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Comment by salmonellaeater | Hacker News Reader

> After three months passed, the families returned to our lab so we could again measure the infants’ attention to our storybook characters.

The researchers are rash to think that an effect observed after three months have passed will still be observable after five years or twenty. The psychological literature is full of examples of interventions that raise intelligence in the short term and have no long-term effect [1]. To date, I'm not aware of any childhood intervention (aside from adequate nutrition) that has an appreciable effect on adult intelligence.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284123208_The_envir...

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I don't know about intelligence, but the Perry Preschool Study comes to mind as an example of a controlled experiment that showed dramatic (in terms of practical, if not statistical, significance) outcomes that lasted for many decades. Also ones which matter more than intelligence, at the end of the day, such as income and jail time.

I'm not sure how much better than that you might expect to get, given the amount of effort and money involved in conducting this kind of study for even a small sample size.

The research is very good that, beyond basic nutrition, very little by way of environment has a significant effect on adult intelligence. Outcomes, as you say, are a different thing and you can teach people to have lower time preferences, increase conscientiousness, etc. but, unfortunately, these are typically not what we focus on in todays social interventions.

I thought that some childhood diseases are also having clear effect?

Lead pollution via cars and paint seems another one that I thought was fairly well supported.

Also Iodine-deficiency, though not sure that's covered by nutrition since it's now added to salt.

People seem very attached to the "you can't do anything" approach though. I find it hard to imagine what a society without education would look like though, even if the people all had high IQs, so presumably there's some benefit to passing knowledge onto the next generation?

Yes, if you poison a child it will have an effect on them.

Contra what you say, people (really, the liberal elite consensi) seem very attached to the "anyone can do anything" approach, but, once you avoid the obvious stuff and give kids enough food, it is simply not the case: raw genetics is responsible for 50-80% of adult intelligence. This is not a popular position, despite the ample evidence, and will get you thrown out of most sociology departments today.

Educational institutions are, generally, an effect of high societal intelligence, rather than a cause.

Yes, avoiding death and horrible diseases in childhood appears to have major effects on adult outcomes. When we speak about these things we are assuming a non-disastrous environment and discussing incremental changes, such as spending more on education.

> Yes, avoiding death and horrible diseases in childhood appears to have major effects on adult outcomes. When we speak about these things we are assuming a non-disastrous environment

But even in the developed world (well, the US at least), the poor very often do not live in a non-disastrous environment, so if that is what you assume, your assumption is flawed.

"Very often" is too vague a statement to respond profitably to. I will say that, broadly, I am against poisoning children.

But, if we are serious about the problem, we need to be honest about the large genetic basis of adult intelligence and then figure out how to humanely encourage eugenic reproductive patterns (or at least discourage dysgenic ones) in the poor.

> But, if we are serious about the problem, we need to be honest about the large genetic basis of adult intelligence and then figure out how to humanely encourage eugenic reproductive patterns

If the problem you are concerned about is "people with a low adult IQ exist" rather than "people are unfairly obstructed by social conditions from realizing their potential", yes, eugenics would seem to be an important part of the solution.

But for many people, the problem is not which people exist, but the degree to which we harm the potential of certain of the people who do exist.

I think we are not as far apart as you might imagine: I am concerned with both problems and, particularly, how the former might interact with the latter, as well as the potential of future people who will exist (who, after all, are far more numerous than the people who currently happen to be walking around.)

I would bet that we could agree on many social programs to help the poor. Where we probably disagree is on the amount that we think these programs would help fix the long term problem of poverty, and I might be more inclined to look to see if the program has dysgenic effects that would compound that long-term problem.

> The research is very good that, beyond basic nutrition, very little by way of environment has a significant effect on adult intelligence.

That's simply wrong; lots of environmental factors beyond nutrition (including pre- and peri-natal environmental factors, as well as post-natal environmental factors) are known which have significant effects on intelligence.

As well as the disease and toxic exposure factors discussed by other responses, this includes things like prenatal maternal stress, and childhood exposure to violence and experience of psychological trauma.

Perry Preschool results still look much less impressive at the age 40 followup (e.g. 36% of those w/ the intervention had been arrested 5 times vs. 55% of the control group). I think almost anyone who's seriously looked at this topic agrees early interventions have some effectiveness and are the sensible/ethical thing to do.

If you agree that we shouldn't expect to do "much better" than 36% being arrested 5 times, 35% not graduating high school and 40% having a job earning less than $20k/year, then you probably agree w/ the parent commenter.

http://library.intellectualtakeout.org/sites/default/files/P...

I do think I agree with the parent. That seems like a huge effect in social science terms.

36% isn't great in absolute terms, no. But if you're willing to accept improvement and not demanding utopia-or-nothing, reducing the rate at which members of a subpopulation are being arrested repeatedly by ~1/3 would be a big deal from a public policy perspective.

My criticism of that statistic would be different. Ones that are structured like "X% reduction in Y happening more than threshold level Z" smell of p-hacking. A simple "Gets arrested X fewer times (p=0.15)" is more trustworthy to me than "X% less likely to get arrested more than 5 times (p = 0.03)".

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