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We do this experiment all the time. It’s called “education”. It’s results are somewhat disappointing: people who do well in grades 1-3 also mostly do well in grades 13-16, and the converse is also true. Abilities are trainable, but trainability is also varying across people, and we don’t know how to train people to be better at learning to any substantial degree.

Anyone who has actual and nontrivial experience in teaching (say, over 50 students over at least few months) will tell you this simple empirical fact: some people just “get it” much easier and quicker than others. The only way to escape this reality is to sort people by mental ability, so that you only see people in the same ability bracket, but that’s just it, an escape.

We collectively have enormous amount of experience in educational interventions, and, in short, none of it really works. It’s easy to complain about lack of resources, about low teacher quality, about wrong methods, and all of these are in fact real problems, and pretty complex and hard to tackle too. At the same time, even if we pull each of those to the state of the art, we can only expect a marginal improvement.

Have you noticed how the educational establishments seem to try a new thing every 5-10 years or so? That’s because none of it really pushes the needle, and these 5-10 years are what it takes to realize that. In reality, the “new thing” is in fact usually an old thing that has already been tried a generation or two ago, but which has not been seen by the current generation of education workers. That’s because everything has already been tried, and none of it really works.

On a more optimistic side, that means that even if the education system is suboptimal, it doesn’t really matter, as outcomes are more or less the same anyway.

>We do this experiment all the time. It’s called “education”.

The poster you're replying to said "just take the lower half of the cohort in each categorty (mental/physical) in a given study and give them intensive one-on-one training in all areas for a year". Pretty much every study has show that one-to-one tutoring is far, far more effective than the standard "education" system.

>We collectively have enormous amount of experience in educational interventions, and, in short, none of it really works.

What are you talking about? There's plenty of evidence that one-to-one tutoring can be quite effective at increasing test scores. Yes this approach can't be deployed at scale due to the sheer cost of it, but that's completely irrelevant to the question of whether intelligence is trainable.

You should watch some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_sport competitions, would blow your mind what people are capable of training themselves to do.

No, one on one tutoring is only marginally more effective than standard education system. As I said, the education establishment has expended enormous amount of effort on figuring out how to teach better, and collected mountain of evidence. You won’t find a lot of d > 1 outcomes in literature, and not many more of d > 0.5. Many of those you find did not replicate, and you should expect at least some bogus outcomes because of how p-values work. Look at federal Head Start assessment, for example: gains are minimal, and they dissipate over time. This is the pattern that repeats over and over in educational studies: either gains are minimal and dissipate, or the study fails to replicate.

> You should watch some https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_sport competitions, would blow your mind what people are capable of training themselves to do.

What some people are capable of, yes. Does it translate to those people being better at other mental tasks of mental ability? No.

> No, one on one tutoring is only marginally more effective than standard education system.

Two sigma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem is not a "marginal" effect. And a chunk of that can be explained by mastery learning, which while still hard to scale up is far easier than individual tutoring as a whole. The educational system is not institutionally incented to effectively pursue these empirically workable approaches. It's a matter of bureaucracy-driven failure, not some immutable fact about the world.

There's even specifically developed approaches to effectively train and educate those who might be often described as 'low I.Q. individuals', such as "direct instruction". Guess what, they get no takeup from the educational establishment, simply because they're (quite wrongly!) perceived as being demeaning for teachers.

The average teacher would rather pretend to educate those who are already highly functionally literate and familiar with educational dynamics (including test taking, of course) and can simply "learn by themselves". Education schools consistently cater to these attitudes and push the same approach.

> "Anyone who has actual and nontrivial experience in teaching (say, over 50 students over at least few months) will tell you this simple empirical fact: some people just “get it” much easier and quicker than others. The only way to escape this reality is to sort people by mental ability, so that you only see people in the same ability bracket, but that’s just it, an escape."

Consider learning how to throw a ball. Do some new students 'just get it' - or did their parents spend hours tossing a ball with them previously? Point being, those anecdotes about students who just get it don't factor in variables like earlier childhood education etc. Few people would argue that such physical skills are not eminently trainable - and clearly, mental skills are also trainable.

The question is, is there something like a clearly delineated genetic factor than makes it easier for someone to, for example, learn a new language, relative to someone lacking that factor? No real clear evidence seems to exist for that claim.

There are physical skills with genetic factors correlated with race or rather with groups of people with shared genetics.

Here is a short and incomplete list: ability to handle sun or lack thereof, ability to handle heat or lack thereof, ability to live in high altitudes, ability to process lactose, ability to tolerate alcohol, resistance to malaria, height.

There are also diseases correlated with groups of genetically related people.

However, these groups most often don't fit so cleanly into the US's constructs of race.

There could be mental skills correlated with groups of people with shared genetics.

The question is how we handle that if that is the case. One approach is to deny it. Another is to force or encourage people to have children with others to smudge out differences. Another is to let it be.

I suspect that the unspoken answer is denial while encouraging the smudging out of visible differences. I suspect that people are morally against the last and that it would lead to massive conflict.

I think a similar calculus has happened many times before. I think that is partially the origin of "whiteness".

This is the focus of the highly-controversial 1990s book “The Bell Curve”. If you want to follow the academic history of the topic, I highly recommend reading it along with responses to it by critics.

Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it. You can lose weight and train explosiveness, but someone with a 10" vertical will never be even average. Compare that to deadlifts, where any individual can triple their max through training.

I'm guessing there is an equivalent with mental capabilities. Somethings you can train, some are innate.

But is it that you can't train it, or that nobody does because there's no carrot?

Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win.

Something like the SAT is a game that people learn to win.

This is oft claimed, but data doesn't back it up. SAT is marginally affected by coaching and training.

"Coached students are only slightly more likely to have large score gains than uncoached students. In addition, about 1/3 of students experience no score gain or score loss following coaching. The typical gain associated with coaching is 8 points for verbal and 18 points for math"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/05/...

You can easily “win” an IQ test: just memorize the answers (ignoring the fact that not everyone, in fact, can easily memorize a lot of random stuff like that). Of course, no reasonable person would say that a person who memorized all answers in IQ test to get a score of 150 has really improved her mental ability.

The situation is somewhat the same with SAT, but it’s not so bad in actual reality: there is no single SAT test, there are multiple instantiatons, and you can’t just memorize all answers for all SAT tests. At the same time, the actual problems on the test come from a rather limited pool of patterns, and if one learns to tackle each pattern, one can really improve their SAT score. This is, in fact, perfectly commonplace: everyone significantly improves their SAT score between grades 8 and 12 (at least among people who do take SAT at both ages).

Does it make SAT useless, as everyone learn all the patterns and gets perfect score? Empirically, no: there is large variation in actual obtained scores, and the results are mostly in expected directions: “better”, “smarter” students get better scores and vice versa.

Why doesn’t everyone get perfect score? Quite simply, because variation in mental ability also makes it so that learning the pattern is easier to some people than it is to others. This is by far the source of most of the variation: there is some residual component of conscientiousness, but it’s much less important: spending more time cramming has lower returns the less able you are, and for everyone, there are significant diminishing returns to extra hour of cramming, and ultimately high scorers don’t differ that much in terms of how much time they spend prepping to SAT compared to mid-scorers.

You ever watch the NFL scouting Combine? It's a stat every recruiter looks at for most sports. As a competitive volleyball player I (and my coach) obsessed over a 5% increase that came from years of training.

The evidence that you can train for the SAT is pretty scarce.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1745-3984.... https://nepc.colorado.edu/sites/default/files/Briggs_Theeffe... https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

That's pretty surprising. I would have thought that everyone who does something like a test the second time does better.

Certainly I don't think I've ever not done better the second time I looked at a paper, so maybe my experience is just special.

To be incredibly reductive:

  - Some people are so disinterested in standardized tests that they never did a practice test or anything like it (this is me!)
  - These people get a pretty significant bump from taking the test a second time, from sheer familiarity effects (I didn't bother, but maybe I should have!)
  - It is unclear that extensive SAT tutoring does anything for anyone more than "force you to look at an SAT practice test at least once, and alert you to the fact that you are allowed to take the test many times, thus giving you a chance to choose the max of a naturally varying set rather than a single measurement"

>Perhaps the best physical test for innate athletic ability is the standing vertical jump. There isn't an awful lot you can do to improve it.

This isn't a very good example, because the reason it gets harder is that increasing the body's muscle mass also increases the strength needed to propel it a certain distance. Hence gaining muscle mass both helps and hurts the vertical jump. Is there any reason to believe intelligence should be like this?

No, it's not a measure of strength. It's a measure of explosiveness, or rate of force production. They are actually very different physical traits. Strength can be trained to a large extent. Explosiveness is mainly genetics. You can improve it by 15 or 20%. That's it.

"bias towards assuming that physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not,"

For the layman, probably. Actual IQ tests try to ensure that subjects don't have experience with the test tasks. If they do, then the test is not as effective at measuring innate ability to learn or problem solve since it has been trained and the strategy to solve is already known. So it shouldn't be a misperception in the fields that deal with it.

Have you looked for answers to your question, and if so, what did you find?

There’s an absolute avalanche of data on this topic - do you want pointers to it, or are you looking to soapbox?

I actually don't know of any studies of the nature I suggested. Note such a study would be fairly expensive as the cost of standardized high-quality one-on-one tutoring (with both mental and physical coaches) over a period of one year for the study cohort would be rather high, so such studies may simply not exist.

It's not soapboxing; in particular it would be interesting to see if the 'ability to learn and improve' changed with age. It's commonly assumed that it's harder to learn new things as we age, but I've never seen that data quantified personally... Hopefully it's less true than we imagine it to be.

There’s nothing “all-inclusive” - but we have really robust research for each piece of this in a vacuum, because frankly it would be incredibly difficult to test the generalizability of any single tutoring methodology when applied long-term.

This is the seminal paper on one-on-one academic tutoring from 1984 that’s spawned hundreds of follow-up papers: http://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf.

The biggest corpus of raw stats on age-related learning AND the generalizability of that knowledge come from the fad of brain-training games from the 2000s (e.g. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=bra...).

But the crux of what you’re talking about, i.e. “physical skills are trainable while mental skills are not”, fall under the banners of “transfer of learning” for cross-domain academic performance, and “malleability of intelligence” for age-related differences in cognitive improvement: e.g. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ903882.pdf, https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1037/0033-295X.109.1.116.

Plenty of exercise physiology research on coaching format (personal trainer vs. group classes), and strength training adaptations by age that shouldn’t be hard to find at all to cover the physical side.