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I teach underpriviledged kids programming for the last 5 years and this rings very true to me. It's more important to teach them self efficacy and to believe in

by inglor 8y ago

I teach underpriviledged kids programming for the last 5 years and this rings very true to me. It's more important to teach them self efficacy and to believe in them than to teach them C++. I think this is also true more generally than just for students. I've given a keynote presentation about it at a conference this year if anyone finds that interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lckris5U5iw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lckris5U5iw

empath75 8y ago
I wonder what percentage of what we measure as IQ is actually measuring an interest in figuring things out and a belief that we’re capable of it.
- stochastic_monk 8y ago
  I read something long ago which said something like 15 iq points were attributable to thinking you were smart vs not. I’m inclined to believe that most people are quite smart and capable and that it’s confidence, effort, and training that makes some produce more than others. The brain is vastly complex, and the subconscious processing power to perform text, speech and image processing is colossal.
  - wool_gather 8y ago
    Another factor I think is that we (culturally) have a bias towards certain domains being "smart" material or not. Mathy logic is just one of many things that your mind can analyze. I have a friend who's a metalworker. He'd never beat me in an algebra test, but he's damn smart when it comes to manipulating the physical world. He also happens to be very thoughtful and insightful about film and photography. But I'm not sure he considers himself "smart", even though he does original and careful analysis in the areas that he cares about. Another friend is -- as far as I'm concerned -- an absolute genius at understanding people psychologically, their decisions and motivations. I'll never be as smart in my own preferred areas as she is in this. But I don't think that most people would give her a "smart" badge for it.
    - jungler 8y ago
      I like to dub this phenomenon the "unnamed skills". There are skills that are categorized and standardized: you can teach someone the poses and movements, the steps to follow, and the concepts to look for. But you can't teach them very much about putting it together into a whole and to apply some techniques in some ways and not others. Direct experience does that, and yet the way in which people interpret their experience leads to the sharp differences in style and overall ability. Often this comes up in written fiction: authors will describe the characters and their thoughts and motivations in a mode natural to how they perceive things: some authors spin up plots and intrigues at every turn, others focus on raw emoting. So I tend to view smarts as a personality trait, when we're dealing with healthy folks with no other issues(and realistically, most people are battling something else most of the time without necessarily being aware of it). There's a limited degree of smarter-is-smarter that shows up in testing, and then after that it starts being about personality-driven specializations, the ways in which they overcome problems. The archetypes are easy to spot in school: the student who seems to ignore any lecture or materials and rushes to get help from the teacher or study buddies, versus the student who quietly reads the text and never asks a single question. Both types can get perfect scores in some subjects, but usually not across the board, effortlessly. And as projects grow in scope and cover more skills, awareness of personality-driven limitations becomes more essential to success.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  IQ is also a measure of how easy it is for you to analyze without interest. People with straight As didn't show passion, yet they clicked very easily on things. That said, passion can drive you super far.
  - alfonsodev 8y ago
    physiologist have studied the relationship between activation(arousal, "passion?") phase of the motivational process and the performance. It turns out that more activation doesn't lead to more performance, but each task has its own optimal activation level, and it seems to be inversely correlated with how hard intellectually is the task. While it might be linearly correlated for physical tasks like running from a predator. See Yerkes and Dodson law[1] and I think Hebbs[2] also touched on this topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      Thanks a lot, I love pointers like these
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Woah, very cool. Thank you.
    - dTal 8y ago
      It's worth noting that, despite its status as dogma in psychology, the Yerkes-Dodson "law" is almost completely unsubstantiated, having been generously extrapolated from an experiment on mice with somewhat dubious methodology, and not reliably replicated since then; the beautiful normal-distribution bell curves one so often sees are complete fabrications. The mice were given 5 levels of (uncalibrated!) electric shocks, which has since been taken to be the "arousal" axis; their task was to learn not to go down a dark hallway, and the number times they attempted this before learning that dark hallway = shock has since been taken to be "performance". This resulted in a jagged 5-point line in which the fastest learning did not occur at the highest or lowest shock levels. That's it. That's the experiment. Needless to say, even if the result were perfectly trustworthy, extrapolating this out to a neat bell curve that describes the performance of humans studying for a calculus test is unscientific. But like all pseudoscience, it has a sort of intuitive appeal. It should be noted that Yerkes and Dodson themselves never made any claims about "arousal" and so on - they were just trying to measure the effect of electric shocks on the speed of animal habit-formation. Here's a fairly comprehensive review of the methodological flaws with Yerkes-Dodson, too numerous to go into detail on here: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/ https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/
- rjf72 8y ago
  There's a really peculiar aspect of IQ that many are not aware of. The heritability of IQ changes as you age - becoming more heritable over time. What this means is that environmental factors can play major differences in a youth's IQ. For instance a child that goes to great schools, has a supportive family, and so forth and so on will generally have a substantially higher IQ than a child from a less favorable environment. But the weird thing is that if you take two adults and compare their IQs the difference there has a negligible weighting for environmental factors. Modern studies put the heritability of adult IQ upwards of 80%. This also has the extremely counter intuitive implication that our privileged child's academic advantage in youth doesn't necessarily carry over into adulthood. And similarly an adult who came from a less fortunate background will not often suffer (at least in terms of intellectual ability in so much as IQ can measure) for it, as an adult. The reason I mention this is because the person coming from a privileged background would ostensibly have a much higher degree of belief in themselves and presumably a wider array of well supported interests. Our '8 year old solves nuclear fusion in spare time' clickbait articles invariably, coincidentally, happen to have a parent or two who is a nuclear physicist. Yet in the end that self confidence and supported interests don't amount to anywhere near as much as we'd expect. ---- One other major argument against this is the sharp rise of parenting where parents genuinely belief, and work to prove, that their child is the next Einstein. And this happening at the same time that the Flynn effect has entirely disappeared, and in some cases substantially reversed, in much of the developed world. The Flynn Effect was the observation that IQs were increasing over time. IQ is a relative value with 100 always set as the mean with a standard deviation of 15 points. But a '100' in 1900 was scoring, in absolute terms, worse than a 100 in e.g. 1920. And this kept happening. But then sometime around the 1990s this trend began reversing. [1] Flynn observed an average increase of about 3 points per decade. In many places in the world today we are seeing a decline of about 2 points per decade. Think about what that means in absolute values. That's a net change of -5 points per decade. That is one third of a standard deviation decline, per decade! Getting into hypotheses here is counter productive and outside the point I'm making which is simply that we've, in most parts of the developed world, decided to begin pretending that every child is special. If IQ were connected to self confidence and belief in oneself - we'd expect to see something at least vaguely looking like a positive correlation here. Instead we've seen a completely unprecedented and sharp reversal in IQ. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
- Simon_says 8y ago
  You become more proficient at the things you do, so I'm guessing a lot. A slight tendency as a baby plus a supportive environment probably makes up a lot of the variation.
thegabez 8y ago
Just wanted to say thanks for your service. It's rare to find someone with such social thoughtfulness.

by inglor 8y ago

empath75 8y ago

I wonder what percentage of what we measure as IQ is actually measuring an interest in figuring things out and a belief that we’re capable of it.

stochastic_monk 8y ago
I read something long ago which said something like 15 iq points were attributable to thinking you were smart vs not. I’m inclined to believe that most people are quite smart and capable and that it’s confidence, effort, and training that makes some produce more than others. The brain is vastly complex, and the subconscious processing power to perform text, speech and image processing is colossal.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  Another factor I think is that we (culturally) have a bias towards certain domains being "smart" material or not. Mathy logic is just one of many things that your mind can analyze. I have a friend who's a metalworker. He'd never beat me in an algebra test, but he's damn smart when it comes to manipulating the physical world. He also happens to be very thoughtful and insightful about film and photography. But I'm not sure he considers himself "smart", even though he does original and careful analysis in the areas that he cares about. Another friend is -- as far as I'm concerned -- an absolute genius at understanding people psychologically, their decisions and motivations. I'll never be as smart in my own preferred areas as she is in this. But I don't think that most people would give her a "smart" badge for it.
  - jungler 8y ago
    I like to dub this phenomenon the "unnamed skills". There are skills that are categorized and standardized: you can teach someone the poses and movements, the steps to follow, and the concepts to look for. But you can't teach them very much about putting it together into a whole and to apply some techniques in some ways and not others. Direct experience does that, and yet the way in which people interpret their experience leads to the sharp differences in style and overall ability. Often this comes up in written fiction: authors will describe the characters and their thoughts and motivations in a mode natural to how they perceive things: some authors spin up plots and intrigues at every turn, others focus on raw emoting. So I tend to view smarts as a personality trait, when we're dealing with healthy folks with no other issues(and realistically, most people are battling something else most of the time without necessarily being aware of it). There's a limited degree of smarter-is-smarter that shows up in testing, and then after that it starts being about personality-driven specializations, the ways in which they overcome problems. The archetypes are easy to spot in school: the student who seems to ignore any lecture or materials and rushes to get help from the teacher or study buddies, versus the student who quietly reads the text and never asks a single question. Both types can get perfect scores in some subjects, but usually not across the board, effortlessly. And as projects grow in scope and cover more skills, awareness of personality-driven limitations becomes more essential to success.
agumonkey 8y ago
IQ is also a measure of how easy it is for you to analyze without interest. People with straight As didn't show passion, yet they clicked very easily on things. That said, passion can drive you super far.
- alfonsodev 8y ago
  physiologist have studied the relationship between activation(arousal, "passion?") phase of the motivational process and the performance. It turns out that more activation doesn't lead to more performance, but each task has its own optimal activation level, and it seems to be inversely correlated with how hard intellectually is the task. While it might be linearly correlated for physical tasks like running from a predator. See Yerkes and Dodson law[1] and I think Hebbs[2] also touched on this topic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes–Dodson_law [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    Thanks a lot, I love pointers like these
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Woah, very cool. Thank you.
  - dTal 8y ago
    It's worth noting that, despite its status as dogma in psychology, the Yerkes-Dodson "law" is almost completely unsubstantiated, having been generously extrapolated from an experiment on mice with somewhat dubious methodology, and not reliably replicated since then; the beautiful normal-distribution bell curves one so often sees are complete fabrications. The mice were given 5 levels of (uncalibrated!) electric shocks, which has since been taken to be the "arousal" axis; their task was to learn not to go down a dark hallway, and the number times they attempted this before learning that dark hallway = shock has since been taken to be "performance". This resulted in a jagged 5-point line in which the fastest learning did not occur at the highest or lowest shock levels. That's it. That's the experiment. Needless to say, even if the result were perfectly trustworthy, extrapolating this out to a neat bell curve that describes the performance of humans studying for a calculus test is unscientific. But like all pseudoscience, it has a sort of intuitive appeal. It should be noted that Yerkes and Dodson themselves never made any claims about "arousal" and so on - they were just trying to measure the effect of electric shocks on the speed of animal habit-formation. Here's a fairly comprehensive review of the methodological flaws with Yerkes-Dodson, too numerous to go into detail on here: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/ https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jhpee/vol7/iss1/3/
rjf72 8y ago
There's a really peculiar aspect of IQ that many are not aware of. The heritability of IQ changes as you age - becoming more heritable over time. What this means is that environmental factors can play major differences in a youth's IQ. For instance a child that goes to great schools, has a supportive family, and so forth and so on will generally have a substantially higher IQ than a child from a less favorable environment. But the weird thing is that if you take two adults and compare their IQs the difference there has a negligible weighting for environmental factors. Modern studies put the heritability of adult IQ upwards of 80%. This also has the extremely counter intuitive implication that our privileged child's academic advantage in youth doesn't necessarily carry over into adulthood. And similarly an adult who came from a less fortunate background will not often suffer (at least in terms of intellectual ability in so much as IQ can measure) for it, as an adult. The reason I mention this is because the person coming from a privileged background would ostensibly have a much higher degree of belief in themselves and presumably a wider array of well supported interests. Our '8 year old solves nuclear fusion in spare time' clickbait articles invariably, coincidentally, happen to have a parent or two who is a nuclear physicist. Yet in the end that self confidence and supported interests don't amount to anywhere near as much as we'd expect. ---- One other major argument against this is the sharp rise of parenting where parents genuinely belief, and work to prove, that their child is the next Einstein. And this happening at the same time that the Flynn effect has entirely disappeared, and in some cases substantially reversed, in much of the developed world. The Flynn Effect was the observation that IQs were increasing over time. IQ is a relative value with 100 always set as the mean with a standard deviation of 15 points. But a '100' in 1900 was scoring, in absolute terms, worse than a 100 in e.g. 1920. And this kept happening. But then sometime around the 1990s this trend began reversing. [1] Flynn observed an average increase of about 3 points per decade. In many places in the world today we are seeing a decline of about 2 points per decade. Think about what that means in absolute values. That's a net change of -5 points per decade. That is one third of a standard deviation decline, per decade! Getting into hypotheses here is counter productive and outside the point I'm making which is simply that we've, in most parts of the developed world, decided to begin pretending that every child is special. If IQ were connected to self confidence and belief in oneself - we'd expect to see something at least vaguely looking like a positive correlation here. Instead we've seen a completely unprecedented and sharp reversal in IQ. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_progression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_p...
Simon_says 8y ago
You become more proficient at the things you do, so I'm guessing a lot. A slight tendency as a baby plus a supportive environment probably makes up a lot of the variation.

thegabez 8y ago

Just wanted to say thanks for your service. It's rare to find someone with such social thoughtfulness.