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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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No, I don't want to address a question posed in bad faith.

This is a reasonable perspective. But people other than the parent sometimes read comments! I'll do my best at a level-zero explanation of "intelligence" in the literature:

Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor".

Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests.

Corrections are of course welcome.

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

#152
post #85
post #73

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'?

Sure, just read their professional literature -- it's a treasure trove of examples that confuse cause and effect. To a degree greater than any other field with scientific pretensions, psychologists ignore the possibility that they're reporting something that either has no objective reality, or is a case of correlation mining.

"Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology" : http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...

Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I don't want to address a question posed in bad faith.

This is a reasonable perspective. But people other than the parent sometimes read comments! I'll do my best at a level-zero explanation of "intelligence" in the literature: Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The…

>But people other than the parent sometimes read comments!

Well I read it and I thought it was interesting. Thanks.

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

#154

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…

The fact that they were technophobic might have been what saved you, since instead of sitting in front of the TV or computers, people were actually talking to each other.

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

#155
I think this article is about much more than nature vs. nurture and it doesn't deserve to be trolled that way.

We can learn a lot about ourselves, language and how we learn from understanding a bit about those born deaf. It really is a big deal and Oliver Sacks gets to the heart of the matter in his excellent book 'Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of the Deaf':

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0330523643/

A highly recommended read for anyone on HN...

The article also mentions nannies. A problem they have that the parents aren't ever made aware of is what happens when the child uses big meaningful words for the first time. The nanny wants the parents to be the first to hear these words rather than merely report back to the parents that said big meaningful words have been said. So praise cannot always be given by a nanny when praise is deserved.

Although the article says that quality conversation is important, the metric seems to be quantity of words. After a certain developmental stage I am not sure how helpful quantity actually is. There are plenty of adults that I have met over the years that can babble on and babble on. If you are actually trying to concentrate on something then having a constant babbler around is just so not what you need. I consider myself to be a bit of a rambler but not a constant babbler. However, I cannot engage with a toddler in the way a constant babbler can. I go quiet on the two year old whereas the babbler does not.

Further down the line I think that the dinner table offers an amazing opportunity for children to improve their vocabulary, engage in conversation, learn when to listen and when to talk. This is particularly the case when parents have adult guests and allow young children to be on the same table eating the same food. Here the nurture comes from extended family and friends. I feel slightly sorry for friends that did not get this during their formative years, even if they did have more time in restaurants (which are posh and grown up).

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

#156
post #137
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be blind to over generalisations... Can you show me the causal link between psychologists and this 'disorder'?

lutusp has strong anti-psychology sentiments. Conversations about it tend to be, uh, unproductive. EDIT: It's a shame, because a lot of what he says about psychology and the flaws in the science is useful and interesting. Psychology has a lousy history of weak science. And any modern researcher could be making mistakes while striving for good science. So it's nice to hear from someone who does understand the importan…

> lutusp has strong anti-psychology sentiments. Conversations about it tend to be, uh, unproductive.

You know, you could address the topic, not the participants. To fail at this is the very definition of counterproductive.

> Psychology has a lousy history of weak science.

Yep. People have asked me why I focus on psychology, since all fields have embarrassing episodes in which the principles of science are ignored. The answer is that, although psychologists have clinics, they don't have enough science to justify their existence.

Sociologists are equally unscientific, but they don't have clinics.

Doctors also have clinics, but they're much more scientific.

This makes psychology a conspicuous gap in the system meant to protect the public from charlatans. But the gap is closing -- the director of the NIMH, the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country, recently decided to pull the plug on the DSM and, by implication, psychiatry and psychology.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."

And that of the fields that created it.

http://xkcd.com/435/

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

#157
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No, but it tells us that it's not rigorous enough to resist such exploitation. There's nothing inherently evil or morally wrong about sloppy measurements. That comes from its uses, not the thing itself.

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

#158
post #108
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

This is your evidence that Gould is a fraud? Nice dodge, but scientists and educated people will notice you avoided your responsibility to back up your words with evidence.

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

#159
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. There's an upper limit to the survival value of intelligence. Not to oversimplify, but that limit is reached when the person says, "What? I should add to the world's problems by having children?" In all seriousness, the fact that the average I.Q. is located where it is, tells us that's the outcome natural selection blindly chose. And natural selection is always right.

The average IQ produced by natural selection depends on the environment. There is no ideal level of intelligence apart from environment. If the Earth had a uniform climate, terrain, and so on from pole to pole, this presumably would not be the case.

> If the Earth had a uniform climate, terrain, and so on from pole to pole, this presumably would not be the case.

I think that would also produce an optimal IQ, just a different one. But all IQs, indeed all traits of living organisms, ultimately derive from the degree to which they contribute to fitness.

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

#160
post #112

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

I also found the book 'Selfish reasons to have more kids' interesting on this topic. It uses twin studies to suggest that although parenting does have an effect in the short term, in the long term genetic factors are dominant as long as the child is raised outside abject poverty.

The conclusion of the book is: provide a healthy environment, but don't agonize over violin lessons and other 'enriching' activities.

That said, I went and bought another book with advice on how to talk to your child to stimulate language development ('look who's talking') and we read to him a lot. So, I believe the twin studies in theory, but not in practice.

Finally, on this general topic, 'how children succeed' points out that character traits like grit (willingness to keep trying something hard and unpleasant) and conscientiousness (desire to do the right thing) are more important than intellect in success, beyond some modest intellect baseline. I suspect my son is plenty smart, but what really interests me is trying to foster grit and conscientiousness.

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