Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

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For the record I think a lot of people who run hot dog stands are a great deal smarter than a lot of Ph.D.'s. Formal education and intellectual training are not the same thing.

Very few people have the inclination or desire to accomplish intellectual greatness, though, and that's enough to keep most people out regardless of ability. When you only look at people who have that inclination and desire, many people openly admit to lacking ability compared to others.

The idea that all humans have the same potential to do anything is, frankly, something people tell their children as an encouragement to work hard, but is not really true, or honestly believed by adults. Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional athlete or a tenured physicist. Everyone who's tried to teach has noticed that some people pick things up better than others. I'm not talking about the people who aren't interested or don't care or don't work hard enough--even among the motivated students, some do better than others. And no matter how hard you work to pick up the people who are behind, they can't quite catch up. And if you invest just as much effort in the better students they only get further ahead.

Consider the evidence. How likely is it, really, that there exists some undiscovered, magical way of evening the divide?

>>Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional >>athlete or a tenured physicist.

Many of the people that think this way always think that it has to do with talent. The thing is that the road to get there is paved with thousands of hours of hard work. That people can be lazy and make excuses I do no dispute. However, we all have the potential to do almost anything we want, as long as you are willing to work for it.

The differences that you are talking about have to do more with environment and culture.

No, even if you only look at the people who work really hard for a very long time, some of them do better than others, and some of them just plain don't make it. I'm not talking about the guy that watched TV six hours a day instead of studying--I'm talking about the guy that works his ass off and doesn't keep up with the top of the class. You've never meet--or even heard of--those people?

My experience has always been that people that do bad in school is because they simply don't work at it. Or that they've neglected years of school and suddenly studying really hard will not make up for all the years of neglect.

Cramming at the end of a semester will not help you at all. It has to be slow and incremental. Baby steps and it has to be consistent. If you keep this up for years eventually you get to a point where it seems that you are learning so much faster than everybody else but it really is just that you have been at it for years already and learning new information using the context of all the previous information makes it a lot easy to learn.

At most schools that might be true. But it beggars belief that, for instance, any human being could graduate summa cum laude (or even magna cum laude) with an engineering degree at MIT when hundreds of lifelong hardworking and genuinely smart individuals try and fail at that feat every year. (Substitute for MIT any top-flight engineering program.)

I agree. It's inspiring to believe and act like anyone can do anything. But this boils down to the nature-nurture debate - how much of what you do is "built in"? Experimentally this always seems to come out in the 30-70% range. Given evolution, it's pretty much axiomatic that some people are better than others at certain things. It's hard to believe that hard work alone can defeat every sub-optimal genetic combination out there.

(I've met some of the people you describe also.)

"Talent" certainly seems to play a role (though "hard work + less talent" will beat "little work + more talent" more often than not unless the talent difference is extreme), but what is talent exactly? What is the nature of it?

I was watching someone take one of these online IQ tests and they were doing a question where you had to add up a bunch of numbers and tell if the result was even or odd. The person reached for a calculator. I laughed and said what the answer was. That person might have thought I was some kind of math genius. In reality, as a software developer I've learned a lot of interesting shortcuts for these kinds of things. I know that if I represent the numbers as base 2 that there is only one bit that has an odd value. I know that even numbers don't have this bit set and can thus be ignored (0 + n = n = id function). I also know that adding an even number of odd numbers gives and even number and an odd number of odds gives an odd. So given this knowledge I don't need to add up anything, just count the odd numbers. Which I can do quite quickly. The thing that made me so much more efficient than the other person was knowing a trick.

Is this the nature of "talent"? If Joe Plumber plays golf for 10k hours and Tiger Woods 10k, could the reason Tiger is so much better be that he knows these "tricks"? He knows how to make his 10k hours be more effective?

>You've never meet--or even heard of--those people?

I have (in the context of programming). The thing that always struck me about them was that they seemed to be working far too hard.

>Everyone who's tried to teach has noticed that some people pick things up better than others.

Obviously. Is this a problem with the students themselves, the teachers, the teaching strategy/material or some combination of those things? I think it's rather short sighted (not to mention far too convenient) to just assume it's the student and move on.

We've spent decades if not centuries looking for better teaching strategies and materials, and we haven't leveled the playing field. Sure, we've made improvements--but after those improvements, even if the slower kids catch up with the quicker kids, the quicker kids get even farther ahead.

How do you even expect to find teaching methods that disproportionately benefit the slower kids over the quicker kids anyway?

>We've spent decades if not centuries looking for better teaching strategies and materials

Have we? Then why is the system so incredibly awful today? Why is it for a wide variety of subjects we are using methods that are known to be inferior?

>How do you even expect to find teaching methods that disproportionately benefit the slower kids over the quicker kids anyway?

We know so little about how the brain works, it could be that the method we have today promotes one kind of brain "layout" (if you will) but some other method might promote a different kind.

We just don't know yet. And deciding something based on this lack of knowledge is premature to say the least.

We're considering the thesis that all human beings (with the possible exception of people with those with certain medical problems) have the same intellectual potential.

We observe that intellectual performance, as far as has ever been measured, varies tremendously by individual. Basically we have a curve of observed intellectual performance.

We also know that we can improve teaching methods. Of this there is no dispute. We can also surmise that the optimal set of teaching methods, applied and distributed in the optimal manner, will influence observed intellectual performance. We can make another curve of how far it's theoretically possible to improve someone's intellectual performance.

We have no idea what the shape of this second curve is. Of the infinite possible shapes it could have, how bloody likely is it that it's exactly the complement of the first curve?

>We observe that intellectual performance, as far as has ever been measured, varies tremendously by individual.

In the ways we have measured, yes. The issue here, I think, is that person A who excels to extreme levels in e.g. math doesn't excel at everything. In fact, the better he is at math the worse he might be in different subjects (Einstein example). So when we measure how well people do aren't we just measuring how good they are at passing our tests?

There does seem to be correlation for people who manage to do well at our system and people who end up successful. I'm just not convinced this is the whole story.

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