10 ms·

Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. Whi

• aptwebapps 13y ago
  This is a useless nitpick. It's not a scientific treatise, it's a public service message to try to change people's behavior. I don't believe for a second that the doctor believes that intelligence has no inherited component whatsoever. She is dealing with a problem in the real world using what tools she has at her disposal. Edit: Responding jamesaguilar's and true_religion's point about the title. Yes, that's true. I had just read the article and the title wasn't in the forefront of my mind. But when you get a title like that, you simply can't know whether it is meant as a bald statement or rather as something to pique the interest (or as link bait, if you aren't feeling charitable). So, if you elect to click the link, read the article to find out!
  • true_religion 13y ago
    Public service announcements should at the very least not contain false information in their titles.
  • jamesaguilar 13y ago
    I don't know if it really qualifies as a nitpick to directly contradict the article's title.
    • snowwrestler 13y ago
      He "directly contradicted" an article full of references to actual research, with a single personal anecdote. I'm not even sure it proves what he thinks it proves. Is he inherently smarter than the rest of his family? Or just more motivated? Or more interested in technology? Is success in computer programming direct proof that someone is very smart? I think a lot of programmers take that as received wisdom, but again I'm not so sure. Anyway, if a child is one of the rare born geniuses, talking to them a lot will not harm them, and it might feed their latent abilities. If a child is genetically normal, talking will help them too. There is no practical reason to object to this article.
    • DanBC 13y ago
      I think we need to ignore titles. HN doesn't allow changes to the title. People writing articles will chose a click-baity title. All titles suck.
      • heyitsnick 13y ago
        Minor nitpick: Very often editors pick the click-baity titles, not those writing the articles.
    • devb 13y ago
      The purpose of an article's title is ONLY to get a reader to start reading the article. Journalism 101.
    • scott_s 13y ago
      I think it qualifies if that's all you talk about. Correct the title, then move on to things that are actually interesting.
  • 011011100 13y ago
    So we "simply can't know" whether the title should be taken at face value, but at the same time the parent's point is a "useless nitpick" because it's irrelevant to the main point of the article. Nice. If we "simply can't know" what the point is, then how do you decide what's relevant?
    • aptwebapps 13y ago
      Yarg. I _knew_ I shouldn't have included the 'useless nitpick' line as it was needlessly aggressive. But to respond: No, not at the same time. As I said in the edit, the title slipped my mind. Without the title it came across as a useless nitpick, with the title it does not even if I find it an uninteresting avenue of discussion.
  • mathattack 13y ago
    Exactly. This is one determinant of intelligence that we can impact, but it's not the sole determinant of intelligence.
• crygin 13y ago
  Congratulations, you've discovered the bell curve (plus a healthy dose of physical attributes that provide you with positive advantages in our society). We congratulate you for being on the nice side of it.
• cmyr 13y ago
  Those words are salon's, not the researchers, and they're a headline at that. I wouldn't assume that "it's nurture!" is the ultimate conclusion of this work. I'd suggest they're saying something more along the lines of, "Children who converse less then their peers are less likely to excel". There is zero doubting that 'nature vs. nurture' is a complicated question (and a false dichotomy) and I don't think this article is making any claims outside of it's pretty narrow (and pretty interesting) focus.
• joelgrus 13y ago
  I'm totally willing to buy that talking to kids is good for them ("massively positively" strikes me as overstating the case) and that screen time rots their brains and their ability to ... um ... I forget. But, as a parent, I have experienced that children are born with a ton of individual personality that is highly noticeable within days. It would be pretty much defy logic (as well as genetics) if some sort of predisposition for intelligence weren't part of this.
• nightski 13y ago
  Could it of been the fact that you were in such an environment, and had such a desire for something different be the source of your inspiration? I am not even talking money necessarily here, but the lack of intellectual stimulation? That made the doses you received all that much more intoxicating? All I am saying is that a particular environment can affect someone in unexpected ways.
  • codex 13y ago
    Why do you think his other family members did not share this desire?
    • rustynails77 13y ago
      I come from a unique environment that has allowed me to draw some very interesting conclusions. I am from a family of 3 children. Two adopted and one "unexpected" natural birth. One of the three of us has been in prison many times (and we have no other relatives that I know of that have ever been in trouble beyond the occasional speeding/parking ticket). The other of the three of us is a carbon copy of their biological mother (dress sense, social sense, taste in music/books/films, mannerisms, extreme anti-social behaviour, etc) - they hadn't spoken until my sibling was 25 - so that was 25 years without contact, visibility, etc - and they still turned out to be a near carbon copy. I followed in my parents footsteps in many ways, more than I realised at the time. All three of us agree that we got the same toys, the same lollies, same schooling, same opportunities, etc... so we can only put the differences down to nature - and I can tell you that I'm a big believer that nature plays a BIG role in defining what we are... I've often said "we don't just LOOK like our parents, it's also the nuances in the structure and wiring of our brains". I have a few kids of my own, and while they are quite different (nerd v/s jock, introvert v/s extrovert, etc) - there are many similarities, unlike my siblings and I.
      • johnchristopher 13y ago
        Did your parents know what the biological parents of your sibling were like ? I am playing the Pygmalion card. Regarding your brother who has been in prison many times: adopted boys I know of are often in trouble. I think it's really hard to adopt and raise a child born from someone else. Some things don't seem to click. I wonder what the statistics are telling about adopted children's success in life and how it is linked to biological parents and the adopting family education.
• protomyth 13y ago
  The title is bunk, but interaction is critical. Also, screenings (starting withe the Denver and going to something like the E-LAP / LAP) are an important item. Correcting an issue at the earliest possible age is important. Kids are different and are individuals. Genetics, nutrition, interaction, and care all count.
• dragonwriter 13y ago
  > Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. You don't understand the claim correctly. The claim is that environmental factors (particularly being talked to) are essential to development of intelligence, not that environmental factors determine intelligence entirely. The distinction between necessary conditions and necessary and sufficient conditions is pretty critical.
• tspiteri 13y ago
  Children are not born smart in much the same way that children are not born strong. Of course, some children are born with more potential smartness, just like some children are born with more potential strength. But they still need the environment to reach their full potential. There are some outliers who become really smart despite the lack of help from their environment, but probably they would have become even smarter in a helpful environment.
  • clarkm 13y ago
    A better analogy is height. Given some minimal level of nutrition, a child's adult height can be extrapolated quite accurately from their parents' genomes. However, if a child grows up in abject poverty, all bets are off. See Judith Rich Harris' The Nurture Assumption [1] for details. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nurture_Assumption
    • bayesianhorse 13y ago
      However we barely understand the genetic factors. In humans it can be pretty difficult to control the environment. And then we assume we can understand the genetics of intelligence, when we barely understand either genetics or intelligence itself.
      • clarkm 13y ago
        You can keep saying stuff like that, but I hope you're not using it as a pretext for ignoring the latest scientific developments. Have you heard of GWAS? They've had some major breakthroughs over the past few years, and have recently had some interesting results with regard to educational attainment. From Science: https://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6139/1467.abstract https://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6139/1467.abstract If you want some more information, here's a good article from early 2012 summarizing the previous five years of findings: http://www.cell.com/AJHG/retrieve/pii/S0002929711005337 http://www.cell.com/AJHG/retrieve/pii/S0002929711005337
    • hamburglar 13y ago
• mmanfrin 13y ago
  'I was disadvantaged ipso facto I am simply genetically gifted'. Could it, perhaps, be that those causal elements in your environment do not work precisely in the way you presume to work? That it's not simply a 'good' upbringing that raises good people? Do you not -- for instance -- have a drive to succeed because of your prior disadvantages in life? Is not the lack of early-life support a driver of your own ambitions?
  • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    Oh bull. We know intelligence has some genetic component, or else a sufficiently trained monkey would do calculus. We just don't entirely know what "intelligence" is well enough to measure its precise heritability.
    • corin_ 13y ago
      In a debate about how things work, "you're wrong because we know you're wrong" isn't a useful argument. As to comparison to other animals, we also know that there is a genetic component to being able to live under water, as fish can do this and humans can't, this doesn't mean some humans are better than others at living without air.
      • eli_gottlieb 13y ago
        The difference being that humans aren't descended from fish, but are descended from apes. We know that some kind of incremental genetic "improvement" to our intelligence must have evolved and then become universal throughout the populations that speciated to become modern humans.
        • corin_ 13y ago
          First, to be pedantic, we aren't descended from apes, just very closely related to them with a common ancestor. Second, is there any evidence that the evolutionary history of intelligence was linear? How do we know that there wasn't a binary-like change where one generation didn't have our level of intelligence and the next did, and all humans today are descended from that single change, as opposed to it happening gradually?
• xenophanes 13y ago
  You claim to "demonstrate that it's a lot more complex than just environmental factors". But the correct conclusion from what you said is that you demonstrated that it's a lot more complex than just the environmental factors that you thought of. You seem to be concluding genetic factors ("always had an intrinsic motivation"). But "not all environment" does not imply "some genetics", that is a false alternative. There are more possible factors than just environment and genetics. One is human choice (sometimes called "free will", but that term has a lot of baggage). I do not agree with the perspective of attributing everything to factors, rather than a person's own choices. Genetics certainly have a role in some sense. If you had different genes, you would have been a cat instead of human, and would not have the brain to be a software engineer. But the general idea that life is very complicated, and the results of people in similar situations vary -- true so far -- simply does not imply (partial) genetic determinism. "Environment", or more generally alternatives to genetic determinism, is/are very subtle and complex. The world is vastly complicated, "environment" refers to a million factors most of which no one documents. You had, in many respects, a different life and environment than anyone else had. Everyone has a unique environment at high precision. So whatever result you get, what would that prove? You wonder how a person with several factors against them could be intelligent and successful? You can't think of any ways, besides genetics? There are a million ways. Poverty, non-wonderful discouraging parents, poor teachers, and whatever else are not one's whole life. You met many people, some more helpful than that. You read some books. Even just an ordered list of what books you read up to age 20 might be unique. People don't start the same, but even if they did, things would quickly branch, again and again. 30 identical students sit in a classroom. The teacher explains something. By sheer randomness, if nothing else, some students understand it today, and some do not understand it yet. Then the next day the teacher gives a second lecture. Everyone hears "the same" lecture, but they have different situations (having understood or not understood yesterday's lesson), so different students experience "the same lecture" in different ways due to their different situations and perspectives. Similarly, in general, people in "the same environment" are not actually having the same experiences.
  • defdac 13y ago
    Reading this gave me goose bumps since you managed to describe and explain something I've been thinking about for a long time.
• SeanDav 13y ago
  You admit that your experience is an outlier ("and I'm definitely the only one like this from my family, a clear outlier"), yet you appear to be trying to use your experience to disprove the effect of environment on intelligence.
• Ma8ee 13y ago
  The fact that they were technophobic might have been what saved you, since instead of sitting in front of the TV or computers, people were actually talking to each other.
• maxerickson 13y ago
  Peer group?
• alphydan 13y ago
  The article gives an 'example' where the child of the janitor is 'smarter' than the one of the doctor or college student. So the question is, did your parents talk to you? (not where your parents astrophysicists?) >> “Now I know I can just have a regular conversation with her,” Adams said. “Just ask her about her day, even if I can’t understand half of it.” If your parents mostly ignored you, plugged you in the TV, didn't ask you open questions and left you to yourself since a very early age then you may be an exception. (of course your memories from 1 - 5 may not be all that accurate either. What do your parents say about talking to you and making you talk?)
• ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  Haven't you just excluded nurture ("can't come up with a single environmental influence that explains this") and nature ("I'm definitely the only one like this from my family, a clear outlier")? If you didn't get if from your family via genes, and you didn't get it from the environment, where else is left? Everyone else seems to be reading your comment as pro-genetics, but given the quote above, I can't see that.
  • mattmcknight 13y ago
    Genetics is complicated- it is possible for offspring to develop traits that were not present in either parent.
    • ZeroGravitas 13y ago
      So is nurture, people go to school in different years from their siblings (and parents) etc. and so on. So it would be a lot stronger case for genetics (assuming it's supposed to be one, and not just a tangential anecdote) if they'd said "No one ever spoke to us but all 7 of my brothers and sisters became top engineers, just like our parents, uncles and cousins (that we'd never met)". As it stands it seems to recommending having some kind of fortitude (which isn't taught via nurture, or inherited via genetics) as the key element.
  • Filligree 13y ago
    Chance. Not saying that's it, but when you have someone self-reporting on a forum like this, claiming to be an outlier, there's probably a good bit of luck involved.
• Datsundere 13y ago
  You probably wouldn't have an intrinsic motivation and desire to be a biologist. You just happened to pick up technology, thought it was cool and enjoyed it. Besides, humans tend to do things they are forbidden to. Your parents didn't stop you from studying "tech-related things" did they? Well, maybe they did but they must have stopped it once they knew it was futile. Otherwise you wouldn't be what you are now. If your parents tied you up, beat you up etc. to forbid you from studying tech, then that's an environmental factor. Them not doing so is also an environmental factor. Believing something is predestined is bullshit. Genetics might give you a better memory, but it doesn't make you a hard worker. Your success depends on your values, priorities and motivation to do so.
• Mikeb85 13y ago
  To see the effects of environment you only need to go to a 3rd world country... Reading is a skill that is generally taught (and very difficult to learn without being taught), so when someone is illiterate, it greatly affects their ability to learn anything. Likewise, people CAN overcome their disadvantages, depending on how severe the disadvantages and how motivated (overcoming negative parents is easier than overcoming illiteracy and being forced to labour in a sweatshop at 10 years of age)... This article is merely a less extreme example of how taking an active interest in your child's education can help them develop, which is 100% true. For me, personally, I could read/write/speak 2 languages at 4 years of age, in large part thanks to my early childhood environment.
• vanderZwan 13y ago
  > Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. While I'm sure talking to ones children contributes in a massively positive way to their IQ, I think it's extremely inaccurate and ignorant to the existence of real-world outliers to claim that it's the only factor. If the stunted growth of the pre-lingual deaf that are denied access to a sign language community are any indication, it's probably the most important factor of all, and I think that was the point of the article. I will quote a section of Oliver Sacks' great book "Seeing Voices" that further illustrates this: The origin of questioning, of an active and questing disposition in the mind, is not something that arises spontaneously, de novo, or directly from the impact of experience; it stems, it is stimulated, by communicative exchange - it requires dialogue, in particular the complex dialogue of mother and child. It is here, [Hilde] Schlesinger finds, that the dichotomies start: 'Mothers talk with their children, do so very differently, and tend to be more often at one side or the other of a series of dichotomies. Some talk with their youngsters and participate primarily in dialogue; some primarily talk at their children. Some mainly support the actions of their offspring, and if not, provide reasons why not; others primarily control the actions of their children, and do not explain why. Some ask genuine questions ... others constraint questions ... Some are prompted by what the child says or does; others by their own inner needs and interests ... Some describe a large world in which events happened in the past and will happen in the future; others comment only about the here and now ... Some mothers mediate the environment by endowing stimuli with meaning [and others do not].' A terrible power, it would seem, lies with the mother to communicate with her child properly or not; to introduce probing questions such as "How?" "Why?" and "What if?" or replace them with a mindless monologue of "What's this?" "Do that"; to communicate a sense of logic and causality, or to leave everything at the dumb level of unaccountability; to introduce a vivid sense of place and time, or to refer only to the here and now; to introduce a "generalized reflection of reality," a conceptual world that will give coherence and meaning to life, and challenge the mind and emotions of the child, or to leave everything at the level of the ungeneralized, the unquestioned, at something almost below the animal level of the perceptual. Children, it would seem, cannot choose the world they will live in - the mental and emotional, any more than the physical world; they are dependent, in the beginning, on what they are introduced to by their mothers. Truth of the matter is, we are born with an unfinished brain that requires nurturing interaction with other humans and with language to truly develop. What's saddening is that Hilde Schlesinger's research is already decades old; this book is from 1989. We have known this for ages and society still has to catch up.
• gdilla 13y ago
  I wonder if epigenetics [1] can also explain some of what you're saying. Genes can be regulated in different ways - and that can explain differences in identical Twins. [1] http://www.livescience.com/25431-gene-regulation-homosexuality.html http://www.livescience.com/25431-gene-regulation-homosexuali...
• BigChiefSmokem 13y ago
  Even poor kids saw the inspiring Apple ads from the 90s... ;)
• EliRivers 13y ago
  Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment", if I understand the claim correctly. I don't think it is equivalent. Saying "Children aren't born smart" means no more than that; they don't come out of the womb smart. The degree to which the smartness they develop will depend on an innate potential to be smart and the degree to which it will depend on environmental factors is not addressed by the statement.
• drzaiusapelord 13y ago
  Unfortunately, we live in an age where its politically incorrect to remotely hint at genetic determinism. Men and women are exactly the same. Dumb people and the ultra smart are exactly the same. Articles that contradict this don't get much traction in the media and certainly don't get on the front page of HN. We're probably a generation or two away before we can accurately look at these issues without activist groups and other political groups declaring them invalid because of misplaced idealism. Somewhere there's a modern day Galileo saying "but some children are born smart!"
  • yetanotherphd 13y ago
    The problem is subtler and worse than simple censorship. A person who concludes the "wrong" casual effect from the data is branded a racist or at least under suspicion. A person who concludes the "right" causal effect might face criticism but at least is not in danger of being labeled an evil person. Such a lopsided set of incentives creates a very strong bias. In my opinion this bias is much stronger than the bias ("racism") that it evolved in response to.
• dllthomas 13y ago
  Intelligence is entirely environmental: if your environment contains nano- and bio-tech that will rebuild your brain to be physically identical with another person's, you will have the same IQ.
• igorlev 13y ago
  I read it as the author of that quote explicitly _choosing_ to say that to make the message simpler to his target audience. I think the author fully understands that in reality it's a mix of both nurture and nature but there's plenty of unfulfilled potential in those kids so telling a little fib will help to push them to maximize their potential...and right now no one can definitively predict what that max is just by looking at their genetics
• bryanvick 13y ago
  Are you implying that Software Engineers are smart? I ask as a Software Engineer who came from a family of techno-phobic Pipefitters. Don't we just have a particular kind of intelligence, and they may have theirs?
• sliverstorm 13y ago
  Saying "Children aren't born smart" is equivalent to saying "Intelligence is determined entirely by one's environment" No it isn't. Think of a young mind as putty. When born, it's just a blob of putty. Children aren't born intelligent. As the child grows, the environment shapes the putty. Some children have different putty than other kids- maybe a little more, a little less, a little firmer, a little more plastic. Thus, intelligence is determined both by what you have to start with, and your environment. You don't have to be born with intelligence, to be born possessing the raw materials to create great intelligence. It's not like Usain Bolt was born the fastest runner in the world. He became fast, partly thanks to what he had to work with, and partly thanks to his environment. That's the point here.
• joshstella 13y ago
  You might be interpreting the "claim" more rigidly than is warranted in a popular publication. Personally, I think children are born potentially smart, but intelligence must be developed constantly in my experience. I have found that many people limit their own intelligence by not stressing themselves, and I suspect the same is true for outside influences. There is a reason people associate bookishness with intelligence and I don't think it's a one-way relationship. I have known a few people whom I believe are not potentially smart, but not that many.
• Thereasione 13y ago
  It is "Nurture over Nature" approach. From wiki about Laszlo Polgar, father of Polgar sisters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r : >He is interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that "geniuses are made, not born". >He home-schooled their three daughters, primarily in chess, and all three went on to become strong players. An early result was Susan's winning the Budapest Chess Championship for girls under 11 at the age of four. Also his daughter, Judit, could defeat him at chess when she was just five. Judit became the best female chess player ever and was the youngest GM back then when she was 15.
• maroonblazer 13y ago
  Pinker, in "The Blank Slate", cites research that shows that in the nature-vs-nurture debate it appears to be 50/50. Interestingly, of the nurture half, peer group has a much larger influence than parents. Given that, I'm curious to know what kinds of friends you had growing up and whether they might account for some of your 'intrinsic motivation'.