8 ms·

To be honest, I believe that all intelligence comes from innate motivations and practice. You suddenly become 10x more "intelligent" when you actually give a s

by elai 18y ago

To be honest, I believe that all intelligence comes from innate motivations and practice. You suddenly become 10x more "intelligent" when you actually give a shit or get some innate joy or obsession relieved when you do it. If that is something that is constant within you, you become more and more practiced and a virtuious cycle results. Nothing is too hard to explain, it's just mathematicians are really horrible at communicating.

byrneseyeview 18y ago
For whom, though? Brains are complicated, but if yours is severely damaged (through a stroke or head injury) motivation is not necessarily going to fix that. And as far as I know, there aren't any permanent ways to raise IQ. Some environmental factors lead to higher childhood IQ, but these vanish by adulthood. And there are tricks people can use to bump up their scores on IQ tests, but I haven't seen a situation in which practicing for test A raises your score, years later, on test B. This stuff is just more static than that. The danger with what you're saying now is that someone with an IQ of 90 -- someone who could be a fine contributor to society in lots of practical, necessary fields that don't require lots of abstract thinking -- could be inspired to throw away lots of time and risk lots of frustration trying to be a mathematician. We should deal with the fact that wasting education on someone who can't use it is as much a tragedy as failing to educate someone who can use it. By pretending that 'smart' just means 'trying hard', you're doing more harm than good.
- DaniFong 18y ago
  The problem may be that our predictors are terrible. There are a lot of Nobel prize winners who later discover their 'dismal' performance on IQ tests. I know grad students at Princeton who've confided sub-100 IQ scores, bad SAT's, horrible performance on one math test or another -- it's like this big, shameful secret for otherwise brilliant people. Everyone carries around the absurd burdens of judgments and measurements, but they don't always mean what people think they mean.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    Are there any other quantifiable variables with such high predictive power? I'd be really interested if there were some other test that could better estimate the odds that someone would get a degree, earn lots of money, stay out of jail, vote often, delay having kids, etc. It would be interesting to know more details, which I'm sure you can't divulge without violating someone's privacy. But it would be neat to find out if those people had other skills that correlate strongly with IQ, like the various digit-memorization/recitation tests, or reaction time. Were these people autistic? Were they taking a test in a language they didn't know too well?
    - DaniFong 18y ago
      They weren't autistic, and there didn't seem to be any strange behaviors socially, and they were quite inquisitive and swift on the uptake. I once heard IQ defined as "ability to navigate bureaucracy, getting the answers others think correct in a manner testwriters imagined, and color in the lines" (paraphrased). This may have something to do with the phenomenon here. The odds that someone would 'get a degree, earn lots of money, stay out of jail, vote often, delay having kids, etc.' seem to have more to do with successfully conforming to certain values of society's upper-middle class. I think I'm capable of inventive thought, but I don't particularly want to get another degree, or earn much money, or delay having kids, or vote often, and the sort of things that one has to do to stay out of jail, are, honestly, quite often absurd, and I often rail against them. And if you start to observe, closely, just how these things are tested, you'll start to get the impression that maybe bright people will find their ways through the cracks more than anticipated. There's an enormous weight given to quick answers -- time directly influences scoring. Linear answers are expected, and alternative interpretations are docked. There's often insufficient information in the questions, or it's based on a model of the world that's wrong. Domain knowledge like mathematics or vocabulary is brought into it. Analogies are made to hone in on one relationship from the many that could exist. Scorers of essays give insufficent weight to substance and too much to form -- despite their lipservice, they are indeed swayed by big words. Even tests like GRE physics are bad. They claim to be testing rapid physical intuition, but in practice what divides good from poor scores is prior experience with 100 simple systems and the ability to get the factors of 2 and pi right with three minutes per question.
- aswanson 18y ago
  someone who could be a fine contributor to society in lots of practical, necessary fields that don't require lots of abstract thinking -- could be inspired to throw away lots of time and risk lots of frustration But the bottom line though, is that it's none of your business to determine how one should spend ones effort and life. Nobody asked for your take on parameterizing their lifes limits. Thats what living is for. I could tell you what you should do with your life after a test or battery of tests and send you on your way. Like that idea? Even if you do, let it apply to you and you alone.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    How do you go from "Nobody should prevent someone from aspiring to do what they want to do" to "It is wrong to point out that people with low IQs are very unlikely to succeed at tasks which require high IQs, and telling them that these real constraints are not real at all is cruel and insensible, since it's factually incorrect advice that will lead them to make poorer decisions."? I mean, I could tell you that if you are really super-passionate and very very outraged, you can convince me to abandon my factual beliefs for some kind of feel-good claptrap. But that might lead you to make another comment of similar tone and content to the one to which I responded, leaving us both worse off. Do you see where I'm coming from? I am in a business that most batteries of tests would predict I'd fail at, so I clearly don't follow your parody of my thought processes.
    - aswanson 18y ago
      since it's factually incorrect advice that will lead them to make poorer decisions The problem with this assertion is the assumption that you have all the facts, facts meaning absolute certainty what a person is capable of given a scalar score from a test. But that might lead you to make another comment of similar tone and content to the one to which I responded, leaving us both worse off. Do you see where I'm coming from? I'm guessing not from a vantage point of omniscience. I am in a business that most batteries of tests would predict I'd fail at, so I clearly don't follow your parody of my thought processes. Not a parody, just an observation that your aggregates mean nothing to a given instantiation. And congratulations on defying what the stats say you would fail at. Hard worker, indeed.

by elai 18y ago

byrneseyeview 18y ago

For whom, though? Brains are complicated, but if yours is severely damaged (through a stroke or head injury) motivation is not necessarily going to fix that. And as far as I know, there aren't any permanent ways to raise IQ. Some environmental factors lead to higher childhood IQ, but these vanish by adulthood. And there are tricks people can use to bump up their scores on IQ tests, but I haven't seen a situation in which practicing for test A raises your score, years later, on test B. This stuff is just more static than that. The danger with what you're saying now is that someone with an IQ of 90 -- someone who could be a fine contributor to society in lots of practical, necessary fields that don't require lots of abstract thinking -- could be inspired to throw away lots of time and risk lots of frustration trying to be a mathematician. We should deal with the fact that wasting education on someone who can't use it is as much a tragedy as failing to educate someone who can use it. By pretending that 'smart' just means 'trying hard', you're doing more harm than good.

DaniFong 18y ago
The problem may be that our predictors are terrible. There are a lot of Nobel prize winners who later discover their 'dismal' performance on IQ tests. I know grad students at Princeton who've confided sub-100 IQ scores, bad SAT's, horrible performance on one math test or another -- it's like this big, shameful secret for otherwise brilliant people. Everyone carries around the absurd burdens of judgments and measurements, but they don't always mean what people think they mean.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  Are there any other quantifiable variables with such high predictive power? I'd be really interested if there were some other test that could better estimate the odds that someone would get a degree, earn lots of money, stay out of jail, vote often, delay having kids, etc. It would be interesting to know more details, which I'm sure you can't divulge without violating someone's privacy. But it would be neat to find out if those people had other skills that correlate strongly with IQ, like the various digit-memorization/recitation tests, or reaction time. Were these people autistic? Were they taking a test in a language they didn't know too well?
  - DaniFong 18y ago
    They weren't autistic, and there didn't seem to be any strange behaviors socially, and they were quite inquisitive and swift on the uptake. I once heard IQ defined as "ability to navigate bureaucracy, getting the answers others think correct in a manner testwriters imagined, and color in the lines" (paraphrased). This may have something to do with the phenomenon here. The odds that someone would 'get a degree, earn lots of money, stay out of jail, vote often, delay having kids, etc.' seem to have more to do with successfully conforming to certain values of society's upper-middle class. I think I'm capable of inventive thought, but I don't particularly want to get another degree, or earn much money, or delay having kids, or vote often, and the sort of things that one has to do to stay out of jail, are, honestly, quite often absurd, and I often rail against them. And if you start to observe, closely, just how these things are tested, you'll start to get the impression that maybe bright people will find their ways through the cracks more than anticipated. There's an enormous weight given to quick answers -- time directly influences scoring. Linear answers are expected, and alternative interpretations are docked. There's often insufficient information in the questions, or it's based on a model of the world that's wrong. Domain knowledge like mathematics or vocabulary is brought into it. Analogies are made to hone in on one relationship from the many that could exist. Scorers of essays give insufficent weight to substance and too much to form -- despite their lipservice, they are indeed swayed by big words. Even tests like GRE physics are bad. They claim to be testing rapid physical intuition, but in practice what divides good from poor scores is prior experience with 100 simple systems and the ability to get the factors of 2 and pi right with three minutes per question.
aswanson 18y ago
someone who could be a fine contributor to society in lots of practical, necessary fields that don't require lots of abstract thinking -- could be inspired to throw away lots of time and risk lots of frustration But the bottom line though, is that it's none of your business to determine how one should spend ones effort and life. Nobody asked for your take on parameterizing their lifes limits. Thats what living is for. I could tell you what you should do with your life after a test or battery of tests and send you on your way. Like that idea? Even if you do, let it apply to you and you alone.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  How do you go from "Nobody should prevent someone from aspiring to do what they want to do" to "It is wrong to point out that people with low IQs are very unlikely to succeed at tasks which require high IQs, and telling them that these real constraints are not real at all is cruel and insensible, since it's factually incorrect advice that will lead them to make poorer decisions."? I mean, I could tell you that if you are really super-passionate and very very outraged, you can convince me to abandon my factual beliefs for some kind of feel-good claptrap. But that might lead you to make another comment of similar tone and content to the one to which I responded, leaving us both worse off. Do you see where I'm coming from? I am in a business that most batteries of tests would predict I'd fail at, so I clearly don't follow your parody of my thought processes.
  - aswanson 18y ago
    since it's factually incorrect advice that will lead them to make poorer decisions The problem with this assertion is the assumption that you have all the facts, facts meaning absolute certainty what a person is capable of given a scalar score from a test. But that might lead you to make another comment of similar tone and content to the one to which I responded, leaving us both worse off. Do you see where I'm coming from? I'm guessing not from a vantage point of omniscience. I am in a business that most batteries of tests would predict I'd fail at, so I clearly don't follow your parody of my thought processes. Not a parody, just an observation that your aggregates mean nothing to a given instantiation. And congratulations on defying what the stats say you would fail at. Hard worker, indeed.