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Douglas_Knight comments on Less Wrong Parents - Less Wrong
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Comments (58)
Is this from real data?
I would think that the behavior of parents has a massive impact on the way the children grow up (but indeed, not the material stuff that so many parents fuss so much over), considering how strong of a correlation there is between the parents' belief systems and behaviors and their children's.
I'm not much compared to even a small survey, but from my small sample I've noticed a possible strong correlation between the way parents respond to questions / handle "problematic" behavior / do anything to "educate" their children and the intelligence, rational behavior and open-mindedness of the children later in life.
The most salient example (but not the most statistically significant) is that everyone I talked to about this who were on the higher end of the intelligence scale had clear memory of their parents responding "I don't know, let's find out" to their curiosity when they were a child, while everyone else I talked to had no such memory.
I think looking into actual pedagogical research results and how to best behave towards children would probably be very high expected utility / value of information if maximizing your child's chances of not being stupid is something you care about.
At the very least, a parent can affect the environmental factors that the book mentioned in the parent post mentions (I haven't read the book, only the abstract) by carefully selecting a good initial environment with these things in mind in the first place.
Obviously also worth looking into is alternative forms of education. Public schools are far from optimal both for social and intellectual development.
If any of this is of interest, I can try to help with some research on it.
Shminux gave a citation. What more do you want?
downvoted.
Book =/= data.
Descriptions of the book mention only "insights" and "clear thinking", so I'm assuming that the author didn't exactly go out and present charts, graphs and reports from careful studies, experiments and analyses. If my assumption that the book is merely "good thinking" rather than actual experimental results and observations is wrong, then my model needs some updates.
I was trying to clarify and differentiate between "Some cool guy wrote a book, some LW user believes what it says" and "A researcher presented experimental results, explained the most logical cause and effect for these results, and a LW user affirms that this is not cherry-picked or biased". I hope that makes it a bit more clear why I asked that question.
Books are such a ridiculous concept.
Someone tells you they know something, or they tell you something and that they can prove it. You click the link to know more, and instead of being told straight away you're supposed to spend money. You then receive a standardized-length text, containing scattered bits of the information you wanted, lots of waffling, padding, anecdotes and forewords, and rarely any raw data dumps.
In the reasonable case, it's also in a rather inconvenient format; text is still text, but there is no easy way of extracting data. The format contains DRM that, if you were to leave them in place, would enable a third-party company to revoke your access anytime they want, and prevent you from redistributing it. The latter is actually illegal, though it's one of those obscure never enforced laws like "don't fish in your pajamas".
In the preposterous case, it's a bunch of squiggles on organic matter. The organic lump must be physically schlepped to you, which can take days or weeks. It will then clutter your house, and is surprisingly heavy for its volume. Of course, it has no searching or exporting methods.
What's next, going to Mount Sinai and waiting for research papers on marble tablets?
The Nurture Assumption has more summaries of existing research (and criticism of insufficiently rigorous analysis), my edition has 32 pages of references.