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I understand what the poster is trying to suggest but it's still not normalizing the right things. Children with "bigger brains" perform better because they've

I understand what the poster is trying to suggest but it's still not normalizing the right things. Children with "bigger brains" perform better because they've matured faster and have better executive control than their peers. That's why you can strongly correlate childhood academic performance on birth month. The ones that do better don't have "larger" brains as adults. If you take people with equal economic opportunities and the same social advantages, you cannot stratify that population based on brain mass and correlate it with anything meaningful. Besides, if this was true then, say the staff at MIT would be NBA sized giants working their big brains and little persons would all have severe cognitive impairments. None of this is the case. Even on strict IQ, which is what these people like to use, it still doesn't work. The highest IQ scorers are normal sized, normal shaped people. They aren't walking around with giant deformed skulls The logical implications of the hypothesis simply don't exist and every study I've seen that tries to demonstrate it gets criticized as actually just showing a proxy measurement for things like nutrition, age, economic status, etc It's also why the phenomena only appears in large population studies. Taller people, on average, grew up with more advantages and access to resources which is why they're taller. As a population, they will do better then their disadvantaged peers. Duh.

SamReidHughes 3y ago
Not true at all. Brain volume correlates with intelligence after stratifying by socioeconomic status, and the relationship can be seen by doing within-family comparisons. Such a correlation is a very repeated finding in all sorts of data sets. Maybe you could chase down some of the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#Brain_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#... . One interesting fact I found on that page right now is that the correlation has also been found in Chimpanzees.
- kristopolous 3y ago
  Even there, the most solid study would be the twin one, which is here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/ The two population cohorts are 11-year olds and 17-year olds so regardless of what they say, we're still just measuring shoe size. I'm guessing they published these two groups because their adult cohorts showed zero difference and that's not a publishable paper. In fact, they admit it "Two previous studies taking this approach, each with a sample size of about 35 sibling pairs, failed to find a significant correlation" Right before they say "chill, let's cheat": "We reexamined this empirical issue in a Human Connectome Project (HCP) (Van Essen et al., 2012; Van Essen et al., 2013) sample of 1,022 young adults" ^ it's a shoe size study from here out so of course they find something.
  - SamReidHughes 3y ago
    Wow, an n=35 study didn't have the power to find a signal while the ones with thousands of people do. That must mean we have vestigial neurons.
    - kristopolous 3y ago
      I've gone over this multiple times. It appears in larger populations because it's a weak proxy for other things. It disappears in smaller populations because it's a weak proxy for other things. The same relationship would exist with the MSRP of the car the test subject arrived in or the cost of their socks. In a small population study you'd see no real correlation between how someone did a test and the price of their car. But over say 100,000 people you would because the cost of someone's car weakly correlates with a number of things that are, in aggregate more advantageous for testing and so the confounding phenomena would arise. In fact, the circumference of someone's head probably has about the same correlation with the price of their socks as it does with whatever intelligence metric your want to use because it's all measuring the same thing - social class, opportunities, economic arrangements, things like that. It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the vary inequality that produced it. Eugenicists called this biological determinism, it's an old idea that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - SamReidHughes 3y ago
        Nope, you're just making stuff up with no factual basis behind it.
      - rramadass 3y ago
        > It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the very inequality that produced it. Nicely put!

SamReidHughes 3y ago

Not true at all. Brain volume correlates with intelligence after stratifying by socioeconomic status, and the relationship can be seen by doing within-family comparisons. Such a correlation is a very repeated finding in all sorts of data sets. Maybe you could chase down some of the references at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#Brain_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_and_intelligence#... . One interesting fact I found on that page right now is that the correlation has also been found in Chimpanzees.

kristopolous 3y ago
Even there, the most solid study would be the twin one, which is here https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440690/ The two population cohorts are 11-year olds and 17-year olds so regardless of what they say, we're still just measuring shoe size. I'm guessing they published these two groups because their adult cohorts showed zero difference and that's not a publishable paper. In fact, they admit it "Two previous studies taking this approach, each with a sample size of about 35 sibling pairs, failed to find a significant correlation" Right before they say "chill, let's cheat": "We reexamined this empirical issue in a Human Connectome Project (HCP) (Van Essen et al., 2012; Van Essen et al., 2013) sample of 1,022 young adults" ^ it's a shoe size study from here out so of course they find something.
- SamReidHughes 3y ago
  Wow, an n=35 study didn't have the power to find a signal while the ones with thousands of people do. That must mean we have vestigial neurons.
  - kristopolous 3y ago
    I've gone over this multiple times. It appears in larger populations because it's a weak proxy for other things. It disappears in smaller populations because it's a weak proxy for other things. The same relationship would exist with the MSRP of the car the test subject arrived in or the cost of their socks. In a small population study you'd see no real correlation between how someone did a test and the price of their car. But over say 100,000 people you would because the cost of someone's car weakly correlates with a number of things that are, in aggregate more advantageous for testing and so the confounding phenomena would arise. In fact, the circumference of someone's head probably has about the same correlation with the price of their socks as it does with whatever intelligence metric your want to use because it's all measuring the same thing - social class, opportunities, economic arrangements, things like that. It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the vary inequality that produced it. Eugenicists called this biological determinism, it's an old idea that doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - SamReidHughes 3y ago
      Nope, you're just making stuff up with no factual basis behind it.
    - rramadass 3y ago
      > It's a physical consequence of our unequal society that then gets used as if it's a biological reason for the perpetuation of the very inequality that produced it. Nicely put!