Schooling improves intelligence, but not the impact of socioeconomics, genetics
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The whole home schooling trend of children has grown in leaps and bounds by parents who don't want their children to be exposed 'learning' they deem to be unhealthy for their kids. ' In an ideal world schooling could improve 'intelligence' by helping children to think for themselves objectively but it's a common trope that school is just programming wrapped up as 'learning'.
I'd say kids are both malleable and at the same time grow to be incredibly resilient.
I personally do not have kids.
It certainly is. You can easily single out rebellious children under a certain doctrine. You can reduce the numbers just by punishment. They might still be rebellious afterwards, but they are also isolated in society as a result also adding to the spiral.
It is hard to deconstruct the frame you are living in.
Issues of “indoctrination” aside, I find the rampant bad behavior and lack of action far more concerning. I’ve been concussed from random assaults circa 2010 with no action being taken. Students with slap-on-the-wrist punishments for serious crimes being allows to commingle with legitimate students is an affront to reason.
Here recently, a friends daughter attempted suicide. She and several other girls were sexually assaulted by a pair of recurring criminals predating upon students. Guidance counselors swept it under the rug in spite of “mandatory reporter” laws. Only on the fourth assault we’re they finally held accountable.
Why would I want to send my kids to a place where this is normal and acceptable?
> Issues of “indoctrination” aside, I find the rampant bad behavior and lack of action far more concerning.
Prioritizing safety over education becomes prioritizing process over purpose. There will never be perfect safety anywhere, and if being safer than home isn't perfect enough, we logically should be intervening a lot more at home. The content and structure of education, however, we have almost complete control over (aside from the latitude of individual teachers who we hire and fire.) It's very convenient to ignore the thing we can control for the sake of the thing we can't.
It's to postpone fixing the thing we can fix (matching educational content and process with our agreed upon intentions) for the sake of the thing that no institution in any place or culture has ever fixed (ending all crime, discomfort or suicide.)
Yeah, um, forgive me if I don't just believe your say-so. Got a source for your claim?
Personally, I would say that it depends on the school, and on the home.
> Prioritizing safety over education becomes prioritizing process over purpose.
How well do you think people learn when they are worried about their safety? If you want to prioritize purpose, then make an environment conducive to the purpose. (In fact, looking at the actual environment created, one might suspect that education is not the actual purpose.)
You know those jokes about the statistician who says that such-and-such thing kills fewer people than car crashes and people worry too much about it, and the other statistician responds that the people who know the statistics about car crashes probably don't worry enough about such-and-such?
See for example https://xkcd.com/795/
School safety is a bit like that. If you look at generic statistics it looks like school is safer than home, but if you are the sort of person who worries about relative safety of schools vs homes and looks up statistics, then schools will in average be less safe than your home.
Imagine thinking such a thing about schools.
Also, the way the consequences of school intervention works is bonkers.
The bully is rewarded since they get suspended (that's a reward from their pov, not a punishment) while the victim gets punished since they get suspended (but now that's a punishment from their pov).
This is entirely normal from my experience and perfectly acceptable from the schools at least. Not sure it's acceptable by parents just yet.
There was a ~30yr period were western society gave it some lip service while backing that up with no reinforcing action. Say 1980-2010 or thereabouts.
There are scarcely any other institutions, parents included, that are capable of teaching children how to read, write, do math, science fundamentals, etc.
We should be dumping 1000x the amount of money we currently are into public schools. Teachers ought to be among the best paid members of the middle class. Yes, schools have their issues, but the solution is to recognize the critical function they serve and the massive underselling of what they could do for us if treated properly as an asset, and to start funding them correctly.
Higher education (for IT and business) is overrated by people who paid so much for their own that they only hire their likes.
Did you? Why not? Myself I didn't.
It's true that the content could theoretically be learned in 1-2 hours a day of studying systematically - if the student is a highly motivated adult with some amount of uninterrupted focus time during the day, and no executive function issues. Children at school are none of this. They're not adults. They're not motivated - or capable of being motivated - by school. They don't have fully developed executive functions. And their parents don't have 1-2 hours a day to spare to homeschool them.
Public school system isn't optimized to help the few ideally-suited children excel - it's optimized to give a chance to grow to everyone. This includes being a daycare, so the parents can work, so the society doesn't break down. This includes giving reliable baseline education to everyone. This includes working as a safe space for children who, due to no fault of their own, were born into poverty, or in pathological families, and would otherwise not have access to proper nutrition and healthcare (this was a big deal during COVID lockdowns). Public school system is, arguably, the only thing enabling any kind of upward mobility in the society.
I think you're right that public education is intended to provide a basic useful level of education to everyone. This is a good goal, though I think many students would benefit from asynchronous (vs. lock-step) study and a less rigid grade structure.
The greater the amount of working memory you have, the more efficient your cognition is. You can reach more conclusions / insights, and connect more dots per unit time than those with poorer working memory. Hence fluid intelligence mediates the rate at which crystalized intelligence can be acquired. The more crystalized intelligence you acquire, the more efficiently you can make use of the working memory you have as you have concepts that effectively compress a tonne of information you would otherwise have to load in and out of working memory if you didn't have them. Regardless of other factors, that particular feedback loop is going to operate the same for everyone, right?
I say this with no ill will, just purely out of interest: can you provide a source or relevant further reading? Obviously I can start the search myself, but I ask because your targeting will be much better.
On the weight of evidence it appears to be related to larger brain volume combined with shorter pathways within and between brain networks. Which makes total sense when you think about it.
Those two things don't comport with one another. You seem confused.
Working memory is indeed a biological reality. You don't "build" working memory. Each Individual has their own fixed capacity for short-term working memory rooted in biology. According to "The Neuroscience of Intelligence", on the weight of evidence higher intelligence comes down to larger brain volume combined with shorter pathways within and between brain networks. It's not hard to imagine the effect those two things have on working memory.
What I was saying is that this innate capacity for working memory is the basis for a positive feedback loop where the cognitively rich get cognitively richer. One's working memory isn't changed by learning things, rather the more things one has learned, the less work one has to do to learn additional / related things.
Children that told they are smart from tests tend to have higher confidence and that has positive effects during a time where most children are unsure about themselves and their role in their world.
Confidence also has secondary effects in other aspects of life from dating to seeking out quality mentors and opportunities.
My experience, annecdata at best - kids who do good in tests have 0 confidence when it comes to dating. If there is a correlation there it is negative, at absolute best 0.
the lack of confidence from dating comes from a lack of opportunity to learn how to date. dating is being treated like such a special activity that require a lot of cultural knowledge. the very fact that a date can go bad and that this has a strong influence on the relationship is a problem.
the conclusion for me is that dating itself is the wrong approach to find a partner. it would be better to pick your partner from among your friends, and then spending time with that friend is more easy and more natural. and if a "date" goes bad, it has less of an aftereffect, because not everything is perfect among friends
Yes, this study goes about measuring it instead of just shrugging their shoulders like your statement is.
It is correlating three variables (predictors) against IQ (the outcome variable). That is, they find that genetics, schooling, and SES all independently influence a child's IQ test score. But that school does not make the gap caused by genetics or SES better or worse.
Can scientists take a 20-40 year old person with an average upbringing and create the next Picasso or Stanley Kubrick by showing and training them on a ton of art? Almost like the data that was used to train ChatGPT in a way.
Or do human brains only soak up information like a sponge when we’re 0-5 year old and it’s impossible for an adult to go from average to genius?
Pretty much.
Don't you think "showing and training" sounds very passive? No one can train a dispassionate person to become a proficient artist let alone genius.
And scientists are unlikely to be particularly good at teaching art.
I had multiple memorable conversations (anecdotal evidence, and potentially b.s. at that) with very successful folks in both pure art and pure science that suggested they are actually very similar at a fundamental level. I say pure in that these folks had spent lifetimes producing public art projects or research from grants. They only taught as a byproduct of their passions.
The idea-generation phase of both industries essentially runs along the same tracts/fascicles/etc. in the brain. I even had a more eccentric professor suggest that the cutting edge of the art world actually mirrors that of science in that the same discoveries are conceptualized in tandem.
A friend of mine is a private piano teacher. And he observed that most adults pick up Piano much faster then children. There is probably a bias since an adult going to learn the piano is intrinsically motivated while the children might be forced by their parents.
It’s the same reason people can pickup a 5th instrument so much faster than their first.
Goes for about everything. Sports too. Noticed it with martial arts classes. If you take kids, prepare for the unmotivated that are there because their parents send them.
Even aside from that, which might be argued to be a biological oddity and explained by early development factors, take any active 8 year old and, yes, if you take any one domain, you might say that the rate of learning is in the same ballpark as an adult, but if you account for all domains within with that child is actively engaged, the total volume is again incredible and likely only comparable to the rate of learning of a gifted adult.
The average adult dedicates approximately 0 time to growing as a person. So it's expected that the vast majority of adults don't grow in ways that you see in your children. My point is that I expect under similar situations adults can grow as much as children.
Personhood is vast and mysterious. It commonly encompasses engagements with many domains that compete for one's time. Often, the values of these domains are not mappable or comparable. We are all of us tangled by wicked and wild problems, shooting from the hip, in the dark, at moving targets which we aren't even sure exist.
Given the complications, I find it very dubious to say that family and career are thieves of time. Much of the profound value of my own time and the core of my growth is driven by taking these parts of my life as seriously as I can.
I'm not saying these are worthwhile choices to make. But if you want to maximize personal growth these are choices you should make.
The fruit of youth is that you actually are encouraged, and in the position, to maximize personal growth. Of course it's a self full-filling prophecy children actually do grow the most. That doesn't mean children are actually better at it.
There are studies that show exactly this for language acquisition. For example: https://core.ac.uk/reader/148309780.
Further, how is it possible for you to evaluate the quality of personal growth independently from all the nonoverlapping magisteria out of which every every life is composed? When you recommend that someone not have a family or a career because they detract from personal growth, it must be because you have some other metric by which personal growth is measured. Unless you have a simple, reductive utility function, I don't see how that's possible. And if you do have a simple reductive utility function, it's very like incorrect.
I don't use a specific utility function. Because it doesn't matter what utility function you use. Pursuing maximizing any utility function for the maximum amount of time and effort will in general lead the maximum return if you go about it correctly. Having a family and a career requires spending loads of time on menial task which otherwise could have been used to improve on any specific metric. And, very importantly, are mutually exclusive. You can't maximize your career and your family. Precisely for the same reason.
It doesn't at all follow in an obvious way that opportunity cost generalizes like you seem to suggest. It's been observed that as people age, they trade fluid intelligence for crystallized intelligence. One slows down and goes deeper.
Regarding my point about utility functions: no, it doesn't matter which you use, because none of them are adequate to the task at hand, which is really just figuring out how to live one's life in the absence of adequate utility functions.
Think of all the most advanced people you know.
Here’s how genius works:
1. Be obsessed, practice 8 hours a day.
2. Repeat daily until you succeed.
Genes can only disqualify the most unfortunate of the genetic bell curve. SES could make it untenable on a greater rate. After that though, it’s a pretty fair race to achieve “genius,” And I can’t imagine more than a 10y variance on creating something prolific.
But it’s you who has to put in the work and attention. Scientists can only brainwash you for obsession, and encourage you to exercise and be healthy.
Ignoring how ignorant it is to ever claim you know "how most people think of" anything...
The original thread referenced Kubrick and Picasso: intellectual, hardworking people. Unless your definition of genius means it is some innate, genetic predisposition for a subject, I'll first refer you back to my word "obsession" and also point out that if we've dwindled down to "IQ" as the lone factor, then what is the fucking point.
"Geniuses" are only relevant for their creative outputs. There are plenty of "high IQ, high promise" MacArthur fellows that don't even make a splash, so who cares about their semi-formal "genius" title.
The "genius" (person) takes the inkling of a "genius" idea and successfully carries it through to completion. My argument is that we all have genius ideas, and none of the characteristic problem-solving knowledge/infrastructure/time to realize those genius ideas.
In order to do that, you've got to know the medium, completely, that is part of genius. This is why Picasso was able to make the strange art that he did. He knew how to precisely capture subjects, lighting. He got bored with it, and wanted to see what else there was. He once said "the chief enemy of creativity is good sense." He only knew that once he studied the classics thoroughly.
You see the same story with Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. Herbie was getting frustrated with what he was playing on tour with Miles in the 60's. Even though it was still masterful, it was boring Herbie to tears. Miles leans over during one of his shows and says "don't play the butter notes". The fuck does that mean? It doesn't mean anything, it's practically an oblique strategy. But Herbie knew everything, and so he took this to mean don't play the 3 in a chord, because it gives the chord too much certainty in its meaning. It solved Herbie's problem.
You hear Jonah Hill talking about Martin Scorsese in the exact same way: "Scorsese is a genius because here's a guy a who can walk on set, be handed any logistics blocker, and we're all moving again in under five minutes."
How do you get mastery of a subject so that you can solve problems at the highest level? You grind. and grind. and grind. Because you are obsessed. And then you get lucky that you have a genius idea that touches people.
So yeah, mastery, genius, they're the same thing, but the genius part is whatever society heralds as relevant.
https://theconversation.com/how-a-study-which-began-just-aft...
Seemingly more schooling, healthy blood pressure in one’s 40s, and healthy BMI seemed to correlate with reduced chance of Alzheimer’s in 70s
Even the abstract basically makes very generic:
"Much of a child’s environment is captured by socioeconomic status (SES), a summary measure usually comprised of household income, parental education, and neighborhood quality"
Am I completely misunderstanding how it is used?
(b) considering maps in, it's not "catch all" because in the US context, Zip+4 generally suffices to predict household income, parental education, and (obviously) neighbourhood quality.
(I suspect it's spelled SES because the US is unwilling to admit that they are not all middle-class)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_status
Personally, whenever I read "socioeconomic status" I mentally replace with "how much money they got".
(Yes, I know, socioeconomic status includes assets other than money, But money can easily be converted to a lot of things. That's why people like it.)
Its true that SES is operationalized somewhat differently in different studies, so that conclusions about it one study may not transfer directly to what is studied under that name in another study. The operationalization here (and this is not uncommon) is, additionally, using summary measure is itself somewhat obfuscatory unless the summary measure captures a complex relationship distinct from the individual contributions of the components, which does not clearly seem to be the case here.
I wouldn’t say that SES is useless, but I would say that it seems to have no utility here separate from studying the individual components of that are used in operationalizing it.
I seem to remember another study showing inteligence in only dependant on genetics, and in long term not affected by schooling and other socioeconomic factors - think they studied twins raised by different families.
There's so many basic concepts they just don't grasp, and even when explained they still don't seem to understand.
That's not to say they're incapable of anything (if anything, their well-honed gut instincts outperform some modern disembodied intellectuals), there's just huge holes in the types of formal thinking that show up on IQ tests.
What this study is showing is that genes and wealth don't boost nor nerf this effect, specifically on the 3rd to 5th grades.
They make it very explicit that this result shouldn't be generalized outside of this context. You folks are reading too much on it.
Or perhaps just not grokking what this means:
"What this study is showing is that genes and wealth don't boost nor nerf this effect, specifically on the 3rd to 5th grades."
It's also interesting, how if school didn't play a factor, putting your kid into a under-performing inner city school wouldn't matter (or conversely, elite private schools wouldn't either)
In contrast, a well functioning capitalist system would rewards the smartest, most capable, hardest working people.
So if school makes you more intelligent but the system doesn't reward you, something is off.
(to understand this book properly I think it helps to recall that Orwell was on scholarship ["outer party"] to bring up the exam scores at a boarding school that otherwise catered to the rich and thick [cream of society — "inner party" sprogs]; many scenes in 1984 can be traced back to the posthumously-published Such Such Were the Joys)
I'm pretty confident we can say this about every economic system. But we can't really say who has saved the most because we can't do very good A/B testing or really any good causal analysis. It is important to remember that economics is not a hard science and most "experiments" are either in the lab (and we gotta question scaling) and natural experiments, which means its difficult to come up with causal explanations.
Historically, everyone dies. The right question is “which systems have produced the most new wealth for their participants” and there’s a clear obvious winner there: private ownership and free trade.
Is that the right question, though? Just the sum of the wealth produced, with no concern to how that wealth is distributed, the effects it had on the population or any externalities?
There are wide differences in human flourishing even among capitalist societies, so it may be better to look what other ingredients make the most difference, aside of private ownership and free trade.
I remember watching an online lecture series on economics once and part of it had live demonstrations of market forces where the people who valued the thing they wanted to obtain more than the currency required to obtain it wound up with those things, and then they went through some graphs of how the maths of that all works out in theory. This was a model from classical economics. I remember thinking wow that's such a beautiful and cool model. Then lecturer turns around and says despite the fact the graph from the model matches our live demonstration almost exactly, it turns out things don't work like this in the real world. The reason being that a reasonable number of people lie, steal and otherwise cheat, and it turns out the effects of that are somewhat non-trivial.
It made me realize that the effect that bad actors have on the free market are actually quite significant. I've also realized over the years that when you look deep enough, not much of anything is "well functioning".
That mechanism is printed money untethered from a hard-to-fake backing, aka hard Money. Hard money advocates say that printed money that loses its value over time screws up all kinds of incentives by more easily rewarding bad behavior like political corruption, and punishing good behavior like saving and not investing in things one doesn’t understand deeply.
It shouldn’t be surprising that printed money leads to people getting more reward for positioning themselves closer to the money printer. I don’t think it should be controversial that most of us invest in things we don’t remotely understand, like businesses we are totally unqualified to operate and manage.
But this is, in fact, the kind of opinion that gets you mocked and ridiculed by educated elites.
Just have to spend a few days on Wall St or SV to work that out.
I'm not sure this is the thing that a well-functioning capitalism system would actually reward; I think value produced is the gold standard incentive for capitalism, all else being equal.
For instance, someone might be very intelligent/capable/hardworking and diligently spend their time documenting the flavor profiles of different cabbage species. If nobody ever reads their work or cares about their results, it's hard to make a case that much value has been produced (capital-wise).
By contrast, a person working at a nail factory might not be the smartest, or just capable, and may slack off. If their work produces nails that actually get boxed up and sold, there's real value to that effort that (ideally) is rewarded.
This made me chuckle. I've found over the last decade, that when you dig deep enough to eventually answer the question of "what's off here?" it turns out to almost always be that your expectations we're what was off due to an incomplete understanding of the system.