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You should ask yourself what it would it take to falsify your working hypothesis and then see if there are research results which falsify it.
by toasterlovin 8y ago
You should ask yourself what it would it take to falsify your working hypothesis and then see if there are research results which falsify it.
- zbentley 8y agoLongitudinal studies in this area (developmental effects on intelligence) are vanishingly rare. Those that do exist are either extremely limited, ethically suspect, or useless (confounded). The difficulty in answering "why is person/are people the way they are?" in a rigorous, falsifiable way has brought about the existence of entire disciplines dedicated to qualitative analysis as a means of getting closer to answers without requiring often-impossible rigor. I think "falsifiable" might be too high a bar for answering these kinds of questions. That doesn't mean we should give up, or presume the null hypothesis: getting to "probable/improbable" in a useful proportion of cases is likely the best we can do.
- toasterlovin 8y agoThere are natural longitudinal experiments in the form of twin studies. They show pretty conclusively that the largest systematic influence of intelligence is DNA at about 50%. Almost everything else about intelligence is due to random variation in the environment (and not due to all of the things you would think make a difference, like parenting, schooling, class size, economic status, etc.). The person I was responding to could also just go talk to a bunch of teachers.