My Attitude About The Math /Science/ Logic Illiterate

[Phil153]

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Think about the size and variability of differences you are talking about and the complexity of the trait.

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I know that the intelligence of "normal" individuals spans all the way from borderline retard to David Sklansky. I know that the demonstrable differences between individual adults are enormous (regardless of reasons). I know that someone who only had a 8th grade education can destroy a college graduate on an IQ test, and other tests of thinking ability. I know that brain processing speed (maybe based on efficiency of learnt organization, maybe not) varies greatly. I know that a 400 gram chimpanzee brain can't come close to a human, and that body size adjusted brain size differences between animal species correlates with intelligence. Mostly importantly, I know that frontal grey matter in humans is strongly linked to IQ and intelligence and is mostly heritable.

And finally, I know that an organ as complex as the brain and so incredibly sensitive to variations in its internal components, is going to be at the mercy of a number of genes. You don't need a biology degree to come to these conclusions.

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But postnatal influences, including nutrition, enrichment, and education, are huge as well. Are you suggesting that I'm only thinking about prenatal when I say "environmental"?

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Of course they're huge. As they are for height. But people getting adequate nutrition and exercise still span a variety of heights. This is the concept of potential. This is borne out by common sense - look at the variation between people growing up in the same families and circumstances. To my knowledge there are no strong differences in IQ between single children or those from large families, farmers or city dwellers, or even a nation of wealthy, highly educated Japanese and their poor, less educated Chinese cousins. What does this tell you??

Yet, there are significant variations between ethnic groups and family groups.


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"Potential" is a huge word in that sentence.

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It seems there's a problem with the concept of intelligence potential. Are you disputing that there are upper bounds on an individual's intelligence, which can vary between individuals? Surely someone who studies brain processing and diseases or whatever it is you study, would have to agree that such things can vary significantly between people?

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Can you explain what you mean by "complex information"? Because IQ tests certainly do not test for processing ability of complex information by any reasonable definition that I've heard.

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Doing a painting is certainly very complex information processing. As is catching a ball I guess. So I'm guess I'm referring to complex MSL type processing. Lack of raw processing power is reason that most people choke on things like physics and the doubly indirected thinking needed to understand pointers in C++. They just cannot do it.

Edited on accident by Rduke55. I accidentally hit "Edit" instead of "Reply". I went back and copied and pasted so I think everything is back to normal.

[Taraz]

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but thinkiing about it I think DS 30% unable to think critically/mathematically doesn't really come from this area, but rather from just having lived their whole lives without anything other than add/sub, these people will simply be unable to excercise these abilities due to simple atrophy. I'm thinking of 30, 40, 50 year old people who can't even do mult/div in their head here.

I guess I meant 70%. It does seem really high but let's remember that for most people thinking is something they actively dislike or are simply not interested in doing. I guess some of them could un-atrophy their brains if they wanted to.

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I'm going to defer to RDuke on all of these neuroscientific matters since IIRC he's a full-blown neuroscientist and I am only about to start on my graduate studies. But I can't let this point go. Do you have any idea how plastic the brain is, even in adulthood? To claim that you somehow permanently lose the ability to do simple mathematical calculations by "atrophy" is so far beyond ridiculous.

I just don't understand where you are getting your facts from. Where have you seen this ever? Are you guys just making this stuff up as you go along? Maybe I'm just getting riled because this is my field, but it's extremely frustrating to me that some of you are claiming these things without any data whatsoever.

Nobody is disputing the fact that it is easier to learn things when you are young. But this doesn't mean that you can't learn things when you are older.

[Taraz]

Phil,

Even if I grant you everything in this post, answer me two questions.

Where in all that you wrote does it say that some people don't have the potential to be MSL literate? Where does it say that after some critical period early on in childhood you can no longer recover the potential to be MSL literate?

I'm not doubting that neurological factors that contribute to intelligence are heritable. I'm doubting your claim that you know that a certain percentage of the population doesn't have the capacity to learn certain things based on your "evidence". You basically made that up.

[Phil153]

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I'm going to defer to RDuke on all of these neuroscientific matters since IIRC he's a full-blown neuroscientist and I am only about to start on my graduate studies.

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Richard J. Herrnstein was professor of psychology at Harvard and an expert on learning and cognition.

He wrote The Bell Curve

Don't be so quick to defer to expert opinion. What neuroscientists know about the brain is laughable, and largely useless compared to the volume of scientific and common sense evidence suggesting heritability of an upper IQ bound. Forest for the trees, and all that stuff.


I did it again. Sorry Phil, it should be corrected.

[Taraz]

Actually, I have one more bone to pick with you Phil.

How do you know what people with an IQ <110 can or cannot do? Do you poll everyone you meet and ask them their IQ? Do you then chart their abilities across a range of subjects? You just claim something like the following without anything to back it up:

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There are a bunch of things that people with <110 IQs cannot grasp or do. It's actually quite shocking. You don't see it much in everyday life because people have had a lifetime of adjustment and experience. And average social interaction hovers around 90.

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Even if you do poll everyone you meet, how do you know they aren't lying to you? I just want to know where you are getting all this.

[PairTheBoard]

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What if they had relied on military and CIA assesments of intelligence but focused more on cultural and sociological assesments of the region.

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I would count cultural and sociological experts as also being in the top 3% of MSL (at least the L part anyway, which is the most important for most issues that don't directly involve science), if they weren't they wouldn't become leaders in their fields.

I think David's OP hints at a bigger problem. David talks about the middle 27% who think their opinions about certain matters should carry more weight than their abilities can justify. I'm more concerned with anyone who thinks their opinions should carry more weight than their abilities can justify. This is especially true of the top 3% because they're more likely to be in a position to actually carry out their opinions.

The people David complains about are usually just annoying, the people I'm concerned about can be absolutely terrifying.

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The point I'm making is that the people making the decision didn't need a lot MSL expertise. They needed the People Sense to know the importance of listening to the experts in the right fields. This is another thing Sklansky misses. A lot of problems are worked on in collaboration.

PairTheBoard

[Phil153]

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I'm not doubting that neurological factors that contribute to intelligence are heritable. I'm doubting your claim that you know that a certain percentage of the population doesn't have the capacity to learn certain things based on your "evidence". You basically made that up.

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No, it's based on the predictive ability of SAT and IQ scores. It's based on the fact that you can't substantially improve scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), which measures acquired verbal reasoning skills. <u>Acquired</u> verbal reasoning skills. Yet you can barely improve your score beyond a natural level no matter how much you study. These are teenage or early adult brains. Think about what that means.

It's based on my experience tutoring high school and college kids. Most of the difficulties of high school students are based on cognitive and emotional blocks which can be unwound, since the subject matter is simple enough. But come to college subjects like pointer arithmetic, and they hit a brick wall. They cannot - cannot - grasp it. Even die hard computer science students end up dropping out because the subject matter is simply beyond them, no matter how hard they try. It's like they don't have that part of the brain. I've conversations with my college professors who say the same thing. There is a certain level of intelligence required to do well in physics/math, and if it's not there, no amount of teaching will bring it.

Take that for what you will.

[PairTheBoard]

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"What Sklansky proposes is something much more radical. Your proposal looks like it slides Sklansky down to a more fuzzy notion of "significant". Sklansky makes no mistake about how huge an advantage he's talking about. Not only is it a Huge advantage when all other things are equal but it remains so when there is expertise in the non MSL area. And for areas with relatively small amounts of MSL. That's what makes the proposal more than a triviality."

You overstate my position. Being a big favorite to be correct when there is a disagreement, is not the same as a huge advantage. And my point that the msl incompetant's expertise in non msl areas is not enough to overcome the msl guy, applies only to those cases where the second guy has a good deal of expertise himself. For example I am quite sure that a college baseball coach who was fully familiar with what the math says about bunting, stealing lineups, etc would win more games than a major league manager who tried to do these things by the seat of his pants.

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Finally you've given an example. One of your pet issues along with your Football example. Your clarification of your clarifying OP sounds a bit different than the language you used there,

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Instead they think that because they have above average IQs they shouldn't be considered morons when they offer their opinions about stuff that isn't obviously highly mathematical. When they enounter a subject that is 20% mathematical they either deny that it percentage, or claim that they can overcome the 20%. Thus they are in fact morons.


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From you Baseball and Football examples, do you think you have shown such a sweeping generalization? Do you have examples in other fields? Ones where the inertia of traditional ways of doing things does not muddle the point the way it does in your pet examples?

PairTheBoard

[Taraz]

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No, it's based on the predictive ability of SAT and IQ scores. It's based on the fact that you can't substantially improve scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), which measures acquired verbal reasoning skills. <u>Acquired</u> verbal reasoning skills. Yet you can barely improve your score beyond a natural level no matter how much you study. These are teenage or early adult brains. Think about what that means.

It's based on my experience tutoring high school and college kids. Most of the difficulties of high school students are based on cognitive and emotional blocks which can be unwound, since the subject matter is simple enough. But come to college subjects like pointer arithmetic, and they hit a brick wall. They cannot - cannot - grasp it. Even die hard computer science students end up dropping out because the subject matter is simply beyond them, no matter how hard they try. It's like they don't have that part of the brain. I've conversations with my college professors who say the same thing. There is a certain level of intelligence required to do well in physics/math, and if it's not there, no amount of teaching will bring it.

Take that for what you will.

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I think your definition of MSL literate is different than Sklanksy's:

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The specific stuff that needs to be learned is logic, (syllogisms, fallacies, truth tables) probability, including permutations and combinations and basic statistics, and some algebra, especially turning word problems into equations. Calculus, physics, and similar things are very good things to learn as well but for most people only because it helps train the brain.

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I don't doubt that there comes a point in someone's life where learning highly complex subject material that you'd find in some college courses becomes difficult enough where you could declare it impossible without the requisite "intelligence". But learning simple logic, algebra, and statistics are not some of these subjects.

Some things are really, really hard to learn. And there might be a very small subset of the population who have the necessary intelligence, motivation, and training from early childhood who could learn these things. However, I doubt that we'd call any of these things essential for competency in life.

[PairTheBoard]

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I'm not doubting that neurological factors that contribute to intelligence are heritable. I'm doubting your claim that you know that a certain percentage of the population doesn't have the capacity to learn certain things based on your "evidence". You basically made that up.

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No, it's based on the predictive ability of SAT and IQ scores. It's based on the fact that you can't substantially improve scores on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), which measures acquired verbal reasoning skills. <u>Acquired</u> verbal reasoning skills. Yet you can barely improve your score beyond a natural level no matter how much you study. These are teenage or early adult brains. Think about what that means.

It's based on my experience tutoring high school and college kids. Most of the difficulties of high school students are based on cognitive and emotional blocks which can be unwound, since the subject matter is simple enough. But come to college subjects like pointer arithmetic, and they hit a brick wall. They cannot - cannot - grasp it. Even die hard computer science students end up dropping out because the subject matter is simply beyond them, no matter how hard they try. It's like they don't have that part of the brain. I've conversations with my college professors who say the same thing. There is a certain level of intelligence required to do well in physics/math, and if it's not there, no amount of teaching will bring it.

Take that for what you will.

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Maybe not with our current teaching methods. But you don't know what you don't know about what advanced teaching technologies of the future might be able to do.

PairTheBoard