These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate.
My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass. Especially in recent years our (teachers’) performance is measure by passing rate and I have very little incentive to fail a student even if they don’t know the material.
I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others. As an extreme example consider the difference in intellectual talent between Einstein and a mentally disabled person. I suggest the possibility that maybe some people start off school in kindergarten behind their peers and never catch up. If the rate of learning is largely the same for people then starting off in kindergarten in the upper half in terms of knowledge would likely lead to one ending up in the upper half of knowledge at the end of college.
It's also a sign of the times that schools have realized it's much easier (and cheaper) to create student outcome equity by preventing exceptional success than by preventing failure.
Despite what many think, gifted kids are actually special needs as well. Not being challenged enough directly leads to a lack of learning to learn. And that in turn leads to hitting a brick wall at some point.
I have now attempted a few times to finish my higher education, always bounced HARD as I lack the mental facilities needed to deal with the frustration/commitment of actually having to learn.
Yep, this is a big deal in gifted ed. "Twice exceptional" (gifted + very ADHD, to pick a common one) as they put it, is frequently encountered. Huge break-downs, depression, and disengagement when, eventually, the student has to actually start trying (which they may never have had to do before, at all, for potentially a decade or more of formal education) are common. Total failure to develop any kind of study habits is common, because, up to a point, they were never needed. Social problems due to having a brain, mental skills, language abilities, and knowledge, that are about half 7-year-old and half 25-year-old, are common (if not due to outright autism—see again, "twice exceptional").
Heh, yeah, when I found out this stuff is basically Gifted Education 101 these days because it's so common, I was like "wow, you mean it wasn't just me?!" The field seems to have gotten a lot better at trying to fill in gaps and get ahead of traps and pitfalls, rather than just providing fun supplemental material, which was pretty much all they did back when I was in gifted programs.
Which universities engage in preventing exceptional success? Even with grade inflation, it's usually pretty easy to tell when someone is exceptionally capable/intelligent/successful compared to their peers at the same institution.
And the problem of grade inflation is more about universities competing for prestige (and keeping wealthy donor/legacy families happy) than about creating outcome equity.
I think it's probably earlier (elementary, middle) schools that just don't provide opportunity for kids that are very advanced to pursue materials that are actually challenging or interesting to them.
From what I've seen, the only higher ed experience where people care a lot about grades, class rank, etc. and it's highly competitive is law school. Everywhere else in academia there is grade inflation. The reason law school has avoided this trap is because top law firms that pay very well only want the top 5% based on class rank, especially outside of maybe the top 14 law schools.
The U.S news law school rankings hold a lot of weight.
They include statistics for how many of their students place at top law firms. If they grade inflate and lose credibility with these top law firms as to the grades being indicative of the quality of their students, top law firms will stop hiring from those schools, and their rankings will collapse. Of course, if you got a C in law school, that's a bad grade. In fact, you can flunk out if your grades go below a B-. Also, classes are graded on a strict curve. The teacher can only give out a certain number of A+s.
Princeton, which had been previously known for grade deflation, removed the requirement to study a classical language (Latin and Ancient Greek) as part of their classics major in able to make the field more accessible to people of color.
That is not why princeton removed it. It was because there were classics in other regions that you could study as well. The requirement of knowing a set of “classics” isnt gone. You could study ancient china for example.
It makes complete sense. If you are already a talented undergrad research that isn't going to focus on european classics in grad school (or in your Junior Papers or Senior Thesis), why make students finish an entire curriculum on ancient rome or greece?
source: this was discussed during princeton reunions at a panel, or I may have heard this from a another alumnus that was a classics major, heard after the change.
edit: cant reply for some reason (?) but ancient china was a mismemory. it didnt go beyond the near east and africa. still makes perfect sense if you specialize in neighbors to mediterranean.
Looking at the degree requirements at the moment, the option to study another language isn't in place of Greek or Latin, but rather in place of other courses.
> One course must deal substantially with classical reception or comparative approaches to the ancient world; this requirement may also be fulfilled by study of another language relevant to the student’s interests (Akkadian, Modern Greek, etc., at any course level).
Ancient China is in a different department. It would make sense to allow students to choose ancient Aramaic instead of Latin, but that's not the change. You can now graduate specializing in Ancient Greek without reading a single line in Ancient Greek.
Aramaic wouldn't make any sense either as aramaic isn't part of european civilization. It should be latin and greek. A degree in "classics" ( the works of greco-roman civilization ) should require both latin and greek.
Heck all students in american education ( K-12 ) should be taught latin at the very least. Why we stopped...
Sorry, I was specifically asking about fake or unserious degrees, so its not really in line with what I was discussing. However, I would question whether removing Latin or Ancient Greek as a requirement meaningfully lowers the quality of education. I'm not privy to all criteria considered when making that decision, but it seems reasonable on the face of it to me -- removing unneeded requirements that may be a barrier to learning.
> However, I would question whether removing Latin or Ancient Greek as a requirement meaningfully lowers the quality of education
In Classics, where Ancient Greek and Latin are principal topics of study
I understand why we might relent on not teaching them as a part of general studies, but in Classics, Theology and Ancient History at the graduate level there's no way to escape the need to read the original, and anyone who must rely on translation will remain crippled in the field as long as they do so.
If you're studying history, you should be reading primary sources. Translations are a useful tool, but everyone makes mistakes and has their own biases, so your scholarship is compromised of you rely on them. The only jobs relevant to a classics major are Latin teachers and college professors. Obviously, you can't do the former without learning Latin. Professorships are already incredibly competitive in classics, so you'd be a lot less competitive without language proficiency. I don't think the degree is quite "fake" yet, but it's definitely getting close.
Moreover, familiarity with Greek and Latin is very helpful even when reading English-language texts, in part due to the influence of those languages on English, and in part (I admit this is a bit circular) because English-language authors—especially the more academic-leaning ones—up until quite recently assumed they could toss in some Greek or Latin and their readers would understand it, especially if it was just a quote from some familiar text the reader surely encountered in school.
I could see loosening the requirement, but if the loosening isn't simply to permit French and German (also hugely important in academics, some fields more than others, very influential on English, and also often untranslated in otherwise English texts, so, justifiable for similar reasons) as substitutes, yeah, I'd regard it as likely a step backwards.
Removing requirements on the basis that they don't increase the quality of education does indeed sound reasonable, but doing it due to the color of skin would be the wrong reason to enact a policy. Racism is what we're fighting against, not trying to make policies enabling it.
Man, McWhorter jumps straight to the point. It's remarkable that NPR still has him on:
> JOHN MCWHORTER: Thanks for having me.
> SIMON: Josh Billings - I don't have to tell you, a classics professor who's the department's head of undergraduate studies - says, quote, "having new perspectives in the field will make the field better." What would be wrong with that?
> MCWHORTER: Nothing at all, but I don't want to hear it until I know that it's not a way of saying through the back door that we want to have more Black students, and it's racist to expect them to learn Latin and Greek.
My own undergraduate degree program was well known among students as a relatively easy major for people who wanted good grades and didn't want to work too hard. There was an honors track for the people who wanted to work harder. I'm not sure if that was the intention, but that's certainly how it worked out.
I'd say that one degree program being less difficult than another doesn't make it fake or unserious though. It's just natural that some topics are harder than others. There's a qualitative difference between "unserious" and "easier" I would say.
People have this weird perception of humanities students that they dick around all day. Some of the hardest-working people I met in school where humanities students. It might be the case that they were working hard on weird esoteric bullshit, but it was hard work nonetheless.
They're ideologically driven. Not so much a field of study as an agenda. Sometimes, when going through academic records of people from certain countries, I see their grades in courses like "Theory and Practice of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" or "Islamic Faith", gender students looks to me like a Western equivalent of those.
My (admittedly uninformed) impression of contemporary gender studies is that so long as you reach them conclusion that X gender is a victim (where X isn't cis men), it matters very little what path you take to get there. This is how an obviously joke study [1] got accepted in a relatively prestigious gender studies journal.
It demonstrates a grave lack of faith in humanity writ large to imagine that such a description can be representative of any distinguished academic tradition.
I'm not saying that gender studies is useless. It has obviously produced many valuable insights in the past, and I'm sure plenty of academics produce high quality scholarship in this field to this day. My point is that it makes little effort to distinguish this high quality scholarship and complete nonsense.
Stating this as some kind of obvious fact on a public forum usually requires some level of personal familiarity on the subject. Otherwise, what you are saying is literally, definitionally, "bullshit".
I made that qualification to acknowledge that I'm not an expert, but I've read enough on my own to make an informed judgement. Feel free to offer an alternative explanation to how such a comically absurd paper got into a prestigious journal instead of hastily declaring that I'm wrong.
> My point is that it makes little effort to distinguish this high quality scholarship and complete nonsense.
You make such sweeping claims based on a sample size of one. You neglect to account for survivorship bias -- you cannot see all the bullshit papers that were rejected from journals. This all feels obvious to me as issues with your analysis. Where is your intellectual rigor?
Not a sample size of one. Out of 20 papers they published, 7 got accepted, 6 were rejected, and 7 were still undergoing review. Also, I don't think that paper is that different from the postmodernist literature that I've read.
I assumed the parent meant K-12 schools (in the USA) cutting gifted and talented programs. The subject of ending tracking in schools and defunding programs for high performing students has been popping up on HN every 6mo or so.
Importantly, you have to simultaneously pull out of submitting information for ranking or metrics on your university.
Make up some reason that sounds nice for the politics of today such that you don't have to confront the truth that your university's performance has dropped substantially due to new policies you have adopted.
Most of the ivy league schools are now doing this simply because they are dropping the most, and hoping that other universities will follow them in dropping out (they typically do).
Admitting that I'm older, and haven't kept up with ideology on the subject of human differences - which of the following statements would be "best kept to yourself", these days?
- Some people are taller than others, Basketball Coach
- Some people can run faster than others, Track Coach
- Some people have more musical talent than others, Piano Instructor
- Some people are sicker than others, Emergency Room Nurse
An abstraction of the old "follow the money" argument is to figure out who politically benefits from dogma, then decide if you want to align with them, then determine if you'll be permitted not to obey.
Tends to be a lot of "convert at the point of a sword" from the authoritarians, as usual for them.
It is one thing to say that there is height variation, which is clear to anyone and easily empirically tested. However, saying that the quality of someone's height is attributable to genetics, diet, diet of the mother during pregnancy, social standing etc, is a bit harder to ascertain. The same with this research. Saying there are smart people or stupid people is not what the article concludes. They are already testing within a selected nonrandom group (college kids).
The claim they are making is that prior knowledge is a very big differentiator in "speed of learning".
Now, to claim this means that the kids with more prior knowledge are not "smarter" is a very weird claim. Smartness is not some metric that exists without a society. We all know the stories of the feral kids. Smartness is mostly cultivated, this article underpins this further by identifying prior knowledge as an important factor. So important, that other differences seem trivial. How the kids gained the prior knowledge is not part of this study and could be the focus of a future study.
What does "smart" even mean? My personal experience has taught me that the superficial appearance of a low-high intelligence spectrum belies a very complicated system.
My non-professional experience is that most people are capable of learning most things with enough time and dedication, up to a certain level of sophistication. There's a huge range of variation in how quickly different people can learn different topics, how capable they are from learning by reading versus listening, how much they struggle with various emotion management problems that might inhibit their otherwise-highly-capable cognitive abilities, et multa alia.
Moreover, very very very few students are ever taught how to study and how to learn. Even fewer still are taught how to understand their own minds, and how to find the balance between training their minds to learn in certain ways and finding learning styles and subject areas that work well with their minds. Some students instinctively realize that writing, drills, and practice form the seeds of intuition, which is the basis for understanding, while others never really figure this out on their own. Some students understand how to take notes that work for them, while others have bad handwriting and find it difficult to take notes at all.
I think that what we tend to perceive as "intelligence" is some combination of "ability to learn a limited set of desirable subjects relatively quickly from conventional instruction techniques and resources" and "well-spoken".
If that is true, then if we want more equitable learning outcomes, we should be focusing on helping students to explore how their own minds work, to learn self-awareness and emotion management skills, to improve communication skills, and to learn their own innate mental strengths and weaknesses, so they can more easily self-select into and self-direct within their own learning environments. And society in general should offer and hold high esteem for a greater variety of learning environments and types of intelligence.
Of course, some people will indeed struggle with emotion management, or communication, just like some people will struggle with learning mathematical proofs or understanding complicated historical events. But I think that's better than our current status quo of just hoping that students figure all this stuff out for themselves. I would even hypothesize that parental involvement in these areas specifically might be causal for some % of differences in student education outcomes.
Edit: All of the above is of course possibly contradicted by the article under discussion here. I'll have to read it in more detail, and maybe I'll update my beliefs as a result.
I said "most people" and "most things" because yeah, some people really do have a low level of general intelligence and will struggle. I know a social worker whose job for a very long time was finding employment for people with IQs in the 50s, and they really struggled with a lot of things. There is a lot of research into IQ demonstrating that some kind of underlying general intelligence probably does exist.
The point of my post was not to deny this, but to assert that what we perceive as intelligence in our day-to-day lives might not be something as deep as that.
That specific stance, I don't believe, is framed to represent accurately the worries many have surrounding educational outcomes. I have trouble believing anyone would disagree that in the present, without a notion of time or continuity, that is indeed an obvious fact.
But your straw man does not stand up under his own power. The concern is and always will be what differentiates peoples' abilities, and which abilities in which people are incentivized / selected for in our society. These are of course still matters of intense debate. We are reasonably sure by now that it is both nurture and nature -- indeed, a synthesis of the two perspectives -- that is vital to understand all the forces at play.
On the "nature" side, genetic damage resulting from multi-generational trauma has been identified as a reasonable explanation over that of some notion of "inherent" genetic differences by race. So, while the contributing aspects of "nurture" happened in the past, it is the "nature" of the specific individual, born already with those disadvantages, that largely determines the outcomes of their lives. There is of course still the "nurture" of that individual, whose environment can influence the balance of advantage or disadvantage for that person after they are born as regards positive outcomes. This is not limited to family life but extends to all forces incident on that individual.
Then it seems inevitable that, as a result of any focused campaign of coercion or discrimination, persistent statistical patterns will arise within oppressed sub-populations which impact outcomes for future generations. In other words, we are all still living among the echoes of the past.
If one asserts that anyone can learn any topic, and there are many in higher ed who do assert this, then demonstrating this isn’t true by pointing out that mentally disabled people can’t learn college algebra is enough to demonstrate the absurdity of this assertion. What those in higher ed are afraid to confront is the idea that there are people who aren’t college material. There is a continuum of intellectual talent ranging from severely mentally disabled to genius. For each topic/subject there is a line in terms of the required talent (and effort) to learn a topic.
Proponents of everyone can go to college and be successful ought to be precise in their statements. What they really mean is that more people are capable of succeeding in college than our currently attending college. If they would argue thusly and say it as such then a real discussion can be had. Instead we have people saying everyone can go to college. This shuts down any notion that perhaps too many people are going to college. No reasonable discussion can be had when one starts with the clearly false statement that anyone can go to college.
Why some people aren’t capable of succeeding in college and the causes of such is a different discussion.
Every discussion about college success rates that I have been a part of revolved around faculty not doing their job correctly. The latest fashion is doing “trauma informed teaching”. Every reform in math teaching is about the need to change teaching to get more students to succeed. Never is there is a discussion about what percent of the population can learn, say, college algebra. The assumption of all of our duty days (days devoted to student success rates) is that more students can pass our classes than do pass.
A majority of incoming college students place into pre-college level courses. A recent trend is to ban pre-college level courses and instead do supplemental instruction in college algebra. Too many students are underprepared so we ban the courses to get them prepared. It is now a trend to no longer require college algebra level knowledge to get a college degree. The only reason for this trend is because a lot of people fail college algebra.
The only discussion I’ve seen regarding limits to learning algebra is at this link:
If you acknowledge you have such a limited viewpoint, why make such strong assertions of facts? You cannot possibly know the things you are pretending to be an authority on.
My limited viewpoint is over 20 years in higher education and experiencing reforms over the years. I’m not an expert in these matters and never claimed to be one. Nor have I given an impression of being an authority.
It is common for people to make conclusions on topics based on their experience and what they’ve read. We all do this since none of us can possibly fully research all topics. In my first post I specifically declared that I have no expertise on these matters. I think this topic is an emotional one for you and this is clouding your interpretation of what I have written.
I’ve encountered people like you at the various colleges I’ve taught at. You make it hard to have discussions regarding uncomfortable ideas. Such is not befitting of a person with your apparent intellectual capabilities.
The only strong assertion that I’ve made is that some people can’t learn college algebra. If you can find a severely mentally disabled person who has learned college algebra then please present your evidence. I suggest you are part of the problem in education. If we can’t acknowledge even the obvious (namely that not everyone can learn every topic) then we will continue the trend of dumbing down standards and curriculum and just passing people through the system in a misguided approach to educational equity.
> It is common for people to make conclusions on topics based on their experience and what they’ve read. We all do this since none of us can possibly fully research all topics.
Normative, not substantive. "Other people speak without knowing the limits of their knowledge" is not a good reason to emulate them.
Research is not about filling your bucket of known knowns: that's merely literature review. It is about converting unknown unknowns to known unknowns related to some question or goal, and then chipping away about the unknown-ness of whatever enables you to reach your conclusion. With this exploration of the limits of knowledge I hope comes some humility about what people are willing to state in such strong and unwavering terms.
> If you can find a severely mentally disabled person who has learned college algebra then please present your evidence.
Straw man. Who has claimed this? The question of who is given advantage in the educational system is not related to this strange fixation of yours. I can acknowledge that someone defined as "disabled" is "dis-abled" from performing certain acts. This is uncontroversial.
I suspect you are hiding behind this innocuous claim to avoid having the more uncomfortable conversation about what you think actually holds people back in the educational system. So far you have said "some people are smarter than others". I proposed a way this could be explained. You seem to have rejected it, but have not replaced it with another theory of your own.
> I think this topic is an emotional one for you and this is clouding your interpretation of what I have written.
It seems correctly caveated; it is really hard to measure intelligence. People could have different skill sets and talents, some of which test better or work better in an academic setting. It isn’t obvious how much teaching experience could tell out about some hypothetical intelligence-horsepower or something like that.
It is surprisingly easy (and cheap), actually. That's why the military does it all over the world. People who score too low are a liability for the military (and not only are they less useful, they tend to be more dangerous than enemy). People who score well are shepherded towards signaling, engineering, that sort of thing. Average people get to be "normal" soldiers.
That “the military” (which one? Or is it Earth Defense Force?) claims to test something doesn’t mean they actually accurately test it. If they actually claim that. I suspect they are more interested in testing aptitude and skills for particular types of tasks.
Indeed. It is surprising how often I've been chastised for saying that some people are smarter than others. Relatedly I believe that some people are just incapable of learning, for example, college algebra. As an extreme example can a mentally disabled person learn college algebra?
Einstein quite frequently messed up his math. But he was lucky to be surrounded by some excellent minds that regularly pulled him out of holes and kept him on the right track. One person's intelligence doesn't matter at all if they are surrounded by idiots, or they are stuck in environments that focuses their minds on bullshit (eg Google - lot bright people there working on pure shit)
It's worth chastisting a little bit, because "smart" is at best an oversimplification. I wrote at length about this in another post, but the tldr is that, in expectation, most people are good at some things and bad at others. If I'm good at university-level mathematics but terrible at woodworking, am I smarter than someone who is good at woodworking but has a hard time wrapping their head around group theory?
Case in point: I struggled in my algebra class and developed no useful intuition for groups until years later, but by most conventional standards I am a moderately intelligent person.
Of course smart is a vague term and it's not one that can be precisely defined or measured. However, let's consider the question,
Can a mentally disabled person learn college algebra?
The answer is yes or no, or some can but others can't. Within the context of college algebra and considering no other areas is it safe to say that some people are smarter than others? I think clearly the answer is yes. Of course a person not smart in college algebra might have genius level talent in programming, writing, art, or some other area.
I'm smarter than the vast majority of people in the world when it comes to mathematics but am completely useless when it comes to engineering, art, writing, physics, and other areas. Saying one is bad at college algebra is not a denigration, it is an assertion of fact and not in any way a determinant on one's worthiness.
I teach mathematics at a university. A large majority of my colleagues think that everyone is equally capable of learning college algebra. I think they are wrong. I think it is obvious they are wrong. They think any assertion that some people college algebra must be rooted in racism or other terrible biases that one has.
Academicians ought not dogmatically cling to notions that are easily disprovable. Namely, it is clear that some people - mentally disabled for instance - can't learn college algebra. We should not shy away from confronting uncomfortable truths.
>The answer is yes or no, or some can but others can't.
The problem is that the answer isn't yes or no. Performance isn't discrete. Someone who fails college algebra and repeats a semester might do better than their peers next time around. Your oversimplification would mean that no improvement is possible which is at odds with the paper this HN submission is about which is about the fact that the learning rate is the same.
That implies that it isn't a yes or no question. The question is how long will it take. You might bucketize a person that needs 10 semesters to finish his bachelor's (assuming European 6 Semesters) as incapable of learning college algebra.
The problem with this reasoning is that finishing the bachelors could still result in a quite significant improvement in quality of life even for a handicapped person, so acting as an authority telling them they can't do anything is counterproductive.
>. Saying one is bad at college algebra is not a denigration, it is an assertion of fact and not in any way a determinant on one's worthiness.
Now you are moving the topic. Being bad at something is different from being unable to learn something.
People who are capable of learning something can still be bad at it. College freshmen are bad at the things they are about to learn, that is the point of college, to learn new things and get better at them.
Leave mental disability out of it, because it's not relevant to the discussion.
What's clear to me is that people have different learning rates and different need for personalized attention. I also would never argue with the assertion that some people have greater natural aptitude for specific things, meaning their ability to pick up the material at a standard pace without a lot of extra personalized help.
There's plenty of research showing that IQ exists and can be consistently measured, but I would hesitate to ascribe the learning outcomes in a higher-level math class directly to IQ. If assessing general intelligence were easy, we wouldn't need decades of psychology research on the topic. So I personally don't think we should be in the business of trying to assess how smart people are in general. Assessing attitude at specific tasks can of course be practical and useful.
That said, have you asked your colleagues for clarification on what they mean by "everyone can learn"? Are they talking about learning it on a hand-wavy pop science level (eg Numberphile), or learning it well enough to derive results and apply it in new problems? Do they have a timeline in mind for learning, or a specific context? Are you sure your colleagues are being dogmatic for fear of confronting uncomfortable truths, or are they just optimistic? Or have they forgotten that algebra is pretty esoteric and far away from what people normally deal with in their day-to-day lives, and might actually be a specialized topic that does require a bit of specialized natural aptitude?
> A large majority of my colleagues think that everyone is equally capable of learning college algebra.
They have to hold that view, though, else their reason for existence disappears. How can students justify the high cost of hiring a professor, accepted on the premise of being able to make it up with higher future earnings, if they realize that the reason there is a spectrum of incomes is because some people can't rise into higher paying work?
You and I know that the mentally disabled person will never rise into a $500,000 per year job, no matter how hard they try, because of their disability. But your colleagues have to suggest that the mentally disabled person won't only because that person hasn't attended their classes. Their entire marketing strategy of getting students into their seats rests on it. Failure to communicate that to students means they soon find themselves out of job.
How is this supposed to be good faith advice? The mentally disabled person may earn $15/h as a janitor or $25/h in some high productivity job that would usually pay $60/h and requires a college education but also has some accomodations for their disability. Mental disability isn't linear and it isn't a discrete yes or no either.
It's like everyone here is taking some extreme edge case as the baseline for mental disability where it is immediately obvious that they can throw them into the "too dumb" bucket.
We also calibrate our definition of smartness to expectations. I say my cat is smart because he opens the front door to let in his deer friends. That doesn’t mean I think he can learn algebra. (Meanwhile, the beagle never figured out how to walk on the same side of a tree as me while on leash.)
I think that is a very dangerous hole those academicians have dug themselves into. And not even healthy for themselves as they're surely always on the look out for the bogeyman?
I agree, natural aptitude absolutely is a thing. I'm somewhat smart, but maths does not come readily to me no matter what I try. And don't even get me started on music - which I have brute-forced myself into being barely able to play.
Jim Simons is a great example. Has made 28 billion from algorithmic trading, has Chern–Simons form named after him in math but has said he sucks at computer programming because he can't remember syntax well enough.
If he was 50 years younger he probably would just be a very mediocre programmer and not have "wasted" his time with this other intellectual activity.
Einstein would be a data entry clerk trying to get a job writing javascript.
I suspect with so many more educated people we have so many more true genius level minds than a 100 years ago but we have narrowed economically useful intellectual life to such a degree that 99% of them are doing well paid sub-optimal bullshit with their genius unexpressed.
> If I'm good at university-level mathematics but terrible at woodworking, am I smarter than someone who is good at woodworking but has a hard time wrapping their head around group theory
We don't have enough information to say. But what's almost certainly true is that one of you is smarter than the other.
I think a useful analogy is smart = compute, wisdom/knowledge=data.
Your example is not great because "woodworking" is primarily a knowledge game. Nothing is complex to the point you can't understand it.
University-level mathematics is less obvious--there's certainly a knowledge aspect--but I would stay largely a compute game.
Almost all people can become top-tier at knowledge games, not nearly as many at compute games.
> Your example is not great because "woodworking" is primarily a knowledge game.
I think his example is very good if he requires much more effort to understand straightforward woodworking concepts. It might not be that he can't be an average woodworker but that it takes him 5x more effort - and after just 3x more effort he's kind of done.
Sure, if that were true. But it's not. Anyone who can understand college algebra can understand woodworking concepts, because woodworking concepts have virtually no cognitive complexity.
Source: I learned college algebra, and I have my woodshop 20 yards from me.
A better example would be my ability in strategy games such as checkers, chess, bridge, et alia. I'm generally worse at such games than most of my friends, none of whom have any special training or aptitude for strategy games.
Giving an "extreme" example turns your example into a flawed logic or apples/oranges comparison which gives no new insight into the original argument anymore.
I think you don’t understand the what constitutes flawed logic. If gave a counterexample to the statement: Everyone can learn college algebra. Therefore this statement is not true.
We are then left we needing to modify the statement. What is true is the following: Some people, but not everyone, can learn college algebra.
This is an uncomfortable statement for a lot of people because the inevitable follow up is: Who can and who can’t learn college algebra?. Relatedly, one must confront the idea that not everyone is college material. Maybe too many people are going to college and this is why so many in college are struggling in basic courses. I could go on.
Your post appears naive in that you don’t seem to have thought through the implications of the idea that not everyone can learn college algebra.
>Your post appears naive in that you don’t seem to have thought through the implications of the idea that not everyone can learn college algebra.
It is naive in the sense in that it actively tries to discourage people from trying and learning including the ones who can because they will have this brain virus implanted into their minds that they can't do something because of some unchangeable factor and then turn the mind virus into reality where they are unable to perform which then further tells them that they can't perform because they aren't smart enough. It is basically the equivalent of pulling up the ladder under the pretense of avoiding injury in case someone falls. You can tell anyone that they aren't smart enough and tell them to not do something but only people who try and succeed can disprove them.
So you have this constant cheap troll attack about people talking how you can't do things and then you must put in the expensive effort to disprove them which they can only do in a few disciplines.
> It is naive in the sense in that it actively tries to discourage people from trying and learning including the ones who can because they will have this brain virus implanted into their minds that they can't do something because of some unchangeable factor
No one's discouraging anything. Differences in cognitive abilities should be no more surprising than differences in ability to jump and run, thus resulting in differences in one's ability to be a professional basketball player.
It is simply a fact that most people cannot play in the college level basketball, let alone the NBA. This should not be surprising, nor does this fact discourage people from playing basketball causally for fun or fitness. I'm not sure why this exact same argument would suddenly be discouraging when applied to cognitive activities.
I would say that anybody without an intellectual disability can learn college algebra. There is a lack of motivation and a lack of training that prevents people from succeeding.
> I would say that anybody without an intellectual disability can learn college algebra.
I think that's a stretch, unless you expand the meaning of "intellectual disability". I would agree that considerably more people can succeed than currently do because effort can make up for a lot, but that's a different claim.
People have different working memory capacity, different abilities to reason deductively and considerably more differences on various other metrics of cognitive performance. There are as many dimensions to cognitive performance as there are ways to measure athletic performance, and people fall on very different parts of this spectrum.
With significant effort over time, I can make up for athletic deficiencies and become a pretty good basketball player, but being 5'9" I almost certainly would never be able to make a college basketball team let alone the NBA. I'm not sure why this same logic applied to cognitive abilities is so controversial.
Not at all. In my experience, many people of mediocre intelligence but a background that has sufficient education think they're geniuses. The variability in intelligence achievable by tutoring vastly exceeds the difference in their intelligence vs. that of the average inner-city high school dropout without a disability.
> People have different working memory capacity
Multiple studies have shown how this is easy to train.
> different abilities to reason deductively
This is also very easy to train by example.
> I almost certainly would never be able to make a college basketball team let alone the NBA
Being able to do college algebra isn't equivalent to making the NBA, which means being in the top fraction of a percent in basketball ability. Being able to do college algebra is equivalent to being able to dribble.
> Multiple studies have shown how this is easy to train.
Running ability is also easy to train, that doesn't mean everyone can run a marathon. Some people have flat feet or poorly proportioned limbs unsuited to long-term running. These aren't disabilities preventing them partaking in such activities, but nevertheless limits their potential.
> Being able to do college algebra is equivalent to being able to dribble.
No, it's being able to at least dunk. Again, a common skill but not one everyone can achieve.
> Running ability is also easy to train, that doesn't mean everyone can run a marathon.
Everybody without a disability can run a 5k. High schools used to require students to do a mile run to pass physical education.
> Some people have flat feet or poorly proportioned limbs unsuited to long-term running.
And some people have microencephaly. We're not talking about outliers. We're talking about the vast majority of people.
> No, it's being able to at least dunk.
Look, you're not special for being able to learn college algebra. 95% of Koreans and Singaporeans can do it today, but this wasn't the case 60 years ago. It just requires a basic level of education.
> And some people have microencephaly. We're not talking about outliers. We're talking about the vast majority of people.
No, you specifically said "people without a disability". Unless you're going to expand the meaning of "disability", various permutations within the range of "normal" physical characteristics will impose different limits on athletic abilities, and analogously, the range of cognitive qualities (memory, focus, spatial reasoning, etc.) will do the same for cognitive tasks.
The fact that these qualities can be improved via training doesn't change the basic fact that those limits will be quite different for different people, even within the normal range. We can quibble all day about whether college algebra falls under that category, but this basic fact won't change.
> the range of cognitive qualities (memory, focus, spatial reasoning, etc.) will do the same for cognitive tasks.
And that range is smaller than the difference between your ability to perform cognitive tasks and the average high school dropout's ability to perform those tasks. Education makes a much larger difference.
I disagree. Education boosts IQ scores by 1-5 points [1], where 1 standard deviation from the mean IQ score is +/-15 points. The spread on cognitive abilities is clearly broader than education can cover.
Education has improved the average IQ of multiple East Asian countries by 15 points over two decades. That's an entire standard deviation improvement for the whole population. One-on-one tutoring has been shown to make a two standard deviation difference. That's the difference between median intelligence and genius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Your study is about the effect of an extra year of badly done education on people who drop out of school, which is worth 1 IQ point. That same study shows that the effect of mediocre education on people who don't drop out of school is an increase of 5 IQ points.
You have defined a too narrow definition of "flawed logic" in order to make a counterargument which still doesn't defy the argument the original comment has made. Then you make a baseless assumption in your last sentence that the commenter has not thought through the implications of the idea that not everyone can learn college algebra. Your writing is also honestly a bit difficult to understand so i assume you're learning English.
> Your writing is also honestly a bit difficult to understand so i assume you're learning English.
His argument seemed like a pretty straightforward logical deduction to me. If his argument doesn't refute the claim that everyone can learn college algebra, then you must have some unusual definition for one or more of "everyone", "learn" and "college algebra".
I think you don’t understand what assumption means. I made no assumption in my last sentence. I wrote how your post appears. This is an opinion of mine. This ought to have been clear because I used appears and don’t seem. The reason I phrased things the way I did is precisely because I was not making an assumption. You might be an expert on this topic. I don’t know your background. I was telling you how your post came across to me.
What is funny and ironic is that you falsely accuse me of making a baseless assumption and then in the next sentence explicitly say you are assuming I’m learning English. I think it’s clear that I’m not learning English.
An educator would have good reason to have an interest in this subject particularly because it is directly related to their job. Professional teachers usually require university-level training in research to be considered qualified for the job are normally given a couple of months away from the classroom each year to engage in this type of research, so it wouldn't have been unexpected if he had said he was an expert. Indeed, it is just as likely that he focuses on other areas of research, but I don't think it is obvious where his work lies like you claim.
I welcome people being more aware of their own cultural, geographic, economic, and preferential biases. If only everyone saw their unrecorded and unreviewed experiences for the anecdotes they are... what a world that would be.
At one time, students were routinely "held back" if they didn't understand something well enough to pass. That gave them a chance to catch up, so that when they got back into the class, they would be more likely to succeed.
It always seemed to me that this was an act of kindness, for the alternative is for them to sit in classes of more and more demanding material, feeling less and less adequate.
Back in those days, it was not really considered a terrible thing to spend some extra time catching up. Folks would ask me around report time whether I had passed my exams. It was not meant as an insult, and was not taken to be one, either.
I see postsecondary students all the time who clearly have missed some steps at around grade 9 or so. Being smart and ambitious, these students would definitely have caught on, if someone had assessed them honestly. Instead, they live in an imposter-syndrome world, always waiting to be "found out".
Folded in with the false kindness of passing everyone is, as others have pointed out, the deeply corrosive influence of measuring teaching performance by passing rates.
It doesn't really take a lot more than honesty and sometimes a helping hand, to let students realize their potential, whatever it might be.
I agree. As highly controversial as IQ is, it does measure something, and is correlated to certain outcomes.
I scanned the paper, but I don't recall if this was just K-12, or also higher ed, but I wonder if this result would fall apart in more complex subjects.
Also, no matter what the learning rate really is, if a student isn't interested in the subject, good luck getting them to learn much at all!
1. How it relates to g-factor and whether it tests it accurately
2. How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices
3. How it relates to academic and professional success
4. How much apparent academic and professional success is influenced by parental cheating and influence - including bequests, donations, "special" deals behind the scenes, in-group networking, and so on
It's not controversial that some people are smarter than others in specific ways, just as some people are better athletes than others.
But there are a lot of unanswered questions about what "smarter" really means, how broad the definition should be, how much it's defined by covert and contingent expectations, whether "smart" behaviours are innate or acculturated, who defines them, and how/why.
> How it's influenced by parenting and class/cultural factors, including class-specific parenting practices
According to adoption studies, there's barely any influence at all. We can measure a little when the kids are young (the better the measurements, the less we can measure). It gradually disappears as they get older.
Measurement of IQ seems to be lacking due to it missing the goal of estimating capacity to learn independent of external factors (I.e. either very *shallow* types of diversity [sex, race, etc], or more meaningful types of diversity [language, sensory abscences, etc]).
It's problematic because sometimes IQ tests will require a mix/match of:
- Literacy
- English language understanding
- Extensive Vocabulary
- Sight / Hearing
Of course literacy worked around with filling in pictures, but that just shifts us to the requirement of certain sensory input.
Requiring English can be worked around by translating to any language, but doesn't address literacy requirements.
One big issue I have is seeing vocabulary involved in these tests, which is outright not testing intelligence, but rather experience with a language.
For example, try testing ChatGPT for it's IQ. You'll see very clearly that an IQ test is not made for a system which doesn't have visual capabilities. Perhaps it would be able to from the domain of given the chance - but we don't know because the test is flawed. That is precisely the thing an IQ test should be able to measure - capacity to learn, regardless of the sensory input fed to the system.
It's popular because it correlates with incredible number of other measurements. Some pertaining to life's successes and failures.
No other measurement is like that.
Nationality at birth, parental income, skin color, height, highest degree completed, etc. are also highly correlated.
But yes, I recognize the "like a scratch-off lottery ticket which might reveal that you should be a Big Winner In Life" psychological appeal of IQ tests. Especially for people who are not actually experiencing any of that Big Winner in Life stuff, or have other issues. Such as needing humanity to be a Well-Ordered Set ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-order ) with a convenient and easily-rationalized "who gets to look down upon whom" metric.
Yes. There are few measurements that also correlate with various outcomes. But I don't think anything is as broad as IQ which is just the speed at which you can do logic puzzles. Isn't it interesting? That something so silly correlates so strongly with so many things? The metrics you mention are kind of obvious in comparison and about as interesting as the hypothesis that "it's better to be healthy and rich than sick and poor".
As for comparing humans with each other I agree it's totally stupid. Personally I blame religions and their simplistic concept of good and evil for this eagerness of comparing humans and putting them on a spectrum of quality.
> As for comparing humans with each other I agree it's totally stupid. Personally I blame religions and their...
Read up a bit on the hierarchy systems found in various non-human primate societies. Religious status is just another convenient and easily-rationalized ordering metric.
Does china strike you as particularly religious? You dont even need IQ tests. Students naturally fall on a distribution if tested. And those students generally test in the same range their whole life.
Intelligence turns out to be mostly one-dimensional -- in other words, most of the difference between people can be described by a single number. More complicated models with more numbers exist -- they do work slightly better but at the expense of being much more complicated.
(This is literally textbook science and not something "all sorts of idiots are [...] delusional about".)
I increased by about 20 points after realizing how to apply some of my knowledge of algorithms. That shouldn't happen (measuring knowledge, not IQ). It's quite a meaningless test - probably best understood when trying to apply it to ML systems like Gato or PaLM.
The point is that you can improve IQ scores a lot by education, some of which helps you do better on IQ tests. Whether it is by practicing IQ tests specifically is not relevant.
15 points over two decades is an entire standard deviation improvement for the whole population. One-on-one tutoring has been shown to make a two standard deviation difference. That's the difference between median intelligence and genius. If that isn't large, what is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
Your study is about the effect of an extra year of badly done education on people who drop out of school, which is worth 1 IQ point. That same study shows that the value of mediocre education on people who don't drop out of school is 5 IQ points.
That improvement might come from all sources. Health and nutrition improvements can have very high impact. Deworming, using safer water. Contribution of education to this 15 points might be just few points.
> Contribution of education to this 15 points might be just few points.
It certainly isn't genetics. You're not going to cause a population-wide one sigma increase within a single generation using any genetic mechanism.
> It's not about IQ, also, was it ever replicated?
Yes, this has been replicated repeatedly. As far as IQ, if you apply for a private school that uses IQ tests for admission, you will find that all of them explicitly forbid test coaching because it is well known that it works. Even a video will cause large gains. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
No. It can't be 100. IQ tests don't require literacy. They don't even require language. You could administer IQ test to analphabet who doesn't speak you language and if he cooperates he could get result faily close to their best capacity that could be achieved.
This is an Urban legend. Whoever did the original research missed the fact that the grade scale reversed between the time Einstein was a student and when they checked. The grade scale was 1 highest to 6 lowest when Einstein was a student, but had changed to 6 being highest to 1 lowest after he moved on.
Einstein was particularly average as a student - barely passing university classes, not getting a research job (or any job) due to his academic performance and having to get his friend's father refer him to the patent office.
He is a prime example of how traditional schooling methods are typically stacked against extremely intelligent students who don't conform to those learning methods.
Fifteen is also around the time students get introduced to calc, isn’t it? In India, fifteen is around tenth or eleventh year of education and while I’m too old now to recall when we started diff calc, it definitely wasn’t in the 12 or later years of education.
In that light, this particular achievement of Einstein’s doesn’t seem very impressive.
High school in the US (~ages 14-18) doesn't have one track, and calculus isn't required to graduate. There were around 800 students in my year, and I'd guess only around 100-200 took the class, and it was usually in the final year. So of the other group, the ones that went straight into working instead of college never had it.
Edit: to clarify, mine was in the mid-2000s, don't know if there have been changes with things like Common Core, but from what I've seen/heard that seems focused on much earlier years so I don't think it would have affected this part of math education.
It would depend upon the details of what is meant by learning calculus. Learning enough to pass the average high school class on it isn't much. Above average at math, but nothing very impressive. But the same language could also describe learning it at something closer to the level of analytics, having a much deeper understanding than the average class produces. The deeper the understanding, the more impressive the achievement, yet it would still be described in layman terms as "learning calculus".
Calculus was introduced around ages 17/18 (senior year, i.e. the last year of high school, aka 12th grade, or the 13th year of formal primary and secondary education that most complete, including kindergarten) at the locally-regarded-as-very-good US high school this "elder" millennial attended, and only for those seeking the variant of our high school diploma that was supposed to get us college-ready.
Einstein still got quite a bit of help from Noether when developing his general relativity because his math skills needed some touching up here and there.
Maybe he was on to something about imagination being a bit more important, if you can use your academic community to polish the formalisms up a tid bit.
Having imagination doesn't matter if you don't understand what geniuses came before you and what they interpreted and misinterpreted about the world. His theory upended Newtonian physics on some level, which is the practical basis for Calculus in the first place. You have to understand those concepts on a deep and abstract level to be able to challenge a dominant, centuries long, paradigm like that. Imagination without complex, higher order, mental models is useless for discoveries like Einstein's.
It’s not that his math skills needed brushing up. Noether’s Theorem was proven as a result of the need to for conservation laws in his theory of general relativity. She discovered (invented?) the mathematics that demonstrated the existence of conservation laws. Needing mathematics that hadn’t been discovered yet does not count as an example of his math skills needing to be touched up here or there.
>I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others
Ironic that if you say this almost anywhere (academia, Reddit, your local bar) people immediately assume you're talking about Eugenics, accuse you of racism and try to get you fired.
I don't know why you are down voted. I've been accused of racism for saying that some people are smarter than others. I guess it is a given for some people that a person's worthiness is tied to their intelligence. I hold no such view but I guess people assume that since I think some are smarter than others then there must be a racial component to said belief.
I would never say to colleagues at my university that I hold the belief that some people have more intellectual talent than others. Amongst certain vocal subgroups of academia an unassailable core belief they hold is that all people are equal in intellectual abilities and that only external factors contribute to any divergence in perceived intellectual talent or in knowledge.
If someone says that the phrase 'some people are smarter than others' is racist, that's specifically them being racist, (as they're the ones who brought race into it in their own mind) not the speaker of the phrase.
I’m kind of confused because I’ve never heard of “some people are smarter than others” to be a eugenicist position. That’s more for stuff like “we should have IQ minimums to become parents” or something.
At the time of eugenics “some people are smarter than others” was self evident. Now we’re entering an era where “all inequality is due to systemic racism” where the act of finding a cause that isn’t systemic racism is in effect acting in support of that very system. Which makes it unfalsifiable and thus not a theory but a new religion.
The book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden does. It’s written by a progressive for progressives. It’s not logically sound and admits to taking such a position on faith in the service of being anti-racist.
I assumed you were stating that no-one believes the second point not that no-one believes the first point.
Yes, she takes the view that individually some people are smarter than others due to purely random factors, a combinations of variants, she also takes the view that the important variants for intelligence are basically equally distributed among races. Thus the inter racial group differences must be due to racism. The book is an attempt to split the difference and in doing so spells out the explicit biases that must be taken on faith. Which is what makes it interesting. The book as gotten quite a bit of push back on the "some people are smarter than others" aspect which demonstrates that there exist people that believe that some people are not inherently smarter than others. I should have been more explicit on my second message but your response was trite and I assumed in bad faith.
> My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass.
This still does not explain why some performed less than others (the ones that should and ones who should not pass).
> I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others.
This is a fact indeed, but the real question is how much variability in performance/learning this explains, and if there are other factors that explain part (and how much) of this variability. For this we need data.
,,I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others''
As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change.
Also one more big disadvantage is that most people can't distinguish between a smart person and an a$$hole (Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole... Elon Musk is an even more controversial example)
>As an autistic person I agree with this, but it comes at a huge cost of much worse understanding of facial expressions of people and much less adaptability to change.
I don't believe that intellectual ability necessarily requires you to miss out on facial expressions or adaptability. It occurs in some people, but even, e.g., John von Neumann was famously gregarious and friendly. Furthermore, it is worth noting that autism (even high-functioning autism) does not consistently present with exceptional ability in formal reasoning — that is also a "sometimes".
>Dr House is a good example of a person focused on saving lifes, but still people think he's an a@@hole
Dr. House is a fictional character. I don't think there has ever been a real life doctor who diagnoses his patients consistently from intuition and then sends his residents on a scavenger hunt for kicks.
High intelligence doesn't necessary come with trade offs in other areas of mental processing.
Neurotypical high-intelligence gets less media attention. I have an aunt that's an incredibly intelligent aerospace engineering professor who the military regularly brings in to teach fighter pilots the math behind flight. (This is a non-trivial achievement.) She's just a regular person.
He seems to have the raw capacity for intelligence and appears to have applied it well in understanding rocketry, but he does not apply it equally. He's said and done a lot of bone-headed things and ignored genuine expertise.
I don't know of any examples of hyper focused, autistic, high achieving leaders. I'm not aware of any examples of hyper focused, high achieving leaders having been confirmed as being autistic. So, for vacuous reasons, the answer to your question is no.
Let's suppose that there are no such examples. What then? If a person is an asshole what does it matter why they are an asshole?
Elon Musk is a bit controversial recently. More and more people begin to notice that he's basically Chat GPT in human skin with twitter handle that has ability to hire people some of who do smart things.
These findings pose a challenge for theories of learning to explain the odd combination of large variation in student initial performance and striking regularity in student learning rate.
My anecdotal experience from teaching math in higher ed for 20 years is that the variation in initial performance might be due to passing students who don’t deserve to pass. Especially in recent years our (teachers’) performance is measure by passing rate and I have very little incentive to fail a student even if they don’t know the material.
I have no expertise on this topic but it seems to me that some people are truly smarter than others. As an extreme example consider the difference in intellectual talent between Einstein and a mentally disabled person. I suggest the possibility that maybe some people start off school in kindergarten behind their peers and never catch up. If the rate of learning is largely the same for people then starting off in kindergarten in the upper half in terms of knowledge would likely lead to one ending up in the upper half of knowledge at the end of college.