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Education is a multiplier of IQ, not an equalizer. Many people, although policymakers won't admit it, don't have the IQ to study at the high school level, for e

Education is a multiplier of IQ, not an equalizer. Many people, although policymakers won't admit it, don't have the IQ to study at the high school level, for example learning algebra. Even more people don't have the IQ to study at the college level, for example studying calculus and writing a coherent, footnoted term paper. And only a small fraction of the population has the IQ to do significant research and earn a PhD. Charles Murray has discussed the IQ prerequisites of educational levels in his book Real Education. The article says, "In the U.S., the big achievement gaps across lines of race or social class open up very early, before kindergarten, rather than during college." Race and class differentials on IQ tests have been well documented but are in Paul Graham's category of What You Can't Say.

benrbray 5y ago
In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. I've studied alongside classmates who could't spend as much time studying as me, simply because they had to support themselves with part-time or full-time work just to keep their head above water. I've met plenty of people who are more or less happy with their current job, and spend time thinking critically about their hobby or other non-academic things. Sure, all other things held equal, maybe inherent intelligence is the limiting factor. But that's the point -- not everything else is equal. There are barriers other than IQ preventing people from achieving more, and I think we'd all be better off helping them overcome those barriers. Besides, IQ tests are a pretty phony measure of intelligence. They're about as reliable as lie detectors.
- kingsuper20 5y ago
  > I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. That strikes me as an insightful point. I'd say that the main point of math, considering how little the average person actually uses it beyond the elementary school level, is to teach people to learn and to approach problems in a different way. It has the same value as learning Latin or simple computer programming for a non-specialist. Also, the learned helplessness applies across society. A time and place filled with the self-employed (mostly farmers) has been replaced with worker bees. For various reasons normal skills sets now lack construction, vehicle repair, clothing fabrication, food production but are big on increasingly arcane theories of software development. It seems to me that learned helplessness is the largest single change of modern times.
- beforeolives 5y ago
  > In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many people out there whose brains don't have the computational power to do your job. And for a subset of those people keeping any job would be a challenge. That's not something that they control or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe they can't).
  - benrbray 5y ago
    I don't think it's really about computational power -- it's about practice and experience. It's about how hard those people choose to work and what things they choose to put effort into over their lifetime. All those choices accumulate over a lifetime, to the point where I agree, yeah, it'd be really hard for someone who has worked as a nurse their entire life to suddenly start over and start writing software. Just like it would be an insurmountable task for me to start over and go into medicine, or work on a construction site. I disagree with the idea that somehow, innate intelligence sets the bar so low. There's definitely a bar somewhere, but I'd argue that most of our jobs (even in tech) don't come anywhere close to reaching that limit. I'd argue that most of us here are of pretty average intelligence, it's just that our life circumstances have pushed us into a role where we get to exercise our brain muscles. One thing is that having good teachers helps immensely. For a a lot of people I meet, when they reflect on their high school math and programming classes, the story is always the same: They had a lousy teacher that had them do everything by rote memorization, without explaining the underlying principles. They got the impression that that's what the whole field is like, and that they weren't smart enough, so why even bother. Occasionally, they'll be interested in hearing me explain what I do, and their response is always the same: "Wow. I wish someone had it explained it that way to me before."
    - 5y ago
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking Well, hang on - there are actually learning disabled people who are incapable of learning to tie their own shoes. That's an extreme outlier, of course, but it suggests that there are two possible interpretations for "intelligence": one, that everybody has an upper cognitive limit that they'll never be able to surpass, and the mentally disabled are just struck with a very unfortunately low limit. The other is that being mentally disabled is like being crippled: you either are able to walk/run (learn) or not, and it's just a matter of how much effort you expend in improving it if you have it. Even then - we know that some people learn much faster than others, so that would define intelligence as a measure of how quickly you can absorb new concepts. You seem to be leaning toward the feel-good, but very provably wrong, "everybody is as smart as everybody else" (captured by the Facebook-popular "everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" quote falsely attributed to Einstein), but you're not doing anybody any favors suggesting that it's going to be as easy for them to learn calculus (if they can learn it all) as it was for you.
  - jordan_curve 5y ago
    Hey this was me! When I was a child, my parents tried very hard to teach me how to tie my shoes, but I could not figure it out. To this day, I just tie them in knots and then make loops to make it seem like I tied them properly. I now have a PhD in mathematics and work at a top tech company. It turns out that I have pretty severe dysgraphia (I have difficulty with cognitive tasks requiring fine motor skills). I think people only noticed because I couldn’t tie my shoes.
- usaar333 5y ago
  In these discussions, there's often conflation between absolute improvements across society and ability of society to alter the rank ordering of students (or cut variance between students). Various environmental improvements have improved the former over time; not so much the latter (assuming that's the goal). See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work for a deep discussion on this.
zozbot234 5y ago
I.Q. is overrated because it lets failing educators and failing educational methodologies ("let the kids discover all the math by themselves! See, no need to teach!") off the hook. I'm willing to bet that even a random kid with no more than a room temperature I.Q. can learn all the algebra they need for school by playing some DragonBox.
onei 5y ago
I struggle to believe that intelligence is fundamentally limited, but I often wonder if the child brain is super susceptible to negative effects based on their environment. Anecdotally, if your parents did not do well in school, and you were born into relative poverty, chances are you aren't going to be an Oxford professor. But if your parents are well educated professionals, it's more likely you're going to follow in their footsteps. I think education is the great equaliser, but it needs to be nourished early and often or you quickly lose out.
tester34 5y ago
what is "many"? 20 000 people? 30% of country? 70% of country?
rejectedandsad 5y ago
I’m skeptical of tabula rasa myself (Speaking as someone on the less capable/“inferior”/low IQ side of the curve) but if true this will have to be remedied with a a robust safety net, right? Somehow Murray doesn’t seem to agree - as a set of policy prescriptions, it feels to me that the message is people like me should just starve.
- usaar333 5y ago
  There's leftists out there who argue just that. https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Injustice/dp/1250752043 https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Inju...
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    Yeah, I’m closer to DeBoer on this than the median center left individual
- Bostonian 5y ago
  Murray has never said that. He supports deregulating the labor market, de-emphasizing educational credentials so that lower-IQ people are not locked out. He also supports a basic income https://basicincome.org/news/2020/06/review-of-charles-murrays-in-our-hands-a-plan-to-replace-the-welfare-state-from-2009/ https://basicincome.org/news/2020/06/review-of-charles-murra... .
omgwtfbbq 5y ago
I think it's been well established that a low IQ White child from affluent/high class parents will out-achieve a high IQ Minority Child from poor/low class parents on average and that this is basically universal across racial groups. So I don't think your conclusion is relevant.

benrbray 5y ago

In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. I've studied alongside classmates who could't spend as much time studying as me, simply because they had to support themselves with part-time or full-time work just to keep their head above water. I've met plenty of people who are more or less happy with their current job, and spend time thinking critically about their hobby or other non-academic things. Sure, all other things held equal, maybe inherent intelligence is the limiting factor. But that's the point -- not everything else is equal. There are barriers other than IQ preventing people from achieving more, and I think we'd all be better off helping them overcome those barriers. Besides, IQ tests are a pretty phony measure of intelligence. They're about as reliable as lie detectors.

kingsuper20 5y ago
> I've met plenty of people who have a learned helplessness when it comes to, say, math. That strikes me as an insightful point. I'd say that the main point of math, considering how little the average person actually uses it beyond the elementary school level, is to teach people to learn and to approach problems in a different way. It has the same value as learning Latin or simple computer programming for a non-specialist. Also, the learned helplessness applies across society. A time and place filled with the self-employed (mostly farmers) has been replaced with worker bees. For various reasons normal skills sets now lack construction, vehicle repair, clothing fabrication, food production but are big on increasingly arcane theories of software development. It seems to me that learned helplessness is the largest single change of modern times.
beforeolives 5y ago
> In my own perhaps limited experience, I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking. I don't know how we're defining deep thought and critical thinking but it's important to recognise that people have limitations to their intellect and for some people that ceiling is very low. If we assume that you have some kind of software job since you're on HN - there are many people out there whose brains don't have the computational power to do your job. And for a subset of those people keeping any job would be a challenge. That's not something that they control or that anyone can change. If human intelligence is continuous and somewhat symmetrical, for every outlier that you meet on the high end of intelligence there is someone out there who can barely function in modern society (or maybe they can't).
- benrbray 5y ago
  I don't think it's really about computational power -- it's about practice and experience. It's about how hard those people choose to work and what things they choose to put effort into over their lifetime. All those choices accumulate over a lifetime, to the point where I agree, yeah, it'd be really hard for someone who has worked as a nurse their entire life to suddenly start over and start writing software. Just like it would be an insurmountable task for me to start over and go into medicine, or work on a construction site. I disagree with the idea that somehow, innate intelligence sets the bar so low. There's definitely a bar somewhere, but I'd argue that most of our jobs (even in tech) don't come anywhere close to reaching that limit. I'd argue that most of us here are of pretty average intelligence, it's just that our life circumstances have pushed us into a role where we get to exercise our brain muscles. One thing is that having good teachers helps immensely. For a a lot of people I meet, when they reflect on their high school math and programming classes, the story is always the same: They had a lousy teacher that had them do everything by rote memorization, without explaining the underlying principles. They got the impression that that's what the whole field is like, and that they weren't smart enough, so why even bother. Occasionally, they'll be interested in hearing me explain what I do, and their response is always the same: "Wow. I wish someone had it explained it that way to me before."
  - 5y ago
commandlinefan 5y ago
> I've never really encountered anyone who is simply incapable of deep thought / critical thinking Well, hang on - there are actually learning disabled people who are incapable of learning to tie their own shoes. That's an extreme outlier, of course, but it suggests that there are two possible interpretations for "intelligence": one, that everybody has an upper cognitive limit that they'll never be able to surpass, and the mentally disabled are just struck with a very unfortunately low limit. The other is that being mentally disabled is like being crippled: you either are able to walk/run (learn) or not, and it's just a matter of how much effort you expend in improving it if you have it. Even then - we know that some people learn much faster than others, so that would define intelligence as a measure of how quickly you can absorb new concepts. You seem to be leaning toward the feel-good, but very provably wrong, "everybody is as smart as everybody else" (captured by the Facebook-popular "everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid" quote falsely attributed to Einstein), but you're not doing anybody any favors suggesting that it's going to be as easy for them to learn calculus (if they can learn it all) as it was for you.
- jordan_curve 5y ago
  Hey this was me! When I was a child, my parents tried very hard to teach me how to tie my shoes, but I could not figure it out. To this day, I just tie them in knots and then make loops to make it seem like I tied them properly. I now have a PhD in mathematics and work at a top tech company. It turns out that I have pretty severe dysgraphia (I have difficulty with cognitive tasks requiring fine motor skills). I think people only noticed because I couldn’t tie my shoes.
usaar333 5y ago
In these discussions, there's often conflation between absolute improvements across society and ability of society to alter the rank ordering of students (or cut variance between students). Various environmental improvements have improved the former over time; not so much the latter (assuming that's the goal). See https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-doesnt-work for a deep discussion on this.

zozbot234 5y ago

I.Q. is overrated because it lets failing educators and failing educational methodologies ("let the kids discover all the math by themselves! See, no need to teach!") off the hook. I'm willing to bet that even a random kid with no more than a room temperature I.Q. can learn all the algebra they need for school by playing some DragonBox.

onei 5y ago

I struggle to believe that intelligence is fundamentally limited, but I often wonder if the child brain is super susceptible to negative effects based on their environment. Anecdotally, if your parents did not do well in school, and you were born into relative poverty, chances are you aren't going to be an Oxford professor. But if your parents are well educated professionals, it's more likely you're going to follow in their footsteps. I think education is the great equaliser, but it needs to be nourished early and often or you quickly lose out.

tester34 5y ago

what is "many"? 20 000 people? 30% of country? 70% of country?

rejectedandsad 5y ago

I’m skeptical of tabula rasa myself (Speaking as someone on the less capable/“inferior”/low IQ side of the curve) but if true this will have to be remedied with a a robust safety net, right? Somehow Murray doesn’t seem to agree - as a set of policy prescriptions, it feels to me that the message is people like me should just starve.

usaar333 5y ago
There's leftists out there who argue just that. https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Injustice/dp/1250752043 https://www.amazon.com/Cult-Smart-Education-Perpetuates-Inju...
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  Yeah, I’m closer to DeBoer on this than the median center left individual
Bostonian 5y ago
Murray has never said that. He supports deregulating the labor market, de-emphasizing educational credentials so that lower-IQ people are not locked out. He also supports a basic income https://basicincome.org/news/2020/06/review-of-charles-murrays-in-our-hands-a-plan-to-replace-the-welfare-state-from-2009/ https://basicincome.org/news/2020/06/review-of-charles-murra... .

omgwtfbbq 5y ago

I think it's been well established that a low IQ White child from affluent/high class parents will out-achieve a high IQ Minority Child from poor/low class parents on average and that this is basically universal across racial groups. So I don't think your conclusion is relevant.