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

slate.com

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

#191

Post by Kudzu_Bob »

lutusp wrote: post #162
Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Gould's ideas have not stood the test of time, and it is now understood that he committed the fraud and abuse of which he accused others. This is why he has been disowned by his own colleagues, something that never happened to Einstein.

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

#193

Post by iliiilliili »

r0h1n wrote: post #64

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…

Sounds like a know-it-all. I think next you should try teaching him how to better interact with others, his age or not.

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

#194

Post by ZeroGravitas »

mattmcknight wrote: post #182
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven't you just excluded nurture ("can't come up with a single environmental influence that explains this") and nature ("I'm definitely the only one like this from my family, a clear outlier")? If you didn't get if from your family via genes, and you didn't get it from the environment, where else is left? Everyone else seems to be reading your comment as pro-genetics, but given the quote above, I can't see that.

Genetics is complicated- it is possible for offspring to develop traits that were not present in either parent.

So is nurture, people go to school in different years from their siblings (and parents) etc. and so on.

So it would be a lot stronger case for genetics (assuming it's supposed to be one, and not just a tangential anecdote) if they'd said "No one ever spoke to us but all 7 of my brothers and sisters became top engineers, just like our parents, uncles and cousins (that we'd never met)".

As it stands it seems to recommending having some kind of fortitude (which isn't taught via nurture, or inherited via genetics) as the key element.

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

#195

Post by Datsundere »

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…

You probably wouldn't have an intrinsic motivation and desire to be a biologist. You just happened to pick up technology, thought it was cool and enjoyed it.

Besides, humans tend to do things they are forbidden to. Your parents didn't stop you from studying "tech-related things" did they? Well, maybe they did but they must have stopped it once they knew it was futile. Otherwise you wouldn't be what you are now.

If your parents tied you up, beat you up etc. to forbid you from studying tech, then that's an environmental factor. Them not doing so is also an environmental factor.

Believing something is predestined is bullshit. Genetics might give you a better memory, but it doesn't make you a hard worker. Your success depends on your values, priorities and motivation to do so.

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

#196

Post by superEb »

xenophanes wrote: post #116
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…

You claim to "demonstrate that it's a lot more complex than just environmental factors". But the correct conclusion from what you said is that you demonstrated that it's a lot more complex than just the environmental factors that you thought of. 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…

> 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.

While I don't discount the whole of your argument, this is possibly the dumbest thing you could have said.

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

#197

Post by a-priori »

ttcbj wrote: post #160
clarkm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Another trait that's important for success in life is deferred gratification, or the ability to give up a small immediate reward for a larger reward in the future. That trait, when measured in children, is correlated with all sorts of positive things later in life, including academic success and physical health.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification

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

#198

Post by jpwagner »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #110
mmanfrin wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'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.

Intelligence is not a scalar.

This article should make you rethink your example: http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/sep/29/chimp-intelli...

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

#199

Post by slurry »

lutusp wrote: post #156
DanBC wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

The studies cited in the Slate article come out of education and speech-disorders research. Those fields have problems too, but not all of the same ones as clinical psych.

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

#200

Post by devb »

jamesaguilar wrote: post #65
aptwebapps wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a useless nitpick. It's not a scientific treatise, it's a public service message to try to change people's behavior. I don't believe for a second that the doctor believes that intelligence has no inherited component whatsoever. She is dealing with a problem in the real world using what tools she has at her disposal. Edit: Responding jamesaguilar's and true_religion's point about the title. Yes, that's true. I…

I don't know if it really qualifies as a nitpick to directly contradict the article's title.

The purpose of an article's title is ONLY to get a reader to start reading the article. Journalism 101.
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