Hacker News Reader

Comment by purple-again | Hacker News Reader

Well I hope this turns out to be true instead of another one of those sci pop headlines that never turns into anything (looking at you type 2 diabetes).

It would really help a lot of people if we could segregate children as they enter the school system into more refined groups based on their needs rather than waiting for someone to select you for gifted programs like we do now.

Then each group could focus on its unique challenges in trying to eliminate whatever portion of intelligence is derived from the environment.

View on HN

I'm sure segregating students based on a genetic test that tries to predict their intelligence wouldn't cause any kind of reinforcement of those trends at all or create disadvantages for those now branded dumb for their entire school career.

Surely this could never happen.

> create disadvantages for those now branded dumb for their entire school career

We already do this too an extent, schools have "smart" classes and "dumb" classes, typically for things like math. The biggest problem is that they don't apply this until high school. Aside from any innate ability, kids have different learning speeds and letting them fall behind on a subject they don't understand while the rest of the class moves on does no good for anyone.

There is a huge huge difference between recognizing a student's need for a different learning style empirically and forcing them into a path based on a genetic test from kindergarten. I am absolutely not in favour of one size fits all education styles, but this is definitely not the answer.

Giving ammo to racists that already take delight in associating intelligence with race… prompting individual or institutional abortion of fetuses that don't appear they will be smart enough after birth…

I, for one, hope that this story isn't true.

Thank you. I don't understand the optimistic smell coming from HN regarding this story.

Denying science because it doesn't fit your preconceived notions? How is that any different than anti-vaxers or global warming deniers? I'm afraid that soon we'll have anti-genomers.

The definition of intelligence and how it should be interpreted is what’s being debated. There is a rich history of people making pseudo-scientific claims based on hereditary intelligence. It’s not clear how close this is from anti-vaxing and how close it is to anti-phrenology to me right now.

Because anti-vaxing is bullshit, but the science of heritability is vastly more subtle and complex.

As is the psychology of intelligence. And the relationship between g and being a good developer.

All of this is called doing science - because it's currently a work in progress - not denying it.

Why bother doing that when we already segregate students by more accurate IQ tests for gifted programs?

Indeed. And the older the testees get the more stable the results are. Infant and early childhood tests are predictive but by 14 or so the results are basically the adult results

Selection of the smartest (also tallest, least disease-prone etc) embryo during IVF. A trillion dollar industry once it is accurate enough - in 15-20 years.

Was that meant with a tongue in cheek?

> It would really help a lot of people if we could segregate children as they enter the school system into more refined groups based on their needs rather than waiting for someone to select you for gifted programs like we do now.

This makes me distinctively uncomfortable.

Also, you've made the conclusion that relative intelligence, if even very accurate, implies specific, categorical needs. I'm very confused by this.

Lots of people have seem to taken your similar reading and it wasn’t the intention. We have gifted programs right now. This would be no diffrent on that front.

Where it would be diffrent is very young disadvantaged students that never made it into the gifted program because they didn’t get any attention when they were young will have a much harder time getting missed.

The gifted programs we have now are highly controversial for exactly the reasons debated in this thread.

Are you against the entire gifted program then? Because current methods leave out some kids who should be in it and probably sign on kids who shouldn’t.

What is wrong with having a more foolproof and efficient way?

Small differences in intelligence are overrated.

Success in academics is almost entirely derived from motivation and the amount of work and interest that the student puts into it. ESPECIALLY at the elementary school level.

Almost all "ex-gifted" students will tell you this. People who accomplish a lot while trying very little are an anomaly.

My grades in AP classes were much better than my regular classes primarily because of who I was surrounded by. I would haven loathed your proposal.

I think this is inevitable. Private schools will absolutely use genetic information for admission if they can. You can outlaw it in state schools, but if the private schools do it, it won't matter what the state system does. You can outlaw the use of genetic information in hiring, but then all you have to do is list your primary school on your resume.

Have you read up much on the education system of Finland? As this is more or less the opposite of their approach.

They do not stream the education system and the quicker children are expected to help explain what they have learned to those still getting to grips with the material. Integrating this method within the lesson structure has the effect of raising the standard of both the slower and quicker kids, for fairly obvious reasons.

How do they prevent slower children from slowing down the quicker ones?

Not Finnish, working off memory of a comment on an old message board.

They have many theoretically equal voluntary high school subjects and tests. More able students take many more, known harder ones. This allows self segregation, much like AP classes in the US will have few people with reading difficulties. No one particularly cares because if you want to go to a third level institution after high school you can.

Have you never had the experience of only really getting a deep understanding of something that you are learning, when you take the time to try and teach it to someone else?

I’m talking about the experience where you are trying to learn but other kids are distracting you with hyperactive nonsense or disruptive behavior.

Streaming by ability wouldn't solve that. To illustrate why, I am reminded of a quote by Stephen Hawking;

“The prevailing attitude at Oxford at that time was very anti-work. You were supposed to either be brilliant without effort or accept your limitations and get a fourth-class degree. To work hard to get a better class of degree was the mark of a ‘grey man’, the worst epithet in the Oxford vocabulary.”

You could stream by behavioural attributes to achieve that if you wanted, but then you would have to accept that the classes would be very wide in ability, unless you stream by both behaviour and ability and then end up with a massive logistical nightmare.

It’s not a nightmare, kids that don’t behave can be kicked out of a school to one with less strict standards. Then, simply have every school stream their children based on intelligence.

My local high-school was also the wider area's sink-school that kids got expelled into from other schools, though there wasn't any way of particularly escaping, should you just happen to be going there anyway. Anyway, the transport arrangements for some of the kids was a nightmare.

edit - also, from my observation, concentrating all the nutters under one roof does not really help, if your aim is educational. It just takes a lot of little problems across a lot of schools and turns them into one big unmanageable problem that can be politely ignored.

Education is not a team sport. If kids want to be nutters that’s their problem, not the responsibility of well behaved kids to reform them by proximity.

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

----

John Donne - Devotions upon Emergent Occasions - Excerpt from Meditation 17

Absolutely.

Top tier schools could also start accepting the most genetically superior applicants. Given two students with equal test scores, one might already be 'maxed out' due to environmental advantages. We can start screening for the most potential and get rid of AA while we're at it.

“Alpha children wear grey They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I'm a Beta, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Gammas and Deltas. Gammas are stupid. They all wear green, and Delta children wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse. They're too stupid to be able…“

A class divided is a timeless classic.

http://www.pbs.org/video/frontline-class-divided/

Race is one of the triggers for ignorance and hate, it is so visible. Once we make genetic makeup visible, it will change how we see each other.

Is it really so bad if it makes them happier? And if the society is happier in aggregate?

I have friends like these, who, if they were to be shoehorned into doing highly abstract creative work, would be downright miserable and would eventually burn out.

People look at BNW as some type of dystopia, but I felt like the novel handled it rather well in the sense than there is a place for outliers to be free as well, without coercion (Iceland).

The people who thought they didn't fit in their 'caste' so to speak weren't forced to work at gunpoint.

The idea of being born into a caste chosen for you before birth and reinforced through biology absolutely horrifies me.

The point of BNW was that there could be effective “coercion” based on molding our desires instead of stamping them out with fear and force. The gunpoint wasn’t necessary; your prison walls were built in your head by chemistry and psychological conditioning.

It sounds bad to you because you weren't conditioned. People are stuck in lower 'castes' even these days in the most progressive countries in the world. Where's the justice in that? You have thousands if not millions of intelligent people across the world having a bad stroke of luck and being born in a different country to the wrong parents.

We all have our prison walls. To pretend that the biological walls are somehow more horrifying and cruel than sociological or economical is, in my opinion, lunacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com