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Comment by loewenskind | Hacker News Reader

>Both claims are provably false if you have a quick look at the literature.

Which literature? You're doing a bit of a (probably unintentional) bait and switch here if you mean the article you submitted. The article talks about learning rates of rats. Rats don't have language. How does having language change the picture [1]? We can't answer that, and therefor we can't know how applicable information about rat learning rates is to humans.

[1] Language certainly makes us more intelligent but there's also been studies that suggest that language may also dampen certain inherent abilities. In other words, maybe some people are born with drastically more "powerful" brains but language removes their advantages effectively evening out the field.

There is way too much we don't know about all this stuff for anyone to have such firm opinions on the mater. Certainly such limiting ones of "well, you're just not smart enough to ever be able to do this".

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We are both making a claim. He has provided no evidence at all, and obviously hasn't read the literature.

The claim here is that the variance in learning rate is absolutely tiny. Think about this. He's basically claiming that despite a large known population variances in IQ and MA, there is no variance in learning rate. Despite research showing ritalin increases learning rate in a large fraction of society, this increase was meaningless. Despite verbal learning test normative data showing non zero variance, the variance is still zero.

There is a large body of literature comparing learning rate in different populations in both human and animal models. Take any study on learning rate, even the ones comparing "normal" to abnormal. Go to the methods and find the variance for each group. See it's non-zero, but often so large that differences between groups is hard to see.

Now, if you accept that learning rate has a non-zero variance, and also that learning rate decreases over time (well supported in the literature as well, and no I'm not going to find papers) and that time is finite, then the only conclusion you can make is that some people have a much higher chance of doing well academically. Not only that but there will be some people who despite trying will never be able to do well.

I don't see how stating this shocking to anyone at all - in a population of some 7 billion, there are millions of people >3 standard deviations from the mean.

>He's basically claiming that despite a large known population variances in IQ and MA, there is no variance in learning rate.

If this is what he's claiming it's obviously silly. A more plausible claim would be that the rate at which one could learn may be close to equal provided an optimum teaching method is used on a case by case basis.

What I mean here is: I think all the literature you're referencing about learning rates doesn't conclusively prove that it's the students at fault. It could be the teaching method. I've experienced first hand that some people who seemed to not "get it" for some subject could in fact understand it quite well when it was presented in a way they understood (perhaps they didn't see the relevance, perhaps they didn't have the proper frame of reference to understand the normal explanation or a poor grasp of those references).

For me it's just too simple to say "everything's fine, those people are just too stupid. Bad genetics". What if it's not? Then we're throwing away a lot of potential unnecessarily. And part of the reason I suspect this to be the case (to some unknown degree) is because plenty of teaching methods that are still in use are not even the best known method (e.g. how most schools teach a second language).

It is clear that there are genetic differences in brains that cause large differences in "learning rate" - for lack of a better term. Interpret this how you want, but it's obvious to those in the field what this means (I talked to a researcher today to check my assumptions here to make sure!).

It is what it is. If my optimised (via teaching, drugs, augmentation etc) learning rate is lower than your's then so be it. So what? Why do you feel the need to make us equals, I accept your superiority in learning rate and do not care one iota.

I don't feel the need for us to be equal. If feel that the idea that we're not is often a cop out to make ourselves feel better about people who could have been our equal but aren't.

That is to say, even if you're right and there is a massive difference that no technique could ever overcome, there are a lot of people who could have done better than they actually did. Maybe their environment destroyed their chances. Maybe they had bad teachers. Who knows. I'm just not comfortable writing them off as "stupid". Education is too important to ever assume we have the best system possible. No matter how good it is.

Isn't there a contradiction here:

"I don't feel the need for us to be equal. If feel that the idea that we're not is often a cop out..."

If the evidence supports the conclusion, we must accept it regardless of our personal biases. My general claim is that each person has a range of capabilities that they are born with, and that this range is ~ normally distributed across the population. By definition these ranges do not overlap for all n. This is supported by both anecdotal, population data and experimental animal and human models to the best of my knowledge.

As for your second paragraph, well as you can see I never claimed to the contrary. I completely agree that one should find a method of learning to maximise their individual potential, and that the range of what is possible for an individual is quite large - see my claim above. In fact I am very close to someone working on this very topic - determining the optimal learning strategy for children to maximise their learning rate.

>Isn't there a contradiction here:

I don't see it as a contradiction. I don't feel that we all must be equal (as in: exactly as good at everything as each other). But I feel that deciding "hey, we're not all equal" can be used as a cop out, even if true. That is, if you strive for the possibly impossible goal of making every student a PhD student whatever it takes you probably wont achieve it but you stand a much better chance of making a breakthrough with your under achievers than you would if you just said "60% of the kids in this class have no chance, so why bother".

>If the evidence supports the conclusion, we must accept it regardless of our personal biases.

We must give it credit, but we can still believe that there is more to the story until it can be proven that there isn't.

>In fact I am very close to someone working on this very topic - determining the optimal learning strategy for children to maximize their learning rate.

Awesome. I wish you all success in this most important of endeavors. Don't take my comments personal. I don't know you so I unless you explicitly state your position I tend to address what I expect most people's to be.

We'll agree to disagree then, both on the structure of the minds of people who make true breakthroughs and your views on epistemology :)

I don't take anything personally at all, and hope you didn't either :)

I think the main point of our disagreement is around rationalism. You seem to be presenting the point as "whatever the evidence shows now must be accepted". It is my belief that most everything we "know" today is incomplete or even wrong in some fundamental way. From that point of view, if what I think is your view is being "rational" then only the irrational can ever truly further our knowledge.

Now of course when making actual decisions I would go with what the evidence shows today. That's the safest bet. And for breakthroughs, of course I would focus on the "brightest" since that is likely to have a much larger impact [1]. I just hope someone isn't excepting status quot.

As far as my views on the nature of knowledge: my view is that we don't know know enough to even speculate. We're learning more but it's slow going. Language seems to have a big effect on knowledge so personally I wish more research were directed in this area [2]. I think we would learn more faster than we do with current methods.

[1] That is, if I invest a tremendous amount of work and can only get every student to "average" then I could have potentially gained more by pushing the "brightest" students even further. Then maybe they could come up with the breakthrough. :)

[2] It is a hard question due to ethical considerations. The simplest test method is unthinkable as it would mean destroying the lives of some number of people to test the effects of lack of language. Of course it was recently pointed out in an article that appeared here that such methods aren't needed. Any time a child is born deaf to hearing parents there is a strong chance they will grow up without language. But this brings another ethical question: instead of studying them after they've grown up shouldn't we be preventing them from growing up without language? But at the very least we could find as many adults as possible who are already in this state.

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