So, the belief isn't exaggerated?
Makes sense; IQ is heritable.
Makes sense; IQ is heritable.
Another data point.
I had the highest SAT score in my school the year I graduated and the second highest in the county - not bragging it is consistently listed as one of the ten poorest cities in the US.
Do you think it was because I was so smart only or because my mom was not only a high school math teacher and whose best friend was an English teacher, they also taught SAT classes for years and I didn’t have to go get help before school from an overworked teacher who volunteered to help kids, but I could get all the help I needed at home?
If you start out on home base and end on second you did well. If you start out on second and finish a home run you did well.
Let's please not have this attitude that the only people who can take credit for any kind of accomplishment are those born in awful circumstances. It's just not true. Everyone has the opportunity to achieve something relative to their circumstances, and many do, and deserve credit for it, at all levels.
That's near the opposite of what I said. Please don't lazily pattern match me to some strawman argument and attack on that basis.
I'm happy to continue if you want to respond to what I actually wrote.
>too many people who have had those advantages think they are “self made”.
Implying that none of them are actually self-made. Which would mean that people born into decent circumstances cannot be self-made. In other words, they cannot take credit for any kind of accomplishment.
It's a reiteration of a common position; my interpretation is not extreme.
Perhaps I misinterpreted something, in which case I'm happy to be corrected. In any case, I certainly didn't explicitly reverse the meaning like was done to me.
HN commenters tend to ascribe a lot of value to IQ. The problem is that proxies for IQ like the SAT are very fallible. The $800 my parents invested in a Kaplan course, increased my score on the SAT by 6 percentile points.
You could have had him do that test prep for free, without paying a tutor. Or gotten a cheaper tutor, a college undergrad, instead of some fancypants professor.
Edit: To add some clarity about what I am saying: Preparation can certainly improve test scores. For example, I did poorly on the SAT verbal because I didn't even have the vocabulary for many questions. I was even, I dare say, unpracticed at reading. Actually preparing would have improved my score.
Also, some "professor" doesn't have access to special mind altering techniques that other tutors don't have. Teaching and test prep is not rocket science.
And general intergenerational income mobility isn’t that high. Also, statistically (and no fault of their own), English as a second language students don’t do as well as native born speakers (https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/02/23/512451228/5-milli...) so I fail to see the relevant of bringing up recent immigrants.
This is a serious question. I didn’t score well on the SAT and didn’t have prep tutors despite having very intelligent parents and lots of prep.
0: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-...
0: https://admission.stanford.edu/apply/selection/profile14.htm...
Why? They gave me a full ride scholarship including room and board even though I stayed at home. I really just wanted the piece of paper to get pass the HR filters of “needs a degree in CS”. My first job out of college based on an internship I had the year before was as a computer operator. I took it so I could move to the “big city” where I still live and figure out my next steps.
So there is that....
I still feel the sting of not performing well on my SAT to this day, and it's been 5 years! It's like a mark against my humanity.
And I had the most “intense” help you could have - a parent who had all of the know how and resources to ensure her child did well in school and on the SAT. How many kids struggling in Calculus or Trig can get as much help at home as they could possibly need. Did I mention that I had an aunt that taught science at my school and that one of my math teachers were taught by my mom?
I have no idea what point you are trying to make. There seems to be zero consistency to your various remarks.
I didn’t have to go get help before school from an overworked teacher who volunteered to help kids, but I could get all the help I needed at home?
And
I know plenty of people who took the test more than once, got help by going to “SAT prep” classes before school etc. and didn’t get any better.
The difference being that while SAT prep was offered by overworked teachers who volunteered to help a class full of students before school started, that was a lot different than having one on one help with a college professor. Also, even the kids who could get help before school were fortunate enough to get a ride to school. Some students couldn’t make it before school because their bus came too late and their parent(s) couldn’t take them because they had to be at work.
Have you ever thought about instead of just lashing out you could ask for clarification when you don’t get the point - that others actually did get?
And how is it “bragging” to say that I had relatives who were teachers and I did very well in what I admitted was one of the poorest cities in the country?
In fact, growing up in the segregated south as my relatives did, one of the few and ways to guarantee a middle class job was to go into education. My relatives were among the first to actually be able to teach in an integrated school - we aren’t talking about a lot of “privilege” here.
I stated that I have no idea what your point is and explained why I'm confused. I consider it bragging because you say that your stepson was simply fortunate ("privileged") to have someone able to pay for it, talk about doing well yourself without monied solutions and also state that it is your stepson, so, no, he didn't inherit your IQ. At every turn, it paints you as the only person with some kind of virtue, whether smarts or money to spend, and dismisses the idea that it genuinely makes other people "smarter," denying them a claim to virtue.
I think the overall picture painted here is one where you see yourself as innately smart but your stepson as just lucky his mom married a rich man who could "open doors" with his money.
I still don't really get what your point is. Your remarks strike me as very inconsistent.
But, in the grand scheme of things, it isn't at all important that I get your point. I'm just a stranger on the internet.
I’m a bog standard “Enterprise Developer/Architect” who makes the median income of “Senior Software Engineer” in a major metropolitan area that’s not on the west coast posting on a site where plenty of people work for companies where the starting pay right out of college is $50k - $100K more than I make. I’m self aware enough to know that HN is the wrong place to brag about either how smart you are or how much you make.
I also mentioned that I grew up in one of the ten poorest cities in the US and that my mom was a high school teacher - not exactly a high paying job. By the way, my dad was a factory worker. I didn’t come from a “monied family”.
I also never mentioned what my IQ was. My wife was already living in the one of the most affluent areas of our state raising two kids. She was doing fine before she met me...
Am I “innately smart”? I don’t know. I’m just a bog standard full stack Enterprise Developer. I’ve never started a company or come up with a great money making idea.
This is getting overly personal and completely pointless and you being personally defensive in no way clarifies what point you were trying to make about tests or IQ or whatever.
And it's really not important, so I'm leaving this discussion at this juncture.
As far as you not “recognizing me”, I don’t pay any attention to who I respond to accept to see if I’m responding to the same person on the same thread. I’m done with this.
I'm undecided as to whether or not I agree, but she/he's been very consistent in their stance.
Also, accusing someone of "bragging" when they're providing anecdotal evidence for their point of view assumes bad faith where there may be none.
This isn't actually true. Most people improve if they take the same style again which is why Mensa, for example, asks that you wait a year before re-taking their proctored tests.
One source of many: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1932-00905-001
"When a Stanford-Binet test is repeated within a period of three or four months the experience gained while taking the first test appears to result in a median gain of four or five points in the second IQ."
The SAT in particular was developed as an IQ test.
I am off the top of my head unaware of any IQ test that you can't get better at by studying, but there may be some.
In this parenting style, many interactions go sort of like this:
(Points at bird) "Do you see that, what is that?"
"Bird!"
"Yes but what kind of bird? That's a Robin... A robin"
...
Repeat over and over all day.
Note that what is being taught here isn't just taxonomy of birds, but also it's a kind of rehearsal for test taking. In a test you get asked questions, and then you have to provide the answer. It's a type of performance, a type of structured conversation.
Other parenting styles are more hands off. In some cultures parent's don't even really talk to their kids until the kids start speaking on their own.
Now which parenting style would you predict would better prepare a kid for getting a high score on an IQ test?
1: It's actually called:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concerted_cultivation
Which parenting style cultivates more curious, intellectually-minded children is probably a better question.
We know this because of a whole ton of social science research trying to measure the effect of childhood environment.
The general effect still exists, yes. It's just reported on poorly in this instance.
The 'relative overplacement' in the first table (the extent that participants over-estimated their own performance) is a correlation of 0.04, while the 'actual rank' is a correlation of 0.13, both in comparison to 'subjective social class'. There are a lot of correlations of higher magnitude than 0.04, so it's disappointing that the article attempts to focus on nothing else.
This article [0] says your generalisation is correct:
> Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation [...] Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-...
Cultivation, when perfectly executed, provides about 50-50 what to do and not to do. Cultivation results in far faster progress. In deep learning, in reinforcement leearning, and in humans. (reinforcement algorithms are worse actually, they will simply barely make any progress at all until they see a positive example)
The problem is that this is really, really not what people want to hear. Free play, freedom to explore, ... results supposedly in happier children, more fulfilling lives, creativity, ... Except ... no it doesn't. It's an empty meaningless long string of failures slowly sapping strength until you fail, with very rare example of great success. It's spending seed corn on a lottery ticket.
This is made more difficult by the observation that, yes, eventually, if you do climb to the very top of society you'll be playing the exploration game, without any cultivation, regardless of whether you got there with exploration or cultivation.
I feel like it doesn’t matter if the belief is exaggerated or not, either way it’s a symptom of inequality.