Increased intelligence is a myth so far (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Increased intelligence is a myth so far (2014)

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

42 pointsgtpasqual42 comments

I've been interested in brain training and nootropics for a very long time. The conclusion I've come to is intelligence is pretty much fixed, current psychopharmaceuticals are of very, very, very limited usefulness, and most of the differences in intelligence we see between people are caused by genetic factors not education or rearing. This was immensely disappointing for me - I'd literally give everything I own to be moved up a few standard deviations, but it does seem to be the case. I'll be the first in line for any effective enhancement, but we do not have them now. The most likely approaches for increasing the intelligence of humans are things like embryo selection and genetic engineering of embryos - biotechnology can only do so much after your brain is done growing.

Iterated embryo selection looks like it will lead to humans smarter than any human who has ever lived - perhaps they will be clever enough to figure out how to upgrade an old fogey like me. As an aside, I'm not sure people understand how ridiculously cheap iterated embryo selection will be provided some very conservative advances in biotech, ethical mores will be unlikely to suppress it - even if international treaties are put in place.

Looks like you've been reading Bostrom. I was actually annoyed about the amount of time he spent on the whole notion of genetically engineering smarter humans. I think his intent was to rigorously prove that even if technology for some reason halted and all progress in machine learning ended along with moore's law we'd still reach super intelligence. From that standpoint I get it as a philosopher to create a bulletproof argument. But I think it's very unlikely that it will happen that way. It's already far more practical to teach Watson to read better than genetically engineer a new Einstein. Also I don't think there's an iq 200 set of genes, there's probably trade offs that would prevent this a brain has a given number of neurons and they operate at a slow speed so this is like trying to breed a better horse when cars are obviously on the horizon and will be followed by jets.

Some equate I.Q. to "mutational load", meaning that the correction of factors interfering with genetic health gets you to a point where your I.Q. is maxed, not really anything else.

I still agree there are tradeoffs but I also doubt that mutational load is ignorable as a major driver of I.Q.; the implication being that if by removing mutation you improve intelligence, the body must be able to support a large I.Q. in the first place.

>The most likely approaches for increasing the intelligence of humans

I agree, given the gestation time of a human, AI may well come first. Even if we perfected iterated embryo selection today, 18 years is a lot of time and perhaps AI would be developed before the super geniuses reach peak productivity.

>Also I don't think there's an iq 200 set of genes, there's probably trade offs that would prevent this a brain has a given number of neurons and they operate at a slow speed so this is like trying to breed a better horse when cars are obviously on the horizon and will be followed by jets.

Everything I'm reading is saying the genes for IQ, as with most traits, are additive. And it really is as easy as putting as many high-IQ-associated genes into one genome as possible.

> 18 years

Why 18 years? You can harvest fertile gametes much earlier than that in an ordinary person. And with some unethical drugs you can reduce that age even more.

Just watch out you don't end up selecting for early maturation :)

> Everything I'm reading is saying the genes for IQ, as with most traits, are additive. And it really is as easy as putting as many high-IQ-associated genes into one genome as possible.

High IQ's come with large tradeoffs. Foremost among them is a much higher rate of depression. Second among them is a reduction in socialization.

Bear in mind that that each of the "high-IQ-associated genes" (alleles) is responsible for the synthesis of a polypeptide, and that the phenotypes produced by their interactions can be extremely difficult to predict.

I believe the studies you have in mind, one of which appeared on HN last week, find that high IQ is not associated with any small set of highly unusual alleles (i.e. "freak mutations"). This isn't to say that genetically engineering a person to have a high IQ is as simple as "putting as many high-IQ-associated genes into one genome as possible." It could be the case that certain specific interactions between the products of these alleles prove deleterious to the individual with respect to intelligence or other traits.

I agree that some of the sentiment on HN about the mutability of intelligence is wishful thinking, but our understanding of genomics and the genetic component of intelligence is still very much incomplete.

I'm getting this from Hsu. He seems to think this will not be an issue: http://arxiv.org/abs/1408.3421

Why not teach Watson to genetically engineer a new Einstein? Brains might be "slow" compared to modern tech, but they're terrifically more efficient. There may be some use to reverse engineering them yet.

It's funny that embryo selection occurs when you freeze a collection and embryos and pick the ones that survive the thaw. Chinese scientists have done studies on this effect - the resulting children are considered to be extremely healthy, much more than normal.

It's one of those border cases that gets me all giddy. Whatcha gonna do, ethicists; stop storing the embryos completely or find a way to do it without freezing? Present the damaged ones? Etc.

That is really interesting... got any links to the studies (or articles talking about the studies) you mentioned?

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2015/05/eugenics-ready/ In here somewhere IIRC.

Thanks!

I went through weird stages when it comes to intelligence. Too many years thinking I was, then college wiped any sort of past confidence in my abilities, then I finally understood some things very late, still not a genius, but the fact that you can finally reach for new abstract concepts even when you spent 3 years looking at them blind is reassuring. Also underlying health, and lifestyle is of great matter.

When young you have less thing to worry about, your focus is very high quite often. This goes away past your twenties. Time goes faster and you become a juggler. I recently had health issues, stupid things like crippled blood flow will impair you capacity to warm up and retain data. The brain version of going out of breath because harmed lungs.

Also, vaguely related, taught myself music in an ad-hoc manner, 6 years until I understood harmony, and by understanding I don't mean knowing the so-called theory, I mean 'sensing' harmony like heat or color, it's almost tangible. I can't explain it, but it seems, depending on the brain, that after a while even the subtle and elusive things start to get parsed by your neurons. It just take a while before you have a mapping of it. And it goes in layers, the more years, the more you're able not to care about simple things, say, fundamental harmonics, and can start to tune yourself to subtle data (higher harmonics, "dissonant" tones, modulated and non quantized movements etc)

I disagree. I think many non-genetic factors affect "intelligence", even on a day to day basis. I myself have been able to detect noticeable and substantial variations in my faculties over these time frames. Brain-training exercises might not increase intelligence (I don't know) but there was a period of time when I found them valuable as a evaluation tool- I would do some sudoku puzzles every morning to "test" my myself that day (a very specific and narrow definition of intelligence). Even between days where I didn't feel noticeably different, I would still sometimes see a large difference in average time to solving the puzzles ( ie. as much as ~1min 30sec vs. ~5min! ).

I found the "fast" days where usually better spent focusing on specific, hard problems that had been vexing me, whereas the "slow" days might be better spent multitasking, organizing and communicating with peers to explore new ideas. I never quite pinned down how to influence these variations... though I suspect it was a combination of sleep, stress, caffeine, etc. In the end, I just roll with it. I haven't done the daily testing in a while, but I still try to be hyper-aware of which "mode" I might be in.

The idea of intelligence has always made me leery. I have a little brother who placed second in a state competition (musical instrument) for kids who almost doubled him in age before his tenth birthday. People like to say he's a genius, but only my family knows the truth: two hours of piano a day, four on weekends, since before he was even in kindergarten. I don't really believe in intelligence.

If only your family knows the truth, how do you know that the people twice his age that he beat didn't practice for four hours a day since they were in kindergarten?

In the specific instrument community among youth competitions, let's call it a small social circle.

Is a very good tennis player a genius? Some things simply can be trained and while extremely impressive, they have nothing to do with intelligence.

So far it does not appear to be possible to increase intelligence via training. You can increase some proxies for intelligence that way, for example memorization, or puzzle solving.

True intelligence is very hard to define, but I define it as the capacity to reason in a non-linear way. i.e. to reach a conclusion without any obvious steps that took you from a to b.

The Polgár sister's story backs you in that:

"Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age.[11] "Geniuses are made, not born," was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r

Which begs the question, when people are willing to commit their children to this kind of super-intensive training regimen at such an early age, why on Earth are they doing it for games or music and not something (if you will excuse a crass way of saying it) useful?

Imagine a physicist or mathematician or engineer tutored in their discipline from age five! And imagine if those were as common as the little kids one sees dutifully going to piano practice every afternoon. The world would look very different.

Quite a lot of physics and mathematics is less useful than playing the piano, since it is equally lacking in practical application and doesn't even give other people pleasure.

As a species (or society) do we have clear objectives in mind when we seek to 'increase intelligence'? Is it higher productivity? more progress? enhanced capability? faster learning? Aren't there lots of low hanging fruit that we haven't taken yet? First, shouldn't we try to eliminate the things that are known to cause decreases in intelligence? Or, do we not know what those are?

Also, having been around a lot of 'highly intelligent' people, I have found that many are still not very effective. Most still make bad choices, have poor judgement, adhere to dogma, can't think laterally or fluidly, lack curiosity, lack discipline, lack self-reflection, etc. Is it possible for a 'smart' individual to easily get better at those things?

>Aren't there lots of low hanging fruit that we haven't taken yet? It seems like it'd be easier to eliminate the things that are known to cause decreases in intelligence, first. Or, do we not know what those are?

Yes, these issues have been researched, and are continually being addressed (though one might argue they should be given much more attention than is currently the case). Some examples of causes of decreased intelligence include malnutrition (sometimes caused by parasites), and heavy metal poisoning (often lead and/or arsenic in well-water).[1][2][3]

>Also, having been around a lot of 'highly intelligent' people, I have found that many are still not very effective. Most still make bad choices, have poor judgement, adhere to dogma, can't think laterally or fluidly, lack curiosity, lack discipline, etc. Is it possible for a 'smart' individual to get better at those things?

If you are interested in these issues, I suggest that you read some of Phillip Tetlock's work on judgement and prediction; I have found it tremendously interesting and helpful, though I have often been taken aback when re-examining my own faults through the lens of his work.[4] From what I have read, you are already at a tremendous intellectual advantage, as you are examining meta-cognition issues, which can help you improve your cognition, and understand your limitations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_health_on_intelligen...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenic_poisoning

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

By putting 'highly intelligent' in quotes, it sounds like you already recognize that you are criticizing society's skewed perception of what makes someone intelligent, rather than those who are truly gifted.

I feel like the whole argument is based on "your true IQ is the highest score you'll ever receive on a test", which is a statement that by definition would make improvements in IQ impossible.[0]

I still don't understand why, if everybody in the control group only change around the error ratio and the test group on average advances beyond the error ratio, that doesn't show an improvement. According to the authors what would show an improvement?

[0] they don't say this outright in the paper, but the SAT discussion clearly allude to this form of thinking. They don't even entertain the idea that practice might be the reason for a large increase in a persons SAT score, but rather say, the highest score is representative.

> I feel like the whole argument is based on "your true IQ is the highest score you'll ever receive on a test", which is a statement that by definition would make improvements in IQ impossible.

I am no statistician, but I think there is more to the argument than that. My take is that Haier is saying that IQ is not a ratio scale, and you cannot gauge the significance of a result by treating it as if it is.

Nevertheless, I get the impression he is trying to stretch the importance of this observation. He writes 'Nonetheless, the main point is that to make the most compelling argument that intelligence increases after an intervention, a ratio scale of intelligence is required' (my emphasis), which raises the question of whether there is not a not-quite-so-compelling argument to be made without such a metric.

FWIW, I don't have a horse in this race as I am on the fence over whether IQ is as fundamental a measure as its proponents insist.

It's more important to increase effectiveness than intelligence anyway. An IQ 20+ points greater causes reduced credibility, which is why people with IQs over 150 are under-represented in "elite" professions like finance, law, consulting[1]

[1] http://michaelwferguson.blogspot.com/p/the-inappropriately-e...

For what it's worth, this article makes the exact same math mistakes that the article discusses. I.e. the phrase "an IQ 20+ points greater causes reduced credibility" doesn't even make any sense, since a point isn't a fixed interval.

(I might not have an IQ of 150+, but I can spot the same pattern 30 seconds later.)

There is a legitimate concern in here about the methodology of testing intelligence-training interventions, but it's not quite clear what exactly the thing is that "is a myth", and I followed a reference at random (Jaeggi et al, 2008) and arrived at a study whose methodology was fine.

(EDIT: Whose methodology passed my cursory inspection but was terrible in a subtle way.)

Don't tell Gwern that. http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20FAQ#moody-2009-re-jaeggi-2008

Huh, good catch. The too-short time limit issue was a methodological issue I had definitely not thought to check for. (Haier doesn't mention it.)

There are actually several distinct issues with Jaeggi 2008. The speeding is a concern but it increasing looks like it's not driving the score increase. The passive control group is a big issue (although Jaeggi et al, via Au, are doing their best to fight to the grim end and deny it as long as possible). As is the subsamples using different IQ tests.

Finally, as Haier spends a lot of time explaining, pre-post test gains is fundamentally invalid as a way of proving testing increases the g-factor, because such gains are necessary but not sufficient; an increase in intelligence should show up as a gain, but many non-increases will also show up as a gain because despite the best efforts, IQ tests do not measure solely intelligence.

I'm increasingly understanding that this is as big a problem for n-back as the passive control group inflation. Many attempts to increase intelligence in the past, some where there was no dispute at all that test scores did increase, have failed as soon as a latent variable analysis was applied; I'm not aware of any which passes. All of the interventions had increased scores on only some subtests, and there were no general gains; they had not increased intelligence, only taught a specific subdomain. So our prior is highly against n-back being the exception. Worse, several studies have already tried to apply the latent variable analysis, and they all indicate that n-back flunked. So our already exceedingly skeptical prior gets reinforced by evidence of no effect on intelligence, whatever one subtest like a matrix test might say. (If Au or Jaeggi have addressed this, I have not seen it yet. They prefer to concentrate on the fact that the test scores increase and that you can cast doubt on the active/passive criticism by trying to correlate with whether a study was done in the USA or not, or whether the control group gained enough pre/post.)

You can see some links discussing the topic, including Haier's methodological argument here, in point #3 in http://www.gwern.net/DNB%20meta-analysis#analysis

The abstract mostly seems to state "increased intelligence is currently too difficult to measure, so we wouldn't know."

Which is fair. But "is a myth so far" suggests disproof, not proof that it's not currently true. As they repeatedly show, it would be very difficult for them to prove that, since they'd have to usefully measure delta in intelligence.

> Which is fair. But "is a myth so far" suggests disproof, not proof that it's not currently true. As they repeatedly show, it would be very difficult for them to prove that, since they'd have to usefully measure delta in intelligence.

The burden of proof should be on anyone who claims to have an intelligence boosting method. The field is littered with hucksters who have claimed to succeeded; this was true in the '60s when Jensen first wrote on it, and it's still true now. It's the cold-fusion of psychology (something which is theoretically possible, would be immensely valuable practically, and has never panned out when examined rigorously).

Anyway, Haier's paper is not intended to be comprehensive, and we can point to some examples of investigating claimed intelligence increases and seeing that they indeed turn in the predicted null effect on intelligence: te Nijenhuis et al 2007, te Nijenhuis et al 2014, etc. See my other comment with link to citations & fulltexts.

What is really most concerning about these studies is that the intervention too resembles the metric in order to believe they don't teach to the test. It's like treating depression by teaching people how to lie to psychiatrists. If you're measuring intelligence by performance on little 10-minute puzzles, and you show an improvement by teaching people to solve puzzles, I'm not really impressed. If you show an improvement in puzzles by teaching people guitar, giving them a drug, or sending them to basic training, I'll invest in your company. On the other hand, if you measure intelligence by job performance or some other life measure, and you show an improvement with puzzle games, it doesn't seem quite so unfair.

A cartoonish description of cognitive behavioral therapy would be encouraging people to tell different lies to themselves. I think it might be hard to learn to effectively lie to a therapist without accidentally believing some of what you are saying, so I would not be stunned if that ended up having some effectiveness.

The article kinda states that being sick can reduce your intelligence.

That to me alone means by staying healthy we stay more intelligent. ie. Get more sleep.

I think the title is quite misleading.

It seems more and more apparent that large sections of modern science are quackery. Will we fix this somehow and look back on this era from the future, and wonder about the many millions spent on serious people in white coats who basically produced random noise with a dash of prejudice and a touch of click-bait?

To be fair, for most of history large sections of science were quackery. Didn't really stop us from getting here.

True, the wrong answer can sometimes make the correct one clear.

worse than noise, the problem with science is that it's the new religion and people would believe anything that a "scientist" says, when they dont even have time to do the research to prove it themselves, that way there is a huge amount of "science" that is based in studies done in extremely biased conditions or just completely made up that make the news and textbooks, this people will be very frowned upon in the future same as the inquisition or witch hunters.

This is generally a low quality article.

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