 | User: cody Member Since: 4-Jun-2000  Last On: 26-May-2009 Page Hits: 1 today (30 in the last 30 days) |
Recent Surveys:
1) What genetic modifications do you believe would make the world a better place?
2) Have you noticed that we are all running out of ideas for surveys?
3) Which of the following conclusions is logical?
more) more surveys by cody...
Recent Comments:
| Jump to Survey | Actually, there is something I didn't think of that does kind of agree with you. In more intelligent populations IQ will *slowly* decline with age if there isn't some sort of active intellectual involvement. This doesn't suggest that IQ can be increased by education (like I said before, nothing appears to increase IQ), but it does suggest that it can be decreased by not being exposed to education or some sort of intellectual task, with the same result. This is being generalized from rat studies (rat studies being studies of large mice), though, there isn't a longitudinal test on people yet that's been completed.
I've actually turned around on this issue since the beginning of our conversation due to new research I've read (I didn't say anything definitively before, I just generally agreed with you that people could learn concept mastery). The only ways currently known to improve IQ are to prevent the loss of IQ in at-risk populations (feeding the hungry, letting 12 year old Kaity out of the closet for the first time in her life etc.). There doesn't appear to be any hope of taking people who are well-off and changing their intelligence. You can change their test-scores with some (considerable) work, but significant intelligence changes aren't going to occur. Sternberg claims that practical intelligence can be changed, but he's addressing a completely different issue than the type of innate intelligence most people are talking about. You may be more fond of Sternberg's idea of practical intelligence (learning how to be smart), but most researchers (and even Sternberg at times) will admit that you aren't really making people more intelligent or raising their "g", you are just teaching them to put the intelligence they have to better use. This may be one of our differences. That's not the type of intelligence IQ is measuring, though, it's measuring "g" which is an inherent aspect of the mind and follows the 25 principles laid down before. |
| Jump to Survey | See my forum post, but, I'll continue this.
It's a semantic issue whether you want to label something a "disorder" or not. Homosexuality is well within my definition of the word, though. Different people can define the word differently if they so choose, and it's not a right or wrong issue. Some facts can put the situation into context though-- Homosexuality was of course removed from the DSM for primarily political reasons (the change came in 1977). The person who led the charge to have it removed later changed his mind. Another factor was that in determining if a behavior is a disorder, one of the criteria has been to determine whether it hurts the individual. In the old days, being offensive to society was grounds enough, but these days the trend has been more towards proving harm. Reproductive harm had not historically been considered in this definition of harm, and allowing reproductive harm to be a criteria would beg the question "Why not diagnose everyone who is single with a disorder?" So, of course, another explanation is that as the trend pushed towards proving harm, there wasn't any evidence suggesting that homosexuality was harmful and it was removed. This was also before twin studies had been done and a lot more people were believing in the now-disproven genetic determinance theories and the now-highly-doubtful biological determinance theories. These days it is clear that homosexuality correlates with a truck-load of undesirable behaviors. There is debate about whether it is treatable in the majority of subjects, but it's clear that some people can re-orient (studies suggest that gay people often have a history of having reoriented). The trend is that the younger the individual the more effective therapy is going to be. The issue is also one of self-determination. People would argue that if a gay person wants to be gay, that is their choice. I agree with this, but I think it is similar to saying "If a heroin addict wants to be a heroin addict"... or "If an hebephile likes being an hebephile...". Sure, it is an unalienable right, but that doesn't mean that they aren't pathological... It's a tough issue. The APA has been historically Neutered on the issue, not really having the balls to say what most researchers are thinking. My impression is that most researchers are fine with it not being in the DSM for political reasons, but in practice I don't know of anyone who doesn't think of it as a disorder... something unusual that is causing the subject harm (because more recently it is proven to be correlated with harmful behaviors (and probably causing them due to an interaction of the gay person with society)). A good number of people have presented developmental theories of homosexuality, recently an extremely good one was published in the Psychological Review called "Exotic Becomes Erotic". Commonly referred to as the EBE theory, I think a lot of people believe it. I do. The behavior has an r of ~.50 in twins reared apart, which suggests high heritability. On the other hand, the rate of the disorder (as I'd call it) varies in populations over time, so it is clear that there is a "Genetic predisposition" not a "genetic cause", and that you need the presence of an environment with certain characteristics for the behavior to show up. People who believe in the "Gay Gene" are simply wrong. That is pseudoscientific bullcrap pushed by homosexual activist and researcher Dean Hamer, who forged his results and used an unethical statistical procedure to "prove" that a particular gene correlated with homosexuality. What he really did is tested hundreds of genes and then found the one which had the least likely "by chance" rate of having had a certain correlation. Needless to say, since you only need a 95% confidence interval to prove correlation, looking at 100+ genes is going to be an effective way to (by chance) in a sample, find one that correlates. As if this wasn't good enough, he manipulated the data. His study failed to replicate and he hasn't published anything in years, some journals aren't accepting his stuff. There are genes that play roles, but seperating genes from environment on the issue is extremely difficult. Picture a girl playing a flute-- how much of the music is being created by her and how much is being created by the instrument? Nonetheless, you could certainly change the flute around so that no music is produced, and you can certainly change the environment around so that homosexuality won't appear in a child. There is a book out on preventing homosexuality in children which rests on firm psychological principles. It's controversial because the reality is that a lot of people don't see anything wrong with the behavior. The science of preventing the behavior, or at least the idea that the behavior can be prevented, is not controversial. Whether the authors of the particular book have an effective methodology remains to be seen, it's a lot of theory with no studies testing it. Whether one sees something "wrong" with the behavior is a personal moral/ideal decision that needs to be made within each person, but those people who don't feel like it is wrong obviously don't agree with preventing it. I see it as similar to drug abuse-- it is going to lead to the evolutionary death of a strain, and therefore is undesirable from a utility perspective of organism functioning and therefore a disorder. Given the fact that having NO sexuality is considered a disorder, I consider it extremely weird that having an abnormal orientation isn't. It was a political decision to remove it, primarily. Ironically, if it were still in the DSM today, with all the new research that is out, there is no way it would have been removed. It's just a political decision whether to have it in the DSM or not. It is what it is, regardless of what you call it. It reminds me of a girl asking me, "So, is this a date?" Does whether we call it a date (disorder) or not change what it is? So the real answer to the question is that by doing a lot of research into homosexuality, you will form an impression of what it "is", and from there you can choose whether it fits into your definition of disorder or not. Regardless of how you label it, it is what it is. On the subject of changing IQ's... IQ appears to be fixed at birth within a pretty small range. You can decrease it but you can't really increase it. You can increase IQ scores on specific tests by teaching to the test, but you aren't increasing the IQ, you are inflating the test result. This isn't a realistic concern for people who don't happen to be in the Head Start program (the very existence of which is based on this method of manipulating tests). In the general population as long as people aren't taking the test 20+ times the score isn't going to change more than a few points based on "Education". There were some studies asserting that this was true but they had bad methodology and there is now an enormous research base contradicting this idea. In any event, it's irrelevant to the life-success correlations because you generally use IQ data that the now adult subjects' schools collected on them when they were kids (which thankfully was common practice at one point). It's called a "quasi-longitudinal" study. The alternative is real longitudinal studies which take longer and cost more, like the Terman study. There's no reason to believe that short of actively trying to raise their IQ and studying for a specific test for many weeks, a person would increase it beyond a 5 point range, which is about the confidence interval to begin with. There are also significant differences between real IQ tests and the ones you buy in the store, take on the internet, etc. I think that is important to note. A real IQ test takes several hours to administer, is administered by a psychometrist (it is a person-to-person test), and is a lot different than those that are available to people who don't have business administering them (you actually have to be registered to even get ahold of the real tests...), so the results of "practice" aren't common. That being said, one of the specific methodological flaws with the study I think you are referencing is that they kept re-testing subjects with the same test over the course of their "educations". What was really being demonstrated was that if you give the same subject the same test twice he'll get a higher score the second time. (Again, this isn't an issue for the studies I am talking about because those ones they took in fifth grade were almost always the first ones they'd ever taken, and there was no relationship between whether they'd taken one before and anything relevant.) There is no evidence suggesting that "intelligence" can be changed over the life-time beyond the variation that is normally attributed to losing some due to head injuries and drug use and whatever else. |
| Jump to Survey | Modesty is interpersonally attractive. Saying things like, "The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know" are good statements to make friends at a cock-tail party, but they aren't true. The more a person learns about something, the more they become an expert on it, and the more they can say certain things with certainty. The whole point of science is to establish things for certain. When Socrates said ""All I know is that I know nothing," in my opinion he was making a statement which reflected the unscientific nature of the world that he lived in at the time. These days we say, "All we know is what we've filled millions of journals with."
What I'm saying on this subject is clearly true, and somewhere in your mind you are acknowledging that. There is no room even for a debate. INTELLIGENCE TESTS MEASURE SOMETHING MEANINGFUL ABOUT PEOPLE WHICH DIRECTLY PREDICTS LIFE SUCCESS TO A SIGNIFICANT EXTENT, PROBABLY BETTER THAN ANYTHING. It's psych 101. It's EXTREMELY BASIC ideas. I'm not going to say, "Well, you know, the more I learn about this the more I realize..." It would be detrimental to the science to allow clearly established conclusions to be called into question by absurd arguments against them that have already been addressed in the literature and which have basic flaws that make them implausible. I'm not saying, "There's no way there isn't something else playing into this." (though I do doubt it). What I'm saying is, "The science is currently established on this issue, it has been for the better part of a century, and you aren't raising any points that haven't been addressed before. You aren't calling these current understandings into question with what you are saying." That's my only conclusion. MSG is wrong. The science is, always has been, and always will be against the specific points that he is raising. He is raising hypotheses which can only be disproven. But the thing is, THEY HAVE BEEN DISPROVEN! My hypothesis CAN be proven, just like evolution can be, and the roundness of the earth before that can be! MSG needs to get with the program and either accept it or make a NEW, PLAUSIBLE, case against it. That is the scientific process. Science doesn't have room for personal opinions or preferences. MSG is trying to exploit the fact that there are always some uncertainties in things to make it seem like his position is true based on some "higher knowledge" of the "ultimate workings of the universe" that he has which I don't because I'm 17. His higher wisdom, which god bestowed upon him, allows him to know the truth of any matter without subjecting himself to the scientific process which rules over lower beings such as Cody. I'm citing the science and this is what the science says. SCIENCE CAN COME TO CONCLUSIONS ABOUT THINGS THAT ARE CERTAIN! THERE IS PROOF! That's the whole point of science. You always have to accept certain assumptions, but they are simple things like "Does the universe exist?" and "Do my senses deceive me?" and on and on and on, but once you have accepted these assumptions proof comes out and stays out. Don't try to say that I should allow "room" for MSG's pseudoscientific bullcrap. There is no room for it in the current literature. IT IS DISPROVEN, INVALID, AND WRONG. Just like astrology, Jonathon Edwards, Scientology, Creationist "Science" and Bio-Rhythms. It's WRONG! Part of science is accepting that certain theories have absolutely no merit. You label them pseudo-science if they have been disproven and you trash them. But the theories, like the Herpes Simplex Virus, will live on through the minds and bodies of people who have been exposed to them a single time. |
