121–130 of 292 posts
Serious question HN: I often see parents have an almost instinctual need to feed their children bad information and see if the can detect the falsehoods. Is this instrumental in teaching "savvy" ?
Except for deaf children, who seem to fall along the same IQ distribution as hearing children. And rich children seem to inherit their parents IQs instead of their Guatemalan nannies' IQs. But feel free to go on believing that genes don't do anything. God just must have created everyone equal.
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'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.
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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…
That's interesting, but I think there are also studies that show childhood IQ tests don't correlate very well to adolescent or adult IQ tests - which, as others studies have shown, are tests that do correlate well to success/happiness/etc. over lifetimes. This study would be a lot more interesting if it followed its sample into adulthood and compared IQ scores over time - it very well may do that, it's just not clear…
But I have had a psychologist who specialized in the field say that the best predictor of adult IQ was receptive vocabulary. Meaning how many words does the child understand? Understanding words, even words you don't know how to use, predicts future intellectual development because it says who has the foundation.
Guess how you would build receptive vocabulary?
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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.
In a debate about how things work, "you're wrong because we know you're wrong" isn't a useful argument. As to comparison to other animals, we also know that there is a genetic component to being able to live under water, as fish can do this and humans can't, this doesn't mean some humans are better than others at living without air.
What nobody knows is the exact weight of this factor in the unknown equation which governs human intelligence. Hence from a scientific point of view:
"Those who assume hypotheses as first principles of their speculations […] may indeed form an ingenious romance, but a romance it will still be." - Roger Cotes.
Excerpt from the preface to Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, second edition, 1713.
My parents like to tell the storiy of my childhood. Basically, I used to think I was an adult (despite being 5) and talk to everyone. The best part, is that I _was_ treated like an adult, and am pretty intelligent these days as well :) More importantly, it gave me confidence from an early age. That's the best gift I think a child can be given, especially one that is into "fringe" pursuits.
I cringed when I read you saying 'am pretty intelligent these days' Einstein, Euler, Reimann realized that the subjects and challenges were truly important, not their intelligence. Solve life, don't inflate self.
And I actually mean that. Not yet. Soon, perhaps, but not now. And I said "pretty intelligent", not that I was up there with the greats. I find it interesting you took that from my post!
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Why do you think his other family members did not share this desire?
I come from a unique environment that has allowed me to draw some very interesting conclusions. I am from a family of 3 children. Two adopted and one "unexpected" natural birth. One of the three of us has been in prison many times (and we have no other relatives that I know of that have ever been in trouble beyond the occasional speeding/parking ticket). The other of the three of us is a carbon copy of their biologic…
Regarding your brother who has been in prison many times: adopted boys I know of are often in trouble. I think it's really hard to adopt and raise a child born from someone else. Some things don't seem to click.
I wonder what the statistics are telling about adopted children's success in life and how it is linked to biological parents and the adopting family education.
I guess poor children hear fewer words because they don't watch much television.
Or does it need for the child to speak back ?