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

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

#141

Post by jlgreco »

jpeg_hero wrote: post #50

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" ?

I do this with other people who aren't kids, though I try to keep it to family and close friends so that I don't thrash my reputation too much. Typically I'll pick a theme (say, "citrus fruit, and related topics") for a particular family get-together and see how many semi-plausible but invented facts revolving around that theme I can inject into conversations. Sometimes I'm rewarded by hearing facts that I made up regurgitated years later (one that I am proud of is that orange juice turns an opaque white when pasteurized, and needs to be dyed back to orange (like margarine) for sale.)

Fundamentally I think this is an exercise in creativity; sort of like telling a good campfire story of your own creation. So far as people play this game with kids, I suspect it is because kids are easier to fool so the game is more rewarding.

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

#142

Post by DanBC »

Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #70
smtddr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented? You can't observe any exact thing and say " Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart ". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable…

Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.

> To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.

But a lot of psychometrics is pure, unadulterated, grade A horse shit.

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

#143

Post by thaumasiotes »

corin_ wrote: post #131
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that humans aren't descended from fish, but are descended from apes. We know that some kind of incremental genetic "improvement" to our intelligence must have evolved and then become universal throughout the populations that speciated to become modern humans.

First, to be pedantic, we aren't descended from apes, just very closely related to them with a common ancestor. Second, is there any evidence that the evolutionary history of intelligence was linear? How do we know that there wasn't a binary-like change where one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did, and all humans today are descended from that single change, as opposed to it happening gr…

> How do we know that there wasn't a binary-like change where one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did, and all humans today are descended from that single change,

This question seems kind of confused. But we can say with complete certainty that it's not the case that "one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did" because generations don't happen at any particular time. Imagine your ancestor through the paternal line 30 generations back from you (that is, your father's father's father's... father). If you call him generation 1, then you're generation 31. But other people born in the same year as you, also descended from him, will not all be generation 31. And if you married one of them who was, for the sake of argument, only 28 generations removed from him, your children would be, in this labeling scheme, simultaneously generation 32 and generation 29.

The reason I say your question is confused is that the model where there was a "single change", and all humans today descend from it, requires several generations to take hold (as it gradually increases its population share), but you appear to posit only one.

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

#144

Post by eli_gottlieb »

corin_ wrote: post #131
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference being that humans aren't descended from fish, but are descended from apes. We know that some kind of incremental genetic "improvement" to our intelligence must have evolved and then become universal throughout the populations that speciated to become modern humans.

First, to be pedantic, we aren't descended from apes, just very closely related to them with a common ancestor. Second, is there any evidence that the evolutionary history of intelligence was linear? How do we know that there wasn't a binary-like change where one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did, and all humans today are descended from that single change, as opposed to it happening gr…

How do we know that there wasn't a binary-like change where one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did, and all humans today are descended from that single change, as opposed to it happening gradually?

Because it's very, very rare for evolution to actually work that way.

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

#145

Post by DanBC »

jpeg_hero wrote: post #50

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" ?

No, that's horrible.

There are better ways of teaching children that people lie, and that information is not always accurate.

Besides, people don't always know that they're passing on bad information, so you'd have the situation where someone is passing on stuff that is wrong but saying "no! this isn't part of the game! this stuff is really real!"

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

#146

Post by thaumasiotes »

btilly wrote: post #125
rizzom5000 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Childhood IQ tests get complicated by the fact that a lot of what you measure is which children hit growth spurts already, which come with attendant intellectual improvements. 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 f…

Adult vocabulary is a strong predictor of adult IQ just as child vocabulary is, but I wouldn't recommend studying vocabulary to get smarter. Being "a predictor" says nothing about being a cause; smarter kids know more words because they're smarter, but the "predictor" relationship is established at the point of "smarter kids know more words".

I am informed (by a Chinese teenager, so possibly not perfectly reliably) that vocabulary size isn't considered a concept in China -- there are words that everyone is expected to know, technical vocabulary, and words that no one is expected to know (by way of example, I use the word "vacillate" in my day-to-day casual speech, but that's unusual, and many native english speakers don't know what it means. That situation is not supposed to be possible in China).

For purposes of my point, the truth of the assertion isn't really relevant. Such circumstances, obviously, mean that vocabulary can't be a predictor of IQ after the age at which it's all been learned. Do you imagine that IQ differences would disappear along with the predictive value of vocabulary size?

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

#147

Post by x0054 »

I agree with the article but the title on HN is terrible, and needs to be changed. The article says that talking with, and reading to, your kids improves their verbal skills and makes them able to better process information. Who could argue with that? My mom would read to me all the time when I was younger. She would read to me books she liked, classic scifi and such. I enjoyed them very much, even though they weren't written for kids. She would talk about the stories with me and explain some things I did not get. I think that helped quite a bit with my language skills. However, that's in noway negates the fact that some kids are simply smarter genetically then others. Paying attention to your kid and talking with them would greatly increase their abilities, but all kids aren't borne equal, and I don't think the article makes that argument, unlike the title. It should be changed to "Talking to kids greatly increases their cognitive abilities."

I think having kids be exposed to several other languages as soon as they are borne, and reading to them books you personally like and find interesting helps them immensely (obviously filter out explicit content, old classics are usually good). It's also important not to dumb things down for kids. Basically Teletubbies = bad, family friendly comedy in a foreign language = good.

In a side note I also find it infuriating how economists always make an argument that women should go back into the workforce after having kids, because its good for the family and for the economy. But what about the kid. I don't want to single out women, but I think either the mother or the father should take at least 5 years off, after the birth of their child, to raise their child, instead of hiring a nanny. I understand that it's not fair to always ask the women to do it, but some one in the family should. It's not always an option, but more often then not its the children of the wealthy that you see being raised by nannies. Ok, that's getting off topic.

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

#148

Post by ckuehne »

None of the results in this article warrants the conclusion in the title.

The fact that "children from affluent families were starting to speak after implant surgery, those from low-income families lagged behind." can simply be explained by genetics. I.e., affluent parents tend to have affluent children, even if those children are raised by other parents [1, 2].

All the cited study does is measure how much the vocabulary of the _caregivers_ increased due to linguistic feedback methods.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nature_versus_nurture [2] E.g., http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21425893

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

#149

Post by david927 »

clarkm wrote: post #111
011011100 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you don't actually want to address a legitimate question.

It's well-defined in the academic literature, though I'm guessing you haven't bothered to look.

No it's not, but please feel free to list the literature to which you're so confidently referring.

Intelligence, like beauty, it is qualitative, not quantitative, which means at some level it is impossible to define.

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