8 ms·

Mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, but IQ at age 7 is not indicative of much. And paying attention to it is actively detrimental. First of all at the

by btilly 7y ago

Mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, but IQ at age 7 is not indicative of much. And paying attention to it is actively detrimental. First of all at the tail of the IQ distribution, the normal approximation breaks down. Secondly, we get a big jump in mental development when we hit our growth spurts. So IQ at that age is not massively well-correlated with your IQ a few years later. But that doesn't get into why it is actively detrimental. It turns out that children are motivated to seek confirmation of what they are complimented on. So a child who is told they are smart seeks easy tasks where they look smart, and tends to avoid hard tasks that might show them not to be so smart. While children who are complimented on their hard work and willingness to learn will seek out challenges to push themselves. Research indicates that this effect sets in shockingly easily. And the two groups respond very differently to setbacks. The ones who are complimented on what they are gets demotivated. The ones who are complimented on what they do get motivated to tackle it again. See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/200909/parenting-dont-praise-your-children https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/2009... for more on this and some verification that I'm not just making this up. Your personal life is an anecdotal data point, but it fits perfectly. You were identified young as smart. It was drilled in enough that you know exactly how smart. But it sounds like you learned to coast on brains and avoid challenges, and are now suffering the consequences. If this is true, I would recommend that you read https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-Master-Your-ebook/dp/B07H453KGH https://www.amazon.com/Cant-Hurt-Me-Master-Your-ebook/dp/B07... for advice on how to build mental toughness. That can help you overcome life challenges which are in your way.

codesushi42 7y ago
Unless you are an outlier on either side of the spectrum (e.g. 80 or 150), IQ isn't very indicative of anything. And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence? It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.
- chrisco255 7y ago
  It's strongly correlated with outcomes in life and better than any psychological test we have. First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties. Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.h...
  - codesushi42 7y ago
    It's strongly correlated with outcomes in life and better than any psychological test we have. Your IQ is correlated with your parents' IQ. But so is your social status, physical appearance and wealth. IQ is not independently responsible, and it's covariant with other heritable traits.
    - chrisco255 7y ago
      It's trivial to study the effect of IQ independent of socioeconomic background. You can segment your study based on these factors. You can also look at outcomes among siblings. IQ is strongly correlated independent of all these factors. It's been studied for over 100 years. It's been sliced every way you can think of.
      - codesushi42 7y ago
        Says you. But in reality what you're claiming as undeniable truth is actually debatable, and there are plenty of studies to the contrary.
tomp 7y ago
> I'm not just making this up You still might be, unintentionally. This "praising kids for effort" is based on "mindset" research by Carol Dweck. Her Wikipedia page highlights a few criticisms of her work, in particular that the research isn't replicable and the interventions (in schools) don't produce results.
- watwut 7y ago
  Anecdotally, it worked on my kids to ridiculous degree. Complimenting them meant that they will do the thing more and more and get better in the process. Outright telling them that "you like this" made them like the thing. Opposite made them dislike it. Including food and activities.
hinkley 7y ago
Even to a lesser degree of dysfunction, gifted kids often find that they can do reasonably well at a wide array of activities. If you're instantly competent at 10% of everything you try, you quickly have more than enough things to keep you busy, engaged, and interesting at parties. Why would you suffer through anything else? Which is one of the reasons I studied the board game Go for almost 4 years after I lost all hope of ever being good at it. At the time it was one of the few things I did despite being just good enough to teach complete beginners, but never any better. The guy I was learning from was a really good teacher and was charitably amused by my lack of progress. I knew I was never going to find a gentler way to fail and be okay with it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
nugget 7y ago
I was tested as a kid and redirected into magnet schools and programs like CTY as a result. I remember my first day in the first magnet school and feeling like I had finally found a group of people "like me". I was 9 years old. I agree with a lot of what you said and especially about the importance of teaching resiliency. But I wouldn't discount the huge benefit to identifying certain outliers early and providing them with gifted education pathways outside of the mainstream.
- toasterlovin 7y ago
  > But I wouldn't discount the huge benefit to identifying certain outliers early and providing them with gifted education pathways outside of the mainstream. I think it's useful to substitute athletic talent for intellectual talent when thinking about this stuff. Does anybody discount the value of getting an athletically talented kid into a school with a good athletics program where they can be around peers and coaches who will enable them to be the best athlete they can be? Would anybody argue in favor of letting some kid with the athletic talent to try for the NBA flounder at whatever high school they happen to naturally feed into? I think the answers to those questions are obvious. And yet we regularly have people arguing that somehow the same principles don't apply to intellectual talent. It's ridiculous. Let the mental prodigies be with their peers. It hurts no one and does them lots of good.
  - watwut 7y ago
    I would argue that, for two reasons. First, kids in those special programs often ends up with harmed bodies way too soon. There is a lot of pressure to perform, it is highly competitive and health is often the price. Only few get that prized career, others get nothing. Second, non-athletic education and interests get lost in the process. And again, most kids wont end with that career as there are only few slots and many competing kids.
    - toasterlovin 7y ago
      There really aren’t that many sports where you sacrifice your body to achieve a certain level of performance. And I think the academic neglect thing is overblown. You probably have college athletes in mind, but it’s useful to keep in mind that what appears to be academic neglect is probably often just non-intellectual athletes doing as well in college as they would have done had they not been athletes.
joelbluminator 7y ago
The Pygmalion effect contradicts what you wrote. It showed that society's expectation of a student (regarding his intelligence) play a direct role on grades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
>https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/200909/parenting-dont-praise-your-children https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/2009... This is a surprisingly insightful blog post, which I wasn't expecting, considering the click-baity title. But I think I see now where my parents went wrong in raising me - the self-esteem movement, which the Gen Xers inherited, played too much a role in my rearing, methinks.
TurkishPoptart 7y ago
I think a lot of what you've said is true with me. I also think there is a "use it or lose it" particularity with IQ, as well. A close friend of mine, who, like me, also has an advanced degree and, like me, also doesn't use it or even know how to get into a job/career situation that would allow for it, also shares the feeling I have of being super freaking mentally stuck, socially isolated, demotivated, left behind, and prematurely burned out. So I'm not saying I blame our parents' generation for instilling arbitrary self-esteem in us, when cultivating discipline would have been far more helpful, and I'm not saying that it's their fault for instilling in us obsolete values and expectations for the future, for a world they never could have predicted, but perhaps I'll look into that e-book. Thank you for your comment.

by btilly 7y ago

codesushi42 7y ago

Unless you are an outlier on either side of the spectrum (e.g. 80 or 150), IQ isn't very indicative of anything. And why would anyone believe it should be? Do you really think a test with a relatively small set of questions, written by a biased group of individuals is going to be representative of human intelligence? It baffles me that IQ is used as any kind of meaningful measurement beyond showing whether someone is mentally retarded or a prodigy.

chrisco255 7y ago
It's strongly correlated with outcomes in life and better than any psychological test we have. First we should understand that IQs and life outcomes follow normal distributions and there's plenty of exceptions to the rule...but as a general trend, the relationship is indisputable. This has been studied for over a century. This suggests that IQ tests are fairly good at gaging mental faculties. Height gives an advantage in many ways across human society. This is a physical attribute that we have little control over, yet it influences outcomes in jobs, social interactions, sports, dating, etc. Height also follows a normal distribution across populations. There is no reason to believe that mental faculties do not have similar physical mechanisms and that a normal distribution does not exist across populations. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/03/120329142035.h...
- codesushi42 7y ago
  It's strongly correlated with outcomes in life and better than any psychological test we have. Your IQ is correlated with your parents' IQ. But so is your social status, physical appearance and wealth. IQ is not independently responsible, and it's covariant with other heritable traits.
  - chrisco255 7y ago
    It's trivial to study the effect of IQ independent of socioeconomic background. You can segment your study based on these factors. You can also look at outcomes among siblings. IQ is strongly correlated independent of all these factors. It's been studied for over 100 years. It's been sliced every way you can think of.
    - codesushi42 7y ago
      Says you. But in reality what you're claiming as undeniable truth is actually debatable, and there are plenty of studies to the contrary.

tomp 7y ago

> I'm not just making this up You still might be, unintentionally. This "praising kids for effort" is based on "mindset" research by Carol Dweck. Her Wikipedia page highlights a few criticisms of her work, in particular that the research isn't replicable and the interventions (in schools) don't produce results.

watwut 7y ago
Anecdotally, it worked on my kids to ridiculous degree. Complimenting them meant that they will do the thing more and more and get better in the process. Outright telling them that "you like this" made them like the thing. Opposite made them dislike it. Including food and activities.

hinkley 7y ago

Even to a lesser degree of dysfunction, gifted kids often find that they can do reasonably well at a wide array of activities. If you're instantly competent at 10% of everything you try, you quickly have more than enough things to keep you busy, engaged, and interesting at parties. Why would you suffer through anything else? Which is one of the reasons I studied the board game Go for almost 4 years after I lost all hope of ever being good at it. At the time it was one of the few things I did despite being just good enough to teach complete beginners, but never any better. The guy I was learning from was a really good teacher and was charitably amused by my lack of progress. I knew I was never going to find a gentler way to fail and be okay with it.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

nugget 7y ago

I was tested as a kid and redirected into magnet schools and programs like CTY as a result. I remember my first day in the first magnet school and feeling like I had finally found a group of people "like me". I was 9 years old. I agree with a lot of what you said and especially about the importance of teaching resiliency. But I wouldn't discount the huge benefit to identifying certain outliers early and providing them with gifted education pathways outside of the mainstream.

toasterlovin 7y ago
> But I wouldn't discount the huge benefit to identifying certain outliers early and providing them with gifted education pathways outside of the mainstream. I think it's useful to substitute athletic talent for intellectual talent when thinking about this stuff. Does anybody discount the value of getting an athletically talented kid into a school with a good athletics program where they can be around peers and coaches who will enable them to be the best athlete they can be? Would anybody argue in favor of letting some kid with the athletic talent to try for the NBA flounder at whatever high school they happen to naturally feed into? I think the answers to those questions are obvious. And yet we regularly have people arguing that somehow the same principles don't apply to intellectual talent. It's ridiculous. Let the mental prodigies be with their peers. It hurts no one and does them lots of good.
- watwut 7y ago
  I would argue that, for two reasons. First, kids in those special programs often ends up with harmed bodies way too soon. There is a lot of pressure to perform, it is highly competitive and health is often the price. Only few get that prized career, others get nothing. Second, non-athletic education and interests get lost in the process. And again, most kids wont end with that career as there are only few slots and many competing kids.
  - toasterlovin 7y ago
    There really aren’t that many sports where you sacrifice your body to achieve a certain level of performance. And I think the academic neglect thing is overblown. You probably have college athletes in mind, but it’s useful to keep in mind that what appears to be academic neglect is probably often just non-intellectual athletes doing as well in college as they would have done had they not been athletes.

joelbluminator 7y ago

The Pygmalion effect contradicts what you wrote. It showed that society's expectation of a student (regarding his intelligence) play a direct role on grades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

>https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/200909/parenting-dont-praise-your-children https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-power-prime/2009... This is a surprisingly insightful blog post, which I wasn't expecting, considering the click-baity title. But I think I see now where my parents went wrong in raising me - the self-esteem movement, which the Gen Xers inherited, played too much a role in my rearing, methinks.

TurkishPoptart 7y ago

I think a lot of what you've said is true with me. I also think there is a "use it or lose it" particularity with IQ, as well. A close friend of mine, who, like me, also has an advanced degree and, like me, also doesn't use it or even know how to get into a job/career situation that would allow for it, also shares the feeling I have of being super freaking mentally stuck, socially isolated, demotivated, left behind, and prematurely burned out. So I'm not saying I blame our parents' generation for instilling arbitrary self-esteem in us, when cultivating discipline would have been far more helpful, and I'm not saying that it's their fault for instilling in us obsolete values and expectations for the future, for a world they never could have predicted, but perhaps I'll look into that e-book. Thank you for your comment.