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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those things obliquely as an accidental side effect. High School is mostly about babysitting and obedience -- your success is measured by your willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops specified by authority figures. Sure, the ones who take an interest in the material will learn something, but that has a lot more to do with the individual than the school system.

I still think going to school and college is the right decision for well over 99% of students, but I think it's a big mistake to treat formal education as a one-size-fits-all panacea.

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It's been 15 years (eep), but 11th grade was not a total waste of time. My public school was large enough to have the full remedial, general, advanced, and honors class spectrum so I could avoid the dumbest elements of society. Granted honor classes where still boring but least they tried to speed things up and my classmates where mildly interesting.

Anyway, I was classified as Exceptionally Gifted (IQ 160+?) / Learning Disabled which basically meant they had no idea what to do with me. I did the whole state science, math, and chess thing so I spent time around people who where focused and intelligent in high school most of the extreme cases seemed broken. I don't feel that having children jump through more and harder hoops leads to a happy healthy life. I would have have loved a shorter more focused school day, but I don't see the value of trying to cram more facts into high school. Adding a course in investing, speed reading, or other useful skills would have been nice.

PS: I don't know if I fear success, but I don't know how I could have coped if I was profoundly gifted and everyone around me had seemed even dumber.

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underserved.htm

Is there any difference between your thinking and less intelligent people besides just being able to "get it" faster? Based on the link you give, I'm curious whether IQ isn't just a quantitative metric but perhaps also qualitative. Like, past a certain level high IQ people have a different kind of mental capability.

Also, do you meet more people than you would statistically expect who are around your level? Another interesting claim the article makes is some researchers say there are more exceptionally gifted people than their statistical distribution would predict. Since the IQ metric is based on assuming a normal distribution in the population, such a result would mean IQ scores are not accurate.

Well, it's not even quantitative metric, it's ordering metric. Making quantitative statements about IQ is quite meaningless. It is not like height or weight.

It seems to be easy to get it wrong. Even the author of the article, who studies giftedness professionally, made such mistake (she tells that IQ 190 to IQ 130 is like IQ 130 to IQ 70).

What's that supposed to mean? The meaning of IQ 190 is that it is 6 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in billion), while both IQ 130 and 70 are 2 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in 50).

When talking about children age * IQ / 100 ~= mental if it's under 16 works as a reasonable approximation for younger children across much of the IQ spectrum. So a 10 year old with an IQ of 70 has a mental age of 7, and someone with an IQ of 150 has a mental age of 15 etc. Now we have redefined IQ to have a more mathematical basis but the approximation still holds.

PS: It's not really completely accurate, but you can treat a 6 year old and a 12 year old with the same mental age in about the same way and see similar types of responses.

Ah, I see. I usually think about IQ in the way Retric describes, where it is proportional to "mental age." That assumption makes it seem quantitative, so yes, it's easy to get it wrong.

Hmmm, now I realized why child psychologists still use old ratio based definition. It's just more useful for them to think in terms of mental ages.

To respond to your original question, I have a hunch that intelligence variance (as opposed to IQ) is indeed quantitative.

It kind of make sense. Intelligence seems to correlate positively with simple stuff, like reaction speed or short term memory span.

Qualitative differences may arise as consequence of applying different "processing power" throughout your life.

For the first order effects, you can imagine that if you don't have enough "CPU-minutes", for some problems you simply time out.

For the higher order effects, it's like compound interest. For example, as written in the article, smarter kids start to speak and read sooner, thus they acquire more information and they also acquire it at higher rate. And as we know from financial compound interests, even tiny initial amounts can balloon into huge sums given enough time.

Back to my question about the distribution, if IQ is just a rarity ordering metric based on rarity, then IQ testing is somewhat confused. For example, say someone scoring 150 on an IQ test is rarer than someone scoring 160, they should be ranked higher according to your definition of the metric. If the claim in the article that higher IQs occur more frequently than predicted, then something like this scenario is possible and IQ scores may be unreliable as a rarity ordering metric.

At any rate, is there quantitative metric for intelligence?

It is not rarity ordering. Just ordering.

Simplified view: people solve a test with a number of questions. They are getting ordered by how many questions they get right.

Tests are constructed to produce Gaussian distribution of numbers of correct answers. Some questions are easy, almost everybody can solve them. Some questions are difficult, almost nobody can solve them. There should be progressively less and less people getting more questions right.

But in reality, it's not a perfect Gaussian distribution. There are some numbers of questions that have more people getting them right than would be predicted by normal distribution.

Now, about quantitativeness. We could get somehow quantitative metric, if questions would simple and uniform in structure, for example test composed just of "how fast you can multiply x-digit numbers" task, or test solely composed of "how fast you can arrange pieces into a particular shape" task.

But it's not like this. There are different tests, some of which have several thematically different sections. Even inside one section, questions do differ a lot (for example, some shapes are harder to compose of primitive elements, how would you quantify this difficulty?).

To further complicate matters, usually completely different tests are used for different intelligence ranges.

And we are not even speaking about normalizations. Your rank is computed just for your age group. For the same raw score, you get extra points if you are younger or older than the optimal age.

If I remember well, there is a fast ramp up of raw scores till 18 years, followed by a slow decline afterwards (rate of decline is slower for more intelligent people).

And then there are national/race differences. And Flynn effect. It's much more messy than it looks.

A very good book about fallacies of treating psychological tests as measurements is Measurement in Psychology: A Critical History of a Methodological Concept

http://www.amazon.com/Measurement-Psychology-Critical-Histor...

by Joel Michell. IQ scores definitely do not, as bd correctly points out, constitute an interval scale. They are not measurements.

For the simple truth:

A reasonable analogy might be replacing a 200hp engine with a 300hp engine in the same car. For a wide range of day to day things they only change is their acceleration. However, at higher speeds increased drag comes into play. So the harder the task the longer it takes them to get there. Untill they just can't keep up. For some things there is little noticable difference but othertimes it's striking.

A good example might be an Algebra II homework mistake. We where doing 2 equations 2 unknowns in class which was simple and the homework was the end of chapter quiz. Well I sat down and the first 4 questions where like that but the next set had 3 equations and 3 unknowns and a few seconds later I figured out how to do that. It's seemed odd that the homework had something new but it was easy enough so moving on. The next day I realized I had not been paying attention and did the next chapters assignment. It took the teacher two weeks to get to that point. I remember thinking what are most of these people just dumb?

A more extream example: A few years before that my had an agument with my 3 year older sister and ended up doing some of her math homework. I do recall her say ok yea this is easy. She skipped 8th grade and was the salutatorian and took AP calculus so it's not like so was slow behind or anything it was just obvious based on the questions.

As to the statistics I don't think think there is much point in measuring IQ's over 150 or so. It's not that people don't become smarter, but it's harder to find how generally intelligent someone is. Plenty of people can solve an Rubik's Cube in under 45 seconds, but how long would it take them the first time they saw one? There are plenty of mental leaps that are easy after you have seen them, but they take can take a long time to show up and 3 people might each solve a different one first. According to several people I was 3 before I spoke my first word, but my first words where "Please pass the butter" so how do you measure that?

"Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work?"

I don't grant your premise. There's busywork in everything, and I never found high school to be worse than anything that has come later in life. We've all got to wait in the same line at the supermarket.

When I read nerd complaints about formal education, I get the feeling that the prevailing sentiment is one of entitlement: "if I have to do anything I don't like to do, then the system is broken." Smart kids seem to have this sense of entitlement worse than many people -- probably because they're so easily bored.

Trouble is, you're always going to have to live and work with people who are slower than you are. You can skip out on high school in an attempt to avoid it, take college classes early, rush into graduate school, whatever. Eventually, however, you run smack into the wall of society, and you've got to work within its framework. The ability to persevere through busywork is an extremely valuable skill in that context.

If the point of school is to teach kids to deal with the busywork of real life, why not just have kids work 30-40 hours a week? Same result, except the kids could earn real money.

Because it's obviously not the only point.

It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabulary assignments to help our SAT scores. She saw my perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT's that year, but she still gave me zero's on those vocab assignments.

So I learned how important busy work was without actually doing it. In life looking for ways to avoid busy work has helped my advance. Teaching people that they need to waste their time stops being useful when you start measuring people on their performance not how they got there. The real reason teachers grade easy assignments is to let people who work hard, but have no idea what there doing pass.

PS: IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives. If doing well in high school correlated with doing well in life people might start caring about their performance.

In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond:

1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting).

2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too.

There are times to recognize busywork for what it is and eliminate it (i.e. where you benefit other people by eliminating it), and times to just suck it up and do it (i.e. where you can't change it and/or don't benefit enough other people by trying). Part of the art of being successful is knowing how to discriminate between the two scenarios, and how to respond accordingly (i.e. diplomatically).

The problem with student complaints about high school curricula, is that they clearly land in category two. Your bad experience with 9th grade geometry doesn't mean that the learning 9th grade geometry is wrong -- it means that you had a bad 9th grad geometry teacher, or that you brushed him the wrong way, or some combination of the two. And in that situation, you can suck it up, and do the work you need to do to get an A, or you can complain and get a bad grade.

Life is full of these situations. Complaining about the unfairness of the situation is not the correct response.

Don't forget the most important and IMO best option: 3) Do just enough busy work to get a decent grade, and don't whine about it too much.

That's my method. If I have a 100% in CS, what's the point of doing all the pointless busywork? Just relax for a month until your grade drops to a 92%, then you have to start working a bit.

That's the first option I listed: do the work quickly, then do something else. I never said that the goal was to get perfect grades in everything; the goal is not to be a martyr in the name of improving the system.

I was in a similar situation. I took college calculus in 8th grade, and linear algebra and discrete math in 9th. I was still a high school student, though, and my high school expected me to spend ridiculous amounts of time on math I'd learned years earlier. Ditto for science, English and history. My choice was

3) Do the minimum required to stay eligible for sports as an underclassman and then drop out once I was old enough to do so legally.

I've never regretted the decision since.

"IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives."

Citation needed.

Is it really true that valedictorians perform worse than students with lower class rank, by any objective metric?

Just the first link I found on Google but: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v4/N2/ARNOLD.ht...

It's not that they do poorly but they are under represented when compared to others of similar intelligence when you look at CEO's and other top positions.

PS: Find the number of US precedents that where valedictorians in high school.

I'm sorry, I don't normally care about misspelling here and there, but it's really hard to take a post seriously when it spells "Presidents" and "were" wrong in a span of three words....

11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.

Wow, your school was a lot better than mine.

I skipped maths class to attend rehearsals for the lead role in the school play, and learnt trig from trying to understand how Doom BSP worked.

I also got more from trying to automate Linux than I ever did in those non-practical Logo and Pascal exercises. My school had no concept of task-based learning.

Slightly off-topic, but

s/high school/corporate life/

Some of the same social structures apply to both, as well.

The cartoon applies to my comment, as well. "The way we've always done it" can be a mercilessly rote and inefficient path. The bit of Perl I picked up (along with a hodgepodge of regex, SQL, VBA -- I know, but I had to use the tools at hand -- and whatnot) boiled a five person department down to one person, all the while handling significantly increased complexity with greatly improved accuracy.

If I hadn't taken the initiative and taught myself, none of it would have happened.

Of course, the ex-jock brought in from the outside to CEO, and his team whacked it, anyway. Just like high school.

But I walked away with a better skill set, to a better job.

I feel compelled to add that my work didn't result in anyone losing their job. Rather, the company was already experiencing strong pressure both financially and, perhaps more so, philosophically from the senior management team that was parachuted in from elsewhere. Headcount in my department was reduced via attrition and a slightly accelerated retirement.

I kept the department afloat. I should have bailed, but personally it wasn't a good time for a transition.

I'd hate for my work to result in others being laid off. In a prior position, I spent a lot of time mentoring and defending a replacement, giving her time to get up to speed.

I also spent a lot of time volunteering my "kung fu" to acquaintances in other departments. Saving an accountant two days' work sorting manually through borked phone records, via a couple of minute Excel hack, provided a certain satisfaction.

There's so much emphasis on "competition" as well as "the way". (All the more ironic for all the "corporate speak" espoused regarding "cooperation".) I'd rather grow people while appreciating their differences, and hoping for some of the same in return.

To try to tie this back to "11th grade", it would be nice if "the Perl hacker" didn't so often have to feel themself quite so the outsider. Or maybe that trait is orthogonal fro the "Perl/hacker" trait? Seems to be a fairly strong correlation.

11th grade was when I read Applied Crypo & Practical Internet Security within a few weeks of each other... Spent the next few years incredibly paranoid...

It's mostly under control now.

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