The Thirty Million Word Gap
literacy.rice.edu
literacy.rice.edu
That's quite a leap to say "this caused that," rather than them both just being a side-effect/characteristic of something else.
It is the height of shoddy science to look at correlated data points and proclaim a conclusion. But of course, much of what falls under 'social science' especially these days is shoddy.
>>> Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials
Abstract Objectives To determine whether parachutes are effective in preventing major trauma related to gravitational challenge.
Design Systematic review of randomised controlled trials.
...
Study selection: Studies showing the effects of using a parachute during free fall.
Results: We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention.
Conclusions: As with many interventions intended to prevent ill health, the effectiveness of parachutes has not been subjected to rigorous evaluation by using randomised controlled trials. Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute. <<<
If mine wasn't clear to you, the article starts with a claim that this 'word gap' is the cause of effects observed later in life. It's easy to see the attraction of this, simply talk to kids more, then better adults right?
This is hardly cutting edge research, this has been floating around for some time, long enough for people to do some 'interventions,' of talking to kids more and the like, what did they find? Not much difference.
Back to the drawing board then right? Nope, not in social science, in social science if the results don't match our desires, we keep trying to beat the square peg into the round hole until they do!
What makes this shoddy science is that they assert the 'word gap' to be the cause with no evidence of it being so, and ignore other explanations, things like perhaps there are heritable 'psychological proclivities' that lead to parents raising a child in a particular way, the child inherits some portion and arrangement of these 'psychological proclivities' from the parent, these same 'psychological proclivities' then have an effect on the things observed later in life.
So if the social scientists want to do something productive instead of ignoring or bemoaning the fact that there are genuine differences among people, they could explore ways of structuring societies and institutions such that better results for people of all 'psychological proclivities' can be achieved.
Some of the other data points that would be interesting to know would be:
1) whether or not the child has a parent or full-time caretaker in the home
2) does the child attend preschool
3) how much television/videos does the child watch
4) how regularly the child is read to
I would say that many scientists are good at acknowledging this, though they may get over eager and forget to emphasize the point once they get to their discussion (or when an article is summarizing a piece of research).
Whenever I read observational research, I just mentally insert "under a set of structural assumptions about the world" before every statement like the one you listed above, and everything is okay again :).
There's tons of evidence around stereotype threat/self-talk and performance[0] so there's a strong argument that being exposed to fewer words, and far more negative words, won't help these people be successful.
Consider a wealthy "Leave it to Beaver" one-income family: dad works, mom stays at home and drags the tots to an endless series of carefully selected enrichment activites, maybe drops them off at a Montessori day care a few days a week.
While at the other end of the social scale, single mom works two jobs to make ends meet and is barely ever home, so kids are left with a relative who's taking care of a whole brood of children, or plunked down in front of the TV and told to keep quiet.
We don't know how often these parents conversed with their kids outside these observation periods.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/starling-a-child-s-wearab...
On RF, the Starling uses Bluetooth LE, which uses about 1500 times less energy than a smartphone. We've also designed it so parents can tell it to only sync with their phones when they place it in its charging dock.
http://www.amazon.com/Thirty-Million-Words-Building-Childs/d...
tl;dr I think 30 million is an overestimate.
That said, if the word gap was smaller, the poorer children would be better off. The effects described above are statistic and only apply to most cases for a certain definition of most.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient#Income
He is an interesting person. If you're curious, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/gods-lonely-programmer gives you a picture of his life's work and some of the challenges that he faces.
I have no sympathy for racists, and I think it's a difficult tradeoff to make here between making HN an inclusive and welcoming place for people who don't happen to know anything about the human behind TerryADavis, and not discriminating on the basis of mental illness, but I think your comment goes too far into frank ableism.
It would work like this: My parents were poor, and had lower IQs. They didn't have time to read to me or talk a lot to me or spend a lot of time with me. They were too tired, just trying to make enough money to keep us all fed.
Now I've got kids, and I'm repeating the same pattern, partly because I'm tired from working too hard, and partly because that's the pattern I saw growing up, and so it's the default behavior for me.
Note well: This account is fictional, not my actual experience. It's not even anecdotal evidence for my position. It's a hypothetical explanation of how cultural baggage could be inherited between generations in a way that could affect IQ.
On this note I have found that replacing g/IQ with height in any conversation about human genetics make for a more civilised discussion.
Intelligence has been evolving and subject to inheritance far longer than that.
Believe it or not, the scenario you describe has occurred to researchers as an avenue of study, and they found it didn't amount to much(i.e. nature over nurture), see 'twin studies.'
This subject, intelligence, is really one of the triumphs of 20th century science, in that it has come to be quite well understood. It's understandable that you and so many others seem unaware of this, however, because to quote Steven Pinker, 'people hate the message.' https://twitter.com/sapinker/status/645301814955388930
Also, you may consider abandoning this notion of genetics and culture being in an uncorrelated relationship.
Cultures are simply people, that is they are emergent from the interactions of people, and since there are high IQ people and low IQ people, there are high IQ cultures and low IQ cultures.
http://people.virginia.edu/~ent3c/papers2/Articles%20for%20O...
See this thread (and the sub it links to) for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10298512
But second it's off topic anyway, if somehow it is on topic it would need to be explained better.