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> Perhaps biased, my wife’s pursuit of her undergrad and master’s degrees, coupled with her unbridled passion for learning what we need to do to give our daught
by yafujifide 16y ago
> Perhaps biased, my wife’s pursuit of her undergrad and master’s degrees, coupled with her unbridled passion for learning what we need to do to give our daughter the best education and upbringing possible is surely close to that number. It shows; my daughter has an insatiable curiosity that, according to Gladwell, is a direct result of how we’re raising her.
Having recently devoured a bunch of the works of Steven Pinker, I question this. If their daughter is naturally curious, it could be inherited rather than learned. In "The Blank Slate" Steven Pinker has an entire chapter on children. There he says that all studies that try to figure out what styles of parenting lead to what results, none of them control for heritability. They simply assume that the child's behavior due to styles of parenting. But what if curious parents lead to curious children because of their genes, and not their style of parenting? Pinker goes on to argue that what the evidence shows is that the style of parenting has absolutely no long-term effect on a person's behavior. Instead, what matters is genes, culture (in particular the child's peers), and chance events.
- tokenadult 16y agoIn "The Blank Slate" Steven Pinker has an entire chapter on children. Do you still have the book at hand? I looked it up the last time there was a big thread about this on HN. Pinker bases most of that chapter on the work of Eric Turkheimer, as his bibliographic references should show. And Eric Turkheimer has substantially revised his opinion about what heritability studies mean after continuing his research and thinking about the data more. I'll recommend here two articles from Turkheimer's faculty web page http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/vita1_turkheimer.htm that more readers of Pinker's book ought to know about, to bring their understanding of human behavioral genetics up to date. http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Johnson%20%282009%29.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O... http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20Online%20CV/Turkheimer%20%282008%29.pdf http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
- yafujifide 16y agoYes I have the book at hand, but it's on Kindle, and it's somewhat painful to look up the references on a Kindle. Thanks for giving me these articles. I will read them.