From: Dale Thorn <dthorn@gte.net>
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 1996 00:46:02 -0800 (PST)
To: "E. Allen Smith" <EALLENSMITH@ocelot.Rutgers.EDU>
Subject: Re: Redlining
In-Reply-To: <01ICY0SRNW7QAEL8AI@mbcl.rutgers.edu>
Message-ID: <32B11667.2740@gte.net>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


E. Allen Smith wrote:
> From:   IN%"dthorn@gte.net"  "Dale Thorn" 13-DEC-1996 01:53:17.65[snip]
> >the rest is a cakewalk.  But what I really wanted to say was that my
> >experience with these children now (whom I didn't know until mid-1996)
> >has convinced me more than ever that intelligence is not only not
> >primarily genetic, but may also be recoverable to a large extent up to
> >the beginning of the teen years, if not beyond that.

> Actually, IQ tests in childhood up until about age 12 aren't
> particularly well correlated with adult IQ; they would thus agree with
> you on that environment can heavily influence IQ until that point.

Again, as a statistical exercise, this might be OK, but, quite a bit of
what you would see in the exceptional areas of the curve in childhood
would be rather obvious in adulthood as well. The fact that this doesn't
seem so obvious across the statistical curve is only evidence of poor
granularity in the data.

> It is possible to raise IQs somewhat with various environmental
> interventions; the question is how much. Research such as that
> discussed in Herman Spitz's "Raising Intelligence" (_not_ a conservative
> or racist by any means) appears to show that such does, unfortunately,
> have some points at which one gets to diminishing returns; see below
> for more discussion.

A typical researcher or team of same would not be proper candidates to
lead an interventionist study such as this.  You'd need people with
proven track records.  As I keep telling my wife again and again, when
we go into a book store and she picks up some book on a "health" topic:
What's the author's track record, not only for him/herself, but in
leading others?

> Regarding the "physical brain damage," I have earlier mentioned
> prenatal traumas such as lead; other instances would be inadequate
> maternal nutrition and the intake of alcohol (signifigantly more harmful
> to a child than crack). These are among the factors, other than racism,
> making studies showing differences in IQ between black adoptees and
> white adoptees difficult to interpret; cultural influences (racism,
> white adoptive parents trying to hard to raise black children in their
> "own" culture, etcetera) are another major group of factors.
> In other words, we don't know yet.

> >The main and overwhelming factor in developing children who can accomplish
> >at a superior level is the personal attention of a caregiver, and what
> >that attention consists of.  There are some things you can read about
> >in a book and guess what they mean, and there are some things you can
> >know when you're staring them in the face...
> 
> Certainly, extremely intensive care can help children who do not
> have physical brain problems. This does not mean that genetics does not
> play a considerable role; neither I nor (so far as I know) Mr. Chudov
> are claiming that genetics sets an unoverridable barrier. It is more a
> matter of that it will take a lot more to get a genetically unintelligent
> child to a given level than it will a genetically intelligent child.

It's just that in my personal experience, I've found that the vast
majority of children fall into the category of "exceptional potential".
I guess what I'm saying is that the accomplishment/test norms for most
children are far enough below where I could get them to with personal
attention, that  1) The norms are useful (to me) only as a stasticical
exercise, and  2) The differences between typical children and typical
children performing at or near their potential obscures the differences
found amongst the norms.

> In the larger, societal context, it is not possible to have
> intelligent parents with ample resources taking care of every child
> unless the number of children is considerably reduced. Quite simply,
> resources are limited (otherwise we would have no need for an
> economic system); money, time, etcetera spent on less intelligent
> children is not being spent on other pursuits (such as raising
> more intelligent children, who will be able to accomplish more in
> later life with the same investment of resources).

This is, I believe, what I and others feared from studies which provide
material for books such as the Bell Curve.  Knowing that the potential
of an allegedly unintelligent (or less-than-average) child might be so
great that that child (if lucky enough to get the opportunity) could
actually develop to be a significantly better performer than another
child with 40 more IQ points, even if the child with the higher IQ has
a reasonably good environment to develop in. Those kinds of possibilities
are (I think) near and dear to what some of our more enlightened founding
fathers in the USA had in mind when they wrote what they did, way back when.

I value the writings of all philosophers, BTW, but I reject the notions
of any that I or any other autonomous individual (a human is more-or-less
autonomous by definition, yes?) could be defined, limited, or otherwise
constrained by studies such as we've discussed.  I say constrained since
these studies do not happen in a vaccuum, and there is always going to be
some kind of fallout.