Interesting paper, but they're very open about their limitations of just running this on Finnish data. From the conclusion:
We plan to extend our current analysis in several directions. A first extension is to replicate our analysis for other countries
There are many things unique to Finland, which makes this hard to generalize.
Also - they mention the interaction between father's income and child's IQ as a misallocation of resources. Is the implication that the parent is misallocating resources, or that Finnish society is misallocating resources by not funding the potential innovators who don't have wealthy dads?
Looks to me like the authors are lamenting the lack of society's resources devoted to enabling the pursuit of innovation for those intellectually capable whose personal resources fall below the level needed for unbroken progress toward achievement of patents. And that's a very high level now arrived at seemingly decently with the data they had to work with.
The paper is fascinating but to me it just confirms what should have been obvious to any natural innovator since childhood.
Once I found out about Edison (and patents) I didn't see much purpose in patents until after I would happen to have solid support for my efforts to begin with. Employers and others have made millions due to my innovations, but that was not truly solid support as long as I am still tasked with diverting so much of my time and effort to survival activites.
If I had patented some of my most promising inventions they would have expired by now anyway, as it is I can maintain readiness indefinitely.
It takes a great individual to overcome the kind of adversity that Edison did, and somebody like that does not come along every day, so I am with WalterBright on this one.
I'm disappointed that people are getting their "agenda" retaliation in early, disregarding most of the content of the paper.
Rather surprisingly this is limited to male (!) inventors in Finland (!), seemingly because that was the easiest place to get a whole-population IQ dataset in an otherwise fairly equal country. One of their conclusions is that involvement of the father is a positive and that divorce is a negative. If you're going to dismiss this as lefty nonsense then that is not the kind of conclusion to expect from it.
Researchers should stop producing this type of misleading content that clearly started out with a hypothesis driven by an agenda.
There are so many things that drive people to become what they become. Even using the "inventor" example, not everyone whose parents are rich has desire to invent something. If anything, it's the opposite. Most rich people are satisfied with the world around them so they just "fit in" to the world. There's not enough motivation for them.
The ones that do come up with world changing inventions in many cases are outsiders. These people are not satisfied with the world around them, that's why they invent something to fix what they think is broken.
So while I do agree that if you're too poor, you probably don't get enough education to know what you can or cannot fix, and you probably don't have the money to sustain yourself, I do not like what this "research" will be actually used for--it will be used for people who want to use it as an excuse not to invent something.
"See some Harvard researchers proved that you can't become an inventor if your parents are not rich, my parents are not rich and look what i have become. it's all my parent's fault! (while doing nothing but sitting around living a pathetic life)"
If you look at a lot of people who actually achieved things that made a difference, a lot of them were at the bottom of their lives before they created their masterpiece. J.K. Rowling was broke when she was writing Harry Potter. Van Gogh died before any of his art became famous. Nikola Tesla had a sad life. Howard Schultz grew up in a housing complex before going to build the Starbucks empire. Larry Ellison grew up in a poor family under adoptive mother.
I don't see any value this type of research adds to society. If anything, it will only make one more person give up her/his dream because "some Harvard researcher said you won't become an inventor because your parents are poor."
> Researchers should stop producing this type of misleading content that clearly started out with a hypothesis driven by an agenda.
Don't you find that your comment is, eh, just as like the research but without any statistical data. Anyone can have an opinion. It is very dangerous to censor people because we disagree with them.
Like you said, anyone should have an opinion. I shared my opinion that "they should stop printing out this type of propaganda material disguised as research", and that's my opinion.
When it comes to social stuff like this, I believe "statistical data" is the weapon. Most people don't truly understand statistics so it's easy to fool the general public just by using percentage numbers.
My point was NOT that they should have provided more statistical proof.
Instead it was that they started out with an agenda so the research was flawed from the beginning. Just like how most research funded by cigarette companies to prove that cigarette was OK was flawed from the beginning.
Of course, you can't get away from social agenda when it comes to social science research, but all the real valuable social science research results come from genuine curiosity whereas a lot of bad research results come from a clear goal to convey their existing message.
I just can't imagine how one could have come up with the underlying hypothesis of this paper WITHOUT starting from an agenda. If you disagree with me, please share your thought on why you think there was absolutely no social agenda when these people started their research.
I wish I could say, "it's true, and knowing it means knowing the truth. Don't let our political sensibilities blind us." However the agenda-driven work you're talking about is very real so instead I'll say this:
>estimated impact of parental income is greatly dimin-
ished once parental education and the individual’s IQ are controlled for.
It sounds to me like the study is showing that the impact of parents is split between knowledge transfer (nurture) and gene transfer (nature). This might actually be one of the least questionable ideas ever published.
Finally, heritability studies don't mean much new for motivating students: all of these IQ and parental wealth indicators show up well before "inventing" in the form of small victories like good grades that we've already learned to associate with adulthood success.
As a scientist, I can tell you that there is plenty of agenda in a lot of research. One thing in particular I take issue with is the notion that IQ is some reliable tracer of "inherent" and genetically heritable "intelligence". This is used to drive all sorts of agendas and has nothing close to what I'd call consensus among scientists.
I do believe there are genetic aspects to intelligence, but it continues to surprise me that there are still people who think IQ measures "innate" genetic intelligence. Have any of you ever taken an IQ test??
It is full of things that require and/or are highly helped by receiving an education (including things you might not immediately think of as something you can teach, like mental models and cognitive tricks). To start out with, it involves reading, which is something that is most certainly "nurture," not "nature."
There are also /epi/genetic aspects of intelligence that are inheritable but actually caused by the environment. Not everything that is inheritable is in the DNA.
I lived in multiple countries when I was young. When I first took my IQ test in my home country, I scored abnormally high. I can't deny this helped me a lot with my confidence growing up.
Then I moved away from my home country and lived abroad for a while.
Then I moved back. By then I had lost a lot of my language skills for my own native tongue since I've been speaking the other language for a while, as in I could understand and speak fluently, but my language skills were still stuck at the level of my younger self, since that was when I had left the country.
A bit after I returned to my home country I took another IQ test because the school made us. I scored low. It wasn't like I scored under average, but it was so significantly lower than my original score that I had an existential crisis.
Thankfully I didn't lose all my confidence because I kept doing well in math and other subjects, but I can say it really had a traumatic effect on me. Most people won't understand because nobody goes through such a drastic IQ change in their lives unless they were in an accident or something.
Well guess what, I took another test later on in my life after getting my language ability back to normal, and was happy to find that my IQ has recovered.
My theory is that a lot of these IQ tests involve language skills. One good example is those logical expression tests where you have to parse through all the cryptic logical expressions and come to a conclusion.
But I don't think it's just language skills. There are many other factors that go into IQ tests that make it an extremely unreliable measure for intelligence. After all, none of us--including whoever invented the IQ test--understands even 1% of how human intelligence work.
Anyway, all this first hand experience made me realize how stupid this whole IQ thing was. It really fucks with your mentality when it really is NOT an objective way to measure intelligence. (Remember, I now have my high IQ back, so it's not like I'm saying this because I'm salty that I scored low)
I'm sure there are many people out there who have very high intelligence in certain areas but got low IQs and just grew up with low confidence. This is absolutely unfair and if anything I think schools should ban IQ tests for this very reason. The IQ test is the very thing that contributes to all this inequality bullshit.
If you believe this is "science", then we're on a different page.
For the record I do believe in science.
It's just that there are some types of research that use non objective and unproven measures to convey a message they wanted to prove from the beginning. This becomes more serious in the field of "social science" because by default "social" is very difficult to come up with an objective hypothesis with. There are many that do a good job of trying to stay as objective as possible, and there are those who actually started out wanting to prove a subjective agenda. I think this particular research is the latter.
Here are a couple of things I dislike about this research:
1. They used IQ as a measure. I won't go into details because this opens its own whole can of worms, but the gist is, trying to prove your theory using another meta measure that has not been proven to be reliable (and many agree that it is also determined by educational background, which is the very thing the authors are trying to prove, resulting in circular logic)
2. They didn't prove anything new. Instead all they did was make an obvious fact much more focused (using the "inventor" qualifier) so that it can be used by lobbyists. Everybody knows if you have better education you have more likelihood of success. Did you not know that? If you did, what does this research add to your knowledge other than as just another source of "research says" recitation some Buzzfeed article can use to generate their page views? Making an already known fact more concrete is a recipe for propaganda. Therefore I see this research as nothing more than a marketing campaign.
3. I do not trust any research results that present themselves as cause-and-effect when all they are is just a correlation. This is really misleading and in fact do exist in numerous "research" results sponsored by cigarette companies and fast food companies that try to use "research" as propaganda that unhealthy is OK because "research said so".
> It's just that there are some types of research that use non objective and unproven measures to convey a message they wanted to prove from the beginning. This becomes more serious in the field of "social science" because by default "social" is very difficult to come up with an objective hypothesis with. There are many that do a good job of trying to stay as objective as possible, and there are those who actually started out wanting to prove a subjective agenda. I think this particular research is the latter.
I'm sorry but everything you say in this paragraph is objectively wrong and indicate that you don't really understand how science works.
There are different approaches to empirical evidence, but none of them can be written off as less serious or reliable than others. They are different tools for different jobs.
You mention "social sciences" as a bad thing, but interestingly enough this article didn't gather it's evidence through hermeneutics or constructivism (two approaches I'll assume you dislike), but rather realism (what you'd probably consider "sciency" science).
> I do not trust any research results that present themselves as cause-and-effect when all they are is just a correlation. This is really misleading and in fact do exist in numerous "research" results sponsored by cigarette companies and fast food companies that try to use "research" as propaganda that unhealthy is OK because "research said so".
Except the research isn't presented in this way. It's tested, it's peer-reviewed and the article itself tells you which problems there is with their approach showing you that the people who wrote it, actually thought about the weaknesses in their statement.
Ironically your approach to science seem to be what you despise about what you call "social science". You disregard evidence because it "feels" wrong to you, and because it's "presented" in a way you don't like.
Where did I say that? I said "you can't get away from social agenda when it comes to social science research, but all the real valuable social science research results come from genuine curiosity whereas a lot of bad research results come from a clear goal to convey their existing message"
> You disregard evidence because it "feels" wrong to you
Yes you got it exactly right. It feels wrong to me. And it's presented in a way that I don't like. That's it.
I don't care how many peer reviews it received. This research WILL be used by lobbyists and viral media to get traffic to their websites, and the authors know it. I didn't say this was not science. But it's science optimized for fulfilling an agenda.
You talk like you know EXACTLY what science is, but at the end of the day the term "science" is a word humans invented. Which means people will have different interpretations. We can't really reach an agreement here just like how people from different religion can't come to an agreement about their Gods. So don't try to feed me your version of science and tell me that's the "real" science.
My only point was that I do not like what this piece of "science research" will be used for. You can argue with me on that point if you really think there is no agenda behind this research. Because that's the only point I'm trying to make.
The study uses percentiles instead of absolute income, that means we can’t probably say a safety net is enough, percentiles still remain even if we have basic income.
Ok, fair enough. In that case it's an argument in favour of finding out what the top wealth percentile gets that others don't that makes them better innovators.
My point is, if unlike me you read the study properly, you can still use it to set useful directions for further research, if not policy conclusions, rather than just justifying failure as the parent comment suggests.
"A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall."
We plan to extend our current analysis in several directions. A first extension is to replicate our analysis for other countries
There are many things unique to Finland, which makes this hard to generalize.
Also - they mention the interaction between father's income and child's IQ as a misallocation of resources. Is the implication that the parent is misallocating resources, or that Finnish society is misallocating resources by not funding the potential innovators who don't have wealthy dads?