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Asking a girl out (the László Polgár story) (lemmy.world)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world to c/anarchychess@sopuli.xyz
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Shamelessly stealing this post from reddit because it's a really cool story:

Context - László Polgár, a Hungarian educational psychologist, conducted an experiment to prove that exceptional talent is developed through intensive education and training, not innate ability. He believed in his theory so strongly that he sought a partner willing to raise children under this philosophy. Polgár wrote to Klára, a Ukrainian teacher, explaining his ideas and proposing marriage as a collaboration in this experiment. Intrigued, Klára agreed, and they married, later raising their three daughters—Susan, Sofia, and Judit—as chess prodigies. From a young age, the girls were immersed in chess and rigorous intellectual training The experiment was a success: all three became world-class chess players, with Judit Polgár widely regarded as the greatest female chess player in history.

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[-] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 54 points 3 days ago

Undiscussed but Polgar helped disprove eugenics. His program proved it wasn't an undeclared genetic trait within the person but the environment they were raised in that proved exceptional individuals can emerge from anywhere.

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de -3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

What? Ofcourse it works, its just that if the childhood environment is bad it will limit the potential so much that investing into that is much more effective most of the time. But yes, parental intelligence absolutely has some impact on the potential of a child, that is proven beyond any doubt.

The good arguments against eugenics are moral, not biological.

[-] Akasazh@feddit.nl 7 points 2 days ago

You confuse things. The childhood environment is part of the nurture part, thus unrelated genetics (the biological aspect). So an adoptive child (no genetical relationship) would do equally well raised similarly.

The intelligence of the parent (or other genetical bagage) has little effect on the development of the child.

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de -1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Just to preface this again. I absolutely think environment has the larger effect, i.e. your genes can be as great as you want, if your environment was shit then its all fucked anyways. So absolutely we should focus on environmental improvements first.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_study

This is what twin studies exist for.

The classical twin design compares the similarity of monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins. If identical twins are considerably more similar than fraternal twins (which is found for most traits), this implies that genes play an important role in these traits. By comparing many hundreds of families with twins, researchers can then understand more about the roles of genetic effects, shared environment, and unique environment in shaping behavior.

You compare two sets of twins. One identical (they are genetically identical from the same egg) and one fraternal (they only share 50% of the genes).

If genetics didnt play a role at all, you would expect identical twins to be just as similar in their intelligence and achievements than fraternal twins, because they share the same environment (averaged over a large enough sample size to avoid parental preferences and stuff).

However fraternal twins diverge much more from each other than identical twins, so that means there is something other than just the environment. This has been studied for decades and the confidence in the results just keeps getting stronger.

To me its kind of absurd how this is even still a discussion because we already know and apply so much of this kind of knowledge in relation to hereditary illnesses. In scientific circles its not really a question of IF this is a thing, but HOW do we deal with this knowledge responsibly. The longer we pretend that this is just not real at all, the more time we give people with bad incentives to use it to their advantage for politics, profit and crimes against humanity.

[-] Akasazh@feddit.nl 4 points 2 days ago

The hereditary aspect of intelligence had been properly researched and debunked. F.i. : Campbell, Frances A.; Pungello, Elizabeth P.; Miller-Johnson, Shari; Burchinal, Margaret; Ramey, Craig T. (2001). "The development of cognitive and academic abilities: Growth curves from an early childhood educational experiment"

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de -1 points 2 days ago

Ah yes the "i saw this one study that said something else than those other 100 studies, so all those studies must be wrong" argument that climate change deniers like so much.

[-] booly@sh.itjust.works 3 points 2 days ago

Your whole baseline assumption in this thread is that most people are raised in an environment where they are likely to reach their full genetic potential. That's an assumption that isn't true in most populations.

If you have a population that has poor childhood nutrition, they won't grow to be as tall as if they had proper access to good food. If you have a heterogenous population where some have access to good nutrition and some don't, then the distribution of heights in that population will be less genetically determined than if they were all equally fed good nutrition.

Or, for another example, we know the number of fingers a person has is coded in their genes. But if you actually go perform a survey of the population to see how many fingers they have, and you collect their genomes, you wouldn't be able to correlate those observed outcomes to genomes, because pretty much everyone who has a number of fingers other than 10 got that way through something environmental (perhaps prenatal development, often an industrial accident or something). So the heritability of the number of fingers is actually close to zero.

Same with sports or fitness: rank the population by how fast they can run 5k, and you'll find out basically nothing about their genetics from those results. The variance in outcomes is utterly dominated by how much they actually run and train, not their genetic potential.

Turning to intelligence, that same phenomenon plays out. Childhood lead exposure, childhood nutrition, access to education (including mentorship and social support for learning), family stability, external stressors (and the accompanying internal changes to one's endocrine system and brain development in high stress environments), all contribute to intelligence. And certain traits that do affect intelligence are less heritable than others (e.g., certain cognitive conditions). All those factors put together in the real world "experiment" of how humans grow up differently mean that even if intelligence were highly heritable in a homogenous environment, the differences in people's environments would still get a wide distribution of outcomes due to non-genetic factors.

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Your whole baseline assumption in this thread is that most people are raised in an environment where they are likely to reach their full genetic potential.

No it is specifically not, what are you even talking about? Did you even read anything in my comment? This whole thing is about explaining difference in outcome with near identical environment. This is not about absolute predictions its about potential, which is why i specifically bothered to preface the whole thing with the following.

Just to preface this again. I absolutely think environment has the larger effect, i.e. your genes can be as great as you want, if your environment was shit then its all fucked anyways. So absolutely we should focus on environmental improvements first.

Nobody in their right mind denies that environment is the most important factor.

[-] Akasazh@feddit.nl 3 points 2 days ago

Ok what tf has climate change to do with this argument. Even if I were a denier (which I'm not) that is a ridiculous ad hominem.

[-] unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

What? That was a behavioural analogy to show that a single study shouldnt be given too much weight in comparison to a large number of studies with differing results.

I didnt call you a climate change denier, i said your response was as shallow as the arguments that those types of people use.

Thats the literal opposite of an ad hominem, as it calls out your bad argument and not you as a person.

[-] ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

Climate change is bad, why would you agree with it?

[-] Akasazh@feddit.nl 15 points 2 days ago

One other thing that he helped prove is that his children had the same general development curve compared to other children when trained on a subject. Just offset for the early start.

Hence he didn't raise prodigies, as he tried to prove, but rather proved the effectiveness of training/education.

[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 18 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

No control group. They needed to have just as many kids who were never allowed to play or observe chess.

Also, small sample size.

[-] qarbone@lemmy.world 22 points 3 days ago

I'm assuming they got along alright if they set up not one, not two, but three test cases in bed.

[-] SirSamuel@lemmy.world 15 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Sergeant Colon owed thirty years of happy marriage to the fact that Mrs. Colon worked all day and Sargent Colon worked all night. They communicated by means of notes. They had three grown-up children, all born, Vimes had assumed, as a result of extremely persuasive handwriting.

  • Guards! Guards! - Terry Pratchett
[-] sunzu2@thebrainbin.org 9 points 3 days ago

If the vibe is right, why not.

[-] sexy_peach@feddit.org 19 points 3 days ago

If I were one of the kids I would feel taken advantage of

[-] The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world 30 points 3 days ago

I know there are lots of gymnasts, musicians, ballet dancers, olympic athletes, etc. that probably feel that exact way, although I'm sure many also are grateful to have had the guidance. It probably depends on how much the kids enjoyed the game vs feeling pressured.

I've read some about how fiercely competitive Judit was as a kid - demanding to play against the boys because she didn't like that everyone expected her to play in the women's leagues. She's incredible and is living proof that women can achieve the same level of play as men (which sounds obvious today, but she became a GM 30 years ago).

[-] masterofn001@lemmy.ca 2 points 3 days ago

Oh no, my parents made me a genius.

Pass the pop tarts.

[-] Maalus@lemmy.world -3 points 3 days ago

Parents made you a genius by basically denying you a childhood you should have had, as an experiment, teaching you one of the most useless thing possible - playing an old boardgame.

this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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