Complex Numbers

Only the (not so) Lonely

I was an "only child," so this article caught my interest. So I'm sharing it. See? We can share.

https://qz.com/980226/neuroscience-shows-that-only-children-are-more-creative-mo...

Neuroscience shows that our gut instincts about only children are right

That headline can bite me. That's not the thrust of the article at all, as we shall see.

Conventional wisdom has it that only children are smarter and less sociable.

"Conventional wisdom" is almost always wrong. But flattery will get you everywhere with me.

Conversely, since those only children never have to share a toy, a bedroom, or a parent’s attention, it is assumed they miss out on that critical life skill of forever-having-to-get-along.

"Critical," my solitary ass.

But are their actual brains different?

OH COME ON.

Jiang Qiu, a professor of psychology at Southwest University in Chongqing, China and director of the Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality in the ministry of education, led a team of Chinese researchers that sought to answer this question with more than 250 college-aged Chinese students.

FWEEEEET! Flag on the play. Minuscule sample size, representative of just one culture. 10 yard penalty, fourth down.

Hey, I just made a sportsball joke.

They used standard tests of intelligence, creativity, and personality type to measure their creativity, IQ, and agreeableness.

Fuck agreeableness.

On the behavioral tests, only children displayed no differences in terms of IQ, but higher levels of flexibility—one measure of creativity—and lower levels of agreeableness than kids with siblings.

You're also going to have to explain to me how to actually quantify creativity. I mean, I know there are issues with IQ tests, but at least some measures of intelligence can be quantified within a particular cultural and socioeconomic context.

Having worked on the 1896 study “Of Peculiar and Exceptional Children,” Hall cast only children as “oddballs” as “permanent misfits,” descriptions that have stuck over the years with remarkable persistence. “Being an only child is a disease in itself,” he claimed.

As developed countries transitioned from agrarian to industrial economies, family sizes tended to get smaller. I mean, I can't be arsed to find the data on that or anything, but I'm pretty sure it's the case. So, naturally, in the 19th century, growing up with a bunch of siblings would be considered "normal" and not doing so would be considered "abnormal." I assert that had the opposite been the case, it would be having siblings that would be considered "a disease in itself."

There is ample evidence suggesting the stereotypes of the “lonely only” are wrong.

As I'm pretty sure I've mentioned in here before, being sibling-free taught me a lot about self-reliance. I wouldn't want it any other way.

They found that only children, along with firstborns and people who have only one sibling, score higher IQ marks and achieve more, but aren’t markedly different personality-wise

Which right there contradicts the Chinese study, throwing both into question.

Jiang and his co-authors hypothesized a few reasons for their findings.

You can hypothesize all day. I mean, I do. Until you do the science, it remains opinion and educated musings.

Creativity —defined as having original ideas that have value—is strongly influenced by everything from family structure and parental views, to interactions and expectations

Okay, so you can define creativity, but again -- how do you measure it? If it can't be quantified, it's not science. And "original ideas that have value?" We share a world with seven billion other humans. I've had original ideas that, it turned out, someone else had already thought of.

The article goes on to talk about some measures of creativity: flexibility, originality, and fluency. Those sound more like general intelligence to me, but what the hell do I know?

Look, I'm not trying to argue from one datum (me), and if I hadn't been drinking wine I might seek out other sources to delve deeper into this, but so far it's not passing the bullshit test for me. Then again, I'm just not very creative, so maybe I'm just inflexible enough to provisionally reject this.

He also noted that just like IQ tests, creativity tests are not perfect measures of the thing they are measuring.

Duh.

Creativity involves spontaneity and intrinsic motivation—things which are a bit hard to assess on a test.

Pretty much by definition, you can't make a standardized test that measures creativity in a meaningful way. I mean, a truly creative person could find a way to bypass the strictures of the test, making it invalid. Right? Think about how James T. Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru test. In either universe.

To summarize, this article panders to confirmation bias.

So back to my wine, and rewatching old episodes of Star Trek because it's been years since I actually watched them. Damn, some things were cringeworthy in the 1960s. But first...

Mini-contest results!

As is appropriate for a question about decisions, this was a tough decision for me. I appreciated all of the comments. From them I gathered that we all have different ways of making decisions, as I expected.

What clinched it for me, though, was the line: "I chart a course I want to take and weigh my decisions based on whether or not they move me along the course." I like that this implies a focus on making decisions based on achieving one's overall goals, and not just the pros and cons of an individual decision -- something that neither I nor the article's author seems to have considered, but in retrospect it seems important.

So this time, the Merit Badge goes to Turkey DrumStik -- but again, I liked all the comments and everyone will get another chance soon.

I should also note that no, I'm not taking sides on which decision-making process is "best." Whatever works for you, works. But I hope that seeing how other people approach it helps us all with our own decision-making. As always, thanks for reading and commenting!