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
Perhaps it is just that you can't sell as many self help books if a lot of our brain's wiring is preordained.
The Library of Congress would disagree with you. The most bothersome realization I had in college was that, no matter how smart I was, how fast I learned, how rich I got, or how much I studied, I could never learn everything I wanted to learn. There's simply too much knowledge and too little time.
But a lot of psychometrics is pure, unadulterated, grade A horse shit.
Concrete, yes. Accurate, absolutely not. Any number of people have exploited the systematic errors in I.Q. testing for purely racist and political objectives.
> The literature on this subject is quite extensive.
Indeed it is:
It's like skimming a poorly-researched paper on vaccines, taking it as gospel, proceeding to claim that they cause autism, and yet reflexively responding with "citation needed" to anyone that dare call into question your insane ideas.
This is your evidence that Gould is a fraud? Nice dodge, but scientists and educated people will notice you avoided your responsibility to back up your words with evidence.
Here, since you apparently are completely inept and mind-killed: in Google, punch in 'Gould fraud'. The very first link is to a Nature.com page: http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/06/did_stephen_jay_gould_f...
The basics of IQ testing and its many misuses? Gould didn't invent this topic, and he doesn't define it. You remarks about Gould and IQ testing remind me of the creationists who think evolution was Darwin's private fantasy. If you take away Gould entirely, you still have any number of terrible examples of misuse of IQ testing for racist and other deplorable objectives.
Obviously psychologists are defensive about IQ testing (they should be), and Gould made himself an easy target. But this substitutes substance with ad hominem, a mode of argument you appear to prefer.
Gould missed things that happened after the writing of Mismeasure, and ignored some later developments that challenged aspects of his original work, but he made a number of important and legitimate points about IQ testing and its abuses, points that have stood the test of time.
Intelligence, like beauty, it is qualitative, not quantitative, which means at some level it is impossible to define.
Let's start by modestly noting that I routinely got the top score on Latin tests in high school (this was worth a small box of chocolates!). Someone applying the concept of "intelligence" might predict that I would also do well in math class. The traditional explanation for this given by Latin teachers is that learning Latin trains the mind to think logically, and getting high scores on Latin tests means that the training has taken. The intelligence-based explanation is that Latin and math are two of many tasks subject to the influence of g, the "general factor".
Moving to a more general level, the observation is that for many, many tests that appear to involve "mental abilities" to a greater or lesser degree, a person's score on any one of them is predictive of the same person's score on all the others. It's rare to find someone who is good at one and bad at another; instead, people tend to be uniformly good or uniformly bad (known in the literature as the phenomenon of the "positive manifold"). This suggests that there's one quality driving all the results, which we can call "intelligence", since that's the label commonly applied to people who tend to do well on those types of tests.
Corrections are of course welcome.
You're saying that if many people find you beautiful, there's a quality driving that, and it's "beauty". That's fine. Beauty exists. But aren't you almost admitting that it is a quality and therefore subject to what evaluates it? In other words, if 5 people call someone beautiful or ugly, are they beautiful? If someone is good at Latin and languages, does that mean they are intelligent? And if someone is not good at Latin, does that mean they are not?
Further, how many people do you have to find to say you are beautiful to be you are "defined" as beautiful? That's not a definition, that's just further confidence-building; the more you have the more confident you can be. But that still doesn't mean there's a point where you can say it is definitively so, and therefore you don't have a true definition.
That's not it.
1. Imagine that we have a system we're happy with for quantifying people's beauty.
2. Imagine that we discover that, in a sample population of 100,000 or so, higher beauty predicts lower willingness to wait in line, lower frisbee golf scores, and redder tablecloths in the home.
The idea here is that from (2) we conclude that (3) there is a single variable, "beauty", responsible for your rating in (1), but also responsible for your frisbee golf scores and the color of your home tablecloths. Now, in addition to using the system in (1), we could in theory rate people's beauty by visiting their home and checking the tablecloths, or by checking a frisbee golf score sheet (lest this sound ridiculous, I'll observe that a real test of intelligence in children consists of the instructions "draw a man", "draw a woman", and "draw yourself": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-A-Person_Test).
In the literature, "intelligence" or g refers to this hidden variable that explains performance across all the various IQ-driven tasks. To discredit the idea, you'd want to find a test which correlated positively with one well-accepted IQ test, and negatively (or zero) with another. Another commenter pointed out that, since we don't have a specific physical metric for intelligence, we can't rate people as having a certain number of "intelliunits". That's correct, and it means that an intelligence-discrediting test could have pretty much any content at all; all that's required is that it be positively related to one existing IQ test and negatively related to another. This turns out to be extremely difficult.
This somewhat murky nature of intelligence as defined means that you're rated in terms of a comparison to the population (we can't say "you have 70 intelliunits", but we do know how to determine that you're smarter than Bob, Carol, and Tom, but dumber than Jennifer). An IQ of 115 means, approximately, that you're smarter than 5/6 of the reference population, which is conceptually all European whites.
So I'll accept both premises. And for premise 1, let's imagine the system we use to quantify beauty measures pronouncement of cheekbones and thickness of lips, etc. Premise 2 remains untouched. Here's the problem: Angelina Jolie would score well, but so would Jocelyn Wildenstein (Google image search that), and Emma Watson would score poorly. We would come to wrong individual conclusions based on correlations made from larger sample sizes. In fact, Jocelyn Wildenstein might come away with the title of "the most beautiful person ever." (And if you think I'm joking, listen to any interview with a man named Chris Langan.)
Since intelligence is qualitative, like beauty or flavors of ice cream, it's about the mix of ingredients. It's about "character". So that while you can make good correlations on large sample sizes, it's that individual mix that defines "beauty", "tasty", etc. Alan Kay was wrong: point of view isn't worth 80 IQ points -- 80 IQ points is worth a better point of view. That point of view is the end result, the character that determines your intelligence.
Again, the most beautiful woman, say, may not have the combined biggest lips and highest cheekbones, but an especially good mix. If you look at Einstein and every other great thinker, the people we consider the smartest, they won't have the highest IQ scores, but they had the best intellectual character.
Well I read it and I thought it was interesting. Thanks.
Depends on how you define "dumb". I bet you'd be insanely good at hunting and eating enough prey to survive the winter.
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.
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.pd...
Congratulations, you've outed yourself as someone who has based all of their conclusions on a couple of feel good pop-science articles.
A 100 to 115 IQ maxed out on potential and perspiration will get you very far in life.
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.
In modern times, ideas are more influential than children. If you doubt this, try to tell me the names of Einstein's children. Give up? They're special and general relativity, and the photoelectric effect. They look charming in group photographs.
Would you rather have two children, or influence the thinking of a million people -- and their children? Which has the greatest effect on evolution?
Just for the record.
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.
"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.
Yes, it might well be the classic confusion of cause and effect, but your argument will have no effect on the OP, who is a psychologist.
For reasons that may or may not be obvious, as part of their training, psychologists are made blind to the possibility that they might confuse cause and effect.
"Final Report: Stapel Affair Points to Bigger Problems in Social Psychology" : http://news.sciencemag.org/people-events/2012/11/final-repor...
Quote: "In their exhaustive final report about the fraud affair that rocked social psychology last year, three investigative panels today collectively find fault with the field itself. They paint an image of a "sloppy" research culture in which some scientists don't understand the essentials of statistics, journal-selected article reviewers encourage researchers to leave unwelcome data out of their papers, and even the most prestigious journals print results that are obviously too good to be true."
EDIT: It's a shame, because a lot of what he says about psychology and the flaws in the science is useful and interesting. Psychology has a lousy history of weak science. And any modern researcher could be making mistakes while striving for good science. So it's nice to hear from someone who does understand the importance of rigour.
You know, you could address the topic, not the participants. To fail at this is the very definition of counterproductive.
> Psychology has a lousy history of weak science.
Yep. People have asked me why I focus on psychology, since all fields have embarrassing episodes in which the principles of science are ignored. The answer is that, although psychologists have clinics, they don't have enough science to justify their existence.
Sociologists are equally unscientific, but they don't have clinics.
Doctors also have clinics, but they're much more scientific.
This makes psychology a conspicuous gap in the system meant to protect the public from charlatans. But the gap is closing -- the director of the NIMH, the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country, recently decided to pull the plug on the DSM and, by implication, psychiatry and psychology.
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
And that of the fields that created it.
You are making a very big claim, so go and do the work to back it up.
Perhaps I have missed something, but I would expect that, if they did not have ideological blinkers on they would be saying things like:
"We are taking particular care to separate environmental and genetic factors here by including adopted children, [identical] twins reared separately, other children raised by other than biological relatives".
But I see none of this at all here.
You may be interested to read "The Nurture Assumption" for a detailed analysis of the effect of parents on their children. The basic conclusion is that if you do not seriously abuse your children you don't affect them much one way or the other. Steve Pinker's book "The Blank Slate" is also relevant.
The discussion usually is omitted in journalistic articles anyway, so it's easy to say for readers that the scientists just "have no clue".
For me it looks like this research is looking for interventions. They are not just trying to understand intellectual development, but what can be done to improve early education. They succeeded at that. They didn't succeed at satisfying romantic and simplistic understandings about a genetic basis for intelligence.
This is the gold-standard for testing genetic association, yes, but it is increasingly considered unethical. And is not perfect - twins are still likely to be placed in similar homes (typically both in foster homes, after all), which likely results in an overestimate of the genetic effect.
Modern statistics is about handling the data that is available: present-day researchers cannot rely on a statistically perfect study which would have to be generational and eugenic in scope.
This study would be a lot more interesting if it followed its sample into adulthood and compared IQ scores over time - it very well may do that, it's just not clear from the article that there is very much meaning here when put into context with other studies on childhood IQ.
But I have had a psychologist who specialized in the field say that the best predictor of adult IQ was receptive vocabulary. Meaning how many words does the child understand? Understanding words, even words you don't know how to use, predicts future intellectual development because it says who has the foundation.
Guess how you would build receptive vocabulary?
I am informed (by a Chinese teenager, so possibly not perfectly reliably) that vocabulary size isn't considered a concept in China -- there are words that everyone is expected to know, technical vocabulary, and words that no one is expected to know (by way of example, I use the word "vacillate" in my day-to-day casual speech, but that's unusual, and many native english speakers don't know what it means. That situation is not supposed to be possible in China).
For purposes of my point, the truth of the assertion isn't really relevant. Such circumstances, obviously, mean that vocabulary can't be a predictor of IQ after the age at which it's all been learned. Do you imagine that IQ differences would disappear along with the predictive value of vocabulary size?
Studying vocabulary as an adult is probably not going to get you very far. But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.
(He was telling this at the same time that he was telling me that my 7 year old son had the receptive vocabulary of an average 13 year old. So I was happy to hear it.)
This isn't true. For example, IQ as a 20 year old is a better predictor of IQ in high school than receptive vocabulary in grade school is. It happens that it's hard to observe the IQ at age 20 of a child who isn't 20 yet, but that doesn't change the strength of the predictor.
> But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.
You provide no support for this other than the fact that a large vocabulary at a young age is indicative of a high IQ later. However, a large vocabulary later is also indicative of a high IQ later. Applying the same logic, you should conclude that being exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're old is just as good (if not better!).
If you don't think studying vocabulary as an adult will get you very far, why do you think studying it as a child is different?
A predictor is something that you can measure and make predictions from in advance. Therefore by definition the eventual IQ at age 20 is not a predictor of future IQ for grade school children.
Now can we dispense with the semantic games?
> But having been exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're young seems to be a good thing.
You provide no support for this other than the fact that a large vocabulary at a young age is indicative of a high IQ later. However, a large vocabulary later is also indicative of a high IQ later. Applying the same logic, you should conclude that being exposed to a lot of vocabulary when you're old is just as good (if not better!).
Not indicative, predictive.
Receptive vocabulary is part of IQ. So of course having a large receptive vocabulary helps your IQ. But children with a large receptive vocabulary when young tend to have future increases in other mental abilities. By contrast children who show high abilities in other areas when young do not show the same improvement.
The theory that I was told is that children who can understand complex verbal things find it easier to learn from our education system. And children can't learn to use complex language without first understanding it.
If you don't think studying vocabulary as an adult will get you very far, why do you think studying it as a child is different?
The research on development that I've encountered indicate that there are specific developmental periods where we are particularly receptive, and where our abilities tend to increase suddenly. Starting with a large receptive vocabulary seems to position you well to make the most of these.
When you're older, studying vocabulary is unlikely to be bad for you. But you don't have the same developmental spurts ahead to try to maximize. Furthermore vocabulary is less likely to be a barrier for adults than children.
For example my son right now loves ants. He is learning things about ants that other children his age would have trouble with because he understands words they don't. But he doesn't have a better vocabulary than most adults. Any literate adult who wants to learn what he is learning about ants can simply pick up material on ants and read it.
My nephew started speaking early and quite well. He can name and knows lot of things, tens or hundreds of different animals, what he does, wants etc. Some other kids I've seen don't talk at all or they don't know any words.
It seems to me it's because my sister and his husband talk with him all the time, and explain when they're doing something together. I've been trying to do the same and talk normally with him and not talk down to him or some kid nonsense. He talks back and says if he doesn't understand.
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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?"
"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"
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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/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
Sure, you need to hold your tongue often to provoke more dialogue (not finish the kids sentences instead of him/her, etc); but in the end it still means much more talking than the 'default' amount.