10 ms·

Here is the logic: 1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world. 2. Take all of their money away. 3. Give it to the other 50%. Lets say we we

Here is the logic: 1. Given all of the smartest 50% of the people in the world. 2. Take all of their money away. 3. Give it to the other 50%. Lets say we were able to do those three. Now do you think being poor causes lower IQ? DON'T CONFUSE CORRELATION WITH CAUSATION!

jre 13y ago
I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household. Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.
- bittired 13y ago
  You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ). IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind. Intelligence is building upon that. Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    "An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
  - mpyne 13y ago
    > A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people. I like to consider myself one of those people. But I have to say, I can't imagine how my IQ would have stayed the same as I got older if I had not at least been able to eat regularly, drink clean water, make medical check-ups, etc. I get what you have been implying, which is that a person's theoretical intellectual capability is not necessarily tied to their current intellectual capability. But the brain is an adaptive organ, not a monolith that comes out of the womb fully-formed. It's at least possible (and likely, IMO) that there are various 'gates' in the development of the brain where if pre-requisites for development are not met, that the opportunity for that natural development gets closed off as the brain moves onto further forms of modification and maintenance of its neural net. At some point the brain has to switch over from adolescent development to adult 'maintenance programming'. If you are resource-constrained during that adolescent phase it may be difficult to catch back up, even in a resource surplus as an adult. This would show as a lower IQ (even on an ideal IQ test), even though a higher IQ could have been achieved with proper 'care & feeding' as a child.
6d0debc071 13y ago
In other words, do I think the removal of something posited to be developmentally advantageous would lower IQ after the developmental period had passed?
- bittired 13y ago
  No, I was saying that money in pocket != intelligence.
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    'Does not equal' is a very strongly bound form of 'cause.' I don't think you can meaningfully make that definition apply to the topic.
  - rooshdi 13y ago
    But money may = opportunity.
joesb 13y ago
Step 1 is more like: "Given all of the kids who would grow up to be the smartest 50% of the people in the world." The problem is we are not able to predict this first step.
thaumaturgy 13y ago
After a generation or two? Yes. Consider the elements of an IQ test: vocabulary, pattern recognition, mathematics, abstract logic. What kind of environment would you think is more likely to teach children the things they need to do well on an IQ test?
- chrischen 13y ago
  I'm pretty sure they don't test vocab or math in an IQ test. I think you're thinking of the modern day SATs, which can be affected by poverty.
  - thaumaturgy 13y ago
    Nope. By "math" I was referring to number sequences (which number comes next...), as opposed to geometric patterns (which shape comes next...); by "vocab" I was referring to analogical questions (a is to b as c is to __). If SATs are readily accepted to be affected by poverty, I fail to understand why IQ tests wouldn't be also.
    - chrischen 13y ago
      Because IQ tests are administered across races, cultures, languages, education levels, and even age, and are normalized across these factors. Obviously for vocab, a Chinese person would fail if they don't understand English, so they'd translate it. For a poor American, the vocab skills required on an IQ test are pretty basic. Also, the modern SAT tests are stated by CollegeBoard[1] to NOT correlate to IQ anymore. They correlate to education. You're conflating a test for knowledge vs a test for cognitive ability. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/views.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/view...
      - thaumaturgy 13y ago
        American Psychological Association, 2003 http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx "People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully." "Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts: rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence." "They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context." "Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded." ScienceDaily, 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm "The researchers also claim that African IQ test scores cannot be interpreted in terms of lower intelligence levels, as these scores have different psychometric characteristics than western IQ test scores. Until now, the incomparability of Western and African IQ scores had never been systematically proven." University of North Carolina, current curriculum http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm "In school settings, psychologists often joke that IQ is what IQ tests measure. There is a lot of truth to this adage. Ideally, IQ tests sample a wide range of experiences and they measure a person’s ability to apply learned information in new and different ways. They do not measure capacity or potential. They do provide information about cognitive skills at a given point in time. Because IQ tests chiefly measure success in school, they are value-laden. Scores provide a statistical indication of the extent to which a person has critical schools and information, but they should not be directly equated with intelligence. Test scores are a useful index of ability, but they may reflect test-taking sophistication, personality, and attitudinal characteristics as well as learned and innate ability (Plomin, 1989)." Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence "But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are." "In modern cultures, more emphasis is being placed on abstraction. Students learn algebra at an earlier age than they used to, for instance, but in addition our everyday lives are full of abstractions." The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UCSD http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html "This point was made very explicitly by a Kpelle anthropological acquaintance of mine who was versed in the more esoteric aspects of Kpelle secret societies and medicine (or magic, according to American stereotypes). We had been talking about what it means to be intelligent in Kpelle society (the most appropriate term is translated as "clever"). "Can you be a clever farmer?" I asked. "No," came the reply. "You can be a hardworking farmer, or you can be a lucky farmer, but we couldn't say that someone is a clever farmer. Everyone knows how to farm. We use 'clever' when we talk about the way someone gets other people to help him. Some people always win arguments. Some people know how to deal with strangers. Some people know powerful medicine. These are the things we talk about as clever."" Poverty Lowers IQ http://www.monitor.net/monitor/5-5-96/povertyiq.html "Adjustments for socioeconomic conditions almost completely eliminate differences in IQ scores between black and white children, according to the study's co-investigators." ""The study strongly suggests that economic and learning environments of the home are the most powerful predictors of racial IQ differences in 5-year-olds," said Brooks-Gunn." Book Review http://bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/ "Human potential at birth is unchanged; we are not, in any fundamental sense, becoming a smarter species. But the way we live has changed. IQ tests were first established in the 19th century at a time when daily life was concrete and practical. The tests, however, had to be abstract to make them culturally neutral. People, therefore, found them harder because they were unaccustomed to such modes of thought." "People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account." (Note that this is a review of a book authored by James R Flynn, the discoverer of the Flynn Effect in IQ measurements. Previous HN commentary on this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038) -- I could pretty easily come up with a lot more like this. Or, you could strike up a conversation with HN user tokenadult, who is knowledgeable on the subject. Either way, IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability, and more researchers are adopting the view that it is impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences (and thus knowledge) from any other innate factors in IQ tests. You really shouldn't assume that the people you're talking to don't know what they mean.
antoko 13y ago
You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error. "Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.
- bittired 13y ago
  IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor. Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. If we were able to teach good parenting skills, social skills, and ethics adequately in schools, and help them develop sense of community, then many of the problems (unrelated to genetics) related to intelligence being lower would go away. I hope if anyone takes home anything from what I'm saying, it is that you can't throw money at a problem like this. Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap. However, back to the study. Genetic problems with IQ cannot be solved by money, period. Also, being poor does not make you have lower potential for intelligence. That has been my point all over this thread.
  - gyepi 13y ago
    > Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. I appreciate that you are trying really hard to make an argument, but you literally have no idea what you are talking about.
rooshdi 13y ago
"This is a population who is in need of early identification and support services. Consistent with previous research, our data suggest that children who grow up in low income households and who have experienced neglect are at risk for difficulties with cognitive and academic achievement. The importance of these findings cannot be overstated given that appropriate early assessments and interventions may help change developmental trajectories and long-term outcomes." http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/neurocognitive-impacts.aspx http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/...
Dylan16807 13y ago
Is the concept of 'causes' so hard? Severe lack of money, over a period of years, causes bad nutrition which causes development to be impaired. This causation takes time. The amount of money at a specific moment is meaningless because it's 0% of the experimental window. Look at the average and compare it to food and necessity prices.

jre 13y ago

I think if you take the babies of the smartest X% people in the world and raise them in poverty then yes, their average IQ will be lower than if they were raised in a middle class household. Poverty means you have to skip meals, you can't afford books, you go to a school were there aren't enough teachers and so on... Those are all things that have an influence the intellectual development of a person.

bittired 13y ago
You are confusing intelligence with intellectual capacity (IQ). IQ is the ability for a child to do exemplary things with his/her mind. Intelligence is building upon that. Being poor does not make you have lower IQ, nor does it make you less intelligent. A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  "An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several standardized tests designed to assess intelligence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_quotient
- mpyne 13y ago
  > A large number of the poor have come up from the depths and are very intelligent people. I like to consider myself one of those people. But I have to say, I can't imagine how my IQ would have stayed the same as I got older if I had not at least been able to eat regularly, drink clean water, make medical check-ups, etc. I get what you have been implying, which is that a person's theoretical intellectual capability is not necessarily tied to their current intellectual capability. But the brain is an adaptive organ, not a monolith that comes out of the womb fully-formed. It's at least possible (and likely, IMO) that there are various 'gates' in the development of the brain where if pre-requisites for development are not met, that the opportunity for that natural development gets closed off as the brain moves onto further forms of modification and maintenance of its neural net. At some point the brain has to switch over from adolescent development to adult 'maintenance programming'. If you are resource-constrained during that adolescent phase it may be difficult to catch back up, even in a resource surplus as an adult. This would show as a lower IQ (even on an ideal IQ test), even though a higher IQ could have been achieved with proper 'care & feeding' as a child.

6d0debc071 13y ago

In other words, do I think the removal of something posited to be developmentally advantageous would lower IQ after the developmental period had passed?

bittired 13y ago
No, I was saying that money in pocket != intelligence.
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  'Does not equal' is a very strongly bound form of 'cause.' I don't think you can meaningfully make that definition apply to the topic.
- rooshdi 13y ago
  But money may = opportunity.

joesb 13y ago

Step 1 is more like: "Given all of the kids who would grow up to be the smartest 50% of the people in the world." The problem is we are not able to predict this first step.

thaumaturgy 13y ago

After a generation or two? Yes. Consider the elements of an IQ test: vocabulary, pattern recognition, mathematics, abstract logic. What kind of environment would you think is more likely to teach children the things they need to do well on an IQ test?

chrischen 13y ago
I'm pretty sure they don't test vocab or math in an IQ test. I think you're thinking of the modern day SATs, which can be affected by poverty.
- thaumaturgy 13y ago
  Nope. By "math" I was referring to number sequences (which number comes next...), as opposed to geometric patterns (which shape comes next...); by "vocab" I was referring to analogical questions (a is to b as c is to __). If SATs are readily accepted to be affected by poverty, I fail to understand why IQ tests wouldn't be also.
  - chrischen 13y ago
    Because IQ tests are administered across races, cultures, languages, education levels, and even age, and are normalized across these factors. Obviously for vocab, a Chinese person would fail if they don't understand English, so they'd translate it. For a poor American, the vocab skills required on an IQ test are pretty basic. Also, the modern SAT tests are stated by CollegeBoard[1] to NOT correlate to IQ anymore. They correlate to education. You're conflating a test for knowledge vs a test for cognitive ability. [1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/views.html http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sats/test/view...
    - thaumaturgy 13y ago
      American Psychological Association, 2003 http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/intelligence.aspx "People in Western cultures, he suggests, tend to view intelligence as a means for individuals to devise categories and to engage in rational debate, while people in Eastern cultures see it as a way for members of a community to recognize contradiction and complexity and to play their social roles successfully." "Over the past several years, Sternberg and Grigorenko also have investigated concepts of intelligence in Africa. Among the Luo people in rural Kenya, Grigorenko and her collaborators have found that ideas about intelligence consist of four broad concepts: rieko, which largely corresponds to the Western idea of academic intelligence, but also includes specific skills; luoro, which includes social qualities like respect, responsibility and consideration; paro, or practical thinking; and winjo, or comprehension. Only one of the four--rieko--is correlated with traditional Western measures of intelligence." "They also agree with studies in a number of countries, both industrialized and nonindustrialized, that suggest that people who are unable to solve complex problems in the abstract can often solve them when they are presented in a familiar context." "Many psychologists believe that the idea that a test can be completely absent of cultural bias--a recurrent hope of test developers in the 20th century--is contradicted by the weight of the evidence. Raven's Progressive Matrices, for example, is one of several nonverbal intelligence tests that were originally advertised as "culture free," but are now recognized as culturally loaded." ScienceDaily, 2010 http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121155220.htm "The researchers also claim that African IQ test scores cannot be interpreted in terms of lower intelligence levels, as these scores have different psychometric characteristics than western IQ test scores. Until now, the incomparability of Western and African IQ scores had never been systematically proven." University of North Carolina, current curriculum http://www.unc.edu/~rooney/iq.htm "In school settings, psychologists often joke that IQ is what IQ tests measure. There is a lot of truth to this adage. Ideally, IQ tests sample a wide range of experiences and they measure a person’s ability to apply learned information in new and different ways. They do not measure capacity or potential. They do provide information about cognitive skills at a given point in time. Because IQ tests chiefly measure success in school, they are value-laden. Scores provide a statistical indication of the extent to which a person has critical schools and information, but they should not be directly equated with intelligence. Test scores are a useful index of ability, but they may reflect test-taking sophistication, personality, and attitudinal characteristics as well as learned and innate ability (Plomin, 1989)." Further Evidence That IQ Does Not Measure Intelligence http://io9.com/5959058/further-evidence-that-iq-does-not-measure-intelligence "But some thinkers cling to the idea that IQ measures an inborn intelligence that transcends culture and schooling. If that's true, one would expect that the most abstract, "culture free" elements of IQ testing wouldn't be subject to the Flynn Effect. But they are." "In modern cultures, more emphasis is being placed on abstraction. Students learn algebra at an earlier age than they used to, for instance, but in addition our everyday lives are full of abstractions." The Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, UCSD http://lchc.ucsd.edu/MCA/Paper/Cole/iq.html "This point was made very explicitly by a Kpelle anthropological acquaintance of mine who was versed in the more esoteric aspects of Kpelle secret societies and medicine (or magic, according to American stereotypes). We had been talking about what it means to be intelligent in Kpelle society (the most appropriate term is translated as "clever"). "Can you be a clever farmer?" I asked. "No," came the reply. "You can be a hardworking farmer, or you can be a lucky farmer, but we couldn't say that someone is a clever farmer. Everyone knows how to farm. We use 'clever' when we talk about the way someone gets other people to help him. Some people always win arguments. Some people know how to deal with strangers. Some people know powerful medicine. These are the things we talk about as clever."" Poverty Lowers IQ http://www.monitor.net/monitor/5-5-96/povertyiq.html "Adjustments for socioeconomic conditions almost completely eliminate differences in IQ scores between black and white children, according to the study's co-investigators." ""The study strongly suggests that economic and learning environments of the home are the most powerful predictors of racial IQ differences in 5-year-olds," said Brooks-Gunn." Book Review http://bryanappleyard.com/flynns-iq/ "Human potential at birth is unchanged; we are not, in any fundamental sense, becoming a smarter species. But the way we live has changed. IQ tests were first established in the 19th century at a time when daily life was concrete and practical. The tests, however, had to be abstract to make them culturally neutral. People, therefore, found them harder because they were unaccustomed to such modes of thought." "People became better at IQ tests and, steadily, the scores rose. So IQ scores are meaningless unless their date and social norms are taken into account." (Note that this is a review of a book authored by James R Flynn, the discoverer of the Flynn Effect in IQ measurements. Previous HN commentary on this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4461038) -- I could pretty easily come up with a lot more like this. Or, you could strike up a conversation with HN user tokenadult, who is knowledgeable on the subject. Either way, IQ tests are readily accepted now not to be a test for cognitive ability, and more researchers are adopting the view that it is impossible to separate cultural and environmental influences (and thus knowledge) from any other innate factors in IQ tests. You really shouldn't assume that the people you're talking to don't know what they mean.

antoko 13y ago

You don't seem like an idiot but all your comments in this thread seem to be making the same obvious error. "Being raised in poverty" is a broad term that means all kinds of things, you seem to think it is merely a measure of wealth. This myopic view is why you're so very very wrong.

bittired 13y ago
IQ not intelligence. IQ is meant to be a measure of intellectual capacity. It is nonsensical to say that someone is unable to be intelligent because they are poor. Let's talk about intelligence, though. Lets say that everyone had the same intellectual capacity, but we still saw the same descrepancy in how well they did on standardized tests. Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. If we were able to teach good parenting skills, social skills, and ethics adequately in schools, and help them develop sense of community, then many of the problems (unrelated to genetics) related to intelligence being lower would go away. I hope if anyone takes home anything from what I'm saying, it is that you can't throw money at a problem like this. Welfare can make things much worse (misusing food funds for drugs, setting up a cycle of dependence on government funds, etc.), but welfare is a perfectly logical solution to lack of money. We made that mistake before, and can't have a whole new generation of people buying into that statist crap. However, back to the study. Genetic problems with IQ cannot be solved by money, period. Also, being poor does not make you have lower potential for intelligence. That has been my point all over this thread.
- gyepi 13y ago
  > Having little to eat and poor schools do not keep a child from learning from others. There is ready access to the internet through libraries in the U.S. with a wealth of information online, and a lot of books on the shelves there also. If you take away all genetic factors (tendency towards aggression, lower intellectual capacity, etc.) and environmental factors (is the child worried about being shot, peer pressure to join a gang or get into drugs or alcohol, etc.), then in the end it is more about parenting and community, not about poverty. I appreciate that you are trying really hard to make an argument, but you literally have no idea what you are talking about.

rooshdi 13y ago

"This is a population who is in need of early identification and support services. Consistent with previous research, our data suggest that children who grow up in low income households and who have experienced neglect are at risk for difficulties with cognitive and academic achievement. The importance of these findings cannot be overstated given that appropriate early assessments and interventions may help change developmental trajectories and long-term outcomes." http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/neurocognitive-impacts.aspx http://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07/...

Dylan16807 13y ago

Is the concept of 'causes' so hard? Severe lack of money, over a period of years, causes bad nutrition which causes development to be impaired. This causation takes time. The amount of money at a specific moment is meaningless because it's 0% of the experimental window. Look at the average and compare it to food and necessity prices.