Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (41952)	11/17/1999 11:03:00 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

With respect to "human nature," I would like to pass along an anecdote that may strike some the wrong way, but ask that my readers "hear me out." Sometime during the first week or two of this school year, I got a call from Ben's high school office, they had no record that he was at school that day and wondered where he was. As I had, personally, dropped him off, I was sure that he was there, but he had been marked absent. Concerned that he might be cutting class, the caller and I discussed his schedule, which she did not have available. I started reading it off, beginning with GT/Pre-IB Biology, then GT/Pre-IB World Geography, and she stopped me, and said, "no, that's ok, I am sure that he's not cutting class. Kids who take classes like that don't cut class." Which isn't, of course, completely true, as Freddy and I could tell her, among others, but there was a very strong element of truth to it. Statistics show that there is a strong correlation between intelligence, social status, income, all things we would expect, but there are also correlations you might not expect, there is a strong correlation between intelligence and successful marriage. Intelligent people are less likely to get divorced, less likely to be arrested, less likely to be incarcerated, less likely to engage in acts of violence. Statistics also show that growing up in an orderly, nurturing, stimulating environment raises the intelligence level. I would argue that there is a kind of feed-back loop in operation, that growing up in a good environment makes kids brighter, which makes them more likely to create a good environment for their own kids. I believe that growing up in a chaotic, barren, unkind environment also creates a kind of feed-back loop, that the kids who grow up intellectually impoverished will raise children who are also intellectually impoverished. I think human nature is more malleable than it's given credit for. We may all have the naked ape within, but we don't have to let it out to murder and maim. And that naked ape also loves babies, and flowers and going barefoot in the grass, and sex, and lots of cuddling.