They have found correlation, not that it "affects", which is causation. It very well could be that the opposite is true, people with low cognitive ability tend to be poor.
Based on the abstract in the OP, the study seems to focus on acute war-related trauma. Poverty can be a kind of slow-rolling, unending trauma of its own. Not criticizing the article/headline, just a cautionary note to avoid extrapolating too much from this.
Wrong, reasoning like yours has caused so much pervasiveness of poverty and other problems. You probably reason that abortion and birth control could help the US black population also. Unintended consequences of thinking like yours has done so much harm to society (especially by politicians/government) and could sadly have easily been avoided by simply seeking solutions from truly creative problem solvers with analytical minds.
Neglect is a truly wretched cycle. When a child's parents cannot afford and value things like basic dietary nutrition and care, it creates cerebral abnormalities [1] due to lack of neuro-cognitive development.
It's then up to half-hearted social/governmental intervention to prevent it from becoming the same for the child's eventual offspring - a hail Mary that rarely lands with some individuals getting on a better path.
This is hugely underrated. My room's poorly insulated so when it's hot, it's like a microwave in here and when it's cold, I can feel it to my bone (I remember almost crying some nights in 2018 because it was so cold). There's no central heating and the AC is outside my room and doesn't reach my room at all. When it was cold, I would stay in bed longer. Then I wouldn't be able to spend longer than 5-10 minutes sitting at my desk before going back to under a blanket. When it's hot, I would feel so incredibly lazy and drained of energy and ultimately do nothing except lie on the floor hoping for better days. Now that I have a fan and a small space heater, things are a lot better.
This becomes even worse if your food supply is limited. Your body produces less heat if you’re not eating enough calories, which can make you feel cold even in a normal temperature.
Imagine having such a shit life that you best move on without looking back. The brain will adapt and stop feeding you that garbage that is your memories. Everything you wanted to be doing hurts when you see others do it. I don't know how scientific it is but I think woman want to have babies. Eventually just seeing one makes a painful experience. If only you could suppress association, turns out you can.
I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because you're going to die homeless next month after you can no longer pay rent due to a pandemic?
I know you are using your experience as an example...but I think with real poverty, you probably wouldnt know much about nutrition and neither would your parents...with enough caloric difficiency and without proper nutrition, much of the decision making/studying/long-term-planning abilities degrade quite rapidly.
That's the thing. I was pretty self-aware and I still made those choices. Imagine how much worse it is for people who don't even know what they're doing to themselves. They'll just keep pushing on ahead while their mind and body deteriorates.
Those choices are pretty hard - modern junk food has been engineered to reinforce unhealthy consumption, the US (mostly) dictates international laws around junk food restriction[1] and it's exporting the terrible free-market approach to food choice. Some of these junk foods should be heavily taxed or just outright illegal.
Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.
How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.
People don't believe they'll literally drop dead next month. But they believe they'll get kicked out of their apartment if they can't pay rent. If that happens, they might end up losing their job after not being able to show up for a few days in order to find a new place if that's even possible. Being poor is miserable. You know how you might lament that due to your full time job you have so little time to spend on your interests and hobbies? Likewise, poor people have very little time or the mental bandwidth to think about doing things that only pay off in the long term. They're focused on surviving to next month. So they spend money on groceries instead of on coding lessons or something which won't get them a better job any time soon. They're probably right anyway. What's the point of learning to code when companies wouldn't hire them in a million years instead of a college graduate or someone with previous experience in the field. So you can imagine how many people are condemned to forever working food service jobs or other such work.
I guess it just doesn't check out with me. I've been around poor people. I've lived with them. I'm sure some of them are working constantly (probably more the ones with kids, which they shouldn't have had in the first place), but generally they don't seem to be particularly busy. Most of them, if they wanted to sit down and start learning web tech from online tutorials (or improve their future in any other way), had the time and resources. They were just not interested. Even things that would save time like 'stop smoking pot 7 days a week' - just nope.
In other words, the submission title is misleading: the effects of poverty are type of trauma. We're not talking about "too poor to afford the latest game console" here; we're talking about people who have trouble with things at the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0].
Poverty is also thought to have caused the diffidence in performance in the marshmallow test[1]. Poor kids learn to take advantage of the moment and distrust the future. And poor kids tend to be lower earners in later life than wealthier kids due to advantage differences[2][3]
If I'm reading the results table in the linked paper correctly, it seems that household wealth was only a significant predictor of working memory in the combined group and the refugee group but not in the non-refugee group, indicating a possible interaction that it is trauma that increases the susceptibility to poverty.
Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. For example, with gender, one would ask the question are males really that much better at working memory, or is there a treatment of male children that would result in the noted difference. In the same way, poverty may result in different treatment during a refugee event or similar mass trauma that may have a larger impact on cognitive function. A simple hypothesis would be that wealthier refugees have better access to food which means that there is less cognitive decline associated with poor nutrition during childhood brain development that occurs during a war time event.
I can't speak to specifically working memory, but there is a wide variety of research on sexual dimorphism in humans, including in cognitive function. I know there was some research showing males having better spatial memory than females.
But all of this is caught up in a large nature vs nurture (vs both) question. Is it genetics that cause this? Is it the environment (social pressure/influence) that causes this? Is it a combination of genetics and environment that causes this?
The same sort of complexity would exist in any real life test like this, because this isn't a laboratory where you can make sure everything but a single independent variable is the same, modify that independent variable, and then measure the influence on the dependent variable.
Crucially, there’s a difference between “males have statistically significantly better memory”, which is what you are talking about, and “gender is one of the top predictors of memory”, which is, reportedly, what the data in the article shows.
Not OP, but statistical significance has to do with how _sure_ you are that there is an effect. It doesn't really say anything about how _large_ the effect is.
It's pretty obvious that gender can't be a top predictor of memory, intelligence, etc. The reason is that even if there is a definite difference where males are better than females, it'd be a modest delta between two bell curves. That would leave huge numbers of pairings in which a female had better memory than a male, etc.
Stipulating most of your comment, gender can still easily be a top predictor of memory / intelligence / etc., because "top" is an ordinal concept. That just says it has more of an effect than other predictors.
But see also https://sci-hub.tw/https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/1... , finding that the top predictor (among those investigated) of a police officer shooting a civilian is "the officer is black", narrowly beating out "the officer is rapidly accumulating negative marks in his file". Are there a large number of pairings in which a white officer shoots someone and a black officer doesn't? Sure, but the effect of race is still enormous in this case. ("Black officers were 3.3 times more likely to shoot than other officers.")
I would expect the effect of sex to dwarf the effect of race, but the study is limited to police officers that exist, of which more than 92% in the sample are male. So probably there's some restriction of range.
Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down.
Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female advantage in short term memory. Jensen's 1998 book for example quotes Cohen's d between -0.2 and -0.3, favoring females.
The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.
* * *
How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?
How robust are working memory differences between sexes across time, across different countries, across different subcultural groups, etc.?
> Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.
The original comment was leaping to the assumption that finding sex differences means there must be something wrong with the study/analysis. That's dangerously wrong.
> Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down.
“May be an indicator”. Not quite the Olympic jumping-at-conclusions performance I’d expect from a “dangerously wrong” comment.
Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been
If you don’t assume that the subtest scores are the same across sexes, the “qualified questioning speculation” that there is something wrong with control variables makes no sense.
How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?
This kind of unentanglement is usually done through twin studies: you compare how well correlated are monozygotic vs dizygotic twins. Since it’s reasonable to assume that both monozygotic and dizygotic twins share the same or at least very similar environments, if the correlation between monozygotic twins on a given trait is greater than in dizygotic twins, it means that genetic causation plays a role, while if the correlation is the same, there it is likely no genetic causation. Of course, it’s a bit hard to find monozygotic twins of different sexes, but similar ideas are used in that case.
The point is, we do have the tools to unentangle nature from nurture, and in general, all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits. I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book I mentioned.
Twin studies don’t help you with this particular question. Beyond that, there are plenty of scholars who question the common interpretation of twin studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study#Criticism
> all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits
To be precise, some evidence points in the direction that some variation in cognitive traits is “heritable”.
It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma, and so on, as well as a substantial amount of variation that we currently don’t have explanations for (not to mention significant experimental noise and epistomological questions about the design and interpretation of the experiments). It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.
For example it was long thought by some people that there were inherent differences between boys’ vs. girls’ mathematical aptitude, as judged by scores on various standardized tests, but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear. A web search turns up https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/women-and-m...
> I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book
It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.
* * *
Disclaimer: I am no expert on this subject. Just a layperson who has occasionally read about it, mostly in popular media.
To be precise, some evidence points in the direction that some variation in cognitive traits is “heritable”.
Yes, this is more precise, but "heritability" is a technical term that I try to avoid, because when some people are not familiar with its technical meaning, it leads to all kinds of confusion when others do use it in the technical meaning. On the other hand, "heritability" very much implies genetic causation in every meaningful sense.
It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma
It is by no means obvious. It depends on what you count as "substantial", what degree of malnutrition, what diseases, what toxins, what kind of physical violence, etc.
It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.
It is plausible, alas I have not seen much evidence for that effect. There is scarce evidence for malnutrition having effect of cognitive ability, but there is some. However, I haven't seen any evidence on shared or non-shared environment causing any sex differences in cognitive ability.
but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear.
I think this is rather more of an artifact of their educational systems putting finger on a scale where it wants. Consider, for example, that in both Iceland and Sweden, mentioned in the article as places where girls matched or exceeded boys achievement, 5 out of last 6 contestants on IMO were boys, and similar disparity happened in previous years. Instead of focusing on outliers, I recommend looking at the whole picture.
It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.
This is an argument without an argument, and smear by association. Jensen is the most renowned scientist in the field of psychometry and intelligence research. You imply that there's something wrong with him, but do not actually give any concrete criticism.
But trauma is what increases their likelihood of committing crimes later in life, according to an excellent paper in AER (?) I recently read but can’t look up right now. :)
Oh great, another study. Thinking for 2 minutes... The same applies to non-refugee people living in poverty. This study shows absolutely nothing new (not already known). And does not state a few things that would make it appear foolish.
1. The impoverished are usually the ones who end up as refugees in the first place.
2. Poverty is highly generational.
3. The impoverished are generally lower IQ/cognitive/resourceful/creative/motivated/entrepreneurial (genetically pre-dispositioning wise)
4. Impoverished aren't exposed to the things that successful people were as children. Not just educational and culturally, but also habitually. Learning good skills and habits such as being organized, working smarter, not harder, finding solutions to propel ones self upward economically ETC. People pass these things down to their children.
5. Other naturally born "privileges" such as being taller, stronger, more attractive are genetic and contribute to being impoverished, leading to being a refugee.
This is an example of condescension and holding contradictory beliefs.
This person implies that this study is a replication of “known” things and that replications like this are not useful. But the replication strengthens the claims of 1, 2, and 4. This is a contradiction.
The sense of condescension comes from “oh great”, “absolutely nothing new”, “foolish”, and claim 5.
Claims 2 and 5 suggest some kind bias but I’m not sure how to classify it. Whatever it is, they give me a gross feeling.
Intelligence is highly hereditable[1]. Intelligence is also highly correlated with earning potential, in middle-income Western Asian nations[2]. (It's correlated everywhere, but I cite that specifically because the study in the link was carried out in Jordan.)
Therefore it's highly likely that high IQ refugee children, have high IQ refugee parents, who are earning a higher household income after they resettle into their new country. For example a doctor from Syria could likely retrain as a doctor in Jordan. Statistically speaking his kids are probably more intelligent than someone who was a janitor in Syria.
Interesting. A possibly relevant point from the Wikipedia article:
>A common error is to assume that a heritability figure is necessarily unchangeable. The value of heritability can change if the impact of environment (or of genes) in the population is substantially altered.[15] If the environmental variation encountered by different individuals increases, then the heritability figure would decrease. On the other hand, if everyone had the same environment, then heritability would be 100%. The population in developing nations often has more diverse environments than in developed nations.[citation needed] This would mean that heritability figures would be lower in developing nations. Another example is phenylketonuria which previously caused mental retardation for everyone who had this genetic disorder and thus had a heritability of 100%. Today, this can be prevented by following a modified diet, resulting in a lowered heritability.
Let's talk about treatment effect (or just plain old Occam's razor): what is the most likely cause statistically significant cognitive function decline in this treatment group.
I hope data like this can help society in ridding this disease -- poverty is a disease. Looking at the results and anecdotal evidence it feels like this is obvious.. but the fact of the matter is unless you've been through it, it's very unlikely you can truly appreciate the magnitude of the results.
I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on this complicated problem.
What still seems unknown to me is what specific environmental traits of "poverty" have the strongest negative impact? I mean, we've all heard of "rags to riches" stories --- how do they differ?
Eliminating extreme poverty would be nice, but unfortunately overreactions to COVID-19 in some countries are currently driving the world economy into a depression and increasing poverty. While the pandemic is clearly a terrible public health crisis, poverty also kills people. It just takes longer than the virus. Expect to see higher rates of suicide, substance abuse, and chronic disease in the next few years.
Well if the owner of the property can't balance out their own finances, they could just sell it. Super anecdotal, but I'm hearing a lot of people are looking to invest in the real estate market now.
I suppose that a lot of economic activity isn't really essential and can be shut down without problems. E.g., cruise ships no longer sailing, or making gold watches. Lack of these kinds of goods and services is unlikely to do any damage to cognitive functions.
It would be interesting to refine "poverty" to identify exactly what the minimum healthy level of "consumption" for a typical human is going to be. It doesn't seem to me that it's very high: food, clean water, safe housing, a bit of electricity for cooking etc., and ideally connectivity to the wider world, e.g., a computer with an internet connection. I suppose you could say that that's actually quite a lot, and brings you up to Western industrial society standards. But I suspect that with an industrial economy, all of that can be provided to the entire population with relatively little effort, e.g., if people were working a couple of days a week.
Any medical requirements would be on top of that of course.
I think that "disease" is a misleading term, because it makes it sound like an act of god or nature. I'd say it's more like a moral evil. Because there are people in power who have the ability to eradicate this, simply by paying their workers more, or allocating government money to public services rather than to tax cuts for the rich, but they don't. They push austerity, they exploit greedily, and those are deliberate human acts of selfish evil.
I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.
Poverty is relative, not absolute. Even if you gave everyone in the country $50,000 in UBI, you'd still have poverty, because you'd have people at the bottom of the income range who can't afford what others can.
The only way to possibly eradicate it is if you made everyone equal - same take home pay, no inheritance, no monetary gifts, etc. Everyone has the same net income at the end of the day.
That's.... just not true, and I feel like you don't really know what poverty is if you say that. Poverty is not just definitionally being in some lower percentile. Poverty is misery because you don't have financial power to meet your basic needs, or have to sacrifice all your time and comfort to do so. There's nothing relative about going hungry, living in bad housing with heat that doesn't work, working 2 jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night, etc.
That's not how the government measures it. They either assume some percentile of income is poverty, or they put together a bundle of things (home, food, etc) to see if income covers it. However, that bundle always gets updated to include more and more.
do you understand the difference between a government definition and a human experience? I'm talking about making it so everyone has the basic needs of their life met - food, shelter, water, medicine, clean environment, leisure time, sleep time.
your argument is so pedantic that it is insulting. it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's classic tweet [0] "Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass." You're like Ben Shapiro saying "eradicating poverty?? that's literally impossible... since poverty is defined as the lowest 5% of income and there will always be someone there. Learn percentiles, dumbass"
This little theory falls completely apart because its axiom is wrong - poverty is NOT a disease. It's a natural state of human affairs in this physical world and it is _complicated_: it is relative to one's point of view, it's an intrinsic part of mammal hierarchy and therefore intrinsic part of humanity. When egalitarianism is pushed externally on a human society, humans tend to "invent" new kind of poverty by simply changing the definition of what "being poor" means, for example.
>This research was funded by Elrha’s Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises (R2HC) Programme (https://www.elrha.org/project/yale-psychosocial-call2/), which aims to improve health outcomes by strengthening the evidence base for public health interventions in humanitarian crises
I know that the intentions appear to be benevolent but I'd just point out that this isn't really an unbiased source, so it may be prudent to take their results with a grain.
Typical leftist front organization masquerading as subject matter experts. You can recognize them easily because their analyses of poverty for example never include analyzing potential negative traits or behaviors in their subjects that might be causing poverty. All blame and potential solutions are always political in nature and inevitably lead to more government involvement.
The problems of poverty in this abstract appear to be framed in terms of the authors' perceived solutions.
What if we looked at the link between self perceptions of victimisation, life outcomes, and symptoms of poverty? I'd posit it's the necessary condition. The overlap in solutions, particularly education, financial independence, social equity are all there, but the difference would be chicken vs. egg, where authors like this would say the victimized identity is caused by the lack of these solutions, whereas many working people would say that inculcating and encouraging the beliefs that support that identity cause and reinforce the barriers to those solutions. The argument that individuals experience poverty for lack of a bureaucracy that is concerned with it should seem a bit specious.
Or as W.H. Auden put it, "The friends of the born nurse Are always getting worse."
A point that merits consideration is whether or not refugee camps perpetuate poverty. For example, did wealthy Syrians end up in refugee camps? And if so, have they remained there? The same question can be asked about Palestinians decades ago. The point is this, as someone who immigrated to the U.S. from the Middle East as a minor, I think while the squalid conditions of refugee camps certainly affect cognitive function in refugee youth, the refugee camp youth probably came from (or were born into) lower socioeconomic strata of their home country. Does my question make sense? Is my assumption correct?
I thought working memory (WM) was mostly number of items recalled, and for most people it's 5-7. The actual test they used would benefit from exposure to video games (poverty would affect access):
> a screen that displayed one, two, or three dots for 2 s and instructed to remember where the dot(s) were located (Figure S2b). The screen then went blank (for 0.1 or 3 s), after which it changed color indicating that participants should touch the screen precisely where the dot(s) had appeared.
Not a serious criticism, more about the nature of WM and how to measure it.
73 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 100 ms ] threadhttps://www.keranews.org/post/kids-living-poverty-living-chr...
Based on the abstract in the OP, the study seems to focus on acute war-related trauma. Poverty can be a kind of slow-rolling, unending trauma of its own. Not criticizing the article/headline, just a cautionary note to avoid extrapolating too much from this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's then up to half-hearted social/governmental intervention to prevent it from becoming the same for the child's eventual offspring - a hail Mary that rarely lands with some individuals getting on a better path.
[1] https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07...
1. Here's coke being terrible https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-fought-regulatio... and there are some other wonderful examples around tobacco use in south east asia.
Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.
How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.
---
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
[2]https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...
[3]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761876166...
https://srcd.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/cdev.1...
If I'm reading the results table in the linked paper correctly, it seems that household wealth was only a significant predictor of working memory in the combined group and the refugee group but not in the non-refugee group, indicating a possible interaction that it is trauma that increases the susceptibility to poverty.
Also, one of the strongest predictions of working memory in all groups was gender, which may be an indicator that confounding factors haven't been broken down. For example, with gender, one would ask the question are males really that much better at working memory, or is there a treatment of male children that would result in the noted difference. In the same way, poverty may result in different treatment during a refugee event or similar mass trauma that may have a larger impact on cognitive function. A simple hypothesis would be that wealthier refugees have better access to food which means that there is less cognitive decline associated with poor nutrition during childhood brain development that occurs during a war time event.
But all of this is caught up in a large nature vs nurture (vs both) question. Is it genetics that cause this? Is it the environment (social pressure/influence) that causes this? Is it a combination of genetics and environment that causes this?
The same sort of complexity would exist in any real life test like this, because this isn't a laboratory where you can make sure everything but a single independent variable is the same, modify that independent variable, and then measure the influence on the dependent variable.
It's pretty obvious that gender can't be a top predictor of memory, intelligence, etc. The reason is that even if there is a definite difference where males are better than females, it'd be a modest delta between two bell curves. That would leave huge numbers of pairings in which a female had better memory than a male, etc.
But see also https://sci-hub.tw/https://amstat.tandfonline.com/doi/full/1... , finding that the top predictor (among those investigated) of a police officer shooting a civilian is "the officer is black", narrowly beating out "the officer is rapidly accumulating negative marks in his file". Are there a large number of pairings in which a white officer shoots someone and a black officer doesn't? Sure, but the effect of race is still enormous in this case. ("Black officers were 3.3 times more likely to shoot than other officers.")
I would expect the effect of sex to dwarf the effect of race, but the study is limited to police officers that exist, of which more than 92% in the sample are male. So probably there's some restriction of range.
Only if you erroneously assume that the sex cannot be predictive of differences in working memory. We know it's not the case: there are sex differences in average scores in subtests (or in group factors). However, most results point in the direction of female advantage in short term memory. Jensen's 1998 book for example quotes Cohen's d between -0.2 and -0.3, favoring females.
The previous commenter made some qualified questioning speculation. Leaping to conclusions about what his or her unstated assumptions must have been and then calling them “erroneous” seems a bit hostile.
* * *
How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?
How robust are working memory differences between sexes across time, across different countries, across different subcultural groups, etc.?
The original comment was leaping to the assumption that finding sex differences means there must be something wrong with the study/analysis. That's dangerously wrong.
“May be an indicator”. Not quite the Olympic jumping-at-conclusions performance I’d expect from a “dangerously wrong” comment.
If you don’t assume that the subtest scores are the same across sexes, the “qualified questioning speculation” that there is something wrong with control variables makes no sense.
How does one tease out the difference between inherent biological differences vs. differences caused by a lifetime spent in the differing social/cultural environment facing boys vs. girls?
This kind of unentanglement is usually done through twin studies: you compare how well correlated are monozygotic vs dizygotic twins. Since it’s reasonable to assume that both monozygotic and dizygotic twins share the same or at least very similar environments, if the correlation between monozygotic twins on a given trait is greater than in dizygotic twins, it means that genetic causation plays a role, while if the correlation is the same, there it is likely no genetic causation. Of course, it’s a bit hard to find monozygotic twins of different sexes, but similar ideas are used in that case.
The point is, we do have the tools to unentangle nature from nurture, and in general, all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits. I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book I mentioned.
> all points in the direction of genetic causation when it comes to cognitive traits
To be precise, some evidence points in the direction that some variation in cognitive traits is “heritable”.
It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma, and so on, as well as a substantial amount of variation that we currently don’t have explanations for (not to mention significant experimental noise and epistomological questions about the design and interpretation of the experiments). It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.
For example it was long thought by some people that there were inherent differences between boys’ vs. girls’ mathematical aptitude, as judged by scores on various standardized tests, but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear. A web search turns up https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/women-and-m...
> I recommend reading the Jensen’s 1998 book
It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.
* * *
Disclaimer: I am no expert on this subject. Just a layperson who has occasionally read about it, mostly in popular media.
Yes, this is more precise, but "heritability" is a technical term that I try to avoid, because when some people are not familiar with its technical meaning, it leads to all kinds of confusion when others do use it in the technical meaning. On the other hand, "heritability" very much implies genetic causation in every meaningful sense.
It is obvious to everyone that there are substantial effects on cognitive traits due to malnutrition, disease, exposure to toxins, physical violence, persistent emotional trauma
It is by no means obvious. It depends on what you count as "substantial", what degree of malnutrition, what diseases, what toxins, what kind of physical violence, etc.
It is at least plausible that large-scale differences in the treatment of boys vs. girls could have effects on cognitive traits.
It is plausible, alas I have not seen much evidence for that effect. There is scarce evidence for malnutrition having effect of cognitive ability, but there is some. However, I haven't seen any evidence on shared or non-shared environment causing any sex differences in cognitive ability.
but in some countries with more equal social/educational environments those differences in scores entirely disappear.
I think this is rather more of an artifact of their educational systems putting finger on a scale where it wants. Consider, for example, that in both Iceland and Sweden, mentioned in the article as places where girls matched or exceeded boys achievement, 5 out of last 6 contestants on IMO were boys, and similar disparity happened in previous years. Instead of focusing on outliers, I recommend looking at the whole picture.
It should be mentioned that Jensen’s work has been highly controversial and has kicked off a lively debate. Some of the biggest promoters of Jensen’s work have been quite unsavory characters. Like all scholarly work (and especially all work seized on more by activists than scholars) it should be read critically and taken in the context of a wider discourse.
This is an argument without an argument, and smear by association. Jensen is the most renowned scientist in the field of psychometry and intelligence research. You imply that there's something wrong with him, but do not actually give any concrete criticism.
1. The impoverished are usually the ones who end up as refugees in the first place. 2. Poverty is highly generational. 3. The impoverished are generally lower IQ/cognitive/resourceful/creative/motivated/entrepreneurial (genetically pre-dispositioning wise) 4. Impoverished aren't exposed to the things that successful people were as children. Not just educational and culturally, but also habitually. Learning good skills and habits such as being organized, working smarter, not harder, finding solutions to propel ones self upward economically ETC. People pass these things down to their children. 5. Other naturally born "privileges" such as being taller, stronger, more attractive are genetic and contribute to being impoverished, leading to being a refugee.
There, save the study...
You didn't even read the first line of the article did you?
It is about refugees from the Syrian war and the effects of war trauma on civilians.
The rest of your claims are just silly - there are plenty of smart people who are born in very poor countries and end up poor as a result.
Have to admit, that did make me laugh.
This person implies that this study is a replication of “known” things and that replications like this are not useful. But the replication strengthens the claims of 1, 2, and 4. This is a contradiction.
The sense of condescension comes from “oh great”, “absolutely nothing new”, “foolish”, and claim 5.
Claims 2 and 5 suggest some kind bias but I’m not sure how to classify it. Whatever it is, they give me a gross feeling.
Do they try to disambiguate that at all?
Therefore it's highly likely that high IQ refugee children, have high IQ refugee parents, who are earning a higher household income after they resettle into their new country. For example a doctor from Syria could likely retrain as a doctor in Jordan. Statistically speaking his kids are probably more intelligent than someone who was a janitor in Syria.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ#cite_note-6 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
>A common error is to assume that a heritability figure is necessarily unchangeable. The value of heritability can change if the impact of environment (or of genes) in the population is substantially altered.[15] If the environmental variation encountered by different individuals increases, then the heritability figure would decrease. On the other hand, if everyone had the same environment, then heritability would be 100%. The population in developing nations often has more diverse environments than in developed nations.[citation needed] This would mean that heritability figures would be lower in developing nations. Another example is phenylketonuria which previously caused mental retardation for everyone who had this genetic disorder and thus had a heritability of 100%. Today, this can be prevented by following a modified diet, resulting in a lowered heritability.
Still, unless you have zero influence on your circumstances, I would always expect the clever to end up in better situations than the less gifted.
I hope studies like these and the changing demographics of power (with respect to age and race) will start focusing on this complicated problem.
What still seems unknown to me is what specific environmental traits of "poverty" have the strongest negative impact? I mean, we've all heard of "rags to riches" stories --- how do they differ?
Who are landlords going to find to replace their tenants that didn't have a job for 6 months? Another unemployed tenant?
It would be interesting to refine "poverty" to identify exactly what the minimum healthy level of "consumption" for a typical human is going to be. It doesn't seem to me that it's very high: food, clean water, safe housing, a bit of electricity for cooking etc., and ideally connectivity to the wider world, e.g., a computer with an internet connection. I suppose you could say that that's actually quite a lot, and brings you up to Western industrial society standards. But I suspect that with an industrial economy, all of that can be provided to the entire population with relatively little effort, e.g., if people were working a couple of days a week.
Any medical requirements would be on top of that of course.
I'd say that the global implicit and explicit ideology of "greed is good" and "might makes right", as well as the tendency of our systems towards nearly boundless concentration of resources and power in the hands of few, is the real disease.
Poverty is relative, not absolute. Even if you gave everyone in the country $50,000 in UBI, you'd still have poverty, because you'd have people at the bottom of the income range who can't afford what others can.
The only way to possibly eradicate it is if you made everyone equal - same take home pay, no inheritance, no monetary gifts, etc. Everyone has the same net income at the end of the day.
That's.... just not true, and I feel like you don't really know what poverty is if you say that. Poverty is not just definitionally being in some lower percentile. Poverty is misery because you don't have financial power to meet your basic needs, or have to sacrifice all your time and comfort to do so. There's nothing relative about going hungry, living in bad housing with heat that doesn't work, working 2 jobs and sleeping 4 hours a night, etc.
your argument is so pedantic that it is insulting. it reminds me of Ben Shapiro's classic tweet [0] "Renewable energy: dumbest phrase since climate change. See the first law of thermodynamics, dumbass." You're like Ben Shapiro saying "eradicating poverty?? that's literally impossible... since poverty is defined as the lowest 5% of income and there will always be someone there. Learn percentiles, dumbass"
[0] https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/30089090699366400
I know that the intentions appear to be benevolent but I'd just point out that this isn't really an unbiased source, so it may be prudent to take their results with a grain.
What if we looked at the link between self perceptions of victimisation, life outcomes, and symptoms of poverty? I'd posit it's the necessary condition. The overlap in solutions, particularly education, financial independence, social equity are all there, but the difference would be chicken vs. egg, where authors like this would say the victimized identity is caused by the lack of these solutions, whereas many working people would say that inculcating and encouraging the beliefs that support that identity cause and reinforce the barriers to those solutions. The argument that individuals experience poverty for lack of a bureaucracy that is concerned with it should seem a bit specious.
Or as W.H. Auden put it, "The friends of the born nurse Are always getting worse."
> a screen that displayed one, two, or three dots for 2 s and instructed to remember where the dot(s) were located (Figure S2b). The screen then went blank (for 0.1 or 3 s), after which it changed color indicating that participants should touch the screen precisely where the dot(s) had appeared.
Not a serious criticism, more about the nature of WM and how to measure it.