DailyDirt: Correlations For Being Smart

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

If there were some simple things you could do that would make you smarter, you'd do them, right? Unfortunately, it's difficult to guarantee that a particular activity will actually cause you to be smarter. If you'll settle for a nice correlation, though, there are plenty of things to try! Here are just a few. If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Hide this

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: babies, causation, correlation, gym membership, intelligence, iq, night owls, parenting, smarter


Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread


  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 13 Aug 2014 @ 5:56pm

    Just wait for the manufacturers of infant formula to sponsor another study....


    Maybe they already have, but decided not to publish because the results weren't favorable to them.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Votre (profile), 14 Aug 2014 @ 6:06am

    Breastfeeding

    The assertions made for breastfeeding tend to be heavily exaggerated when viewed purely from a scientific perspective.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • identicon
      Anonymous Coward, 14 Aug 2014 @ 6:44am

      Re: Breastfeeding

      Yup, that formula from China is entirely safe for human consumption ... film at eleven.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • icon
    Tobias Harms (profile), 14 Aug 2014 @ 9:13am

    Since breastfeeding is the natural and original way to feed a baby, shouldn't that say "bottle fed babies have lower iq at age seven than the ones that were breastfed"?

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      John Fenderson (profile), 14 Aug 2014 @ 10:34am

      Re:

      Since we're getting all technical about it, the distinction shouldn't even be between breast fed and bottle fed. It should be between being fed breast milk and formula.

      link to this | view in chronology ]

  • identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 14 Aug 2014 @ 10:24am

    "sustained nocturnal activities are largely evolutionarily novel. The Hypothesis would therefore predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be nocturnal than less intelligent individuals."

    Oh FFS. "would therefore predict" is clearly based on the concept (foregone conclusion with no cites) that evolutionary novelty correlates positively with higher intelligence (define that at your leisure). May evolution save me from social scientists and 'experts'. Almost every sentence in TFA has holes in the logic big enough to drive a truck through.

    link to this | view in chronology ]

    • icon
      JP Jones (profile), 14 Aug 2014 @ 11:42am

      Re:

      I felt the same way. HUGE "scientific" stretches in that article.

      First of all, it ignores a TON of potentially mitigating factors. It ignores education opportunities, social class, parenting, genetic predisposition...all things that influence intelligence.

      Not only that, the ENTIRE sample apparently went to bed between 11:41 pm and 12:29 am on school nights, and apparently staying up for an extra 48 minutes in the middle of the night took you from "very dull" to "very bright" (whatever that means, no actual IQ values were listed).

      I'm fairly smart, graduated number 9 in my high school class with a full scholorship in computer engineering to University of Florida, and have been in advanced classes my entire life. I don't think my parents ever let me stay up past 10:00 pm on a school night. By this article's logic, I should be dumber than a box of rocks.

      Granted, I naturally tend to stay up late and sleep in on weekends (my work prevents me from doing so during the week) but I'm pretty sure the logic and conclusions reached by that article are almost completely coincidental.

      Sigh. This is why a third of America doesn't believe in evolution. They read bad science based on it and assume the whole thing is a bunch of BS.

      I guess that's why you wrote that "People who are skeptical of this statement are even smarter." Or does that mean the skeptical people like to sleep in? =)

      link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        John Fenderson (profile), 14 Aug 2014 @ 12:21pm

        Re: Re:

        "(whatever that means, no actual IQ values were listed)"

        And even if the IQ values were listed, it wouldn't add much meaning. Nobody is really sure what IQ actually means, after all. One thing that is for sure, it doesn't fully equate to intelligence (you can be very intelligent and have a low IQ).

        This is sort of the problem with intelligence studies: the word "intelligence" is so vague and broad that it has nearly no scientific value.

        link to this | view in chronology ]

      • icon
        John Fenderson (profile), 14 Aug 2014 @ 12:23pm

        Re: Re:

        (Oops, forgot this part)

        "They read bad science based on it and assume the whole thing is a bunch of BS."

        I'd like to refine that a bit. They read bad science reporting, not bad science. The vast majority of the time what studies are being reported as saying and what the studies actually say are very, very different things.

        link to this | view in chronology ]


Follow Techdirt
Essential Reading
Techdirt Deals
Report this ad  |  Hide Techdirt ads
Techdirt Insider Discord

The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...

Loading...
Recent Stories

This site, like most other sites on the web, uses cookies. For more information, see our privacy policy. Got it
Close

Email This

This feature is only available to registered users. Register or sign in to use it.