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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

#161

Post by lutusp »

snowwrestler wrote: post #97
lutusp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name . [emphasis added] Interesting idea, but untestable, therefore unscientific. Do you see why? A color we can't name isn't open to systematic investigation. If we try to get around this by asking a subject to compare the "unseen" color to a color patch, we're only given th…

The point is that "color" does not physically exist[1], it is a construct of human perception and language. Thus you cannot scientifically study color at all--if you try, what you are actually studying is human perception and language. This is not an unscientific concept, because human perception and language are naturally occurring, albeit incredibly complex, phenomena. Animals do not see colors, they react to physi…

> Animals do not see colors, they react to physical phenomena including photons.

Come on. This is a roundabout way to try to define animals in terms of what they don't have -- not color perception, which many animals have, but words to describe the colors.

Of course animals see colors, in the most basic biological sense. Many see colors more efficiently than we do, indeed see more colors, colors we can neither imagine nor name.

> ... it just means that color is a human construct so they need human language to reason about it.

Believe me when I tell you, animals don't need us to tell them how to reason about color. Why do you think the Peppered Moth changed color over a period of 150 years? It was the only way the species could survive their changing environment and the acute visual sense of their predators.

> What physically exists are photons across a range of frequencies, but that's not the same thing as color.

No, what we call "color" or "color perception" is the biological sensing of electromagnetic energy, which many animals have. So, since we and animals have color perception, and since some animals do it better than we do, the argument has no substance.

While we're on the topic, here are my favorite colors:

* Unforeseeable fuchsia, the color you never see coming.

* Statutory grape, the color of a dress worn by a 13-year-old girl.

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

#162

Post by lutusp »

Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #88
lutusp wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Citation needed.

Simply Google "gould" and "fraud" and you will have hours of fascinating reading.

Yep. That works for "Einstein" and "fraud" also. In fact, it works for any well-known name in any field.

Gould missed things that happened after the writing of Mismeasure, and ignored some later developments that challenged aspects of his original work, but he made a number of important and legitimate points about IQ testing and its abuses, points that have stood the test of time.

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

#163

Post by tezza »

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.

I also do not know if this is true. It seems safe to presume that it is at least a mild benefit because it is cheap and easy to do. If it were more costly in terms of child aide resourcing, then we'd have to look a lot closer at whether we should divert resources to speak-to-the-child programs.

---

Some schooling like Steiner education actively de-emphasises speaking to your children until 6+.

Steiner teachers would not answer a child with the factual answer, but instead posing another question.

  Child:          "Mum, why do planes fly in the sky?"
  Steiner Parent: "I Wonder?"
The Steiner thinking is that by posing another question you don't 'crimp' the childs' creativity. This is strictly age related and once the child is a bit older the conversation becomes more mainstream.

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

#165

Post by alephnil »

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…

If you are going to be pedantic, genetically we are not just descended from apes, we are apes. If you look at the evolutionary tree of the apes and monkeys, it makes no sense to consider humans outside the ape group. Chimpanzees and humans are more closely related than Chimpanzees and Gorillas for example.

The only reason we consider humans to be descended from rather than being apes, is that we don't look at the evolutionary tree from the outside. Biologically it makes no sense.

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

#166

Post by ordinary »

clarkm wrote: post #122
schoper wrote: post #98

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.

That's actually not true -- congenital deaf children average almost a standard dev below average on IQ tests. However, your overall point still stands, as non-deaf children of deaf parents do just fine.

Conversation need not be audio-based.

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

#167

Post by maxerickson »

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…

Peer group?

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

#168

Post by hrjet »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #144
corin_ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being rare != it didn't happen.

In a sample size of one, statistics is useless.

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

#169

Post by Daniel_Newby »

lutusp wrote: post #63
ChuckMcM wrote: post #57

Solid parenting advice, #1 talk to your children even when they cannot talk, #2 read new books to your children every week. You can always re-read favorites but just keep the new books coming. And then combine #1 and #2 and talk to your children about the books you read. There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name.…

> There is an excellent Radiolab podcast on "Colors" [1] which has (for me) the fairly stunning revelation that you can't see a color you can't name . [emphasis added] Interesting idea, but untestable, therefore unscientific. Do you see why? A color we can't name isn't open to systematic investigation. If we try to get around this by asking a subject to compare the "unseen" color to a color patch, we're only given th…

>> you can't see a color you can't name

> Interesting idea, but untestable, therefore unscientific.

Astonishingly, it has been tested and falsified. Some people have color synesthesia: they experience various patterns as colors. For example, in number-color synesthesia, the person experiences numbers as having colors regardless of their literal visual color. For example, the numeral 7 might appear as a particular shade of green.

Some of these color synesthetes are color blind due to genetic defects in their light detectors. Nonetheless they appear to experience the full range of synesthesic colors including ones they have never seen by direct perception. One person called them Martian colors.

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

#170

Post by Ras_ »

I've seen many similarities with the group of friends I grew up with. Did we grow up and become more like each other or was our similarity (temperament, values) something that brought us together in the first place?

For example I was the first in our father's side of family to go into higher ed, but everyone in my group of pre-18 school friends ended up there. Many other groups in our school were characterized by other things like marrying young or seeking traditional blue collar jobs.

At least there was plenty of time for conversations to mold our thoughts. Parents might actually account for less than friends.

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