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I don't know whether this is true, but it feels true, and I've been operating as if it were.
by pg 13y ago
I don't know whether this is true, but it feels true, and I've been operating as if it were.
- clarkm 13y agoYou're right -- it feels true, which probably explains why it has so much staying power. Though the idea has been around for decades, it was really popularized by Hart and Risley in the 90s. However, it has been popping even more frequently over the past couple years. A few months ago, when a similar article ran in the New York Times, Steven Pinked opined: > The Blank Slate lives: Yet another story on parent-child correlations that dares not mention the g-word https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/322367630331740160 https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/322367630331740160
- ShardPhoenix 13y agoJust because genetics is important doesn't mean that talking doesn't help - and the difference is that talking is in the parents' control.
- zizee 13y agoIt's weird how people are happy to say genetics plays a hand in the limits of human abilities, but when it comes to talk about intelligence, there are so many people in denial. Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.
- a3voices 13y agoIntelligence is a mixture of upbringing and genetics. If you're raised by a pack of wolves in the woods, you'll probably be rock dumb by all measures, regardless of your DNA.
- bkirkbri 13y ago> If you're raised by a pack of wolves in the woods, you'll probably be rock dumb by all measures, regardless of your DNA. Depends on how you define "dumb". I bet you'd be insanely good at hunting and eating enough prey to survive the winter.
- telephonetemp 13y agoGoing a step further, you have to wonder if the genetic correlates of IQ (or g) affect survival and health in feral children.
- clarkm 13y agoI can't remember where I read it, but I know that hunting and tracking skills don't correlate very well with g. Though surprisingly, marksmanship does.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoIf a wolf is raised by humans, how much will that improve its IQ score?
- smtddr 13y agoWhat you call "denial", I call reasonable doubt. And by that, I mean we don't have any concrete way to measure intelligence potential/capacity in the same way we can measure 12 inches. We know what 12 inches mean, but can anyone tell me what it means to be smart? What subjects do I need to learn to qualify? And to what level of detail? Why do we conclude Stephen Hawkins is smart? Who is an example of someone that isn't smart and could never become smart no matter how hard that person tried? Barring any serious mental illness, I am of the belief anyone can learn whatever they want. The speed may vary, but I don't believe there is more information in the human-society than the human brain can contain.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoWe do have concrete ways to measure intelligence, and have had them for over a hundred years. The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
- smtddr 13y agoWe do not. Are there answers to the questions I presented? You can't observe any exact thing and say "Right there! This person is exactly 49 intelliunits smart". IQ tests may give you an idea of one point of view of a measurement of intelligent is, but it is certainly not concrete like 12 inches is. Not concrete like we know 2 hydrogens & one oxygen is water. I think our obsession that everything must be measurable & categorized fails when it comes to the human mind. We are more than the sum of our measurable parts... for now. You can look at a car engine specification and know exactly the maximum speed given optimum conditions and assuming no mechanical failures. There's no such measurement for the human brain. You cannot know what my top performance is. At the absolute best, you can have a ball-park guess. You could end up being right or being way off.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoHuman personality contains any number of traits that can be measured. To pretend that pyschometrics does not exist is the equivalent of refusing to look through Galileo's telescope.
- worldsayshi 13y agoIt might be that intelligence is a plastic ability ("software"), while many other abilities are less plastic ("hardware"). We agree that the human brain is highly adaptable, people loose half their brains in early age and can still function. It doesn't seem that far fetched that such small differences as those between someone bright and someone not so bright is about adaptation. And perhaps the right type of curiosity.
- Alex3917 13y ago> Yet another story on parent-child correlations that dares not mention the g-word Except for that the Hart & Risley study measured the impact of genetics, and found it to be insignificant. Maybe Pinker should try actually reading the studies he's criticizing instead of just reading about them in the paper.
- bjterry 13y agoIf I am understanding your argument correctly in context, based on what you quoted, you are saying that the impact of genetics on g was found to be insignificant in the Hart & Risley study. That objectively seems not to be the case. First, the measurement outcome of the study was language use. They didn't attempt to measure IQ or g except when the children were 3. As far as I can tell from references, without access to the primary source, they did not perform any IQ tests on the children at later dates. I verified this with google searches within the book which only returned mentions of a test given at age three, but this is not iron-clad given google books' search mechanism. As far as I can tell, any claims that IQ was shown to be increased by the intervention are based on the very high correlation found between IQ and vocabulary at that age three test. Second, they only evaluated children (for language use) until the age of 9-10, which would be broadly consistent with the consensus understanding of psychometricians, which is that the heritability of IQ increases throughout childhood (implying in simplified language that non-heritable environmental factors have lesser correlation with IQ at adulthood, even if they have a greater impact during childhood). The study wasn't designed to measure the impact of genetics on g, so we shouldn't be surprised that it fails to measure it. It was designed to measure the impact of in-home language use on vocabulary acquisition, which it clearly does well. That effect has been further validated in meta-analysis, e.g. [1]. 1: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sbneuman/pdf/marulisNeuman.pdf http://www-personal.umich.edu/~sbneuman/pdf/marulisNeuman.pd...
- Alex3917 13y agoThe study looked at the impact of genetics on language acquisition, and found that at most the contribution of IQ to language acquisition could only be a few percent. They were not really looking at the impact of genetics on IQ, although I think this is mentioned at one point and they say genetics plays a larger part here.
- philwelch 13y agoIf there are genetic components to intelligence, presumably you can't do anything about them after you've had kids so what do they matter?
- Alex3917 13y agoC.f. the cited book by Hart & Risley, Meaningful Differences In The Everyday Experiences of Young American Children. "The more parents talked to their children, the faster the children's vocabularies were growing and the higher children's IQ test scores at age 3 and later. [...] [By age 4], an average child in a professional family would have the accumulated experience with almost 45 million words, an average child in a working-class family would have accumulated experience with 26 million words, and an average child in a welfare family would have accumulated experience with 13 million words. [...] Just to provide an average welfare child with an amount of weekly language experience equal to that of an average working-class child would require 41 hours per week of out-of-home experience as rich in words addressed to the child as that in an average professional home. [...] By the time children are 4 years old, intervention programs come too late and can provide too little experience to make up for the past." The basic idea is that the best determiner of academic success is the number of words per day spoken to the child (listening to audio/tv doesn't work, and is generally thought to be harmful, especially before age 3.) Essentially by the time kids get to kindergarten, there is already a 2+ year achievement gap between wealthy kids and poor kids, mostly for this reason. In addition to being enormous on its own, this gap then compounds greatly because of tracking, which tends to be introduced in some form or another starting around age six: "We found that first-grade ability-group placement can have persistent effects on children's achievement in school over a period of several years and may shape the expectations of children's performance held by significant others, such as parents and teachers. Whether these effects are instructional, social, or institutional, they are real, and they have implications for children's future schooling trajectories. [...] Instructional grouping may have the unintended effect of increasing inequalities in educational outcomes, largely by creating inequalities in educational resources and rewards." (I forget the author, but this is quoting in Riordan's book Equality and Achievement in the relevant section.) Anyway I'd definitely recommend reading Meaningful Differences, in addition to being a great example of how science should be done in terms of robust methodology, it's also one of the most insightful and important scientific findings of the last hundred years. The one thing I'd add though is that in addition to the total volume of language, which is the most important variable, there are a few other counterintuitive findings worth knowing about. E.g. reading aloud to your kids doesn't actually benefit their language skills, unless you purposely use certain linguistic constructs while reading to them. And there are other linguistic features you can use that are beneficial, that you wouldn't necessarily think to use without knowing the research, but I'll stop there though so as not to spoil it.
- adventured 13y agoI've always believed smart (developed capability) is taught, and genius (typically narrow high level mental capability) is born. And that all people at birth, except the relative few born with mental handicaps, are capable of being smart. A 100 to 115 IQ maxed out on potential and perspiration will get you very far in life.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoA 100 to 115 IQ maxed out on potential will get you very far in life, but not as far as a 130 to 145 IQ maxed out on potential will.
- lutusp 13y agoNot really. There's an upper limit to the survival value of intelligence. Not to oversimplify, but that limit is reached when the person says, "What? I should add to the world's problems by having children?" In all seriousness, the fact that the average I.Q. is located where it is, tells us that's the outcome natural selection blindly chose. And natural selection is always right.
- Kudzu_Bob 13y agoThe average IQ produced by natural selection depends on the environment. There is no ideal level of intelligence apart from environment. If the Earth had a uniform climate, terrain, and so on from pole to pole, this presumably would not be the case.
- lutusp 13y ago> If the Earth had a uniform climate, terrain, and so on from pole to pole, this presumably would not be the case. I think that would also produce an optimal IQ, just a different one. But all IQs, indeed all traits of living organisms, ultimately derive from the degree to which they contribute to fitness.
- 13y ago
- gault8121 13y agoThe process of expressing statements creates stronger synaptic connections (relative to reading statements). Communication is an essential part of learning and retaining ideas.
- malandrew 13y agoFWIW language gives children a tool with which they can discuss and more importantly reason about abstract concepts. The sooner you acquire a rich and varied vocabulary the sooner you can form a rich understanding about the phenomena in the world around you. Since kids learn fastest when they are young and that slows with age, a strong grasp of language means that they can absorb and understand more abstractions sooner. Measures of betweenness, distance, centrality and distance for nodes in a child's mental graph of abstractions are all likely to be better when you have a richer vocabulary at a young age. Even edges between abstractions can be linguistic abstractions like similes and metaphors, giving a child a quickness in recall of well understood abstractions to aid in the processing and understanding of novel concepts.
- eulerphi 13y agoEdges between abstractions? You lost me with your abstraction.
- opminion 13y agoThis is discussed by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate.
- tezza 13y agoI also do not know if this is true. It seems safe to presume that it is at least a mild benefit because it is cheap and easy to do. If it were more costly in terms of child aide resourcing, then we'd have to look a lot closer at whether we should divert resources to speak-to-the-child programs. --- Some schooling like Steiner education actively de-emphasises speaking to your children until 6+. Steiner teachers would not answer a child with the factual answer, but instead posing another question. Child: "Mum, why do planes fly in the sky?" Steiner Parent: "I Wonder?" The Steiner thinking is that by posing another question you don't 'crimp' the childs' creativity. This is strictly age related and once the child is a bit older the conversation becomes more mainstream.
- pitt1980 13y agothat seems to jive well with the article about not talking to your kid in directives: "In low-income households, parents commonly speak to their children in simple commands, and participant Aneisha Newell said the week on directives was particularly significant to her. “Instead of saying, ‘go put on your shoes,’ I can say, ‘All right, it’s time to go. What else do you need? … That gives my child the chance to respond, and say, ‘shoes,’ ” said Newell, 25, who has a 4-year-old daughter and a 10-month-old son and works for a company providing recess supervision and after-school activities in Chicago Public Schools. Newell said many of her friends and relatives think she’s crazy for talking to her daughter as if she’s an adult. “I can quote this: ‘Neisha, no one wants to sit and talk to the kids like they understand’ That’s basically the response I get." (I hate that such a thought provoking article couldn't get a better discussion than a college freshman debate over nature v nurture) in my experience that's one of the best take aways from the articles, I find even really educated parents tend to give alot of commands to their kids, I would recommend mixing that up my daughter just entered the 'why' stage, the other day, I flipped it around and for 10 or so minutes, even thing she would ask say, I would ask her 'why?' it was really facinating I think it ended with: "because I am a big girl" "why" "because I pee on the potty" "ha ha, yeah I guess so" ---------------------------------- second thought I've often heard that learning a second language forces you to relearn the basics of the english language similarly, I think that putting thought in how to comminicate with little kids forces you how to relearn communication skills with all people book recommendation: http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/0380570009/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1380714922&sr=8-2&keywords=how+to+talk+so+kids+will+listen+%26+listen+so+kids+will+talk http://www.amazon.com/How-Talk-Kids-Will-Listen/dp/038057000... one of the big take aways from that book was not to invalidate your kids feelings, even if it seems silly or stupid to you I find that to be a really useful comminication tip with adults too and one the most people don't do a very good job with
- drcode 13y agoI feel like every time a science article gets attention just because it "feels true" and which is based on just another retrospective cohort study (which can't untangle causation) it sends the wrong message to the public about what real substantive scientific research is like/needs to be like.