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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 peop

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."
  - beforeolives 5y ago
    I don't think that my point is getting across because you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the people for whom the innate intelligence limit is low, by definition. People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a mental disability. That's just under 5% of the population. Do you think those people can take your advice and just put in more effort? What about the people who score just above that threshold? Do you think they could do your job only if they had better teachers? I don't think they could. We all have natural limitations - it's much better to recognise that some people's limitations are holding them back so much that they can't function normally in modern society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that people just need to apply themselves more.
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.

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."
- beforeolives 5y ago
  I don't think that my point is getting across because you're focusing on the people that you have most commonly observed in the environment around you. Sure - people can work harder, most of us are average and we don't need to get close to our limits in our jobs. That's not who I'm talking about. I'm talking the extreme outliers on the lower end of the intelligence distribution. Those are the people for whom the innate intelligence limit is low, by definition. People with IQ below 75 can be classified as having a mental disability. That's just under 5% of the population. Do you think those people can take your advice and just put in more effort? What about the people who score just above that threshold? Do you think they could do your job only if they had better teachers? I don't think they could. We all have natural limitations - it's much better to recognise that some people's limitations are holding them back so much that they can't function normally in modern society. That seems healthier to me than pretending that people just need to apply themselves more.

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.