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Comment by Spinnaker_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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>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.

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"

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