111–120 of 292 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's the thing that blank slatists say can be improved by a better environment when they're not busy claiming that it can't be measured.
So you don't actually want to address a legitimate question.
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 sma…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How did the researchers determine causation? What if there is simply a gene for strong language which is responsible both for the parents' financial success and the child's academic success, and the extra words were simply a by product? Yes, it might well be the classic confusion of cause and effect, but your argument will have no effect on the OP, who is a psychologist. For reasons that may or may not be obvious,…
I think you may be blind to over generalisations... Can you show me the causal link between psychologists and this 'disorder'?
Believing everyone is tabula rasa when it comes to intelligence is one of those white lies society tells itself to make itself feel better. Of course the environment one grows up in is important but this article is kidding itself into thinking it is the primary factor. We inherit so many other traits from our parents, why should intelligence be any different? What makes it so special that it requires a convoluted exp…
What do we know? Getting Malaria in childhood reduces IQ by a few points. Resistance to Malaria is partly genetic. Are these genetic factors now a genetic basis for Intelligence? Shouldn't we just vaccinate the children and eliminate the problem?
We know that in developing countries, every month in school increases IQ and earning potential. Should we assume and accept genetic factors in school attendance as inevitable or should we just require attendance?
We know that in Africa, using cheap deworming agents in school children two times a year will increase their intelligence and school attendance. Are there genetic factors in resistance against worms? Does it matter where the particular ethnicity lives? Sure. Should we care? Not really.
The image that emerges is: Once you hold the environment pretty constant, as has been done in twin studies (regarding to the above known factors at least), IQ is largely genetic.
But making decisions on the basis of assumptions about the genetic basis intelligence is at the very least quite stupid.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sma…
A better analogy is height. Given some minimal level of nutrition, a child's adult height can be extrapolated quite accurately from their parents' genomes. However, if a child grows up in abject poverty, all bets are off. See Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption [1] for details. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption
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…
You seem to be concluding genetic factors ("always had an intrinsic motivation"). But "not all environment" does not imply "some genetics", that is a false alternative.
There are more possible factors than just environment and genetics. One is human choice (sometimes called "free will", but that term has a lot of baggage). I do not agree with the perspective of attributing everything to factors, rather than a person's own choices.
Genetics certainly have a role in some sense. If you had different genes, you would have been a cat instead of human, and would not have the brain to be a software engineer.
But the general idea that life is very complicated, and the results of people in similar situations vary -- true so far -- simply does not imply (partial) genetic determinism. "Environment", or more generally alternatives to genetic determinism, is/are very subtle and complex. The world is vastly complicated, "environment" refers to a million factors most of which no one documents.
You had, in many respects, a different life and environment than anyone else had. Everyone has a unique environment at high precision. So whatever result you get, what would that prove?
You wonder how a person with several factors against them could be intelligent and successful? You can't think of any ways, besides genetics? There are a million ways. Poverty, non-wonderful discouraging parents, poor teachers, and whatever else are not one's whole life. You met many people, some more helpful than that. You read some books. Even just an ordered list of what books you read up to age 20 might be unique.
People don't start the same, but even if they did, things would quickly branch, again and again. 30 identical students sit in a classroom. The teacher explains something. By sheer randomness, if nothing else, some students understand it today, and some do not understand it yet. Then the next day the teacher gives a second lecture. Everyone hears "the same" lecture, but they have different situations (having understood or not understood yesterday's lesson), so different students experience "the same lecture" in different ways due to their different situations and perspectives. Similarly, in general, people in "the same environment" are not actually having the same experiences.
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…
While I tend to think analytical skills are more important, it is probably not good to entirely neglect the skills to experience and "live in the moment" either, since that seems to be the foundation of many social skills.
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.
Congratulations, you've outed yourself as someone who has based all of their conclusions on a couple of feel good pop-science articles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ideologi…
The discussion usually is omitted in journalistic articles anyway, so it's easy to say for readers that the scientists just "have no clue".
For me it looks like this research is looking for interventions. They are not just trying to understand intellectual development, but what can be done to improve early education. They succeeded at that. They didn't succeed at satisfying romantic and simplistic understandings about a genetic basis for intelligence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 sma…
A better analogy is height. Given some minimal level of nutrition, a child's adult height can be extrapolated quite accurately from their parents' genomes. However, if a child grows up in abject poverty, all bets are off. See Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption [1] for details. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption