have any concrete way to measure intelligence potential/capacity in the same way we can measure 12 inches. We know what 12 inches mean, but can anyone tell me what it means to be smart? What subjects do I need to learn to qualify? And to what level of detail? Why do we conclude Stephen Hawkins is smart? Who is an example of someone that isn…

...I don't believe there is more information in the human-society than the human brain can contain.

The Library of Congress would disagree with you. The most bothersome realization I had in college was that, no matter how smart I was, how fast I learned, how rich I got, or how much I studied, I could never learn everything I wanted to learn. There's simply too much knowledge and too little time.

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#104

Post by r0h1n »

bdamm wrote: post #96
r0h1n wrote: post #64

Father of a 3.5 year old brought up using tons of "targeted talking" here: our son has a vocabulary and logical comprehension skills that are significantly beyond his peer group. As a result I'd noticed in the past that he prefers engaging with other adults in conversation over kids his age. Yesterday was his first PTA meeting and the feedback from his teacher seemed to confirm it too. She narrated an incident when t…

Right, being too far ahead of the curve can become an emotional handicap all its own. Too bad we can't put kids like that together in the same schools.

I'm not sure whether you meant that sarcastically. If you did, I'm not at all a supporter of segregated schooling of any kind, be it class, 'abilities' or even neighbourhoods. There's value in kids growing up in a heterogeneous and diverse environment, and my comment was only meant to highlight how having an advanced vocabulary can sometimes hinder that.

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#105

Post by nitrogen »

lutusp wrote: post #72
Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.

> We do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives. > The literature on this subject is quite extensive. Indeed it is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

The fact that something has been exploited for evil or trivial ends does not mean that the thing exploited is itself evil or trivial.

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#106

Post by bjterry »

Alex3917 wrote: post #29
clarkm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right -- it feels true, which probably explains why it has so much staying power. Though the idea has been around for decades, it was really popularized by Hart and Risley in the 90s. However, it has been popping even more frequently over the past couple years. A few months ago, when a similar article ran in the New York Times, Steven Pinked opined: > The Blank Slate lives: Yet another story on parent-child co…

> Yet another story on parent-child correlations that dares not mention the g-word Except for that the Hart & Risley study measured the impact of genetics, and found it to be insignificant. Maybe Pinker should try actually reading the studies he's criticizing instead of just reading about them in the paper.

If I am understanding your argument correctly in context, based on what you quoted, you are saying that the impact of genetics on g was found to be insignificant in the Hart & Risley study. That objectively seems not to be the case. First, the measurement outcome of the study was language use. They didn't attempt to measure IQ or g except when the children were 3. As far as I can tell from references, without access to the primary source, they did not perform any IQ tests on the children at later dates. I verified this with google searches within the book which only returned mentions of a test given at age three, but this is not iron-clad given google books' search mechanism. As far as I can tell, any claims that IQ was shown to be increased by the intervention are based on the very high correlation found between IQ and vocabulary at that age three test. Second, they only evaluated children (for language use) until the age of 9-10, which would be broadly consistent with the consensus understanding of psychometricians, which is that the heritability of IQ increases throughout childhood (implying in simplified language that non-heritable environmental factors have lesser correlation with IQ at adulthood, even if they have a greater impact during childhood).

The study wasn't designed to measure the impact of genetics on g, so we shouldn't be surprised that it fails to measure it. It was designed to measure the impact of in-home language use on vocabulary acquisition, which it clearly does well. That effect has been further validated in meta-analysis, e.g. [1].

1: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sbneuman/pdf/marulisNeuman.pd...

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#107

Post by tspiteri »

electrograv wrote: post #30

Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. While I'm sure talking to ones children contributes in a massively positive way to their IQ, I think it's extremely inaccurate and ignorant to the existence of real-world outliers to claim that it's the only factor. To provide just one example (out of many, I'm s…

Children are not born smart in much the same way that children are not born strong. Of course, some children are born with more potential smartness, just like some children are born with more potential strength. But they still need the environment to reach their full potential. There are some outliers who become really smart despite the lack of help from their environment, but probably they would have become even smarter in a helpful environment.

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#108

Post by clarkm »

lutusp wrote: post #81
Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gould has been exposed as a fraud.

Citation needed.

Interesting how you never bothered to ask that while reading the fraudulent book itself.

It's like skimming a poorly-researched paper on vaccines, taking it as gospel, proceeding to claim that they cause autism, and yet reflexively responding with "citation needed" to anyone that dare call into question your insane ideas.

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#109

Post by mmanfrin »

electrograv wrote: post #30

Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. While I'm sure talking to ones children contributes in a massively positive way to their IQ, I think it's extremely inaccurate and ignorant to the existence of real-world outliers to claim that it's the only factor. To provide just one example (out of many, I'm s…

'I was disadvantaged ipso facto I am simply genetically gifted'.

Could it, perhaps, be that those causal elements in your environment do not work precisely in the way you presume to work? That it's not simply a 'good' upbringing that raises good people? Do you not -- for instance -- have a drive to succeed because of your prior disadvantages in life? Is not the lack of early-life support a driver of your own ambitions?

Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation

#110

Post by eli_gottlieb »

mmanfrin wrote: post #109
electrograv wrote: post #30

Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. While I'm sure talking to ones children contributes in a massively positive way to their IQ, I think it's extremely inaccurate and ignorant to the existence of real-world outliers to claim that it's the only factor. To provide just one example (out of many, I'm s…

'I was disadvantaged ipso facto I am simply genetically gifted'. Could it, perhaps, be that those causal elements in your environment do not work precisely in the way you presume to work? That it's not simply a 'good' upbringing that raises good people? Do you not -- for instance -- have a drive to succeed because of your prior disadvantages in life ? Is not the lack of early-life support a driver of your own ambitio…

Oh bull. We know intelligence has some genetic component, or else a sufficiently trained monkey would do calculus. We just don't entirely know what "intelligence" is well enough to measure its precise heritability.
Post reply on HN