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Comment by xmddmx | Hacker News Reader

There is something wrong with this article, possibly just copyediting mistakes but it makes me question the whole thing.

For example, check out this mess:

> “Unfortunately, there is one significant issue with the aforementioned data: schooling. Seeing as the majority of work to date includes only aggregate data, it is impossible to account. The first concerns small N: seeing as most publish studies only include a handful of TRA data, there is a lot of room for error and over.

Unfortunately, there is a largely unaccounted for confound in this aggregate data which may make generalized analysis questionable: schooling.”

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Good catch. Additionally, one of the authors on this is just a student at UWisc, and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.

This is not an ad-hominum, but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds of both of these authors to accurate assess the data.

> but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds

This is true of virtually all university research. Statistics is far more nuanced than what a semester course can teach you. And the incentives to publish can cause bad actors to use poorly defined surveys or p hack or whatever.

> and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.

This makes the awkward wording even more confusing. I don't understand how a professional author who appears to speak English very well would write so poorly and not follow up with edits.

If not ad-hominum, what is it then? I mean, you did not provide any substantiated reason why would their research be false but you went straight to pin-point their experience, or lack thereof.

FWIW I find this research to align on my thoughts about the IQ - IQ is not a constant but a function of multiple variables, where one of the variables is most likely an education.

For instance, I am pretty sure that drilling through the abstract mathematical and hard engineering problems to some extent during the high-school but much more during and after the University, develops your brain in such a way that you become not only more knowledgeable in terms of memorizing things but develops your brain so that it can reason about and anticipate things that you couldn't possibly do before.

The language is consistent with ESL writing, in my experience.

The strange thing is that the corresponding author and the co-author appear to be english speakers, as far as I can tell. I googled the primary author and found a YouTube channel where someone by the same name speaks clearly about neuroscience. Maybe I'm looking at another person with the same name and middle initial who also happens to speak about neuroscience and brain development?

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