5 ms·

Step one: have genes correlated with the type of success you're looking for. As far as I'm aware, you have a margin of 10-20% worth of difference you might be a

Step one: have genes correlated with the type of success you're looking for. As far as I'm aware, you have a margin of 10-20% worth of difference you might be able to make once the kid is born.

Joof 10y ago
Step two: create experiences that allow people to become successful.
- microcolonel 10y ago
  There's a huge difference between brilliance and success, however. Brilliant people often have tragic flaws, which render them ultimate failures; and make them fabulously unhappy.
  - Joof 10y ago
    While you are correct, everyone has flaws at a similar rate (although I think shortsightedness is related to IQ for whatever reason); the brilliant people are just able to compensate better. I think the tragedy is that people recognize their potential (especially as children) and expect them to perform as if they had none (especially if they develop flaws later in life or are inconsistent and excel in only some circumstances.)
  - astazangasta 10y ago
    Non-brilliant people also have those flaws. It's called being human. Nevertheless, brilliant people can and do find success and happiness. This isn't a Homeric myth!
forkandwait 10y ago
Do you have a citation?
- microcolonel 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_of_the_heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_o... There are three citations attached to the first sentence in this paragraph. Also take a look at the caveats section there though. It's technically possible that we're doing something which we could stop doing and vastly improve IQ; however once that became standard, the inheritance correlation would be higher, not lower. Measuring the heritability of IQ-type intelligence is inherently difficult; but outside of sociology departments, there is effective consensus that the correlation is at least half. Also, I would conjecture that there's a publication bias in favour of finding that nurture tops nature; because it is what people want to be true. This is a special concern in publications from after rightfully-unpopular negative eugenics programmes.
  - tokenadult 10y ago
    That Wikipedia article is appallingly badly edited, and badly in need of an update. The updating has been made difficult by a concerted campaign by ideologues to keep that article full of dreck. (Basis of knowledge: I am a Wikipedian, and I am a researcher on that topic.)
    - aurelianito 10y ago
      Can you point us to a good survey on the subject?
      - tokenadult 10y ago
        Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. . . . "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." Deary, I. J., Penke, L., & Johnson, W. (2010). The neuroscience of human intelligence differences. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(3), 201-211. http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur... "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]." Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182 http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ).pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... "Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic." Johnson, W., Penke, L., & Spinath, F. M. (2011). Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not. European Journal of Personality, 25(4), 287-294. DOI: 10.1002/per.835 http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_Heritability_rejoinder.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He... "Our target article was intended to provide background knowledge to psychologists and other social scientists on the subject of heritability. This statistic, in many ways so basic, is both extremely powerful in revealing the presence of genetic inﬂuence and very weak in providing much information beyond this. Many forms of measurement error, statistical artefact, violation of underlying assumptions, gene–environment interplay, epigenetic mechanisms and no doubt processes we have not yet even identiﬁed can contribute to the magnitudes of heritability estimates. If psychologists and other social scientists want to understand genetic involvement in behavioural traits, we believe that it is going to be necessary to distinguish among these possibilities to at least some degree. Heritability estimates alone are not going to help us do this." Turkheimer, E. (2011). Genetics and human agency (Commentary on Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137, 825-828. DOI: 10.1037/a0024306 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer_darnimrod%20comm%20(2011).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... "That heritability depends on the population in which it is measured is one of the most frequently repeated caveats in the social sciences, but it is nevertheless often forgotten in the breach. (For example, it is nearly meaningless for Dar-Nimrod and Heine to note that 'heritability [of intelligence is] typically estimated to range from .50 to .85' [p. 805]. The heritability of intelligence isn’t anything, and even placing it in a range is misleading. Making a numerical point estimate of the heritability of intelligence is akin to saying, 'Social psychologists usually estimate the F ratio for the fundamental attribution error to be between 2.0 and 4.0.') The observation that genotypic variation accounts for 90% of the variation in height in the modern world depends on the variability of genotype and environment relevant to height. Among cloned animals with widely varying diets, body size is perfectly environmental with heritability of 0; in genetically variable animals raised in identical environments heritability is 1.0. This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand." Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological science, 23(11), 1314-1323. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611435528 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/ http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Reported_Genetic.pdf?sequence=1 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Repo... "At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by an appreciation that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Step 1: Have brilliant children. Step 2: Don't ruin them, do a bunch of other stuff. Step 3: Assume that some of that other stuff is the 'active ingredient' in your brilliant child.
brc 10y ago
I would say it is less than that. Leaving aside heritability, the environment in which the child will grow up is more or less set in concrete by the time they are born. This includes the parents socio-economic level, but more importantly to that, their attitudes towards relationships, learning, critical thought, reading, victim vs control personality and plenty more. A house without books doesn't fill with books when the child arrives. Pretty much by the time the first cry is made, a huge chunk of their future is already written. The margin is small, but, having said that, small changes at the margin can make a big difference in individuals.
- turnip1979 10y ago
  The margin is larger IMHO. I'm a professional scientist and I have no one remotely resembling an academic in my extended family. Now I'm not a textbook example of success but I've read about many other scientists in similar boats: Feynman and Tesla both come to mind. Feynman had an electronics hobby as a kid. Tesla's father was fairly set against him becoming an engineer. I know some people with amazing private school education flounder because of it. They saw crazy competition early in life and it seems decided to settle. I had very little competition in my early years. Being the smartest kid in your undergrad makes you feel really good, and motivates you to do better. Where I really needed guidance is going from the sheltered world to reality (early 20s .. when I entered the workforce and subsequently made the decision to get a PhD). What I want to try to do is teach my kid to have her own hobbies and be generally happy in life.
  - brc 10y ago
    That might be your specific interests but I'd wager you didn't come from a family with anyone in jail, your parents sent you to school and stressed its importance, and were well read for their education level. Of course outliers exist and some very successful people come from very dysfunctional families. But if you look at enough people, they come out in temperament and attitude very similar to their family. The really surprising thing is how often one family will produce two top level musicians or sports players.
  - mcphage 10y ago

Step one: have genes correlated with the type of success you're looking for. As far as I'm aware, you have a margin of 10-20% worth of difference you might be able to make once the kid is born.

Joof 10y ago

Step two: create experiences that allow people to become successful.

microcolonel 10y ago
There's a huge difference between brilliance and success, however. Brilliant people often have tragic flaws, which render them ultimate failures; and make them fabulously unhappy.
- Joof 10y ago
  While you are correct, everyone has flaws at a similar rate (although I think shortsightedness is related to IQ for whatever reason); the brilliant people are just able to compensate better. I think the tragedy is that people recognize their potential (especially as children) and expect them to perform as if they had none (especially if they develop flaws later in life or are inconsistent and excel in only some circumstances.)
- astazangasta 10y ago
  Non-brilliant people also have those flaws. It's called being human. Nevertheless, brilliant people can and do find success and happiness. This isn't a Homeric myth!

forkandwait 10y ago

Do you have a citation?

microcolonel 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_of_the_heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#Estimates_o... There are three citations attached to the first sentence in this paragraph. Also take a look at the caveats section there though. It's technically possible that we're doing something which we could stop doing and vastly improve IQ; however once that became standard, the inheritance correlation would be higher, not lower. Measuring the heritability of IQ-type intelligence is inherently difficult; but outside of sociology departments, there is effective consensus that the correlation is at least half. Also, I would conjecture that there's a publication bias in favour of finding that nurture tops nature; because it is what people want to be true. This is a special concern in publications from after rightfully-unpopular negative eugenics programmes.
- tokenadult 10y ago
  That Wikipedia article is appallingly badly edited, and badly in need of an update. The updating has been made difficult by a concerted campaign by ideologues to keep that article full of dreck. (Basis of knowledge: I am a Wikipedian, and I am a researcher on that topic.)
  - aurelianito 10y ago
    Can you point us to a good survey on the subject?
    - tokenadult 10y ago
      Turkheimer, E. (2008, Spring). A better way to use twins for developmental research. LIFE Newsletter, 2, 1-5 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20(2008).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... "But back to the question: What does heritability mean? Almost everyone who has ever thought about heritability has reached a commonsense intuition about it: One way or another, heritability has to be some kind of index of how genetic a trait is. That intuition explains why so many thousands of heritability coefficients have been calculated over the years. . . . "Unfortunately, that fundamental intuition is wrong. Heritability isn't an index of how genetic a trait is. A great deal of time has been wasted in the effort of measuring the heritability of traits in the false expectation that somehow the genetic nature of psychological phenomena would be revealed. There are many reasons for making this strong statement, but the most important of them harkens back to the description of heritability as an effect size. An effect size of the R2 family is a standardized estimate of the proportion of the variance in one variable that is reduced when another variable is held constant statistically. In this case it is an estimate of how much the variance of a trait would be reduced if everyone were genetically identical. With a moment's thought you can see that the answer to the question of how much variance would be reduced if everyone was genetically identical depends crucially on how genetically different everyone was in the first place." Johnson, Wendy; Turkheimer, Eric; Gottesman, Irving I.; Bouchard Jr., Thomas (2009). Beyond Heritability: Twin Studies in Behavioral Research. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 4, 217-220 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20(2009).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... "Moreover, even highly heritable traits can be strongly manipulated by the environment, so heritability has little if anything to do with controllability. For example, height is on the order of 90% heritable, yet North and South Koreans, who come from the same genetic background, presently differ in average height by a full 6 inches (Pak, 2004; Schwekendiek, 2008)." Deary, I. J., Penke, L., & Johnson, W. (2010). The neuroscience of human intelligence differences. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 11(3), 201-211. http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neuroscience_of_intelligence_review.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Deary_Penke_Johnson_2010_-_Neur... "At this point, it seems unlikely that single genetic loci have major effects on normal-range intelligence. For example, a modestly sized genome-wide study of the general intelligence factor derived from ten separate test scores in the cAnTAB cognitive test battery did not find any important genome-wide single nucleotide polymorphisms or copy number variants, and did not replicate genetic variants that had previously been associated with cognitive ability[note 48]." Johnson, W. (2010). Understanding the Genetics of Intelligence: Can Height Help? Can Corn Oil?. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(3), 177-182 http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/Johnson%20Current%20Directions%20Psych%20Science%202010%20(G%20and%20E%20in%20IQ).pdf http://apsychoserver.psych.arizona.edu/JJBAReprints/PSYC621/... "Together, however, the developmental natures of GCA [general cognitive ability] and height, the likely influences of gene-environment correlations and interactions on their developmental processes, and the potential for genetic background and environmental circumstances to release previously unexpressed genetic variation suggest that very different combinations of genes may produce identical IQs or heights or levels of any other psychological trait. And the same genes may produce very different IQs and heights against different genetic backgrounds and in different environmental circumstances. This would be especially the case if height and GCA and other psychological traits are only single facets of multifaceted traits actually under more systematic genetic regulation, such as overall body size and balance between processing capacity and stimulus reactivity. Genetic influences on individual differences in psychological characteristics are real and important but are unlikely to be straightforward and deterministic." Johnson, W., Penke, L., & Spinath, F. M. (2011). Understanding Heritability: What it is and What it is Not. European Journal of Personality, 25(4), 287-294. DOI: 10.1002/per.835 http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_Heritability_rejoinder.pdf http://www.larspenke.eu/pdfs/Johnson_Penke_Spinath_2011_-_He... "Our target article was intended to provide background knowledge to psychologists and other social scientists on the subject of heritability. This statistic, in many ways so basic, is both extremely powerful in revealing the presence of genetic inﬂuence and very weak in providing much information beyond this. Many forms of measurement error, statistical artefact, violation of underlying assumptions, gene–environment interplay, epigenetic mechanisms and no doubt processes we have not yet even identiﬁed can contribute to the magnitudes of heritability estimates. If psychologists and other social scientists want to understand genetic involvement in behavioural traits, we believe that it is going to be necessary to distinguish among these possibilities to at least some degree. Heritability estimates alone are not going to help us do this." Turkheimer, E. (2011). Genetics and human agency (Commentary on Dar-Nimrod & Heine, 2011). Psychological Bulletin, 137, 825-828. DOI: 10.1037/a0024306 http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer_darnimrod%20comm%20(2011).pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... "That heritability depends on the population in which it is measured is one of the most frequently repeated caveats in the social sciences, but it is nevertheless often forgotten in the breach. (For example, it is nearly meaningless for Dar-Nimrod and Heine to note that 'heritability [of intelligence is] typically estimated to range from .50 to .85' [p. 805]. The heritability of intelligence isn’t anything, and even placing it in a range is misleading. Making a numerical point estimate of the heritability of intelligence is akin to saying, 'Social psychologists usually estimate the F ratio for the fundamental attribution error to be between 2.0 and 4.0.') The observation that genotypic variation accounts for 90% of the variation in height in the modern world depends on the variability of genotype and environment relevant to height. Among cloned animals with widely varying diets, body size is perfectly environmental with heritability of 0; in genetically variable animals raised in identical environments heritability is 1.0. This is no mere statistical fine point: it means that the entire project of assessing how essentially genetic traits are in terms of measured heritability coefficients is a fool’s errand." Chabris, C. F., Hebert, B. M., Benjamin, D. J., Beauchamp, J., Cesarini, D., van der Loos, M., ... & Laibson, D. (2012). Most reported genetic associations with general intelligence are probably false positives. Psychological science, 23(11), 1314-1323. DOI: 10.1177/0956797611435528 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3498585/ http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Reported_Genetic.pdf?sequence=1 http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9938142/Most_Repo... "At the time most of the results we attempted to replicate were obtained, candidate-gene studies of complex traits were commonplace in medical genetics research. Such studies are now rarely published in leading journals. Our results add IQ to the list of phenotypes that must be approached with great caution when considering published molecular genetic associations. In our view, excitement over the value of behavioral and molecular genetic studies in the social sciences should be tempered—as it has been in the medical sciences—by an appreciation that, for complex phenotypes, individual common genetic variants of the sort assayed by SNP microarrays are likely to have very small effects. Associations of candidate genes with psychological traits and other traits studied in the social sciences should be viewed as tentative until they have been replicated in multiple large samples. Doing otherwise may hamper scientific progress by proliferating potentially false results, which may then influence the research agendas of scientists who do not appreciate that the associations they take as a starting point for their efforts may not be real. And the dissemination of false results to the public risks creating an incorrect perception about the state of knowledge in the field, especially the existence of genes described as being 'for' traits on the basis of unintentionally inflated estimates of effect size and statistical significance."

Aelinsaar 10y ago

Step 1: Have brilliant children. Step 2: Don't ruin them, do a bunch of other stuff. Step 3: Assume that some of that other stuff is the 'active ingredient' in your brilliant child.

brc 10y ago

I would say it is less than that. Leaving aside heritability, the environment in which the child will grow up is more or less set in concrete by the time they are born. This includes the parents socio-economic level, but more importantly to that, their attitudes towards relationships, learning, critical thought, reading, victim vs control personality and plenty more. A house without books doesn't fill with books when the child arrives. Pretty much by the time the first cry is made, a huge chunk of their future is already written. The margin is small, but, having said that, small changes at the margin can make a big difference in individuals.

turnip1979 10y ago
The margin is larger IMHO. I'm a professional scientist and I have no one remotely resembling an academic in my extended family. Now I'm not a textbook example of success but I've read about many other scientists in similar boats: Feynman and Tesla both come to mind. Feynman had an electronics hobby as a kid. Tesla's father was fairly set against him becoming an engineer. I know some people with amazing private school education flounder because of it. They saw crazy competition early in life and it seems decided to settle. I had very little competition in my early years. Being the smartest kid in your undergrad makes you feel really good, and motivates you to do better. Where I really needed guidance is going from the sheltered world to reality (early 20s .. when I entered the workforce and subsequently made the decision to get a PhD). What I want to try to do is teach my kid to have her own hobbies and be generally happy in life.
- brc 10y ago
  That might be your specific interests but I'd wager you didn't come from a family with anyone in jail, your parents sent you to school and stressed its importance, and were well read for their education level. Of course outliers exist and some very successful people come from very dysfunctional families. But if you look at enough people, they come out in temperament and attitude very similar to their family. The really surprising thing is how often one family will produce two top level musicians or sports players.
- mcphage 10y ago