30 million words fewer in 3 years?? That's 27397 words per day... at 12 waking hours per day for a child it's about 38 words per minute - I find it hard to believe.
Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
241–250 of 292 posts
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
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) t…
The English language has an order of magnitude or so more words than other languages.
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#243Earlier 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.
Sure, if you define success strictly in terms of reproductive fitness. By that standard, two of the heroes of hners, pg and Steve jobs, are abject failures, while a crack whore who has eight kids who were taken away by cps is a paragon of success.
Paul Graham and Steve Jobs are/were both fathers.
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think what you're missing is that, for whatever reason, we are genetically programmed to seek balance. Whatever is missing in your childhood environment, you will search for as an adult. The metaphor that comes to mind is this: imagine yourself as a spring, standing upright. In childhood, this spring was held down by a heavy boot. Now that the boot has lifted, what has happened to the spring? Is it back to the orig…
That's a nice thought but not a fact. Some who are held down search for what they were deprived, some don't. I would assume the many examples of this are all anecdotal since they make great stories. The flip side is not that uncommon and thus not celebrated and reported about.
I guess it depends on how closely you look at things.
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#245Saying "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…
Unfortunately, we live in an age where its politically incorrect to remotely hint at genetic determinism. Men and women are exactly the same. Dumb people and the ultra smart are exactly the same. Articles that contradict this don't get much traction in the media and certainly don't get on the front page of HN. We're probably a generation or two away before we can accurately look at these issues without activist group…
The problem is subtler and worse than simple censorship. A person who concludes the "wrong" casual effect from the data is branded a racist or at least under suspicion. A person who concludes the "right" causal effect might face criticism but at least is not in danger of being labeled an evil person. Such a lopsided set of incentives creates a very strong bias. In my opinion this bias is much stronger than the bias ("racism") that it evolved in response to.
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#246I don't know whether this is true, but it feels true, and I've been operating as if it were.
You're right -- it feels true, which probably explains why it has so much staying power. Though the idea has been around for decades, it was really popularized by Hart and Risley in the 90s. However, it has been popping even more frequently over the past couple years. A few months ago, when a similar article ran in the New York Times, Steven Pinked opined: > The Blank Slate lives: Yet another story on parent-child co…
If there are genetic components to intelligence, presumably you can't do anything about them after you've had kids so what do they matter?
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#247“Conversation enriches the understanding, but solitude is the school of genius”. - Gibbon
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#248Saying "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…
I read it as the author of that quote explicitly _choosing_ to say that to make the message simpler to his target audience. I think the author fully understands that in reality it's a mix of both nurture and nature but there's plenty of unfulfilled potential in those kids so telling a little fib will help to push them to maximize their potential...and right now no one can definitively predict what that max is just by looking at their genetics
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#249Saying "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…
Are you implying that Software Engineers are smart?
I ask as a Software Engineer who came from a family of techno-phobic Pipefitters. Don't we just have a particular kind of intelligence, and they may have theirs?
Re: Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation
#250Saying "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…
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.
Chance.
Not saying that's it, but when you have someone self-reporting on a forum like this, claiming to be an outlier, there's probably a good bit of luck involved.