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You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculu

You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculus" and "mental disabilities exist" to "therefore intelligence is a scale and controlled by genetics and unalterable," which doesn't really track. Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence. I mean, all I know of you is this comment, so I could easily be missing a lot more context about this argument you've had, but it sounds like you have an axe to grind, not a carefully-considered conclusion.

clusterfish 5y ago
How do you know what effect upbringing and cultural values has on math performance? You know because there's research for that. But you can't base any argument on that when research into alternative (or complementary), genetics-based explanations is being stiffled. Or well you can, but that's just society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer. When you stiffle research directions for political reasons, you're doing politics, not science, and the arguments based on lack of stiffled research don't hold any more water than arguments based on no research.
- strogonoff 5y ago
  > society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer Unfortunately, in practice science often turns out to be almost as much of a vehicle for confirming answers one already has in mind, rather than open-ended investigation.
  - clusterfish 5y ago
    Nothing is ever perfect. That's not a reason to deliberately make it worse than it normally is.
tnzm 5y ago
"Nature vs nurture" in the hairless ape presupposes free will, which is a linguistic universal but a metaphysical unprovable. Look closely enough and there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors. Other than maybe some people jumping to the conclusion that one has an axe to grind with minorities when one attempts to explain certain things with genetics. Which is just as much an arbitrary social taboo as the preceding taboos that constitute what we today call bigotry. (For the record, I'm a staunch opponent of all forms of violence and oppression.) For me it makes exactly zero difference. Even if free will does exist in some essential sense, I do not believe that people generally choose what opinions to espouse. They simply acquire them through mimesis of their social environment. If that makes me a nihilist and a coward, then so be it. Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality. I dream of a world where the concept of free will is considered just as poor taste as racial slurs. I think that, perhaps paradoxically, it will be a much more free and just world.
- EllieEffingMae 5y ago
  There are too many causitive factors to attempt to make a point at genetics. Any attempt to do so is racially motivated, or will be co-opted to institute racist policies. Studying genetics and how they affect one's life, future, cognitive ability, ect, is interesting and worthwhile. But genetics are not easily separated from other causal factors. However, there are certain other things that we know affects ones outcomes, mainly socioeconomic status and education level. These issues have not been addressed, nor fixed. Until then, I would like to keep research that can be very very easily twisted towards the goal of eugenics off the table.
  - tnzm 5y ago
    Fair enough. I still believe that tiptoeing around these issues gives power to those who consciously perpetrate and benefit from institutionalized violence. Like another commenter said, operating with a comfortably skewed mental model doesn't help resolve the actual socioeconomic issues.
    - 5y ago
Hermitian909 5y ago
I think the more people can learn algebra than OP implies, but as a former math educator my experience also indicates some people are genetically limited in mathematics. For reference, my specialty was working with very remedial students and only ever had a few students not make progress (~2%) but I do think that small percent was genuinely hopeless and I don't say that lightly. I have a pet theory as to why those students could not do algebra that that you might find convincing: To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid. Think of it as the number of distinct ideas you can hold in your head at once, sort of like trying to hold a phone number in your head when you've just heard it for the first time. The general consensus in psych is that this number for the average person is in the single digits and is relatively static in adulthood till a decline in old age. It's been my observation that people with really incredibly small working memory cannot do algebra. The amount of numbers/ideas held in their head is too large, and multiple students in this group described the experience of attempting an algebra problem as feeling like sand constantly slipping through their fingers. Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.
- smhost 5y ago
  HN crowd doesn't think twice about people who try to run DOOM on a stack of pennies, but are ready to give up before trying to get algebra to run on someone with less working memory. It's weird how different the attitude is.
  - exmadscientist 5y ago
    Have you ever been a teacher? Even a teaching assistant? I have. Some people are dumb. You try teaching these people (anecdotally they're less than 1% of the population, with no obvious markers, so you have to actually find one first) and then come back and tell me how it's like "getting algebra to run on someone with less working memory". If I wanted to continue that analogy, I might say that the task is like getting algebra to run on someone whose brain has a power supply that randomly shorts out and spends half its time browned out. Because some people out there are just not easy to teach.
ZephyrBlu 5y ago
How does this not track? It's clearly obvious that there are intellectual boundaries that exist (E.g. if you're not this smart you're going to struggle). Previous education, upbringing, cultural values, etc are all separate effects that may influence your overall ability, but intelligence __definitely__ influences your ability. Low intelligence + good education = poor overall ability
LukaCEnzo 5y ago
Other traits like height, health, beauty vary and are influenced by genetics. Intelligence varies between species, and is therefore, at least in part determined by genetics. Presuming that there are only mentally disabled and normal people is the weird hypothesis. The baseline idea should be that it varies just like health and height. Affected by both genetics and outside factors such as malnutrition and injuries.
- syops 5y ago
  This is very nicely put. I wish I had thought of this phrasing when I posted my original comment. The point of my comment was to mention that there are heretical ideas that people won’t discuss in other areas of intellectual inquiry. That was the relation of my comment to the article.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
I bet if you spent three weeks going over basic math, basically decimals, and fractions; you might see a 90% honest pass rate. I have found with math, the way it's presented matters more than most subjects.
- rocqua 5y ago
  My feeling with math is that moving on too soon is disastrous. If you move past a subject without having grasped it, you don't have a good base for the next subject. This compounds, and the explanations stop making sense. At that point people are trying to help you but saying things to you as if you are stupid, but you still don't understand. That really sucks, so people get afraid of math. Avoiding it, and nodding when asked "do you understand" when really they do not. This is hard to fix because you need to go back to the point they did not understand, but the fear and pain makes even teaching that a lot harder to fix as well. My feeling is that most people should be able to understand algebra. However, I think that requires a very deliberate and personalized approach for some people. Certainly with collective classes, if you go at the speed of the slowest student there will be slow progress and a lot of people who are bored and mentally check-out. If any approach is going to work for people who have real difficulties, it needs to be small-scale personal teaching, and it needs to come with trust. Someone needs to feel like they can keep saying "no I do not understand" without disapproval, disappointment, or frustration from the tutor.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  This is so true. I'm Black and attended one of the worst performing elementary schools in my city for the first four years of school, which gave me an awful base for my math learning when I was finally transferred to a much higher performing school in a Jewish neighborhood on the other side of the city, not to mention high school and college. Only when I started working in programming did a lot of algebra and trig click (probably helps my first junior role threw me in the deep end working with linear algebra and trigonometry in animation and was lucky to have a senior around who chose to take on a mentor role). Math in public schools is basically magical spell incantation and it appears to most kids that you either have "it" or you don't. Math is a subject I believe requires long-term work that doesn't easily fit into the grade pass/fail structure of school, but then again a lot of aspects of mass education are fundamentally broken.
bencollier49 5y ago
The thing which I think gets missed out of these discussions is the notion of community. We're such horrific individualists in the West that we seem to see nature and nurture as distinct, which of course they aren't. The nurture of a child is a product of the combined abilities (from nature and nurture) of the people in their family and community. There is no "I"; our DNA and mores are all part of a greater whole.
- imbnwa 5y ago
  That's because we haven't yet cornered good ol' "free will" yet like we have this subject, or if we have, it certainly isn't trotted out as regularly and forcefully by the Right, likely because the virtue of the concept is to support punitive discursive apparatuses.
syops 5y ago
There were no leaps of logic made by me. I never indicated or said anything about genetics. I said that it’s clear some people can’t learn algebra and gave an extreme example of such a person by saying that an intellectually disabled person can’t learn algebra. I then said that I’m convinced that there is some level of “intelligence” required to learn algebra. I said absolutely nothing about what percent of people this is true for and absolutely nothing about why this is true. I brought it up in the context of the article because saying that not everyone can learn algebra is as taboo in education as the thought that genetics plays a role in poverty and success in life in psychology. My reason for thinking this is responses like yours. There are clearly people who can’t learn algebra: intellectually disable people are such an example. I believe some level of “intelligence” is require to learn algebra. How can you conclude from what I’ve written that I haven’t thought much about my belief? How can it appear I have an axe to grind from what I’ve written? You have formed an image of me that is wildly incorrect. Do you initially assume that everyone who thinks not everyone can learn algebra has an axe to grind?
bart_spoon 5y ago
> Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence. They didn't seem to do this at all. It can simultaneously be true that there are some who, due to genetics, simply cannot complete a particular task, no matter how conducive an environment they are put in, while for others genetically do not have these hurdles but whose success is still dependent on their environment. If anything, you are the one dismissing this possibility out of hand, and making leaps of logic.

clusterfish 5y ago

How do you know what effect upbringing and cultural values has on math performance? You know because there's research for that. But you can't base any argument on that when research into alternative (or complementary), genetics-based explanations is being stiffled. Or well you can, but that's just society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer. When you stiffle research directions for political reasons, you're doing politics, not science, and the arguments based on lack of stiffled research don't hold any more water than arguments based on no research.

strogonoff 5y ago
> society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer Unfortunately, in practice science often turns out to be almost as much of a vehicle for confirming answers one already has in mind, rather than open-ended investigation.
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Nothing is ever perfect. That's not a reason to deliberately make it worse than it normally is.

tnzm 5y ago

"Nature vs nurture" in the hairless ape presupposes free will, which is a linguistic universal but a metaphysical unprovable. Look closely enough and there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors. Other than maybe some people jumping to the conclusion that one has an axe to grind with minorities when one attempts to explain certain things with genetics. Which is just as much an arbitrary social taboo as the preceding taboos that constitute what we today call bigotry. (For the record, I'm a staunch opponent of all forms of violence and oppression.) For me it makes exactly zero difference. Even if free will does exist in some essential sense, I do not believe that people generally choose what opinions to espouse. They simply acquire them through mimesis of their social environment. If that makes me a nihilist and a coward, then so be it. Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality. I dream of a world where the concept of free will is considered just as poor taste as racial slurs. I think that, perhaps paradoxically, it will be a much more free and just world.

EllieEffingMae 5y ago
There are too many causitive factors to attempt to make a point at genetics. Any attempt to do so is racially motivated, or will be co-opted to institute racist policies. Studying genetics and how they affect one's life, future, cognitive ability, ect, is interesting and worthwhile. But genetics are not easily separated from other causal factors. However, there are certain other things that we know affects ones outcomes, mainly socioeconomic status and education level. These issues have not been addressed, nor fixed. Until then, I would like to keep research that can be very very easily twisted towards the goal of eugenics off the table.
- tnzm 5y ago
  Fair enough. I still believe that tiptoeing around these issues gives power to those who consciously perpetrate and benefit from institutionalized violence. Like another commenter said, operating with a comfortably skewed mental model doesn't help resolve the actual socioeconomic issues.
  - 5y ago

Hermitian909 5y ago

I think the more people can learn algebra than OP implies, but as a former math educator my experience also indicates some people are genetically limited in mathematics. For reference, my specialty was working with very remedial students and only ever had a few students not make progress (~2%) but I do think that small percent was genuinely hopeless and I don't say that lightly. I have a pet theory as to why those students could not do algebra that that you might find convincing: To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid. Think of it as the number of distinct ideas you can hold in your head at once, sort of like trying to hold a phone number in your head when you've just heard it for the first time. The general consensus in psych is that this number for the average person is in the single digits and is relatively static in adulthood till a decline in old age. It's been my observation that people with really incredibly small working memory cannot do algebra. The amount of numbers/ideas held in their head is too large, and multiple students in this group described the experience of attempting an algebra problem as feeling like sand constantly slipping through their fingers. Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.

smhost 5y ago
HN crowd doesn't think twice about people who try to run DOOM on a stack of pennies, but are ready to give up before trying to get algebra to run on someone with less working memory. It's weird how different the attitude is.
- exmadscientist 5y ago
  Have you ever been a teacher? Even a teaching assistant? I have. Some people are dumb. You try teaching these people (anecdotally they're less than 1% of the population, with no obvious markers, so you have to actually find one first) and then come back and tell me how it's like "getting algebra to run on someone with less working memory". If I wanted to continue that analogy, I might say that the task is like getting algebra to run on someone whose brain has a power supply that randomly shorts out and spends half its time browned out. Because some people out there are just not easy to teach.

ZephyrBlu 5y ago

How does this not track? It's clearly obvious that there are intellectual boundaries that exist (E.g. if you're not this smart you're going to struggle). Previous education, upbringing, cultural values, etc are all separate effects that may influence your overall ability, but intelligence __definitely__ influences your ability. Low intelligence + good education = poor overall ability

LukaCEnzo 5y ago

Other traits like height, health, beauty vary and are influenced by genetics. Intelligence varies between species, and is therefore, at least in part determined by genetics. Presuming that there are only mentally disabled and normal people is the weird hypothesis. The baseline idea should be that it varies just like health and height. Affected by both genetics and outside factors such as malnutrition and injuries.

syops 5y ago
This is very nicely put. I wish I had thought of this phrasing when I posted my original comment. The point of my comment was to mention that there are heretical ideas that people won’t discuss in other areas of intellectual inquiry. That was the relation of my comment to the article.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

I bet if you spent three weeks going over basic math, basically decimals, and fractions; you might see a 90% honest pass rate. I have found with math, the way it's presented matters more than most subjects.

rocqua 5y ago
My feeling with math is that moving on too soon is disastrous. If you move past a subject without having grasped it, you don't have a good base for the next subject. This compounds, and the explanations stop making sense. At that point people are trying to help you but saying things to you as if you are stupid, but you still don't understand. That really sucks, so people get afraid of math. Avoiding it, and nodding when asked "do you understand" when really they do not. This is hard to fix because you need to go back to the point they did not understand, but the fear and pain makes even teaching that a lot harder to fix as well. My feeling is that most people should be able to understand algebra. However, I think that requires a very deliberate and personalized approach for some people. Certainly with collective classes, if you go at the speed of the slowest student there will be slow progress and a lot of people who are bored and mentally check-out. If any approach is going to work for people who have real difficulties, it needs to be small-scale personal teaching, and it needs to come with trust. Someone needs to feel like they can keep saying "no I do not understand" without disapproval, disappointment, or frustration from the tutor.
imbnwa 5y ago
This is so true. I'm Black and attended one of the worst performing elementary schools in my city for the first four years of school, which gave me an awful base for my math learning when I was finally transferred to a much higher performing school in a Jewish neighborhood on the other side of the city, not to mention high school and college. Only when I started working in programming did a lot of algebra and trig click (probably helps my first junior role threw me in the deep end working with linear algebra and trigonometry in animation and was lucky to have a senior around who chose to take on a mentor role). Math in public schools is basically magical spell incantation and it appears to most kids that you either have "it" or you don't. Math is a subject I believe requires long-term work that doesn't easily fit into the grade pass/fail structure of school, but then again a lot of aspects of mass education are fundamentally broken.

bencollier49 5y ago

The thing which I think gets missed out of these discussions is the notion of community. We're such horrific individualists in the West that we seem to see nature and nurture as distinct, which of course they aren't. The nurture of a child is a product of the combined abilities (from nature and nurture) of the people in their family and community. There is no "I"; our DNA and mores are all part of a greater whole.

imbnwa 5y ago
That's because we haven't yet cornered good ol' "free will" yet like we have this subject, or if we have, it certainly isn't trotted out as regularly and forcefully by the Right, likely because the virtue of the concept is to support punitive discursive apparatuses.

syops 5y ago

There were no leaps of logic made by me. I never indicated or said anything about genetics. I said that it’s clear some people can’t learn algebra and gave an extreme example of such a person by saying that an intellectually disabled person can’t learn algebra. I then said that I’m convinced that there is some level of “intelligence” required to learn algebra. I said absolutely nothing about what percent of people this is true for and absolutely nothing about why this is true. I brought it up in the context of the article because saying that not everyone can learn algebra is as taboo in education as the thought that genetics plays a role in poverty and success in life in psychology. My reason for thinking this is responses like yours. There are clearly people who can’t learn algebra: intellectually disable people are such an example. I believe some level of “intelligence” is require to learn algebra. How can you conclude from what I’ve written that I haven’t thought much about my belief? How can it appear I have an axe to grind from what I’ve written? You have formed an image of me that is wildly incorrect. Do you initially assume that everyone who thinks not everyone can learn algebra has an axe to grind?

bart_spoon 5y ago

> Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence. They didn't seem to do this at all. It can simultaneously be true that there are some who, due to genetics, simply cannot complete a particular task, no matter how conducive an environment they are put in, while for others genetically do not have these hurdles but whose success is still dependent on their environment. If anything, you are the one dismissing this possibility out of hand, and making leaps of logic.