241–250 of 265 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The results of IQ tests are strongly driven by poverty as well.
Related: Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa http://www.amren.com/news/2012/04/six-brain-damage-scourges-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially when it translates to greater food availability. The poor in the US do not suffer from a lack of food availability. 5.1% of poor children don't get enough to eat. For comparison, 5.7% of children above 4 x poverty line don't get enough to eat. http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html Food availability is a solved problem in the United States. Portraying it as a problem takes resources away f…
If you take it merely as a question of caloric intake you're right. If you're talking about the cost of high-quality and nutrient-rich food, there's a long way to go. The massive subsidizing of junk food through corn subsidies does not help, but if you try getting those calories through vegetables and quality meat you may find it's out of reach for many people, and that does have an impact on intelligence and develop…
If you are purchasing too many calories, you are wasting money that could be spent on veggies.
Poor parents raising their children badly is a real problem that should be solved if we want to improve the next generation. One possible solution is to constrain the food choices of the poor - replace food stamps with food boxes and fill the box with only healthy options.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially when it translates to greater food availability. The poor in the US do not suffer from a lack of food availability. 5.1% of poor children don't get enough to eat. For comparison, 5.7% of children above 4 x poverty line don't get enough to eat. http://mchb.hrsa.gov/chusa11/hstat/hsa/pages/221oo.html Food availability is a solved problem in the United States. Portraying it as a problem takes resources away f…
If you take it merely as a question of caloric intake you're right. If you're talking about the cost of high-quality and nutrient-rich food, there's a long way to go. The massive subsidizing of junk food through corn subsidies does not help, but if you try getting those calories through vegetables and quality meat you may find it's out of reach for many people, and that does have an impact on intelligence and develop…
In fact, the U.S. actually provides incentives for companies to use high fructose corn syrup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5795478
And for those on WIC, while many crap items aren't on the WIC list, parents can still abuse it by buying things like only Cheerios for their kids to eat instead of veggies, etc. And yes, regardless of welfare, Obesity and diabetes are going to remain very common among the poor in the U.S.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you take it merely as a question of caloric intake you're right. If you're talking about the cost of high-quality and nutrient-rich food, there's a long way to go. The massive subsidizing of junk food through corn subsidies does not help, but if you try getting those calories through vegetables and quality meat you may find it's out of reach for many people, and that does have an impact on intelligence and develop…
...especially when those cheap calories lead to obesity, diabetes, and other complications. If you are purchasing too many calories, you are wasting money that could be spent on veggies. Poor parents raising their children badly is a real problem that should be solved if we want to improve the next generation. One possible solution is to constrain the food choices of the poor - replace food stamps with food boxes and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So my wife was a summer associate at a law firm while she was pregnant. The difference between having a drink with dinner and not drinking at all was the difference between being a regular summer associate, interviewing for a job, and "the pregnant one." In our society, where drinking is an important social rite, not drinking makes you "the other" and we're tremendously eager to force women into that position based o…
In our society, where drinking is an important social rite, not drinking makes you "the other" IMO, the appropriate response to that is to fix our society's attitudes about drinking as a social rite, not to use it as an excuse for women to risk harm to their children. That said, if the woman's job is what's going to support the child, that does add an element to the risk-benefit calculation.
Its one step above segregating women into sanitation tents during menstration. A policy completely disproportional to the underlying problem whose intent is social exclusion as much as anything else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In our society, where drinking is an important social rite, not drinking makes you "the other" IMO, the appropriate response to that is to fix our society's attitudes about drinking as a social rite, not to use it as an excuse for women to risk harm to their children. That said, if the woman's job is what's going to support the child, that does add an element to the risk-benefit calculation.
You're begging the question. There is no evidence of harm to children from light drinking during pregnancy. So you really have to question the motives of a policy that dictates women to engage in a behavior that excludes them socially for an imagined benefit to children. Its one step above segregating women into sanitation tents during menstration. A policy completely disproportional to the underlying problem whose i…
What's the limit of "light drinking"? Nobody knows for sure. If the woman were making a decision about her own risk, that's one thing; but she's making a decision about the risk to her child. That makes a big difference; when you're imposing a risk on someone else, the standard should not be "is there evidence of harm", but "is the risk avoidable". The risk of drinking is avoidable, so it should be avoided.
So you really have to question the motives of a policy that dictates women to engage in a behavior that excludes them socially for an imagined benefit to children.
I question the motives of people who claim drinking is so socially necessary that it's OK to socially exclude people who don't drink, and OK to exert social pressure on women to drink while pregnant even if it might harm their child.
But that's really a red herring, because you're misrepresenting the policy--at least, the policy I've been advocating in this thread. I'm not saying anyone should force women to not drink during pregnancy; I'm just saying that, IMO, whatever imagined benefits there are to drinking are not worth the risk to the child.
Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act ) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure ) It's alcohol, a legal drug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome )
Alcohol isn't really that dangerous for babies either. The prevalence of fetal alcohol syndrome is less than 5% for babies of women who drink more than 14 drinks per week during pregnancy: http://www.motherisk.org/prof/updatesDetail.jsp?content_id=2... . There's very little evidence that low levels of alcohol consumption during pregnancy are bad for babies: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2023984,00.ht…
There is quite a huge deal of controversy around the heritability of IQ.
If anything, the story in this article shows that IQ is much more influenced by the environment than genetics.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correlation between A and B does not imply causation from A to B, but it does imply causation there is some causation somewhere, from A to B or B to A or something more complicated. In those cases we have to step down a level and look at the particular mechanisms. We can see some very good mechanisms for how a low IQ might cause poverty in most cases, but the specific reason I mentioned the East/West Germany situatio…
Personally, I believe (!) in a causal chain like this: Poor people dream smaller (hopelessness,knowledge) -> less ambition (in school, career, wealth) -> less motivation (e.g. in IQ tests) -> envy -> aggression against wealthy people Also what does "poverty" mean here? "Lack of basic resources", then practically nobody is poor in Germany due to our welfare system. Statistics use "less than 60% of average income" or s…
Now, it might be that communism was crushing the hope of East Germans or something. That could also explain this particular difference. But we can measure social mobility and people's beliefs in social mobility across countries and see if it makes a difference. And as far as I can tell it doesn't, since social mobility and believe in social mobility are lower in most places today than they were in 1960, but the Flynn effect[1] continues to march on.
Having beliefs is nice and complex beliefs like those put us humans way above the vast majority of the lifeforms on this planet. But as someone pursing a PhD I would hope that you would examine the implications of your beliefs and test those implications against reality.
And IQ does have predictive power with respect to income[2], though not as strongly as other factors.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect [2]en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
Earlier quoted context omitted.
An abstruse way of saying "I don't know what you should do" is likely not particularly credibility-enhancing either.
Absent the proper research, it seems to me like avoiding any possible risk would be the wise course of action.
Science vs. hysterical racism, yet again. There's a reason it's "crack baby", and not "cocaine baby". Helps imprison the right sort of person. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Sentencing_Act ) There's a much more dangerous drug than cocaine, for babies. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenatal_cocaine_exposure ) It's alcohol, a legal drug. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetal_alcohol_syndrome )
Caffeine is actually much more dangerous for babies than either crack or alcohol. After caffeine the second highest drug-related risk factor may actually be not smoking weed; that is, mothers who don't smoke enough weed during pregnancy may have a much higher rate of infant mortality: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/100/1/79
> Mortality rates between the drug-positive group or specifically, the cocaine-positive, morphine-positive, or cannabinoid-positive groups were not significantly different from the drug-negative groups (P A number of 8.9 to 15.7 deaths per 1k live births doesn't necessarily imply a protective factor, especially when considering all the variable factors and a much smaller sample size compared to the drug negative group.
Also, caffeine isn't mentioned once on there, sure you don't mean cocaine?