Children aren't born smart. They're made smart by conversation • Hacker News Board

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

#91

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 5:29 AM UTC

Kudzu_Bob wrote: post #70

smtddr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented? You can't observe any exact thing and say " Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart ". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable…

Human personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by aptwebapps » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 5:34 AM UTC

011011100 wrote: post #82

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…

So we "simply can't know" whether the title should be taken at face value, but at the same time the parent's point is a "useless nitpick" because it's irrelevant to the main point of the article. Nice. If we "simply can't know" what the point is, then how do you decide what's relevant?

Yarg. I _knew_ I shouldn't have included the 'useless nitpick' line as it was needlessly aggressive.

But to respond: No, not at the same time. As I said in the edit, the title slipped my mind. Without the title it came across as a useless nitpick, with the title it does not even if I find it an uninteresting avenue of discussion.

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

#93

Post by lstamour » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 5:37 AM UTC

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…

I'd suggest that it's not so much any colour is "unseeable" as it is "indistinguishable" for some or most people compared to similar colours. And since our perception of colour is relative to different contexts, that makes the research even harder to account for. That all said, an "unseeable" colour to my mind really refers to how if you put two very, very similar colours together, only some people can tell them apart, and perhaps more often once they've learned to recognize the difference? No idea how close I am to the mark, as I haven't listened to any of this or read much source material. But I would compare it to colourblindness -- just because in a certain context someone can't tell red from green doesn't mean it can't be objectively, absolutely measured as such. Which is to say, just because you can't perceive it yourself doesn't mean it can't be studied: either the perception (false or true) or the absolute measurements of reality.

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

#94

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 5:43 AM UTC

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.

He "directly contradicted" an article full of references to actual research, with a single personal anecdote.

I'm not even sure it proves what he thinks it proves. Is he inherently smarter than the rest of his family? Or just more motivated? Or more interested in technology? Is success in computer programming direct proof that someone is very smart? I think a lot of programmers take that as received wisdom, but again I'm not so sure.

Anyway, if a child is one of the rare born geniuses, talking to them a lot will not harm them, and it might feed their latent abilities. If a child is genetically normal, talking will help them too. There is no practical reason to object to this article.

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

#95

Post by rcfox » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 5:43 AM UTC

ethyl66 wrote: post #23

"At home there was a game that all the parents played with their children. It was called, What Did You See? Mara was about Dann’s age when she was first called into her father’s room one evening, where he sat in his big carved and coloured chair. He said to her, ‘And now we are going to play a game. What was the thing you liked best today?’ At first she chattered: ‘I played with my cousin . . . I was out with Shera i…

Half tongue-in-cheek, half serious, but all I could think of while reading the first paragraphs was, "Playing all of those text adventure games has trained me to be a better parent!"

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

#96

Post by bdamm » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 5:55 AM UTC

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…

Right, being too far ahead of the curve can become an emotional handicap all its own. Too bad we can't put kids like that together in the same schools.

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

#97

Post by snowwrestler » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 6:01 AM UTC

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…

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 physical phenomena including photons. Humans use the concept of color to describe what animals do.

Certain animals who learn human language can communicate with us about color. That doesn't mean they can't think, it just means that color is a human construct so they need human language to reason about it.

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

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

#98

Post by schoper » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 6:01 AM UTC

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.

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

#99

Post by worldsayshi » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 6:05 AM UTC

zizee wrote: post #20

clarkm wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's weird how people are happy to say genetics plays a hand in the limits of human abilities, but when it comes to talk about intelligence, there are so many people in denial. Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.

It might be that intelligence is a plastic ability ("software"), while many other abilities are less plastic ("hardware"). We agree that the human brain is highly adaptable, people loose half their brains in early age and can still function. It doesn't seem that far fetched that such small differences as those between someone bright and someone not so bright is about adaptation. And perhaps the right type of curiosity.

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

#100

Post by baq » Wed, Oct 02, 2013, 6:10 AM UTC

sharkweek wrote: post #16

My boss's son is one of the smartest 18 month old kids I have ever met. He communication levels are through the roof, and for words he might not be able to say, or things he might not be able to express, he knows rudimentary sign language to communicate, e.g., he has a hand signal for "I'm tired" or "I'm hungry" -- he almost never has to cry to show he needs something. It's really quite impressive.

my 15-month daughter runs to her high chair when she's hungry. sometimes she skips the chair and runs directly to the fridge. i don't think it's unusual, i hear the same things from my friends.

one related anectode: my boss' 3-yo son said to him, 'dad, i'm not stupid, i'm just small' :)