4 ms·

Unless you're one of the leading behavioral genetics researchers who has personally conducted multiple famous longitudinal studies (adoption studies, monozygoti

Unless you're one of the leading behavioral genetics researchers who has personally conducted multiple famous longitudinal studies (adoption studies, monozygotic and dizygotic twin studies) since the mid 70s trying to nail down exactly what the environment is responsible for and you have done a thorough analysis of the literature and summarized it in a book. Then it's clear. How much more rigorous of an analysis could you get? The conclusion isn't that environment doesn't play a role. It does. The conclusion is that shared environment (family, school etc) doesn't contribute in any predictable way to the heritability of psychological traits (I think he says it's less than 1% ~ 2%). All psychological traits are on average 50% heritable (he says it ranges from 30% ~ 60% but it's on avg. 50%). The rest of the variance is from so called "non-shared" environmental differences. If you live in the same home with the siblings and go to the same school and are even in the same class, you still don't have exactly the same experience. A lot of your experiences are unique to and it's those things that shape you in combination with your genetics. He concludes that after all the research that has been done that non-shared environmental differences are unsystematic and unstable which means they are essentially random and you can make no predictions based on them and that implies you cannot systematically engineer outcomes for people.

AlexCoventry 8y ago
> The conclusion is that shared environment doesn't contribute in any predictable way to the heritability of psychological traits What a shock it would be, if such a complex object developed through interactions with its environment which are still largely illegible to current experimental methodology.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Shared environmental effects are not illegible. You longitudinally study multiple children living in the same home and attending the same school and you control for genetics by studying homes where two children have been adopted from different families into the same family,so they share only the same shared environment. Annnnd... it turns out, it seems, the shared environment doesn't explain more than 1%~2% of the variance. The methodologies for the twin studies and adoption studies outlined seem, as far as I can tell, like the best possible way to try measure that variable. How else might you do it? What isnt measurable directly are the non-shared environmental effects which contribute the Lions share of the variance attributable to the environment and represent about half the variance overall. The other half being genetics. The point is that non-shared environmental differences are essentially random and parents and schools can't manufacture them.
  - AlexCoventry 8y ago
    They're not random, they're just not systematizable at this point.
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      They're not systematizable ever. We're talking about experiences unique to each individual. If you get 30 kids sitting in a classroom they share the room they're in and the words the teacher is saying. They don't share how much attention each one is paying, they don't share the same comprehension or interpretation of the content, they don't share the way they feel about the content, they don't share the thoughts they have about the content and they don't share the new connections made in their brain as the lesson progresses. You can't systematize that. It's random.
  - chongli 8y ago
    Annnnd... it turns out, it seems, the shared environment doesn't explain more than 1%~2% of the variance. And yet we have the case of Lazslo Polgar who raised 3 daughters to be strong chess players, two of whom became world class and one who became the best female player ever [1]. How likely an outcome would this be if there had never been a chessboard in the Polgar household (nor a determined father to teach them)? Vanishingly unlikely. Scott Alexander over at SSC has written about the Polgar household [2], even going so far as to arrange a community fundraiser to pay for Laszlo Polgar's book to be translated into English [3] so that he could review it. There is a lot to be said for the Polgar family's ethnic background being a major factor in intelligence, yet children don't learn chess (or anything for that matter) without exposure to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r [2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-budapestians/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii... [3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-gen...
    - james_s_tayler 8y ago
      This is one of my favorite stories. I remember watching the documentary they did on this. If I say "on average American men are 5 feet 9 inches" and you say "and yet we have Robert Pershing Wadlow who is 8 feet 11 inches" That just doesn't make the case you want it to make. We also have the famous Williams sisters of tennis fame who's dad was their coach too. However, let's focus back on the original articles claim about the "science behind making your child smarter". Specifically we need to zero in on the "make" portion of the claim. That there is something that you as a parent can do to engineer the outcome of having your children be smarter than they otherwise would. Let's evaluate the case of the Polgar sisters as it relates to that claim. Well, if look at the Williams sisters and the Polgar sisters together we could make the case that it might , perhaps, be possible to engineer the outcome of your children becoming world-class at something. In that case I would expect to see a pattern within categories and not just between, and I would also expect more data points. Perhaps more data points are out there and I would be interested to see as many as possible. The data we really need which we don't have is the data which would shed light on the survivorship bias - "how many tennis coach parents or chess grandmaster parents tried to engineer the same outcomes and failed?". For all the tennis parents out there and for all the effort those parents and their kids put in, their kids performance probably falls on some normal distribution of achievement in the sport. You can generalize that to whatever profession you'd like and for the claim to be true that there was something you could do to engineer the outcome you would want to see a high success rate or at least for the cases that we can find not for them to be statistical outliers. My guess is that they are, but I'm open to revise that position if I can see convincing evidence for it. Next lets address the part of the claim that relates to intelligence. That there is something you can do to engineer the outcome of smarter children. Are the Polgar sisters smarter or are they better at chess? We have it on excellent authority that they are very, very good at chess. Lazslo's book is called "How To Raise a Genius!". Are they geniuses? Does it require a genius to play chess? Does it require a genius to become a chess grandmaster? Are the average life accomplishments of Chess Grandmasters in line with what we would typically call genius? Are you a genius if you can operate in the very narrow domain of moving plastic toys around a wooden board? Not to diminish the accomplishment or belittle chess players. My point with that is I think there is a conflation between genius and expertise in a very narrow domain. We see natural born geniuses go on to pick a certain field and produce results in it, but we don't normally see parents training kids to be geniuses in a particular field. Their story is one of my favorites and I think about it often. But you have to ask a few questions... does it generalize to different domains? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. I suspect it does. Can it reliably be repeated and systematized? Perhaps, but I suspect not. Is that at all practical and useful to the average parent? Probably not? I actually think his experiment and it's result make a lot of sense. He trained them from the age of 3. They fought hard with the government to be allowed to home-school them so they could focus on a curriculum of their choosing, so they had control over what the girls were required to do academically. They made them practice hours and hours a day. The girls, as I recall, loved it. They loved chess. That helps. Lazslo also likely devised good learning strategies. It was a completely unorthodox experiment. Overall I'm not surprised he got those girls to where he did. I also think that as a pedagogical method it is stunningly impractical for society as a whole to try and model, so I'm not sure it's useful even though I actually think he's right on the money. The traditional education system is not really designed for education, it's designed for credentialing. You have to focus on the lowest common denominator in order to meet the required throughput with a given consistency of results. If you wildly adjust the parameters of the system to say OK what about if we only need to educate three people and we can choose the design goal of the education system? You can certainly wind up with the result that he did. Does that make them smarter? Or does that just make them hyper-capable in a narrow domain? I think back to my own educational experiments over the years with regards to language learning and compare my results with the results of learning languages inside the university system. It's worlds apart in terms of results. I can personally do it 3x faster on average. I'm undertaking a new experiment in 2019 to deeply learn psychology. We'll see where that winds up. Suffice to say you can most definitely get out-sized results with regards to education if you're in control of the system, you're very capable at devising novel learning strategies and you aren't required to mass-produce results.
stewbrew 8y ago
Twin studies sometimes are less rigorous than they seem to be. Some people go a long way to prove what they think is right, see Sir Burt: https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific+fraud+twin+studies https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific+fraud+twin+studie...
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  What's say that's true... what's the likelihood all the data over the last 50 years was faked?
  - stewbrew 8y ago
    The data probably isn't fake but its interpretation could be biased by statistical incompetence. I say this as somebody who (originally) graduated in a field where the majority of studies most likely is not worth the storage used to save the pdf. Let's just say I'm skeptical when strong beliefs and world views are involved in the interpretation of data.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Twin studies sometimes are less rigorous than they seem to be IQ being just over 50% genetic is a consistent result from twin studies and other attempts to study the genetic influence.
p1esk 8y ago
you cannot systematically engineer outcomes for people I'm describing a particular scenario, and I'm not sure your studies have any data about it - the situation where a gifted child is developing in an indifferent environment (not being stimulated or motivated). No one claims we can turn anyone into a genius. But I'm pretty sure one needs very fortunate conditions to become one.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan It's not necessary.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    This is a great counter example, but I would urge people not to get caught up in trying to look for outliers to try and prove a point. The parents comment still stands I think. You kinda have to ask is it always the case that even in a bad home genius always manifests where it might? Or do you sometimes find that it goes entirely to waste. I'd venture to say it sometimes does go entirely to waste. On balance those kids probably go on to do well above average and it's likely you've never heard 99.999% of their names. I'm not sure why people want to focus on outlier geniuses so much when debating the claim that there is something they as a parent can do to systematically engineer higher intelligence in their own children. I just don't think it's that useful.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  Given that you would have to fall into the extreme tail end of the normal distribution you ipso facto need fortunate conditions to become one to have a genius level IQ. And geniuses themselves are likely normally distributed as to their contributions to the world. So you multiply two very slim possibilities that you first have a very high IQ and that you then go on to do something noteworthy. I'm not sure that's a very helpful thing to think about though. You don't have any reasonable expectation of controlling that. I think one thing to consider is your scenario is personal choices made by the individual. If they have genius level IQ at least one of their parents has to have a significantly above average IQ and is, on the balance of probabilities, likely interested in educating their child. But let's take the hypothetical that the home environment isn't encouraging at all. When you raise kids you don't spend every waking moment with them, there is plenty of time you leave them to their own devices and they choose what they do based on what's available to them and what interests them. Kids pester their parents pretty damn hard to get what they want. Let's assume there are pretty cold and uncaring parents. Well you will probably be in daycare, so you're not at home all the time and the chance you also go to a wretched daycare is not that high, so assume you are exploring and developing your intellect there. Then you go to school and that continue s. Maybe you are too far ahead and get bored and are diagnosed with a learning disability. As you get older you gain more freedom. Perhaps you discover the library and it makes you feel wonderful that you can learn so much and you don't get such good feelings anywhere else, so you spend more and more of your time there reading and nurturing yourself. Maybe, just maybe, you nurture yourself into a genius still.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> He concludes that after all the research that has been done that non-shared environmental differences are unsystematic and unstable which means they are essentially random No, what it actually means is that the specific environmental influences haven't been identified. “Shared environment” and “unshared environment” are big buckets inferred in “top down" studies from whether people who share some pre-identified candidate influences (family environment, school, etc.) get equal or different effects. (There's also studies that work bottom-up to try to identify candidate specific environmental factors, but it's a long process of identifying potential ones and then working them into top-down studies where you can tease out the exact influence of each; we've actually identified quite a number of environmental factors, especially in early childhood, that are specific negative influences, and you can, given resources, engineer to avoid them.)

AlexCoventry 8y ago

> The conclusion is that shared environment doesn't contribute in any predictable way to the heritability of psychological traits What a shock it would be, if such a complex object developed through interactions with its environment which are still largely illegible to current experimental methodology.

james_s_tayler 8y ago
Shared environmental effects are not illegible. You longitudinally study multiple children living in the same home and attending the same school and you control for genetics by studying homes where two children have been adopted from different families into the same family,so they share only the same shared environment. Annnnd... it turns out, it seems, the shared environment doesn't explain more than 1%~2% of the variance. The methodologies for the twin studies and adoption studies outlined seem, as far as I can tell, like the best possible way to try measure that variable. How else might you do it? What isnt measurable directly are the non-shared environmental effects which contribute the Lions share of the variance attributable to the environment and represent about half the variance overall. The other half being genetics. The point is that non-shared environmental differences are essentially random and parents and schools can't manufacture them.
- AlexCoventry 8y ago
  They're not random, they're just not systematizable at this point.
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    They're not systematizable ever. We're talking about experiences unique to each individual. If you get 30 kids sitting in a classroom they share the room they're in and the words the teacher is saying. They don't share how much attention each one is paying, they don't share the same comprehension or interpretation of the content, they don't share the way they feel about the content, they don't share the thoughts they have about the content and they don't share the new connections made in their brain as the lesson progresses. You can't systematize that. It's random.
- chongli 8y ago
  Annnnd... it turns out, it seems, the shared environment doesn't explain more than 1%~2% of the variance. And yet we have the case of Lazslo Polgar who raised 3 daughters to be strong chess players, two of whom became world class and one who became the best female player ever [1]. How likely an outcome would this be if there had never been a chessboard in the Polgar household (nor a determined father to teach them)? Vanishingly unlikely. Scott Alexander over at SSC has written about the Polgar household [2], even going so far as to arrange a community fundraiser to pay for Laszlo Polgar's book to be translated into English [3] so that he could review it. There is a lot to be said for the Polgar family's ethnic background being a major factor in intelligence, yet children don't learn chess (or anything for that matter) without exposure to it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r [2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii-mastering-the-core-teachings-of-the-budapestians/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii... [3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-genius/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-gen...
  - james_s_tayler 8y ago
    This is one of my favorite stories. I remember watching the documentary they did on this. If I say "on average American men are 5 feet 9 inches" and you say "and yet we have Robert Pershing Wadlow who is 8 feet 11 inches" That just doesn't make the case you want it to make. We also have the famous Williams sisters of tennis fame who's dad was their coach too. However, let's focus back on the original articles claim about the "science behind making your child smarter". Specifically we need to zero in on the "make" portion of the claim. That there is something that you as a parent can do to engineer the outcome of having your children be smarter than they otherwise would. Let's evaluate the case of the Polgar sisters as it relates to that claim. Well, if look at the Williams sisters and the Polgar sisters together we could make the case that it might , perhaps, be possible to engineer the outcome of your children becoming world-class at something. In that case I would expect to see a pattern within categories and not just between, and I would also expect more data points. Perhaps more data points are out there and I would be interested to see as many as possible. The data we really need which we don't have is the data which would shed light on the survivorship bias - "how many tennis coach parents or chess grandmaster parents tried to engineer the same outcomes and failed?". For all the tennis parents out there and for all the effort those parents and their kids put in, their kids performance probably falls on some normal distribution of achievement in the sport. You can generalize that to whatever profession you'd like and for the claim to be true that there was something you could do to engineer the outcome you would want to see a high success rate or at least for the cases that we can find not for them to be statistical outliers. My guess is that they are, but I'm open to revise that position if I can see convincing evidence for it. Next lets address the part of the claim that relates to intelligence. That there is something you can do to engineer the outcome of smarter children. Are the Polgar sisters smarter or are they better at chess? We have it on excellent authority that they are very, very good at chess. Lazslo's book is called "How To Raise a Genius!". Are they geniuses? Does it require a genius to play chess? Does it require a genius to become a chess grandmaster? Are the average life accomplishments of Chess Grandmasters in line with what we would typically call genius? Are you a genius if you can operate in the very narrow domain of moving plastic toys around a wooden board? Not to diminish the accomplishment or belittle chess players. My point with that is I think there is a conflation between genius and expertise in a very narrow domain. We see natural born geniuses go on to pick a certain field and produce results in it, but we don't normally see parents training kids to be geniuses in a particular field. Their story is one of my favorites and I think about it often. But you have to ask a few questions... does it generalize to different domains? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. I suspect it does. Can it reliably be repeated and systematized? Perhaps, but I suspect not. Is that at all practical and useful to the average parent? Probably not? I actually think his experiment and it's result make a lot of sense. He trained them from the age of 3. They fought hard with the government to be allowed to home-school them so they could focus on a curriculum of their choosing, so they had control over what the girls were required to do academically. They made them practice hours and hours a day. The girls, as I recall, loved it. They loved chess. That helps. Lazslo also likely devised good learning strategies. It was a completely unorthodox experiment. Overall I'm not surprised he got those girls to where he did. I also think that as a pedagogical method it is stunningly impractical for society as a whole to try and model, so I'm not sure it's useful even though I actually think he's right on the money. The traditional education system is not really designed for education, it's designed for credentialing. You have to focus on the lowest common denominator in order to meet the required throughput with a given consistency of results. If you wildly adjust the parameters of the system to say OK what about if we only need to educate three people and we can choose the design goal of the education system? You can certainly wind up with the result that he did. Does that make them smarter? Or does that just make them hyper-capable in a narrow domain? I think back to my own educational experiments over the years with regards to language learning and compare my results with the results of learning languages inside the university system. It's worlds apart in terms of results. I can personally do it 3x faster on average. I'm undertaking a new experiment in 2019 to deeply learn psychology. We'll see where that winds up. Suffice to say you can most definitely get out-sized results with regards to education if you're in control of the system, you're very capable at devising novel learning strategies and you aren't required to mass-produce results.

stewbrew 8y ago

Twin studies sometimes are less rigorous than they seem to be. Some people go a long way to prove what they think is right, see Sir Burt: https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific+fraud+twin+studies https://www.google.com/search?q=scientific+fraud+twin+studie...

james_s_tayler 8y ago
What's say that's true... what's the likelihood all the data over the last 50 years was faked?
- stewbrew 8y ago
  The data probably isn't fake but its interpretation could be biased by statistical incompetence. I say this as somebody who (originally) graduated in a field where the majority of studies most likely is not worth the storage used to save the pdf. Let's just say I'm skeptical when strong beliefs and world views are involved in the interpretation of data.
dragonwriter 8y ago
> Twin studies sometimes are less rigorous than they seem to be IQ being just over 50% genetic is a consistent result from twin studies and other attempts to study the genetic influence.

p1esk 8y ago

you cannot systematically engineer outcomes for people I'm describing a particular scenario, and I'm not sure your studies have any data about it - the situation where a gifted child is developing in an indifferent environment (not being stimulated or motivated). No one claims we can turn anyone into a genius. But I'm pretty sure one needs very fortunate conditions to become one.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan It's not necessary.
- james_s_tayler 8y ago
  This is a great counter example, but I would urge people not to get caught up in trying to look for outliers to try and prove a point. The parents comment still stands I think. You kinda have to ask is it always the case that even in a bad home genius always manifests where it might? Or do you sometimes find that it goes entirely to waste. I'd venture to say it sometimes does go entirely to waste. On balance those kids probably go on to do well above average and it's likely you've never heard 99.999% of their names. I'm not sure why people want to focus on outlier geniuses so much when debating the claim that there is something they as a parent can do to systematically engineer higher intelligence in their own children. I just don't think it's that useful.
james_s_tayler 8y ago
Given that you would have to fall into the extreme tail end of the normal distribution you ipso facto need fortunate conditions to become one to have a genius level IQ. And geniuses themselves are likely normally distributed as to their contributions to the world. So you multiply two very slim possibilities that you first have a very high IQ and that you then go on to do something noteworthy. I'm not sure that's a very helpful thing to think about though. You don't have any reasonable expectation of controlling that. I think one thing to consider is your scenario is personal choices made by the individual. If they have genius level IQ at least one of their parents has to have a significantly above average IQ and is, on the balance of probabilities, likely interested in educating their child. But let's take the hypothetical that the home environment isn't encouraging at all. When you raise kids you don't spend every waking moment with them, there is plenty of time you leave them to their own devices and they choose what they do based on what's available to them and what interests them. Kids pester their parents pretty damn hard to get what they want. Let's assume there are pretty cold and uncaring parents. Well you will probably be in daycare, so you're not at home all the time and the chance you also go to a wretched daycare is not that high, so assume you are exploring and developing your intellect there. Then you go to school and that continue s. Maybe you are too far ahead and get bored and are diagnosed with a learning disability. As you get older you gain more freedom. Perhaps you discover the library and it makes you feel wonderful that you can learn so much and you don't get such good feelings anywhere else, so you spend more and more of your time there reading and nurturing yourself. Maybe, just maybe, you nurture yourself into a genius still.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> He concludes that after all the research that has been done that non-shared environmental differences are unsystematic and unstable which means they are essentially random No, what it actually means is that the specific environmental influences haven't been identified. “Shared environment” and “unshared environment” are big buckets inferred in “top down" studies from whether people who share some pre-identified candidate influences (family environment, school, etc.) get equal or different effects. (There's also studies that work bottom-up to try to identify candidate specific environmental factors, but it's a long process of identifying potential ones and then working them into top-down studies where you can tease out the exact influence of each; we've actually identified quite a number of environmental factors, especially in early childhood, that are specific negative influences, and you can, given resources, engineer to avoid them.)