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Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the one to bring up the taboo:

It's totally possible that intelligent people have well paying careers and give birth to intelligence advantaged children. Mother nature loves bestowing fortune to the fortunate.

There is the pervasive "blank slate" approach to cognition, when there is plenty of evidence that your brain is not in fact a blank slate at birth. I mean people just passively accept that some people are just born physically stronger, or with a more athletic build. Especially if their parents are athletes, or it runs in the family.

But bring up intelligence along with genetic factors and everyone recoils and tenses up. It seems so plainly true, there is plenty of evidence to back it, yet its article after article, discussion after discussion of "Kids who read books end up being more successful" and never "Naturally smart kids enjoy reading books".

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I'm going to risk quite a lot of fake internet points to add to your point. Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture, and you'll be demonized. Yet study after study of children who were not raised by their natural parents suggest a very strong link between parents' and childrens' behaviour - even after accounting for externalities such as the area where they live or intake of e.g. lead. I would be very, very surprised if the children of intelligent people - who typically enjoy reading from what I observe - didn't themselves enjoy reading.

How is being raised by natural parents related to culture? Is there a particular culture which promotes or disapproves of this?

The usual direction this goes is, some cultures place higher or lower relative value on parenting your kids, and some cultures are in practice rife with absent parents as a byproduct of what they value.

edit: on rereading, I think the original comment about “natural parents” was trying to make a point about nature vs nurture, not about parenting.

Some "cultures" are just organs of a larger cultural superstructure, and they don't make sense to discuss in isolation.

I think they meant that studying children "not raised by their natural [i.e. genetically related] parents" is a way to tell that any differences are a result of parenting or culture rather than some other factor, like genetics or location.

Anyone who works with or spends time with children will tell you that all kinds of behaviors, including violence, are learned from adults and peers.

Once someone starts talking about “culture” though they're usually veering toward some really vicious stereotypes and wink-nudge fig leafs that help people hold & promote racist attitudes without thinking of themselves as racist.

  > Once someone starts talking about “culture” though they're usually veering
  > toward some really vicious stereotypes and wink-nudge fig leafs that help
  > people hold & promote racist attitudes without thinking of themselves as racist.

I would like to understand what you're talking about. Do you think that some people use culture as a proxy for race? Do you agree or disagree that different cultures have different values? Do you agree or disagree that culture is very closely associated by race?

To be clear, my original comment did not address any of this. I was seriously discussing culture, not race. But I think that I have something to learn from someone who takes such a stance as you have written, so I don't mind if the subject drifts a bit OT.

What’s a specific example of culture that would clarify your meaning in this post?

> Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture, and you'll be demonized.

> Anyone who works with or spends time with children will tell you that all kinds of behaviors, including violence, are learned from adults and peers.

That's literally everyone in the child's vicinity. What constitutes "culture" to you, if not the values shared and imparted by the influences around you?

> Once someone starts talking about “culture” though they're usually veering toward some really vicious stereotypes and wink-nudge fig leafs that help people hold & promote racist attitudes without thinking of themselves as racist.

You're calling him out for stereotyping...while confidently suggesting discussion of race/culture is usually racist, and anybody daring to initiate it is just a racist in denial? I don't even agree with him but holy shit man, rethink your approach.

I thought this was clear in context but obviously not. Obviously not all discussions of race/culture are racist. However…

> Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture, and you'll be demonized.

Is not all discussions of race/culture. Whose violent tendencies? What does OP mean by culture here? Unclear, it’s left to your imagination.

Should it read: > Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with culture [of teaching children violence] and you'll be demonized.

Or should it read: > Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with [violent people’s] culture, and you'll be demonized.

Or should it read: >Bring up violent tendencies or anything to do with [you know who I mean’s] culture, and you'll be demonized.

Why does OP expect to be demonized? Maybe because these are common racist shibboleths, in the same vein as someone trying to tell you about threats to “western civilization”.

Idk if OP actually meant it that way. Their meaning was vague, which is how these things work. A good tule of thumb with strangers on the internet though is that if it quacks like a duck it might be a duck.

> But bring up intelligence along with genetic factors and everyone recoils and tenses up.

I don't think this is true; general intelligence is considered to be highly heritable (40-80% according to Wikipedia). If you start suggesting that g is correlated to race then you'll get a lot of push-back, but as far as heritability not really.

To the degree that intelligence is affected by the environment, we should encourage things that help. Not starving kids and preventing them from ingesting lead both probably have a higher effect than reading, but I would not be surprised if reading doesn't at least cause some development to occur earlier (whether or not there are measurable effects that last into adulthood).

Nobody believes 100% blank state. The debate is about the percentage.

Also intelligence (as measured by IQ) is not linearly correlated with success. After a certain point the higher IQ you have the less likely you are to be successful.

> After a certain point the higher IQ you have the less likely you are to be successful

Being much smarter than the people around you must feel very isolating. The expectations placed on you since you are a child can't be easy to deal with either.

Thankfully I'm too stupid to have any of those problems.

I think the problem is that people tend to see the genetic factor as the predominant factor, and conclude that some kids aren’t worth the effort.

The balance between nature and nurture is tbd, but what we’ve seen is that humans have a lot of plasticity and the major factor is your environment.

Your athletics analogy is apt I think. Here’s the part that’s missing - who’s likely to be better at basketball? A gifted child with no training or an average kid who has spent years drilling and studying basketball.

Through this we can see that even average people can do really well at something if we give them a proper upbringing, something that many kids are denied today.

(For completeness, of course there are kids who are gifted and receive training. Those are gonna be fine and we probably don’t have to worry about them, they already excel)

The article does try to control for this via the education levels of the parents:

> Our results showed that reading for pleasure in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic status. It may also be helpful regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level. That’s because the effect didn’t depend on how many years of education the children’s parents had had – which is our best measure for very young children’s intelligence (IQ is partially heritable).

It seems that the article/study does not disagree with your point:

> Our results showed that reading for pleasure in early childhood can be beneficial regardless of socioeconomic status. It may also be helpful regardless of the children’s initial intelligence level.

The difference in attention being paid seems rather sensible to me. It's more useful information, because it's actionable. You can't alter the genetic make-up of your children post-facto, but you can nurture them.

Well, you can now. Just not legally or perhaps not even ethically.

The CRISPR-style editing you have to do very early after conception, though. I meant bigger version of "post facto" :-)

It’s dangerous ground, so people are leery of it. For example, if different races have at a population higher or lower average IQ, and IQ is heritable, that starts to look uncomfortably like the old arguments from a few hundred years ago justifying racism.

The point is not to compare people to each other, comparing people is purely secondary to the task, the point is to enable people as best they can be enabled. Even if you are low iq, you should still learn to read if you can.

People are worried about the outcomes of such thinking, not so much the accuracy of it. Especially since it's only one step removed from talking about cultural/racial association.

Kids who grow up in a household with a mother and father who read are more successful.

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