My oldest is turning 12, she has been doing calculus since second grade. Not "calculus" like taught in school to work through formulae, but rather she understands the concept of "infinite addition of infinitesimally small things". This is because she asks questions, and I give her full answers. The calculus thing started when on a train with me she asked if we can know the position of the train, given only its rate of acceleration. Yes, she did ask that in second grade. And we had an entire 1-hour train ride to determine that yes, it is possible and this is how.

Younger daughter has absolutely no interest in maths or science. She'll listen to daddy babble on about Arduino or Falcon rockets landing, and she'll even write some Python with me to solve a problem, but she has no real internal interest. Her grades show it.

From my experience with my girls, I would say "genetics and nature" are most important in bringing up curious people with good problem-solving skills (or however else you define "smart").

And now we get to the boy who proves otherwise. The woman I live with has a son in first grade, who when I met him a year ago knew not to put on his socks or soap himself in the shower. Why would he, when he could cry and his grandmothers and mother would do everything he sobs for? When he is with them, he cannot do simple addition or figure out how to open a door with an unusual handle. But with me, and only when he is alone with me, he multiplies, makes puns, eats more varied food, and solves puzzles.

The conclusion? I have none. Every child is different. Nurture them, answer their questions, but accept that some just won't be interested or able.

You can get smarter by reading and people should be told that.

I'm really interested in this because I have someone who keeps telling me this isn't possible. Do you have a source by any chance?

Intelligence as an aggregate term refers to a number of things which include but aren't limited to verbal acuity, spatial reasoning, abstract reasoning etc and the individual components differ from person to person. So you might be amazing at abstract reasoning and your friend might have above average verbal acuity.

I agree with the notion of intelligence being a social process. I think IQ isn't able to capture that all. Though that is not individual intelligence, it is collective intelligence but individual intelligence is a function of genetics+non-shared environment+collective intelligence is what I want to say.

You can see collective intelligence at work if you examine language. Certain concepts have a high power:weight ratio and can help you make better decisions than you otherwise would and those concepts first have to be discovered and then they have to diffuse throughout the general population and that happens via language.

I think the '80/20' or Pareto Principle is a fantastic example of this. It's very widely known and it helps you reason better about the world in a useful way. Before that was ever discovered, nobody could leverage it. As time ticks by our models of the world are slowly getting higher and higher resolution (if that makes sense as a metaphor) and that is filtering down into the general population.

Reading is fantastic. You can acquire in 4 days what it took someone 40 years to come to. I think regardless of your IQ the more data and the higher quality you can assimilate you can increase the resolution of your models of the world and that helps you reason about things more clearly.

I'm always really fascinated by people with learning disabilities who really buck the trend and go on to do amazing things academically. Sometimes the strategies they come up with for learning are unbelievable either in terms of creativity or sheer determination. There are some pretty extreme examples of this in Dr Norman Doige's The Brain That Changes Itself and a favorite recent example I encountered was David Goggins' talking about how it would take him 18 months to get through the textbook for his diving training, so he started memorizing it 18 months ahead of time by writing out every sentence in the book by hand 10 times each. I swear there is a tonne of unutilized headroom in the general intelligence of all populations.

I'm pretty optimistic about the general trend overall and I don't think having a low IQ in a general population or even as an individual necessarily consigns you to a life of mediocrity or that you will be unproductive as a society.

I'm not so sure. If you look at genius level people (Mozart, Einstein, Perelman, etc) pretty much all of them had supportive, smart, educated, and usually wealthy parents. Of course genetics plays a major role, but it's not clear that genetics would overcome indifferent development environment.

How much more rigorous of an analysis could you get?

The conclusion isn't that environment doesn't play a role. It does. The conclusion is that shared environment (family, school etc) doesn't contribute in any predictable way to the heritability of psychological traits (I think he says it's less than 1% ~ 2%). All psychological traits are on average 50% heritable (he says it ranges from 30% ~ 60% but it's on avg. 50%). The rest of the variance is from so called "non-shared" environmental differences. If you live in the same home with the siblings and go to the same school and are even in the same class, you still don't have exactly the same experience. A lot of your experiences are unique to and it's those things that shape you in combination with your genetics. He concludes that after all the research that has been done that non-shared environmental differences are unsystematic and unstable which means they are essentially random and you can make no predictions based on them and that implies you cannot systematically engineer outcomes for people.

I'm describing a particular scenario, and I'm not sure your studies have any data about it - the situation where a gifted child is developing in an indifferent environment (not being stimulated or motivated). No one claims we can turn anyone into a genius. But I'm pretty sure one needs very fortunate conditions to become one.

I'm not sure that's a very helpful thing to think about though. You don't have any reasonable expectation of controlling that.

I think one thing to consider is your scenario is personal choices made by the individual. If they have genius level IQ at least one of their parents has to have a significantly above average IQ and is, on the balance of probabilities, likely interested in educating their child.

But let's take the hypothetical that the home environment isn't encouraging at all. When you raise kids you don't spend every waking moment with them, there is plenty of time you leave them to their own devices and they choose what they do based on what's available to them and what interests them. Kids pester their parents pretty damn hard to get what they want. Let's assume there are pretty cold and uncaring parents. Well you will probably be in daycare, so you're not at home all the time and the chance you also go to a wretched daycare is not that high, so assume you are exploring and developing your intellect there. Then you go to school and that continue s. Maybe you are too far ahead and get bored and are diagnosed with a learning disability. As you get older you gain more freedom. Perhaps you discover the library and it makes you feel wonderful that you can learn so much and you don't get such good feelings anywhere else, so you spend more and more of your time there reading and nurturing yourself. Maybe, just maybe, you nurture yourself into a genius still.

It's not necessary.

The parents comment still stands I think. You kinda have to ask is it always the case that even in a bad home genius always manifests where it might? Or do you sometimes find that it goes entirely to waste. I'd venture to say it sometimes does go entirely to waste. On balance those kids probably go on to do well above average and it's likely you've never heard 99.999% of their names.

I'm not sure why people want to focus on outlier geniuses so much when debating the claim that there is something they as a parent can do to systematically engineer higher intelligence in their own children. I just don't think it's that useful.

IQ being just over 50% genetic is a consistent result from twin studies and other attempts to study the genetic influence.

what's the likelihood all the data over the last 50 years was faked?

No, what it actually means is that the specific environmental influences haven't been identified. “Shared environment” and “unshared environment” are big buckets inferred in “top down" studies from whether people who share some pre-identified candidate influences (family environment, school, etc.) get equal or different effects.

(There's also studies that work bottom-up to try to identify candidate specific environmental factors, but it's a long process of identifying potential ones and then working them into top-down studies where you can tease out the exact influence of each; we've actually identified quite a number of environmental factors, especially in early childhood, that are specific negative influences, and you can, given resources, engineer to avoid them.)

What a shock it would be, if such a complex object developed through interactions with its environment which are still largely illegible to current experimental methodology.

Annnnd... it turns out, it seems, the shared environment doesn't explain more than 1%~2% of the variance.

The methodologies for the twin studies and adoption studies outlined seem, as far as I can tell, like the best possible way to try measure that variable. How else might you do it?

What isnt measurable directly are the non-shared environmental effects which contribute the Lions share of the variance attributable to the environment and represent about half the variance overall. The other half being genetics.

The point is that non-shared environmental differences are essentially random and parents and schools can't manufacture them.

And yet we have the case of Lazslo Polgar who raised 3 daughters to be strong chess players, two of whom became world class and one who became the best female player ever [1]. How likely an outcome would this be if there had never been a chessboard in the Polgar household (nor a determined father to teach them)? Vanishingly unlikely.

Scott Alexander over at SSC has written about the Polgar household [2], even going so far as to arrange a community fundraiser to pay for Laszlo Polgar's book to be translated into English [3] so that he could review it. There is a lot to be said for the Polgar family's ethnic background being a major factor in intelligence, yet children don't learn chess (or anything for that matter) without exposure to it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

[2] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-iii...

[3] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/07/31/book-review-raise-a-gen...

Yeah, I don't think anyone has argued that obvious, easily identified elements of shared environment aren't obviously connected to chess skill. That's a very different trait than intelligence.

If I say "on average American men are 5 feet 9 inches" and you say "and yet we have Robert Pershing Wadlow who is 8 feet 11 inches"

That just doesn't make the case you want it to make.

We also have the famous Williams sisters of tennis fame who's dad was their coach too.

However, let's focus back on the original articles claim about the "science behind making your child smarter". Specifically we need to zero in on the "make" portion of the claim. That there is something that you as a parent can do to engineer the outcome of having your children be smarter than they otherwise would.

Let's evaluate the case of the Polgar sisters as it relates to that claim. Well, if look at the Williams sisters and the Polgar sisters together we could make the case that it might , perhaps, be possible to engineer the outcome of your children becoming world-class at something. In that case I would expect to see a pattern within categories and not just between, and I would also expect more data points. Perhaps more data points are out there and I would be interested to see as many as possible. The data we really need which we don't have is the data which would shed light on the survivorship bias - "how many tennis coach parents or chess grandmaster parents tried to engineer the same outcomes and failed?". For all the tennis parents out there and for all the effort those parents and their kids put in, their kids performance probably falls on some normal distribution of achievement in the sport. You can generalize that to whatever profession you'd like and for the claim to be true that there was something you could do to engineer the outcome you would want to see a high success rate or at least for the cases that we can find not for them to be statistical outliers. My guess is that they are, but I'm open to revise that position if I can see convincing evidence for it.

Next lets address the part of the claim that relates to intelligence. That there is something you can do to engineer the outcome of smarter children. Are the Polgar sisters smarter or are they better at chess? We have it on excellent authority that they are very, very good at chess. Lazslo's book is called "How To Raise a Genius!". Are they geniuses? Does it require a genius to play chess? Does it require a genius to become a chess grandmaster? Are the average life accomplishments of Chess Grandmasters in line with what we would typically call genius? Are you a genius if you can operate in the very narrow domain of moving plastic toys around a wooden board?

Not to diminish the accomplishment or belittle chess players. My point with that is I think there is a conflation between genius and expertise in a very narrow domain. We see natural born geniuses go on to pick a certain field and produce results in it, but we don't normally see parents training kids to be geniuses in a particular field.

Their story is one of my favorites and I think about it often. But you have to ask a few questions... does it generalize to different domains? Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn't. I suspect it does. Can it reliably be repeated and systematized? Perhaps, but I suspect not. Is that at all practical and useful to the average parent? Probably not?

I actually think his experiment and it's result make a lot of sense. He trained them from the age of 3. They fought hard with the government to be allowed to home-school them so they could focus on a curriculum of their choosing, so they had control over what the girls were required to do academically. They made them practice hours and hours a day. The girls, as I recall, loved it. They loved chess. That helps. Lazslo also likely devised good learning strategies. It was a completely unorthodox experiment.

Overall I'm not surprised he got those girls to where he did. I also think that as a pedagogical method it is stunningly impractical for society as a whole to try and model, so I'm not sure it's useful even though I actually think he's right on the money. The traditional education system is not really designed for education, it's designed for credentialing. You have to focus on the lowest common denominator in order to meet the required throughput with a given consistency of results. If you wildly adjust the parameters of the system to say OK what about if we only need to educate three people and we can choose the design goal of the education system? You can certainly wind up with the result that he did. Does that make them smarter? Or does that just make them hyper-capable in a narrow domain?

I think back to my own educational experiments over the years with regards to language learning and compare my results with the results of learning languages inside the university system. It's worlds apart in terms of results. I can personally do it 3x faster on average. I'm undertaking a new experiment in 2019 to deeply learn psychology. We'll see where that winds up. Suffice to say you can most definitely get out-sized results with regards to education if you're in control of the system, you're very capable at devising novel learning strategies and you aren't required to mass-produce results.

It's such an obvious claim that I feel almost embarrassed in making it, yet it's an important one. If Richard Williams had never handed his daughters tennis racquets, they would never have won Wimbledon. Similarly, it doesn't matter if your child scores 180 on an IQ test, if he never cracks open a math textbook in his life then there's no way he's winning an IMO gold medal.

Environment makes all the difference. Math textbook beats no math textbook every time. Same goes for tennis racquet and chessboard.

Since 2002, the USAMO has been a six-question, nine-hour mathematical proof examination spread out over two days. (The IMO uses the same format.) On each day, four and a half hours are given for three questions.

Maybe the high school math curriculum is way different in the US, but as a Canadian in second year of university studying math, I had never written a single proof until my first year calculus and algebra courses. I have a hard time believing any kid, no matter how smart, could qualify through that exam without opening a math textbook and only doing homework on normal math problems from high school.

You haven't shown it is 'preposterous' at all. You haven't shown anything. You have presented a single outlier and interpreted it poorly.

A meta-analysis of broad statistical analyses of a large number of people controlling for genetics and shared environment that looks into house after house after house and concludes that on average 50% of the variance of individual psychological traits is genetic, 1% ~ 2% is attributable to shared environment and the rest is attributable to non-shared environment isn't magically negated by one outlier appearing.

For starters in both cases the girls share 50% of their DNA. Your data point just isn't making the case you think it is. To figure out the variance attributable to shared environment you have to get a statistically significant result with the right controls in place in a well designed study. And then that has to be replicated across many studies to be considered reliable.

It doesn't make the case that siblings turn out much more similar than that in the general population due to being raised in the same home and/or going to the same school. The claim doesn't even suggest that you will never see a household where two siblings are very similar.

It's not at all obvious that if Richard Williams never handed them a tennis racquets that they wouldn't have won Wimbledon. You can't possibly make the claim there was a ZERO percent chance they wouldn't find tennis on their own or through school or through friends and get interested in it and become good. Or that they wouldn't find some other sport. Generalize the thought experiment across many many pairs of sisters where their father tries to coach them in something and what do you find? Does the conclusion you draw from a single data point have predicative power as it relates to what you would expect to see in the general population?

Is it equally as 'obvious' that if Roger Federer's parents never turned the on the TV where he saw tennis and became obsessed with it that he would never have become a tennis champion? His sister is a nurse too, not a tennis champion.

Robert Plomin, in Blueprint, makes the case that what our parents and schools do for us pretty much comes out in the wash as we make our way into adulthood and that throughout our lives our individual choices shape our environment greatly based on what we choose to spend our time doing and what who we choose to hang out with. And he states that our genetic propensities nudge us in the direction of making the choices that shape the environment that in turn shapes us. What parents and schools do has very little predictive power as to how their life will turn out.

Genetics may be a necessary condition to be a tennis champion but it definitely isn't sufficient. If Roger Federer had been kidnapped as a baby and raised by central African warlords, he would not have qualified for Wimbledon, let alone won it as many times as he has.

You've looked at a bunch of statistics and left your common sense at the door. People's lives are vastly more malleable through parenting than a mere 1-2%. Parents have the ability to give or take away any opportunity you could think of.

A kid with no known "piano playing genetics" (whatever that means) to speak of, adopted by a wealthy family that owns a grand piano and makes piano lessons mandatory for all of their children is going to be a hell of a lot better at piano than if Glenn Gould's (hypothetical) child were adopted by a poor family who could never afford lessons.

If you get 30 kids sitting in a classroom they share the room they're in and the words the teacher is saying. They don't share how much attention each one is paying, they don't share the same comprehension or interpretation of the content, they don't share the way they feel about the content, they don't share the thoughts they have about the content and they don't share the new connections made in their brain as the lesson progresses.

You can't systematize that. It's random.

Many gifted children come from upper middle class to upper class families. I’d wager majority of the people on this site are from those sorts of families and look around them and say “hey, none of us are geniuses! So, environment alone is not sufficient!” This is dismissive and misses the point (while ignoring most of these people went to good colleges and have good jobs, which typically is associated to “smart people” accomplishments).

What I think you’re getting at, is that you can be gifted and raised in an environment where your parents are uneducated and you lack a support systems to nurture your intellectual growth. You can be gifted and raised in an environment where you aren’t taking college level courses in high school and don’t have what it takes (on paper) to enter a good college and then potentially get held back from what your potential would otherwise allow you to achieve.

Even a kid that has a 160 IQ but went to a school where the highest math course they took is Calculus, will be behind a kid that took Calculus I-III, Differential Equarions, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, Real Analysis and Number theory at a STEM magnet school. Even if they are equally smart as them. The latter kid would likely get into top colleges, while the former kid may get into a State school. The latter kid will be seen as traditionally intelligent, while the former kid may be viewed as average given their high school accomplishments.

I think the demographics of people on this site assume everyone is from the same upper middle to upper class backgrounds and equally have the same educational opportunities like the latter kid.

What they don’t all realize is you can be really smart in a very bad environment and not achieve anywhere near what you’d otherwise be capable of.

Environment plays a big factor along with genetics.

The claim is that the differences are random and you cannot systematically manufacture environmental differences to engineer outcomes. At least not in a way that meaningfully generalizes across a population in any useful way.

In other words don't bother buying Baby Einstein.

That historical level of accomplishments requires the accumulation of skills as well as the opportunities to develop it for extended periods of time since childhood when neuroplasticity is at its highest. At the extreme end of the accomplishment distribution, both nature and nurture must be very high. If one of them is lacking, there would be many others whose work is as impressive and their names would not stand out.

It is likely that a kind of luck, defined as being at the right place at the right time in history that matches their particular mix of skills plays a role in such cases. There are currently many times more people in the world than at any time in the past, why don't we have significantly more geniuses, as defined by accomplishments? Situations external to the individuals contribute to their geniuses.

A lesson I took from this is to think strategically and work in an area you have the potentials to achieve world-class level, given your existing foundations and the possible circumstances you can choose to be in.

This also applies to skill development in kids as their options, though quite broad, are not unlimited.

That's the takeaway. Play to your strengths and nurture yourself. Help your kids find their strengths and help them nurture them.

How many supportive, smart, educated and wealthy parents in history have had children who never achieved anything resembling Einstein's work?

How many of extraordinarily accomplished people didn't have intellectually nurturing environment? How many supportive, smart, educated and wealthy parents in history have had gifted children who have not became extraordinarily accomplished people?

More importantly, how many gifted kids are not realizing their potential because their parents are too busy working, and their school teachers suck? Many times I've heard people mentioning they hate math then describing horrible ways it was taught to them in school. Often they don't even realize it was horrible.

You only get 50% of the genes from each parent. It's not likely both parents are geniuses.

And genetics only accounts for half the variance. The other half being non-shared environmental differences. The kids and their parents have completely unique experiences.