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Interesting article but it neglects a very important factor in its comparison of physical test results and mental test results, namely the extent to which physi

Interesting article but it neglects a very important factor in its comparison of physical test results and mental test results, namely the extent to which physical and mental capabilities are trainable. It's a simple exercise to, just take the lower half of the cohort in each categorty (mental/physical) in a given study and give them intensive one-on-one training in all areas for a year, then compare their performance on said mental and physical tasks after that training. Doing this for different age groups might be particularly interesting. There's often a bias towards assuming that physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not, because many people have been raised to assume that the latter are due to mainly to genetic factors. This 'genetic superiority' is typically then used to justify current class structures, racial makeup of the wealthiest 1% etc. Such views have little if any supporting scientific evidence - mental skills are just as trainable as physical skills (yes there's a genetic component in both cases, which might place an upper bound on one's performance, but such genetic factors are not correlated with race/gender/etc.).

Spinnaker_ 5y ago
Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. You can lose weight and train explosiveness, but someone with a 10" vertical will never be even average. Compare that to deadlifts, where any individual can triple their max through training. I'm guessing there is an equivalent with mental capabilities. Somethings you can train, some are innate.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  But is it that you can't train it, or that nobody does because there's no carrot? Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win.
  - WillPostForFood 5y ago
    Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win. This is oft claimed, but data doesn't back it up. SAT is marginally affected by coaching and training. "Coached students are only slightly more likely to have large score gains than uncoached students. In addition, about 1/3 of students experience no score gain or score loss following coaching. The typical gain associated with coaching is 8 points for verbal and 18 points for math" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/09/can-coaching-truly-boost-sat-scores-for-years-the-college-board-said-no-now-it-says-yes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    You can easily “win” an IQ test: just memorize the answers (ignoring the fact that not everyone, in fact, can easily memorize a lot of random stuff like that). Of course, no reasonable person would say that a person who memorized all answers in IQ test to get a score of 150 has really improved her mental ability. The situation is somewhat the same with SAT, but it’s not so bad in actual reality: there is no single SAT test, there are multiple instantiatons, and you can’t just memorize all answers for all SAT tests. At the same time, the actual problems on the test come from a rather limited pool of patterns, and if one learns to tackle each pattern, one can really improve their SAT score. This is, in fact, perfectly commonplace: everyone significantly improves their SAT score between grades 8 and 12 (at least among people who do take SAT at both ages). Does it make SAT useless, as everyone learn all the patterns and gets perfect score? Empirically, no: there is large variation in actual obtained scores, and the results are mostly in expected directions: “better”, “smarter” students get better scores and vice versa. Why doesn’t everyone get perfect score? Quite simply, because variation in mental ability also makes it so that learning the pattern is easier to some people than it is to others. This is by far the source of most of the variation: there is some residual component of conscientiousness, but it’s much less important: spending more time cramming has lower returns the less able you are, and for everyone, there are significant diminishing returns to extra hour of cramming, and ultimately high scorers don’t differ that much in terms of how much time they spend prepping to SAT compared to mid-scorers.
  - Spinnaker_ 5y ago
    You ever watch the NFL scouting Combine? It's a stat every recruiter looks at for most sports. As a competitive volleyball player I (and my coach) obsessed over a 5% increase that came from years of training. The evidence that you can train for the SAT is pretty scarce. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-3984.1999.tb00549.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-3984.... https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe... https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
    - lordnacho 5y ago
      That's pretty surprising. I would have thought that everyone who does something like a test the second time does better. Certainly I don't think I've ever not done better the second time I looked at a paper, so maybe my experience is just special.
      - mercutio2 5y ago
        To be incredibly reductive: - Some people are so disinterested in standardized tests that they never did a practice test or anything like it (this is me!) - These people get a pretty significant bump from taking the test a second time, from sheer familiarity effects (I didn't bother, but maybe I should have!) - It is unclear that extensive SAT tutoring does anything for anyone more than "force you to look at an SAT practice test at least once, and alert you to the fact that you are allowed to take the test many times, thus giving you a chance to choose the max of a naturally varying set rather than a single measurement"
- logicchains 5y ago
  >Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. This isn't a very good example, because the reason it gets harder is that increasing the body's muscle mass also increases the strength needed to propel it a certain distance. Hence gaining muscle mass both helps and hurts the vertical jump. Is there any reason to believe intelligence should be like this?
  - Spinnaker_ 5y ago
    No, it's not a measure of strength. It's a measure of explosiveness, or rate of force production. They are actually very different physical traits. Strength can be trained to a large extent. Explosiveness is mainly genetics. You can improve it by 15 or 20%. That's it.
giantg2 5y ago
"bias towards assuming that physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not," For the layman, probably. Actual IQ tests try to ensure that subjects don't have experience with the test tasks. If they do, then the test is not as effective at measuring innate ability to learn or problem solve since it has been trained and the strategy to solve is already known. So it shouldn't be a misperception in the fields that deal with it.
xyzzyz 5y ago
We do this experiment all the time. It’s called “education”. It’s results are somewhat disappointing: people who do well in grades 1-3 also mostly do well in grades 13-16, and the converse is also true. Abilities are trainable, but trainability is also varying across people, and we don’t know how to train people to be better at learning to any substantial degree. Anyone who has actual and nontrivial experience in teaching (say, over 50 students over at least few months) will tell you this simple empirical fact: some people just “get it” much easier and quicker than others. The only way to escape this reality is to sort people by mental ability, so that you only see people in the same ability bracket, but that’s just it, an escape. We collectively have enormous amount of experience in educational interventions, and, in short, none of it really works. It’s easy to complain about lack of resources, about low teacher quality, about wrong methods, and all of these are in fact real problems, and pretty complex and hard to tackle too. At the same time, even if we pull each of those to the state of the art, we can only expect a marginal improvement. Have you noticed how the educational establishments seem to try a new thing every 5-10 years or so? That’s because none of it really pushes the needle, and these 5-10 years are what it takes to realize that. In reality, the “new thing” is in fact usually an old thing that has already been tried a generation or two ago, but which has not been seen by the current generation of education workers. That’s because everything has already been tried, and none of it really works. On a more optimistic side, that means that even if the education system is suboptimal, it doesn’t really matter, as outcomes are more or less the same anyway.
- logicchains 5y ago
  >We do this experiment all the time. It’s called “education”. The poster you're replying to said "just take the lower half of the cohort in each categorty (mental/physical) in a given study and give them intensive one-on-one training in all areas for a year". Pretty much every study has show that one-to-one tutoring is far, far more effective than the standard "education" system. >We collectively have enormous amount of experience in educational interventions, and, in short, none of it really works. What are you talking about? There's plenty of evidence that one-to-one tutoring can be quite effective at increasing test scores. Yes this approach can't be deployed at scale due to the sheer cost of it, but that's completely irrelevant to the question of whether intelligence is trainable. You should watch some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_sport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_sport competitions, would blow your mind what people are capable of training themselves to do.
wswope 5y ago
Have you looked for answers to your question, and if so, what did you find? There’s an absolute avalanche of data on this topic - do you want pointers to it, or are you looking to soapbox?
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  I actually don't know of any studies of the nature I suggested. Note such a study would be fairly expensive as the cost of standardized high-quality one-on-one tutoring (with both mental and physical coaches) over a period of one year for the study cohort would be rather high, so such studies may simply not exist. It's not soapboxing; in particular it would be interesting to see if the 'ability to learn and improve' changed with age. It's commonly assumed that it's harder to learn new things as we age, but I've never seen that data quantified personally... Hopefully it's less true than we imagine it to be.
  - wswope 5y ago
    There’s nothing “all-inclusive” - but we have really robust research for each piece of this in a vacuum, because frankly it would be incredibly difficult to test the generalizability of any single tutoring methodology when applied long-term. This is the seminal paper on one-on-one academic tutoring from 1984 that’s spawned hundreds of follow-up papers: http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf. The biggest corpus of raw stats on age-related learning AND the generalizability of that knowledge come from the fad of brain-training games from the 2000s (e.g. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=brain+training+age&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DyEpW0mqfrnEJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=bra...). But the crux of what you’re talking about, i.e. “physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not”, fall under the banners of “transfer of learning” for cross-domain academic performance, and “malleability of intelligence” for age-related differences in cognitive improvement: e.g. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ903882.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ903882.pdf, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.116 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.116. Plenty of exercise physiology research on coaching format (personal trainer vs. group classes), and strength training adaptations by age that shouldn’t be hard to find at all to cover the physical side.
fakethenews2022 5y ago
There are physical skills with genetic factors correlated with race or rather with groups of people with shared genetics. Here is a short and incomplete list: ability to handle sun or lack thereof, ability to handle heat or lack thereof, ability to live in high altitudes, ability to process lactose, ability to tolerate alcohol, resistance to malaria, height. There are also diseases correlated with groups of genetically related people. However, these groups most often don't fit so cleanly into the US's constructs of race. There could be mental skills correlated with groups of people with shared genetics. The question is how we handle that if that is the case. One approach is to deny it. Another is to force or encourage people to have children with others to smudge out differences. Another is to let it be. I suspect that the unspoken answer is denial while encouraging the smudging out of visible differences. I suspect that people are morally against the last and that it would lead to massive conflict. I think a similar calculus has happened many times before. I think that is partially the origin of "whiteness".
- wswope 5y ago
  This is the focus of the highly-controversial 1990s book “The Bell Curve”. If you want to follow the academic history of the topic, I highly recommend reading it along with responses to it by critics.

Spinnaker_ 5y ago

Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. You can lose weight and train explosiveness, but someone with a 10" vertical will never be even average. Compare that to deadlifts, where any individual can triple their max through training. I'm guessing there is an equivalent with mental capabilities. Somethings you can train, some are innate.

lordnacho 5y ago
But is it that you can't train it, or that nobody does because there's no carrot? Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win.
- WillPostForFood 5y ago
  Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win. This is oft claimed, but data doesn't back it up. SAT is marginally affected by coaching and training. "Coached students are only slightly more likely to have large score gains than uncoached students. In addition, about 1/3 of students experience no score gain or score loss following coaching. The typical gain associated with coaching is 8 points for verbal and 18 points for math" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/09/can-coaching-truly-boost-sat-scores-for-years-the-college-board-said-no-now-it-says-yes/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  You can easily “win” an IQ test: just memorize the answers (ignoring the fact that not everyone, in fact, can easily memorize a lot of random stuff like that). Of course, no reasonable person would say that a person who memorized all answers in IQ test to get a score of 150 has really improved her mental ability. The situation is somewhat the same with SAT, but it’s not so bad in actual reality: there is no single SAT test, there are multiple instantiatons, and you can’t just memorize all answers for all SAT tests. At the same time, the actual problems on the test come from a rather limited pool of patterns, and if one learns to tackle each pattern, one can really improve their SAT score. This is, in fact, perfectly commonplace: everyone significantly improves their SAT score between grades 8 and 12 (at least among people who do take SAT at both ages). Does it make SAT useless, as everyone learn all the patterns and gets perfect score? Empirically, no: there is large variation in actual obtained scores, and the results are mostly in expected directions: “better”, “smarter” students get better scores and vice versa. Why doesn’t everyone get perfect score? Quite simply, because variation in mental ability also makes it so that learning the pattern is easier to some people than it is to others. This is by far the source of most of the variation: there is some residual component of conscientiousness, but it’s much less important: spending more time cramming has lower returns the less able you are, and for everyone, there are significant diminishing returns to extra hour of cramming, and ultimately high scorers don’t differ that much in terms of how much time they spend prepping to SAT compared to mid-scorers.
- Spinnaker_ 5y ago
  You ever watch the NFL scouting Combine? It's a stat every recruiter looks at for most sports. As a competitive volleyball player I (and my coach) obsessed over a 5% increase that came from years of training. The evidence that you can train for the SAT is pretty scarce. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-3984.1999.tb00549.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-3984.... https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffectofadmissionstestpreparation.pdf https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe... https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-they-work-bias.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...
  - lordnacho 5y ago
    That's pretty surprising. I would have thought that everyone who does something like a test the second time does better. Certainly I don't think I've ever not done better the second time I looked at a paper, so maybe my experience is just special.
    - mercutio2 5y ago
      To be incredibly reductive: - Some people are so disinterested in standardized tests that they never did a practice test or anything like it (this is me!) - These people get a pretty significant bump from taking the test a second time, from sheer familiarity effects (I didn't bother, but maybe I should have!) - It is unclear that extensive SAT tutoring does anything for anyone more than "force you to look at an SAT practice test at least once, and alert you to the fact that you are allowed to take the test many times, thus giving you a chance to choose the max of a naturally varying set rather than a single measurement"
logicchains 5y ago
>Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. This isn't a very good example, because the reason it gets harder is that increasing the body's muscle mass also increases the strength needed to propel it a certain distance. Hence gaining muscle mass both helps and hurts the vertical jump. Is there any reason to believe intelligence should be like this?
- Spinnaker_ 5y ago
  No, it's not a measure of strength. It's a measure of explosiveness, or rate of force production. They are actually very different physical traits. Strength can be trained to a large extent. Explosiveness is mainly genetics. You can improve it by 15 or 20%. That's it.

giantg2 5y ago

"bias towards assuming that physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not," For the layman, probably. Actual IQ tests try to ensure that subjects don't have experience with the test tasks. If they do, then the test is not as effective at measuring innate ability to learn or problem solve since it has been trained and the strategy to solve is already known. So it shouldn't be a misperception in the fields that deal with it.

xyzzyz 5y ago

We do this experiment all the time. It’s called “education”. It’s results are somewhat disappointing: people who do well in grades 1-3 also mostly do well in grades 13-16, and the converse is also true. Abilities are trainable, but trainability is also varying across people, and we don’t know how to train people to be better at learning to any substantial degree. Anyone who has actual and nontrivial experience in teaching (say, over 50 students over at least few months) will tell you this simple empirical fact: some people just “get it” much easier and quicker than others. The only way to escape this reality is to sort people by mental ability, so that you only see people in the same ability bracket, but that’s just it, an escape. We collectively have enormous amount of experience in educational interventions, and, in short, none of it really works. It’s easy to complain about lack of resources, about low teacher quality, about wrong methods, and all of these are in fact real problems, and pretty complex and hard to tackle too. At the same time, even if we pull each of those to the state of the art, we can only expect a marginal improvement. Have you noticed how the educational establishments seem to try a new thing every 5-10 years or so? That’s because none of it really pushes the needle, and these 5-10 years are what it takes to realize that. In reality, the “new thing” is in fact usually an old thing that has already been tried a generation or two ago, but which has not been seen by the current generation of education workers. That’s because everything has already been tried, and none of it really works. On a more optimistic side, that means that even if the education system is suboptimal, it doesn’t really matter, as outcomes are more or less the same anyway.

logicchains 5y ago
>We do this experiment all the time. It’s called “education”. The poster you're replying to said "just take the lower half of the cohort in each categorty (mental/physical) in a given study and give them intensive one-on-one training in all areas for a year". Pretty much every study has show that one-to-one tutoring is far, far more effective than the standard "education" system. >We collectively have enormous amount of experience in educational interventions, and, in short, none of it really works. What are you talking about? There's plenty of evidence that one-to-one tutoring can be quite effective at increasing test scores. Yes this approach can't be deployed at scale due to the sheer cost of it, but that's completely irrelevant to the question of whether intelligence is trainable. You should watch some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_sport https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_sport competitions, would blow your mind what people are capable of training themselves to do.

wswope 5y ago

Have you looked for answers to your question, and if so, what did you find? There’s an absolute avalanche of data on this topic - do you want pointers to it, or are you looking to soapbox?

photochemsyn 5y ago
I actually don't know of any studies of the nature I suggested. Note such a study would be fairly expensive as the cost of standardized high-quality one-on-one tutoring (with both mental and physical coaches) over a period of one year for the study cohort would be rather high, so such studies may simply not exist. It's not soapboxing; in particular it would be interesting to see if the 'ability to learn and improve' changed with age. It's commonly assumed that it's harder to learn new things as we age, but I've never seen that data quantified personally... Hopefully it's less true than we imagine it to be.
- wswope 5y ago
  There’s nothing “all-inclusive” - but we have really robust research for each piece of this in a vacuum, because frankly it would be incredibly difficult to test the generalizability of any single tutoring methodology when applied long-term. This is the seminal paper on one-on-one academic tutoring from 1984 that’s spawned hundreds of follow-up papers: http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf. The biggest corpus of raw stats on age-related learning AND the generalizability of that knowledge come from the fad of brain-training games from the 2000s (e.g. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=brain+training+age&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&u=%23p%3DyEpW0mqfrnEJ https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=bra...). But the crux of what you’re talking about, i.e. “physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not”, fall under the banners of “transfer of learning” for cross-domain academic performance, and “malleability of intelligence” for age-related differences in cognitive improvement: e.g. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ903882.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ903882.pdf, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.116 https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.116. Plenty of exercise physiology research on coaching format (personal trainer vs. group classes), and strength training adaptations by age that shouldn’t be hard to find at all to cover the physical side.

fakethenews2022 5y ago

There are physical skills with genetic factors correlated with race or rather with groups of people with shared genetics. Here is a short and incomplete list: ability to handle sun or lack thereof, ability to handle heat or lack thereof, ability to live in high altitudes, ability to process lactose, ability to tolerate alcohol, resistance to malaria, height. There are also diseases correlated with groups of genetically related people. However, these groups most often don't fit so cleanly into the US's constructs of race. There could be mental skills correlated with groups of people with shared genetics. The question is how we handle that if that is the case. One approach is to deny it. Another is to force or encourage people to have children with others to smudge out differences. Another is to let it be. I suspect that the unspoken answer is denial while encouraging the smudging out of visible differences. I suspect that people are morally against the last and that it would lead to massive conflict. I think a similar calculus has happened many times before. I think that is partially the origin of "whiteness".

wswope 5y ago
This is the focus of the highly-controversial 1990s book “The Bell Curve”. If you want to follow the academic history of the topic, I highly recommend reading it along with responses to it by critics.