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I'm unconvinced. Color blindness is easy to test for, as soon as it matters. We can do the tests where figures pop out with baby chimps right? What would chang
by iguy 9y ago
I'm unconvinced.
Color blindness is easy to test for, as soon as it matters. We can do the tests where figures pop out with baby chimps right? What would change if you knew this earlier?
Are we even sure that dyslexia is something more than a catch-all term for kids who have more difficulty learning to read? And either way, do we know that starting earlier, or later, would be an effective intervention? The error bars on our knowledge of such things (even for the largest samples, all kids) seem huge.
- DonaldFisk 9y agoI'm not sure, which is why I hedged my words rather carefully. I'm skeptical about a dyslexia gene (or genes) myself, as writing is relatively recent and there have been only a few hundred years to select for it, but it's not my area of expertise. So, if you like, you can replace dyxlexia with condition A, Italian with subject B, and French with subject C.
- Robin_Message 9y agoDyslexia is specifically related to difficulty processing sequences; the symptoms are fairly specific, and have an obvious underlying mechanism, even if we don't understand what that mechanism is yet. It's not just difficulty learning to read.
- iguy 9y agoOK, don't know too much about it, don't mean to open another can of worms! But we seem to have difficulty even discerning the best ways to teach normal kids to read. Hence my skepticism that our interventions for something specific could be so well-understood that starting the intervention when we had the genetic test (rather than waiting for the classroom) would matter.
- Robin_Message 9y agoThat is a very fair point. Teaching in the UK at least seems quite faddish. At the moment, pre-teen children are taught extensive vocabulary to talk about how English is constructed. They are taught terms like "split diagraph", which sound liguistic, but aren't terms actually used by linguists!
- iguy 9y agoRight! And don't they try to teach them to read at 4, while the Finns wait until 7, or something? The state of knowledge about what works best seems pretty poor.