Delicious LiveJournal Links for 9-26-2009

[andrewducker]

• Spain's Goth First Daughters Embarrass, Embarrassed By Dad - Barack Obama
  Great picture
  (tags: goths Spain Obama usa photos)
• Now this is how to rob a bank
  Damned impressive
  (tags: crime EpicWin)
• Evil Science!
  On three classic cases of "unethical" psychological experiments. (Milgram, Stanford Prison Experiment, Little Albert)
  (tags: psychology ethics evil)
• How to write Science Fiction
  Just in case you were wondering
  (tags: scifi writing parody funny)
• Which BBC channel costs you the most?
  Costs for each channel, broken down per user-hour.
  (tags: bbc radio tv business television)
• Smacking children lowers their IQ
  Alternatively, stupid kids need to be hit more. Hard to tell which way round it is from the article :->
  (tags: violence children punishment intelligence)

Comments

Smacking kids.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Or there is a genetic component of intelligence passed on from parents to their children that correlates with physical chastisment stratergies and intelligence which they pass on.

IE. Stupid people smack and have stupid children (wow that looks like a value loaded statement... Not that I meant that but I'll leave it anyway as it's a pleasing example of sophistry.)

Re: Smacking kids.

[andrewducker]

That would be perfectly good other explanation. I despair that the original article has decided that there is a single "right" explanation based on radically insufficient data.

Re: Smacking kids.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

I think it's possibly partly because "Determinism" or anything that remotely approached determinism is automatically lambasted. As it's counterintuitive and unpleasent to think that everything might be written already and we are really just stimulus response machines... (Of course determinism in the age of random quantum events is a fair bit weaker then this description).

Or alternatively because we want to believe it's nurture because this means that nigh on every little facet of human behaviour can be socialised or re-educated out of us.

Whatever reason, it could well be another, it's worth considering that despite claims to the contrary and what may look like concessions to the idea that "both nature and nurture play a part" the intellectual consensus and hedgemony appears to be firmly on nurtures side.

Re: Smacking kids.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

Unless of course they controlled for variations in parental intelligence. It seems such an obvious thing to do that it might be weird if they didn't... :S

Re: Smacking kids.

[andrewducker]

I don't see why "stupid parents who hit kids raise stupid kids" has to be nature. Stupidity can be easily passed from generation to generation through nurture. It does seem remarkably obvious that both have massive effects though.

Oh - and I don't believe in free will. It seems like a remarkably incoherent idea.

Re: Smacking kids.

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Perhaps, ultimately, though, the genetically clever offspring leave the stupids behind. So the stupid get stupider and the clever get cleverer.

Do we need a War Against Stupid?

Re: Smacking kids.

[andrewducker]

Most of the evidence I've seen shows that parenting and other parts of upbringing have a massively bigger effect on intelligence.

Which also tends to magnify down generations - but is at least more amenable to being fixed by outside forces.

Re: Smacking kids.

[endless-psych.livejournal.com]

What evidence have you seen just out of interest?

Re: Smacking kids.

[andrewducker]

Not a question I can easily answer, I'm afraid, as I've mostly just read a lot of "stuff". Luckily some of it was in my delicious links:
http://delicious.com/andrewducker/intelligence

My favourite is probably this one:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/520.html
which has sufficient stats to keep you happy :->