5 ms·

Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those things obliq

by jey 18y ago

Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those things obliquely as an accidental side effect. High School is mostly about babysitting and obedience -- your success is measured by your willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops specified by authority figures. Sure, the ones who take an interest in the material will learn something, but that has a lot more to do with the individual than the school system. I still think going to school and college is the right decision for well over 99% of students, but I think it's a big mistake to treat formal education as a one-size-fits-all panacea.

Retric 18y ago
It's been 15 years (eep), but 11th grade was not a total waste of time. My public school was large enough to have the full remedial, general, advanced, and honors class spectrum so I could avoid the dumbest elements of society. Granted honor classes where still boring but least they tried to speed things up and my classmates where mildly interesting. Anyway, I was classified as Exceptionally Gifted (IQ 160+?) / Learning Disabled which basically meant they had no idea what to do with me. I did the whole state science, math, and chess thing so I spent time around people who where focused and intelligent in high school most of the extreme cases seemed broken. I don't feel that having children jump through more and harder hoops leads to a happy healthy life. I would have have loved a shorter more focused school day, but I don't see the value of trying to cram more facts into high school. Adding a course in investing, speed reading, or other useful skills would have been nice. PS: I don't know if I fear success, but I don't know how I could have coped if I was profoundly gifted and everyone around me had seemed even dumber. http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm
- yters 18y ago
  Is there any difference between your thinking and less intelligent people besides just being able to "get it" faster? Based on the link you give, I'm curious whether IQ isn't just a quantitative metric but perhaps also qualitative. Like, past a certain level high IQ people have a different kind of mental capability. Also, do you meet more people than you would statistically expect who are around your level? Another interesting claim the article makes is some researchers say there are more exceptionally gifted people than their statistical distribution would predict. Since the IQ metric is based on assuming a normal distribution in the population, such a result would mean IQ scores are not accurate.
  - bd 18y ago
    Well, it's not even quantitative metric, it's ordering metric. Making quantitative statements about IQ is quite meaningless. It is not like height or weight. It seems to be easy to get it wrong. Even the author of the article, who studies giftedness professionally, made such mistake (she tells that IQ 190 to IQ 130 is like IQ 130 to IQ 70). What's that supposed to mean? The meaning of IQ 190 is that it is 6 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in billion), while both IQ 130 and 70 are 2 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in 50).
    - Retric 18y ago
      When talking about children age * IQ / 100 ~= mental if it's under 16 works as a reasonable approximation for younger children across much of the IQ spectrum. So a 10 year old with an IQ of 70 has a mental age of 7, and someone with an IQ of 150 has a mental age of 15 etc. Now we have redefined IQ to have a more mathematical basis but the approximation still holds. PS: It's not really completely accurate, but you can treat a 6 year old and a 12 year old with the same mental age in about the same way and see similar types of responses.
    - yters 18y ago
      Ah, I see. I usually think about IQ in the way Retric describes, where it is proportional to "mental age." That assumption makes it seem quantitative, so yes, it's easy to get it wrong.
      - bd 18y ago
        Hmmm, now I realized why child psychologists still use old ratio based definition. It's just more useful for them to think in terms of mental ages. To respond to your original question, I have a hunch that intelligence variance (as opposed to IQ) is indeed quantitative. It kind of make sense. Intelligence seems to correlate positively with simple stuff, like reaction speed or short term memory span. Qualitative differences may arise as consequence of applying different "processing power" throughout your life. For the first order effects, you can imagine that if you don't have enough "CPU-minutes", for some problems you simply time out. For the higher order effects, it's like compound interest. For example, as written in the article, smarter kids start to speak and read sooner, thus they acquire more information and they also acquire it at higher rate. And as we know from financial compound interests, even tiny initial amounts can balloon into huge sums given enough time.
timr 18y ago
"Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work?" I don't grant your premise. There's busywork in everything, and I never found high school to be worse than anything that has come later in life. We've all got to wait in the same line at the supermarket. When I read nerd complaints about formal education, I get the feeling that the prevailing sentiment is one of entitlement: "if I have to do anything I don't like to do, then the system is broken." Smart kids seem to have this sense of entitlement worse than many people -- probably because they're so easily bored. Trouble is, you're always going to have to live and work with people who are slower than you are. You can skip out on high school in an attempt to avoid it, take college classes early, rush into graduate school, whatever. Eventually, however, you run smack into the wall of society, and you've got to work within its framework. The ability to persevere through busywork is an extremely valuable skill in that context.
- bokonist 18y ago
  If the point of school is to teach kids to deal with the busywork of real life, why not just have kids work 30-40 hours a week? Same result, except the kids could earn real money.
  - timr 18y ago
    Because it's obviously not the only point.
- Retric 18y ago
  It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabulary assignments to help our SAT scores. She saw my perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT's that year, but she still gave me zero's on those vocab assignments. So I learned how important busy work was without actually doing it. In life looking for ways to avoid busy work has helped my advance. Teaching people that they need to waste their time stops being useful when you start measuring people on their performance not how they got there. The real reason teachers grade easy assignments is to let people who work hard, but have no idea what there doing pass. PS: IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives. If doing well in high school correlated with doing well in life people might start caring about their performance.
pasbesoin 18y ago
Slightly off-topic, but s/high school/corporate life/ Some of the same social structures apply to both, as well. The cartoon applies to my comment, as well. "The way we've always done it" can be a mercilessly rote and inefficient path. The bit of Perl I picked up (along with a hodgepodge of regex, SQL, VBA -- I know, but I had to use the tools at hand -- and whatnot) boiled a five person department down to one person, all the while handling significantly increased complexity with greatly improved accuracy. If I hadn't taken the initiative and taught myself, none of it would have happened. Of course, the ex-jock brought in from the outside to CEO, and his team whacked it, anyway. Just like high school. But I walked away with a better skill set, to a better job.
- pasbesoin 18y ago
  I feel compelled to add that my work didn't result in anyone losing their job. Rather, the company was already experiencing strong pressure both financially and, perhaps more so, philosophically from the senior management team that was parachuted in from elsewhere. Headcount in my department was reduced via attrition and a slightly accelerated retirement. I kept the department afloat. I should have bailed, but personally it wasn't a good time for a transition. I'd hate for my work to result in others being laid off. In a prior position, I spent a lot of time mentoring and defending a replacement, giving her time to get up to speed. I also spent a lot of time volunteering my "kung fu" to acquaintances in other departments. Saving an accountant two days' work sorting manually through borked phone records, via a couple of minute Excel hack, provided a certain satisfaction. There's so much emphasis on "competition" as well as "the way". (All the more ironic for all the "corporate speak" espoused regarding "cooperation".) I'd rather grow people while appreciating their differences, and hoping for some of the same in return. To try to tie this back to "11th grade", it would be nice if "the Perl hacker" didn't so often have to feel themself quite so the outsider. Or maybe that trait is orthogonal fro the "Perl/hacker" trait? Seems to be a fairly strong correlation.
steveblgh 18y ago
11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.
- sah 18y ago
  Wow, your school was a lot better than mine.
- nailer 18y ago
  I skipped maths class to attend rehearsals for the lead role in the school play, and learnt trig from trying to understand how Doom BSP worked. I also got more from trying to automate Linux than I ever did in those non-practical Logo and Pascal exercises. My school had no concept of task-based learning.
lallysingh 18y ago
11th grade was when I read Applied Crypo & Practical Internet Security within a few weeks of each other... Spent the next few years incredibly paranoid... It's mostly under control now.

by jey 18y ago

Retric 18y ago

It's been 15 years (eep), but 11th grade was not a total waste of time. My public school was large enough to have the full remedial, general, advanced, and honors class spectrum so I could avoid the dumbest elements of society. Granted honor classes where still boring but least they tried to speed things up and my classmates where mildly interesting. Anyway, I was classified as Exceptionally Gifted (IQ 160+?) / Learning Disabled which basically meant they had no idea what to do with me. I did the whole state science, math, and chess thing so I spent time around people who where focused and intelligent in high school most of the extreme cases seemed broken. I don't feel that having children jump through more and harder hoops leads to a happy healthy life. I would have have loved a shorter more focused school day, but I don't see the value of trying to cram more facts into high school. Adding a course in investing, speed reading, or other useful skills would have been nice. PS: I don't know if I fear success, but I don't know how I could have coped if I was profoundly gifted and everyone around me had seemed even dumber. http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm

yters 18y ago
Is there any difference between your thinking and less intelligent people besides just being able to "get it" faster? Based on the link you give, I'm curious whether IQ isn't just a quantitative metric but perhaps also qualitative. Like, past a certain level high IQ people have a different kind of mental capability. Also, do you meet more people than you would statistically expect who are around your level? Another interesting claim the article makes is some researchers say there are more exceptionally gifted people than their statistical distribution would predict. Since the IQ metric is based on assuming a normal distribution in the population, such a result would mean IQ scores are not accurate.
- bd 18y ago
  Well, it's not even quantitative metric, it's ordering metric. Making quantitative statements about IQ is quite meaningless. It is not like height or weight. It seems to be easy to get it wrong. Even the author of the article, who studies giftedness professionally, made such mistake (she tells that IQ 190 to IQ 130 is like IQ 130 to IQ 70). What's that supposed to mean? The meaning of IQ 190 is that it is 6 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in billion), while both IQ 130 and 70 are 2 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in 50).
  - Retric 18y ago
    When talking about children age * IQ / 100 ~= mental if it's under 16 works as a reasonable approximation for younger children across much of the IQ spectrum. So a 10 year old with an IQ of 70 has a mental age of 7, and someone with an IQ of 150 has a mental age of 15 etc. Now we have redefined IQ to have a more mathematical basis but the approximation still holds. PS: It's not really completely accurate, but you can treat a 6 year old and a 12 year old with the same mental age in about the same way and see similar types of responses.
  - yters 18y ago
    Ah, I see. I usually think about IQ in the way Retric describes, where it is proportional to "mental age." That assumption makes it seem quantitative, so yes, it's easy to get it wrong.
    - bd 18y ago
      Hmmm, now I realized why child psychologists still use old ratio based definition. It's just more useful for them to think in terms of mental ages. To respond to your original question, I have a hunch that intelligence variance (as opposed to IQ) is indeed quantitative. It kind of make sense. Intelligence seems to correlate positively with simple stuff, like reaction speed or short term memory span. Qualitative differences may arise as consequence of applying different "processing power" throughout your life. For the first order effects, you can imagine that if you don't have enough "CPU-minutes", for some problems you simply time out. For the higher order effects, it's like compound interest. For example, as written in the article, smarter kids start to speak and read sooner, thus they acquire more information and they also acquire it at higher rate. And as we know from financial compound interests, even tiny initial amounts can balloon into huge sums given enough time.

timr 18y ago

"Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work?" I don't grant your premise. There's busywork in everything, and I never found high school to be worse than anything that has come later in life. We've all got to wait in the same line at the supermarket. When I read nerd complaints about formal education, I get the feeling that the prevailing sentiment is one of entitlement: "if I have to do anything I don't like to do, then the system is broken." Smart kids seem to have this sense of entitlement worse than many people -- probably because they're so easily bored. Trouble is, you're always going to have to live and work with people who are slower than you are. You can skip out on high school in an attempt to avoid it, take college classes early, rush into graduate school, whatever. Eventually, however, you run smack into the wall of society, and you've got to work within its framework. The ability to persevere through busywork is an extremely valuable skill in that context.

bokonist 18y ago
If the point of school is to teach kids to deal with the busywork of real life, why not just have kids work 30-40 hours a week? Same result, except the kids could earn real money.
- timr 18y ago
  Because it's obviously not the only point.
Retric 18y ago
It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabulary assignments to help our SAT scores. She saw my perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT's that year, but she still gave me zero's on those vocab assignments. So I learned how important busy work was without actually doing it. In life looking for ways to avoid busy work has helped my advance. Teaching people that they need to waste their time stops being useful when you start measuring people on their performance not how they got there. The real reason teachers grade easy assignments is to let people who work hard, but have no idea what there doing pass. PS: IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives. If doing well in high school correlated with doing well in life people might start caring about their performance.

pasbesoin 18y ago

Slightly off-topic, but s/high school/corporate life/ Some of the same social structures apply to both, as well. The cartoon applies to my comment, as well. "The way we've always done it" can be a mercilessly rote and inefficient path. The bit of Perl I picked up (along with a hodgepodge of regex, SQL, VBA -- I know, but I had to use the tools at hand -- and whatnot) boiled a five person department down to one person, all the while handling significantly increased complexity with greatly improved accuracy. If I hadn't taken the initiative and taught myself, none of it would have happened. Of course, the ex-jock brought in from the outside to CEO, and his team whacked it, anyway. Just like high school. But I walked away with a better skill set, to a better job.

pasbesoin 18y ago
I feel compelled to add that my work didn't result in anyone losing their job. Rather, the company was already experiencing strong pressure both financially and, perhaps more so, philosophically from the senior management team that was parachuted in from elsewhere. Headcount in my department was reduced via attrition and a slightly accelerated retirement. I kept the department afloat. I should have bailed, but personally it wasn't a good time for a transition. I'd hate for my work to result in others being laid off. In a prior position, I spent a lot of time mentoring and defending a replacement, giving her time to get up to speed. I also spent a lot of time volunteering my "kung fu" to acquaintances in other departments. Saving an accountant two days' work sorting manually through borked phone records, via a couple of minute Excel hack, provided a certain satisfaction. There's so much emphasis on "competition" as well as "the way". (All the more ironic for all the "corporate speak" espoused regarding "cooperation".) I'd rather grow people while appreciating their differences, and hoping for some of the same in return. To try to tie this back to "11th grade", it would be nice if "the Perl hacker" didn't so often have to feel themself quite so the outsider. Or maybe that trait is orthogonal fro the "Perl/hacker" trait? Seems to be a fairly strong correlation.

steveblgh 18y ago

11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.

sah 18y ago
Wow, your school was a lot better than mine.
nailer 18y ago
I skipped maths class to attend rehearsals for the lead role in the school play, and learnt trig from trying to understand how Doom BSP worked. I also got more from trying to automate Linux than I ever did in those non-practical Logo and Pascal exercises. My school had no concept of task-based learning.

lallysingh 18y ago

11th grade was when I read Applied Crypo & Practical Internet Security within a few weeks of each other... Spent the next few years incredibly paranoid... It's mostly under control now.