Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

This is counter to how I would have guessed, which makes it quite interesting!

To those complaining that the results are non-determinative (e.g. “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues”) that’s how science works: do some studies, make or evaluate a hypothesis, then you or others iterate on different dimensions, possibly untangling some variables or even refuting the results of such a study. It’s OK to be where it is at this stage.

Of course it’s hard to incorporate that ambiguity into a regular article, especially when you are writing for the university’s publicity office, which is what “MIT News” is.

View on HN

I likewise had the opposite intuition: low SES brains will have higher reward response to make the most out of fewer opportunities. Smoke ‘em if ya got ‘em. That would track nicely with the erratic, easily distractible ADHD behavior that began in my childhood.

Oh well. To quote The FairlyOdd Parents: “You win some, you lose a lot!”

Also, “they didn’t disentangle genetics from social issues” is a bit aside from the point: someone born into a lower SES family faces an additional challenge to achieving and maintaining success, be that learned or born. Childhood circumstances can have lifelong effects in the same way that genetics can.

Now, combine that with all of the other things we do know are SES (nutrition, access to resources like tutors, lifestyle & residential stability, etc, which seem quite difficult to ascribe to genetics)…

The genetics/social aspect is probably less an issue than using real money as a reward.

I'm with on the process where we do experiments, and hope they can help to step forward in a direction or another. But then we're discussing an expirement that doesn't have any real exploitable results yet...which is weird, and probably on us.

I still hope this doesn't get ropped into a meta analysis that takes the results at face value as one data point to correlate to other similarly flawed studies.

To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. I was asking a question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com