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Comment by alecco | Hacker News Reader

The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigration (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries). And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization and catering to the lowest common denominator. Student A is bad at math and good at language, student B is the opposite, both get the worst education for both subjects.

I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.

View on HN

Education is a weird field with perhaps a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas.

Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!

A big part of the problem education systems are solving is not "how do we get knowledge to children", but "how do we get masses of children to learn without coercion of the ugliest kind".

Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.

Thus, peer pressure. That's what putting a whole bunch of students in the same room accomplishes.

>Some children are innately motivated to learn. Some are motivated so strongly you could give them a smartphone and watch them learn all they need to learn in life. But those children aren't the norm - they're the freaky 1 in 1000 outliers. And education has to work with everyone.

I worked as a teacher for a year. Children are innately motivated and curious (this is not just a cliche). If there was any laziness it usually stemmed from fear of not being good enough but they definitely all tried, even students that didn't know their 5 times table by age 10. Some students have greater self-perseverance than others though, some can't handle being wrong and fear being seen as less-then their peers. Others like to challenge themselves without such fear.

> fear of not being good enough

I believe that fear is not unwarranted. It's a learned behavior that helps one survive in their environment. I imagine many of those children were likely punished for mistakes or for not being good enough.

Don't ask me how I know...

> Some children are innately motivated to learn

I don't think I've met a single child in my life that isn't excited about learning about new stuff, but it really depends on what it is, it differs a lot! And they're all different as well, someone who's really into math might hate history, or vice-versa. But they all want to learn something, in my experience.

The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about, and that kind ruins the other parts they actually find fun and engaging.

> The problem occurs when you place them all in one school, and force them to learn everything, even things they don't want to learn about

A difficult part is that children aren't really in the position to know what they want to learn most of the time.

Sure, many prefer sports over math but covering a broad spectrum in pre-teen and teenager education is quite important to get them develop these preferences and themselves as a person. They are given more agency/choice (electives etc.) as they grow up.

There are also topics you need to learn that aren't fun/engaging (especially as fun/engaging is quite subjective and depends on the individual). Especially when those topics are prerequisites to other potentially fun topics (you will have to learn the fundamentals before engaging with advanced topics in most subjects)

Lest you think there’s one simple solution, my kid went to a school for one year that deliberately eliminated all that stuff - no set curriculum, no specific academic goals, and students get the majority of the vote on the rules and anything about the whole setup. They could learn about anything they want to, with no pressure.

Most of the kids spent their whole days playing Xbox, Switch, or brainrot games like Roblox on tablets. (No, they weren’t “creatively building new worlds” on Roblox, just screwing around consuming what others had made in order to manipulate them into spending Robux).

What about the minority?

There were a few kids, primarily among the handful of high school aged ones, who seemed to be doing some sort of work vaguely resembling schoolwork, doing some kind of reports on some topic, or a project writing some kind of video game mod.

Yep. This is the human condition for the vast majority of humans.

I grew up in a place where education and hard work wasn’t valued much by the community. Those that could scam some sort of government benefits did so, and they certainly were not working on art or helping out their communities with all their spare time. At best was a consumption state - the median was actively self destructive behavior, and the worst was behaviors that ruined their surrounding community.

This whole idea that on average humans would hit some utopia of creativity and community mindedness if only they could throw off the yoke of needing to work to survive goes against every single bit of my lived experience. And recent history.

The kids who went to the local public school my nieces went to basically did the bare minimum - usually just showing up is enough these days. Zero interest in learning or putting effort in. Only when they were removed from that environment and put with self-selecting (well, parent-selecting) peers that were curated beforehand did this fact change.

The vast majority of humans are not inherently motivated to better themselves in any way.

Its so sad that humans perform best when suffering. I adopted a supper skinny worn out street cat, all she did was sleep eat and poop, she never went outside, straight from the sofa to the food and back to the sofa, really really slowly. For 4 years it did nothing but sleep, no exceptions. Then one day a different cat looked around the corner of the open door. In 0.3 seconds she launched from the sofa covering impressive distance and ran after it to the end of the street. Safe to say, if I don't move for 4 years I wouldn't be looking to pick a fight. But cats do get stupid if they don't have to work for food.

I hear this often but I don't really buy it. Variety is good. If I had been routed into a field in first grade or whatever based on what I liked and was good at at the time my life would look completely different, but likely not better. I certainly never would have taken art history or design classes in college, both requirements that I wouldn't have otherwise considered, but among my favorite classes in retrospect.

Ricardo Semler had a hilarious take. When allowed to pick their own topics some kids chose to play only videogames. They dropped far behind. Then They hear other kids learned how to read and write! From scoring no points the gamers went to the top, catched up then continued at the same place.

That it was their own idea apparently made all the difference.

I mean, that LLM idea _sounds_ ridiculous, but similar ideas have worked really well in machine learning for games like Chess and AI.

This is assuming that the knowledge space being aimed at is discoverable solely by exploration of 1v1 games. Maths and maybe some of the sciences could be set up like this if you were very clever about it, but not much else.

LLMs have only a very small working memory and they don't have a memory beyond the current session.

What would you recommend I read if I wanted to learn more about a few thousand years of very good unimplemented ideas?

>Imagine training an llm by putting it in a room with other untrained LLMs? All that knowledge is sure to rubb of!

Right around puberty your theory starts to break down.

> by top skilled immigration

who are mostly from countries where education is

> leaning more to memorization

There’s a potential irony here that a commenter lamenting the decline of education in the West is leaning on the “critical thinking over memorization” trope in contemporary Western education, when that trope has contributed to a decline in educational effectiveness.

The massive success of information retrieval allowed people to trick themselves that they no longer needed to remember things, and remember them easily. They should instead turn focus on critical thinking.

But critical thinking is knowledge based. At least, I buy E. D Hirch’s argument that it is.

Believe or not, if you look at Zhihu[0] you'll see a lot of people glazing Western education system. Grass is always greener on the other side of Pacific.

[0]: China's Quora equivalent, but much better than Quora

I think both viewpoints can be right. Chinese people come here, study engineering, chemistry, pharma, computer science, etc. and then graduate and then they invent and make insanely cool things.

Meanwhile at the same schools, so many Americans major in things like the various identity “____ studies,” fake sciences like psychology, etc. They graduate from college with potentially less useful skills or knowledge than could have been gained by watching a few (non-AI) YouTube videos a day.

We’ve turned half or more of our educational system into babysitting and self-esteem therapy for a generation we’ve raised to be incredibly anxious and fragile.

Memorizing is not understanding. You can see this clearly with LLMs trying to predict outside their training data.

Yes, memorization is important. What I argue it's pushing out truly understanding and critical thinking. Kids need trial and error from experimentation (play).

This argument is also explored by the “Quantum Computing for the Very Curious” series that uses spaced repetition to teach an advanced topic. The series has been posted to HN more than once.

I also find it convincing.

The trend of discounting memorization is damaging. Memorization is an incredible tool for learning.

Memorization is pretty much the single largest undervalued thing in the west which has a gigantic impact on the mental capabilities of people.

I mean I get that rote memorization of eg. The multiplication table (7x7=49 etc pp) feels pointless, but it is training your brain. And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't, only put in minimal effort because everyone around them talks like intelligence is mostly genetics.

I mean genetics definitely plays a role given the same circumstances - but your effort - including memorization - is massively more impactful.

> And a growing person whose brain is still developing who continuously memorizes new things will be smarter by the time they're 20 then the same person that didn't,

I dunno, I guess it depends on what we mean by "smart" but I've definitively met (and been friends) with people who weren't able to live on their own by their 20s, although they were very "smart" in school and highly intelligent in general. I've also seen the reverse, dumb people being "better at life in general". I don't think it's as black and white as you're trying to make it out to be.

Possibly things are worse, but here’s an argument that we’ve gotten unrealistically ambitious about universal education through college:

What People Want From Our Schools Has Never Been Accomplished, Anywhere, Ever https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-people-want-from-o...

College and school are super suboptimal at dispensing education.

We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level.

We don't let kids excel at their interest area. Math and science, obviously, but we lack programs for entrepreneurship and leadership that might be better for kids that aren't STEM-focused. Something like a scouts-type program that teaches them business, accounting, management, leadership. Sports and the arts are pretty well covered, though.

If you're born poor and/or without interested parents, the system doesn't help mobility much. Kids gravitate to the environments they live in, and school doesn't shelter them from this.

College itself is a bubble for many degree programs. It's fantastic for hands-on sciences, but useless for career development in liberal arts. It will put you into debt if you're not already wealthy. We need to subsidize STEM and reintroduce college loan dischargeability so risk to lenders is back in the equation.

Programs are too expensive. Universities sell themselves as "experiences". Amenities, facilities, day spas. Admins are too big. Kids are taking degrees they shouldn't.

Grad programs are also inefficient. Academic publishing, the research and grant treadmill, not letting smart students immigrate, ...

The whole thing needs to be gutted and rewritten. From early childhood to post-grad.

You get a free education in entrepreneurship and leadership when you're born into the upper socioeconomic groups.

Nothing can be done about that.

We need to focus on ways to boost class mobility at a young age.

What's the solution to that problem

I think you are reflecting on survivor bias for successful people.

Almost all rich families I met saw entrepreneurship as lower-status. They chase arts and such. They are posturing they don't need to care about money. [of course it's a lie, but they do it anyway]

Only a fraction of the new rich get their kids into entrepreneurship while the rest are just spoiled. I heard many times "I want my kids to have all the things I din't have growing up" and then the kids turn into horrible entitled brats who hate their parents. Then the inevitable "How could they do this to me! I gave them everything!". It's not easy raising kids, even with enough money.

The college degree system is just so bad that I’d say it’s a farce but no one should be laughing.

They’ve managed to con us into believing that first every teenager should decide what their “true passion” is, then if it’s not white collar they should be pressured to change their answer until it is, then they should take out $100,000+ in loans to live on a pretty campus for four years and hopefully mostly pay attention to the classes, and then they graduate and are greeted with the reality that half the majors offered are primarily academic pursuits with the employment possibilities mostly just being the colleges themselves. It’s a recipe for making an entire generation of nihilists (GenZ), who have a right to feel completely bamboozled and ripped off. I blame their late Gen-X parents for teaching them these fairytales in the first place.

> We keep smart kids co-mingled with disruptive kids and bullies. We need to do what Asian countries do - entrance exams at every level.

When I was in about the 7th grade, our school switched to "Tracking": In each grade, the smart kids were in track 1, the next smartest were in track 2, all the way down to track 6 which were the kids who unfortunately needed so much remedial help that they were probably not even going to be functional adults post high school. The curricula were tuned for each track's academic level. Moving track-to-track could happen yearly. This system was great for keeping the nerds away from the troublemakers. Overnight, it changed for the better. I hardly saw the crayon-eaters, only in the hallways, and they hardly saw me. We never shared classes. It didn't fully stop bullying: Smart kids bully too, but in different ways. But, it did put a huge dent in it.

I don't know why we abandoned Tracking. It was such a drastic and instantly positive change, as a kid.

Worth mentioning that I also think bullying is less of a problem now? It's not gone, but when I was a kid I was bullied mercilessly on the playground and on my walks home for a few years (until I learned how to fight back, but that's a different story), my kids just do not have that sort of experience in school, I mean, it's "there" but it does not appear to be nearly as bad today as it was in the late 90's early 'oughts.

My kids were literally shocked to learn recently that people got made fun of for being gay when I was a kid, or that gay was a pejorative. They've never seen a fight on the playground etc. I only have n=3 as a sample size, so, maybe it's bad in other schools or other places, but yeah, at least for me, I think it's a lot less "Lord of the Flies" today than it was 25 years ago.

> And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization

The idea that (correct) answers are something that can and may be known is all over the place, lately also in technology (LLMs, curve fitting, etc). Notably, answers must be able to validate themselves, every time. (Western) education used to be about this, before it reoriented towards instruction.

Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists. Is “stupid people breed too much” really an issue we think is worth propagating?

Really the issue is about cultivating a culture of caring and willingness to learn. That generally threatens the powerful so it is always an uphill battle to protect said values.

There can be also a softer version of it, which is that cultural richness and focus on education are easily transmitted within families. A society that doesn't value culture and education is going to produce less educated families with even less educated children.

It’s also true that IQ is both real and highly heritable. The military uses what’s essentially an IQ test to screen out the bottom 15% or so of the population: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/after-service/201801.... The military has found that people with aptitude test scores below the cutoff can’t be trained to competently perform any job in the military.

IQ is also highly heritable: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5985927.

Ah, yes, the IQ test; the universal, unbiased gauge of intellect across all cultures.

It isn't that, but it is one of the strongest predictors of success in the US military.

It loses its signal once you reach triple digits. You don't want someone with <80 but it tells you nothing about someone with 120 or 160.

They eliminate the bottom third of applicants by ASVAB score which would mean an IQ of 93 if it translated exactly (ADVAB to IQ and SAT is only about 0.8 correlation). That is the minimum to get in to do any job at all for a minimum enlistment contract. So to talk about statistically significant career success predictors you would have to get into the low three digits, just looking at nothing but the math of IQ distributions. A cut-line of 80 would only drop the bottom 9% of the general population.

I call BS. From my extensive anecdata:

No amount of education, experience, and grit can turn a 100 IQ person into Einstein. IQ is a massive multiplier.

Do we even know what turns someone into an Einstein? The sheer reason you even mention Einstein is because he was beyond exceptional. There have been millions of people to walk the face of this planet with astronomical IQs, but there has only been a handful of Einsteins, von Neumanns, Eulers, Mozarts, etc.. So few that the uttering of the names of these individuals carries strong meaning.

It's also worth noting that none of these individuals ever took an IQ test. Their genius is entirely recognized through their work. Which again raises the question of what exactly IQ testing and what IQ is adding to our understanding of exceptional ability.

It appears that over a century of research in psychometrics has demonstrated nothing we already could not infer. We do not need some boring puzzle test to tell us someone with Down syndrome will not be a Nobel Prize winner. Nor do we need some boring puzzle test to tell us that von Neumann or Mozart had godlike childhood abilities and could maybe make large contributions for humanity.

Compared to what though? Also, how is success in the military even defined? Highest rank? Most years served? Least injuries? The highest body count? Lowest double-digit APR% on 2018 Mustang with a rebuilt title?

You can learn about these things by following the links given by the GP of my comment and reviewing the studies they reference. The other strongest criteria of success was the time of their two-mile run (at their specific age of enlistment).

I read the links, and the answers are still unsatisfactory.

Here is the abstract from the original paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2466/pms.1989.69.1.2...

> The purpose of this research was to assess how well success in early combat training was predicted by scores on a test of general intelligence

It seems this research pertains to early combat training and not broad, post-training success in one's military career. Not to mention the research is essentially predicting test performance from test performance. I imagine the same predictions can be made about one's two-mile run and one's three-mile run.

> Analysis indicated that intelligence test scores AND run time significantly predicted success, each adding to the prediction provided by the other.

Which is not surprising. It shows that intelligence is just one of the multiple contributing factors. Being exceptionally tall is essential in the NBA, but being exceptionally tall, alone, is insufficient to make it to the NBA.

Sure, but what has that got to do with “IQ is also highly heritable?” which, in this context, suggests intelligence is something innate and biological, rather than recognizing an IQ test as a gauge skewed by culture and socioeconomic status.

Well, that was a different reference in GP's post. You can go read it. Heritability is definitely a thing, but far from the only thing and it isn't simple Mendelian inheritance - there are many components to intelligence that reflect differently in gene transfer and so while you can see a correlation in specific individuals and their immediate ancestors there are lots of exceptions and its probably a mirage - if seen at all - in any large demographic. See my other comment on the problems with eugenics in this thread.

I'm trying to understand your comment. You write: "heritability is definitely a thing". I think I agree? What thing is it you're saying heritability is?

Attacking IQ test is like vaccine denialism. People don’t like the fact that requiring individuals to cooperate can enhance health outcomes for the group as a whole. Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.

> People don’t like the fact that requiring individuals to cooperate can enhance health outcomes for the group as a whole.

I am not certain where you are deriving this claim from.

> Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.

Nor this claim, as well.

I have had many discussions on the topic of IQ, and I have never once seen anybody ever argue that there is no variance in human intelligence. There is a large range of variance in every human attribute. That is not the focus of the debate. Rather, most of the debate seems to be surrounding the construct validity of IQ. Statistical validity != construct validity.

> Statistical validity != construct validity.

Sure. But in science, we regularly postulate the existence of some construct, and confirm that construct by conducting many empirical tests that return results consistent with the existence of that construct. General intelligence is like that. We can’t see it directly. But we have myriad results that are statistically consistent with its existence.

Results consistent with the existence of a construct are not sufficient evidence for the existence of a construct. We can talk about statistical correlations till the Sun goes down, and I will not dispute that this ethereal 'g-factor' can infer minor to moderate predictions in some domains of people's lives at a population level.

However, I have one question. What evidence is there that this 'g-factor' is actually representative of general intelligence? You may not use the correlation values used to derive the g-factor to support your argument. My understanding is that correlations cannot be used to explain the general factor because the general factor should be what explains the correlations.

If you are interested, I implore you to read this blog from the statistician, Cosma Shalizi, of CMU. His explanation is far better than anything I could attempt to make.

https://bactra.org/weblog/523.html

Sorry, what exactly do you mean by "is representative of general intelligence"? This is a very abstract statement. What does this mean in scientific, empirical terms? What kind of facts we would observe in the world where this is true? What empirical observations we'd make in the world where it's false?

> Sorry, what exactly do you mean by "is representative of general intelligence"? This is a very abstract statement.

No need to apologize. Perhaps my g is too low to describe my thoughts properly.

> "is representative of general intelligence"?

This factor that is derived from the positive correlations, g, is called general intelligence. So, g is nominally general intelligence, but is g actually what the name implies? One can take n number of positively correlated but independent things, and there will always be a some factor that can be derived from it. However, that does not mean the underlying factor is necessarily causal.

> This is a very abstract statement.

We are discussing abstract concepts.

> What does this mean in scientific, empirical terms?

That causality would be scientifically and empirically verifiable.

> What kind of facts we would observe in the world where this is true? What empirical observations we'd make in the world where it's false?

Alas, that is precisely the point I was trying to paraphrase from Shalizi. Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.

One can take n number of positively correlated but independent things, and there will always be a some factor that can be derived from it.

I hope you understand that your vague question cannot be seen as equivalent to this rather more concrete statement. That’s why I asked for clarification, and your patronizing comments were really not called for.

In any case, Shalizi is very wrong, probably because he is entirely unfamiliar with the literature. He is wrong on multiple accounts.

First, yes, any number positively correlated measurements will yield a common factor. However, when talking about g, this is not an artifact of how we constructed IQ tests. Shalizi says:

What psychologists sometimes call the “positive manifold” condition is enough, in and of itself, to guarantee that there will appear to be a general factor. Since intelligence tests are made to correlate with each other, it follows trivially that there must appear to be a general factor of intelligence.

But this is just not true. Tests are not made to correlated with each other. Any time anyone attempts to construct a test of general mental ability, we always find the same g factor, even if they explicitly attempt to make a battery that tries to measure distinct, uncorrelated mental aptitudes. Observe how Shalizi fails to provide a single example of a test that does not exhibit the positive manifold with other tests.

Second, unlike Shalizi, we know that g is the predictive component of the IQ tests. IQ predicts real world outcomes very well, but what is really interesting is that the predictive power of individual subtests of an IQ test is practically perfectly correlated with g-loadings of the subtest. This would be very surprising if g was just a statistical artifact.

Shalizi says

So far as I can tell, however, nobody has presented a case for g apart from thoroughly invalid arguments from factor analysis; that is, the myth.

But this is just baffling if you have any familiarity with the literature.

Whether g be true or false -- the result wouldn't look any different. The methodology being used cannot determine what is true nor false, and that is the crux of this entire problem.

That’s just not true. For example, if g was a statistical artifact, one of the hundreds of intelligence tests devised would have not exhibited the positive manifold with all the others. It would not be correlated with heritability. It would not be correlated with phenotype features like reaction time. The world where g is a statistical artifact looks much different than our world.

> I will not dispute that this ethereal 'g-factor' can infer minor to moderate predictions in some domains of people's lives at a population level

The U.S. military won’t hire people below an 83 IQ to peel potatoes, because experience shows that such people can’t effectively be trained. So it’s more than just “minor” predictions.

One, you are conflating IQ and g, which are not the same thing. IQ is a proxy for the measurement of g, but it does not measure g directly.

Two, the military does not administer protected IQ exams, but rather, the ASVAB which correlates with IQ.

Three, our entire global society does not revolve around who can do what for the military.

Four, what can someone with an IQ of 84 do that one with an IQ of 83 cannot?

Five, the US military has plenty of uses for low scores. If one can't peel potatoes, then I'm sure the military would just send them out to stomp for land mines. However, Federal law is what disallows this, not the military: https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-10-armed-forces/10-usc-se...

And why do you think Congress has passed this law? What prompted them to micromanage the military in this manner? I encourage you to research this topic, “McNamara’s folly” will serve as a good starting keyword. Spoiler: it has everything to do with unsuitability of low IQ enlisted.

FWIW, ASVAB is an IQ test. Any intelligence researcher will tell you so, because it exhibits the usual positive manifold, you find the usual g factor in it, and it shows high correlation with other IQ test. The military doesn’t usually call it as such for political reasons, but will happily admit in private that ASVAB and WAIS measure the same thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20200425230037/https://www.rand....

> If you are interested, I implore you to read this blog from the statistician, Cosma Shalizi, of CMU. His explanation is far better than anything I could attempt to make.

Ah, this essay is very, very good. I’m not surprised, Shalizi is a genius, but I hadn’t read this particular one before. Thanks for the link.

There's no debate on construct validity of IQ among the experts in the field. The consensus position is that IQ tests measure something real, that the tests enjoy extremely high measurement invariance (which implies construct validity), and that the results have extremely high predictive validity (relative to literally anything else in the entire field of psychology). The current debate is more along the lines, whether the contribution of genes to variance in IQ is closer to 30% or to 80%.

Wait, this comment starts out with an assertion about one scientific question (the construct validity of a quantitative psychological metric) and ends with a statement about the range of a totally different question, and it's one studied by different fields than the former question.

Yes, I could have left off the last comment. I added it to illustrate where the debate currently lies. I am not sure what your point is.

That the logic of your comment doesn't even hang together? Which debate? You've managed to cite two of them.

I’m really struggling to understand what your point is. The person I replied to was wrong as to where the current debate is among experts, so I pointed it out, and gave an example of where the debate currently is. Is that really so strange thing to say?

I don’t mean to suggest that an IQ test doesn’t have any value, only that they don’t account for many subtleties across (sub)cultural boundaries and are too heavily considered in determining one’s intellect, and often worth, by society.

You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism, on the basis that they are both “for the greater good”, which conveniently paints my point in a certain political light. How exactly does selectivity on the basis of IQ test results “enhance health outcomes for groups as a whole”? Maybe you could back up this argument with some historical context.

> “Similarly, people don’t like the idea that some individuals are just born smarter than other individuals.”

What data do you have to support this claim? And how much of this inherent intellect factors into IQ test results?

> You’re using Motte-and-Bailey tactics to conflate IQ test results with vaccines denialism

No, I’m pointing out that in both cases people attack the science because the implications of the science are in tension with their ideological priors. The fact that top-down coercion is an effective response to pandemics is inconvenient for libertarian-conservatives. Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.

> Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth

Yes, of course people differ in intellectual capabilities at birth. That is not the argument. The argument is how much that actually impacts IQ test score results.

Your point suggests that “science” supports the idea of IQ being predetermined at birth.

> Likewise, the fact that people differ in their intellectual capabilities from birth is inconvenient for liberal egalitarians.

It is? Egalitarianism is usually considered to be the position that all humans have equal moral worth, not the position that all humans have equivalent physical and mental capacities. Not even actually existing Communists believed the latter, as far as I’m aware.

But just to double check:

> Egalitarian doctrines are generally characterized by the idea that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or moral status. As such, all people should be accorded equal rights and treatment under the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism

Nor does the existence of special laws or practices concerning low (or high, for that matter) IQ people pose any great obstacle to egalitarianism, assuming the laws or practices in question do not infringe upon moral personhood.

Rawls is a typical egalitarian philosopher and he takes care to account for these natural variations in the human condition during both the classic _A Theory of Justice_ and the modern “restatement” in _Justice as Fairness_.

Attacking IQ is nothing whatsoever like vaccine denialism. The valid/meaningful uses of IQ are widely debated in several hard science fields. That's not true of vaccines.

> ttacking IQ is nothing whatsoever like vaccine denialism. The valid/meaningful uses of IQ are widely debated in several hard science fields

You’re shifting the goal posts from the first sentence to the second sentence. What I said was: “IQ is real and highly heritable.” Responding to that by asserting that IQ tests are “skewed” and culturally biased, as OP did, is up there with vaccine denialism.

If you want to make a more nuanced point about what you can use IQ to prove, sure, that’s up for debate. But that’s not what we were talking about.

IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class, with members of the same ethnic group scoring higher over the decades as that ethnic group as a whole becomes wealthier.

Exactly the opposite is true. Adoption studies have been used to isolate the effect of SES itself, and the contribution of that factor is low: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602... (“Proportion of variance in IQ attributable to environmentally mediated effects of parental IQs was estimated at .01… Heritability was estimated to be 0.42.”).

This is just SIBS data. It has all the standard "Minnesota" limitations: the study is tiny, the cohort isn't demographically representative, adoption isn't itself random, nothing deconfounds the prenatal environment, and the children in the cohort are also adopted at different ages.

It's one thing to call out an interesting paper; it's another to act as if the matter has been settled simply by pointing to SIBS.

The assertion I was responding to was this: “IQ correlates most strongly with socioeconomic class.”

Find me any study that shows that IQ is more strongly correlated with SES than with parental IQ.

Socioeconomic status limits genetic potential. Thus the effects of SES dominate for those in poverty, but heritability dominates for those with higher SES.

For the intuition think of height - a malnourished child will not reach their “genetic” height. A fully nourished child will be limited by their “genetics”. Why wouldn’t other biological characteristics be similar?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarr%E2%80%93Rowe_effect

Note that at what you’re describing is a hypothesis and at least some studies have failed to identify empirical support for it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027656242...

Genetic heritability, which is a subset of heritability, does not generally mean what people think it means, though. To the extent IQ can be attributed genetically to parents, it does not imply a "compounding" effect where smart people continuously have smarter kids and dumb people have dumber kids. This can understood by analogy to other personal traits like eyesight, height, weight, hair color, etc. which vary within a range across generations with occasional unpredictable outliers. This is why folks who do test for intelligence, have to test each person individually and not just rely on bloodline tracking.

Yes, but since the heritability is high, the average IQ of the children will be close to the average IQ of the parents, despite the fact that it will tend to regress towards the mean.

That’s not how genetics works. It’s not a simple averaging scheme.

That’s exactly how it works in the standard additive model of heritability, and we have lots of empirical evidence that heritability of intelligence matches that model very well.

The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication, which is doubly unfortunate because it wasn’t even necessary for the plot. Society can just get dumb due to people not valuing education.

Genetically we’re not that different from cavemen, so the floor (without any weird eugenic theories about dumb people breeding too much) is “tamed caveman.”

Education is still very much present in Idiocracy (Brawndo blah blah). It's the lack of value in logic and thought process that causes the problem. When people value winning an argument on a logical fallacy, there's a severe issue. Education is oft used as the fallacy itself.

Much like today on all sides of every significant debate. Where the loudest most emotional rise on feelings over logic.

If a person doesn't immensely value learning they're wrong, they exist as part of the problem.

A room full of people in charge of the most power nation wouldn't fall prey to something like false dichotomy, during an important address to said nation? Would they...?

I think you hit on a key note about learning when they're wrong, and I think that's one of the biggest issues with social media and modern debate - namely that being wrong in public is incredibly painful and can often destroy a reputation. But then people realized there are groups who agree with them even when they're wrong, so the most important thing is to cater to them and never agree that you're wrong in public, and some percentage of people will go along with your argument.

I think never believing fully in your own ideas and always being able to admit you're wrong and always questioning is almost a super power that I wish we valued more.

>The movie did have an unfortunate eugenic implication

You’re thinking of dysgenic, not eugenic.

Gattaca is a movie about eugenics.

Depends on the timescale you care about. It is, objectively, a very big problem over larger timescales (assuming we aren't killed off and don't engineer our children's genes).

> Idiocracy really seems to appeal to eugenicists

And all men are Socrates...?

"Stupid people breed too much" is a proposition that is either true or false, within some worldview.

(For example, how stupid is stupid? How much breeding is to much? Is there even such a thing as too much breeding? All these are variables up for debate.)

But preventing the spread of an idea that you fear may be true, simply because you don't like the consequences, is intellectually dishonest.

Would you endorse suppressing the idea that the earth orbits the sun just because you lived in a milieu where the primacy of the church was more important than truth?

Argue against eugenics because it's unethical to prevent people from reproducing (and therefore no amount of "stupid people" reproducing is "too much"). Don't cloud your judgment by denying propositions that you fear may be true.

Singapore seems to have done quite well operating on that notion

Casually tossing about an accusation like that is not at all in keeping with the guidelines for this website.

That movie can be understood in several different ways.

Also, I'd like to point out that the core problems with eugenics isn't an assertion that intelligence is hereditary, but that:

- Race is not a scientifically grounded concept

- Complex traits do not have Mendelian inheritance

- Measurement of intelligence is problematic

- Even measures that strongly correlate with success are confounded by environmental, cultural and economic factors

Thus, the conclusions drawn by eugenicists are based on their racism and prejudice, not by any scientific conclusions. It is a pseudo-scientific framework to justify (at the limit) ethnic cleansing.

The opening of the movie could also be read as a commentary or satire about a certain type of reality TV show or talk show that was popular at that time, but it was also a really cheap shot at a specific class of people and demonstrated a level of contempt that cannot really be defended.

But the rest of the movie was focused more on anti-intellectual and shallow culture and corporate greed - the heritability of intelligence never got another mention.

Society absolutely needs to more correctly incentivize smart people to 'get together' to form child creating and raising units (families).

Maybe society should focus on supporting high quality environments for raising children well.

This probably includes a bunch of budget expensive things like...

  * Rich interaction between smart adults and children, at low density
  * Ensure good breakfast and lunch at minimum
  * year round childcare
  * Every child great medical care

If we like the idea of biological parents bonding strongly with their children, the whole 'work from home' and 'work life balance' things should also be strongly evaluated. I happen to think that delivering strongly on the above points would also pair well with at least some 'work from home' so that parents have time to work, time for being human, and time to be a good parent. Harder to measure experimental results probably include a healthier emotional and motivational status, lower stress for everyone involved, and maybe even higher output if not just higher quality output during hours worked.

It’s not the stupid people’s fault. They’ve always bred. The problem is smart people used to as well, and now we’ve stopped. Because of lots of reasons that make sense for the individuals:

- childfree is probably more enjoyable

- kids expensive and student debt crippling, so let’s delay starting till we’re 37 and own a home

- scary time/place to raise kids if you think about it too much

- etc.

So that’s thrown things out of balance. it’s not eugenics to say that smart people shouldn’t hold their birth rate so close to zero.

Dumb people - smart computers. What's the consequence of that I wonder.

> (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries)

Ah yes, the undevelopped and oppressive countries able to provide them good enough education and not make them debt-ridden for it.

I don’t blame people for moving for better wages, but the level of rationalization used here to make brain drain feel virtuous is off the charts.

I'd actually say we could use more targeted memorization for things you have to know. I'd love if my kid's school taught them much about spaced repetition. At risk of being that guy, Anki has changed my life for the better and I'm trying to foster an understanding of the utility of SRS in my kids.

I think it's kind of a good thing to learn how to not have to look literally everything up because that's a time suck. I speak 3 languages "decently." My native language, one I learned as an exchange student (it's rusty, but it's still in there and if I start speaking it regularly the words come back almost unbidden), and Spanish from several long-distance backpacking trips in Spain for months and months. I dabble in others as necessary. If I'm learning a new language for travel or something I find that memory alone is invaluable. A few months of using SRS and memorizing 1000 words and you are suddenly able to communicate with a millions of people. Sure you might speak caveman Italian or whatever, but read a little bit of grammar you're off to the races. You're no Dante, but you are able to get by - that's so useful, and I can't see why people eschew the practical advantages of learning how to memorize!

I'm taking some classes (perpetually, I don't know why I must hate myself) and I find I consistently do better learning new things if I just know some facts about a topic before I even learn all the connections between ideas. Let's say you are learning, I don't know, DC circuits? I'm taking that class for fun this semester because I'm mostly self-taught in hardware and wanted to fill in some of the gaps. If you need to know how to calculate the step response, sure you can do it from first principles if you've taken ODE. But imagine if you're taking this as your first "real" engineering class on the EE track as a 19 or 20 year old kid. At the university I went for undergrad and this university now, you wouldn't get exposed to ODE for another semester or 2. But if you can just memorize the formula now, you can absorb the material - the "why" can come later.

I mean, I can never remember some math things, so I just derive the math when I need it, sure, I assume everybody does this where they have to, but if I could remember the damn derivation I wouldn't have to. Same with some code. There are some things in this world like matplotlib - I have used it 1000s of times and somehow I've literally barely learned it beyond the basics and constantly end up looking up how do things. As soon as I get the chart I want, it falls out of my brain until I am forced to learn it again to make a chart for a slide a couple months later. But there's insane utility to just... knowing things. When I was a pilot for a living, there were certain emergency procedures and limitations that I was just... expected to know - down cold. I haven't turned a prop for money in almost 6 years now, and there's some emergency procedures and limitations that I still can recite from memory. What's a great way to learn those things? Well... memorizing them. Then there's the practical nature of things. You're not going to derive maneuvering speed from first principles when you encounter mountain wave, you just need to know what you've gotta slow down to.

That doesn't mean throw out your analytical brain, but having access to facts that you can use in furtherance of your cognition is super useful. And I don't really think that is the major "problem" with education in this day and age? I have 3 kids in school. They're great kids and all doing more or less well. From the outside looking in today, I'd say the biggest issues I'm aware of are:

1) A downright authoritarian environment in schools. No seriously, even the school my kids go to which is by the numbers a pretty good school seems a bit like incarceration.

2) The teaching to the lowest common denominator (which you mentioned and I think is a very good point).

3) The money is going to the wrong stuff and so quality is going down but costs are still rising.

4) Schools are basically viewed as babysitting places so that the parents can go and work and contribute to the economy, not hallowed halls of learning or some-such. It's viewed as "jobs training" from the bottom to the top. Even at the university level.

5) The incentives, both social and financial, that exist to become an educator suck and needing licenses and specialized university training to teach in some states means that an engineer with 20 years of experience isn't going to go to school for 2 years just be treated like garbage at some middle school or high school. We're not getting "the best of the best" in education.

6) The phones. I don't think a constant entertainment drip is really that good for young people.

7) Educational software is usually pretty bad? And the kids are forced into using a lot of these garbage tools day in and day out. This isn't really as big of a problem as the rest of the things, but it irritates me when I'm forced to interact with iReady or the absolute garbage (and insanely expensive) platforms the school uses to track grades.

Also, I mentioned this in another thread and got downvoted, but I honestly think that the reversal of the Flynn effect might have some environmental basis too? We go outside a lot less, indoor CO2 counts are higher, issues start occurring above 1000ppm - that's not uncommon, we eat terrible, are more likely to be obese, had COVID, and are filled with plastic, we spend a lot less time bored and are mostly overstimulated. I'm not a biologist, so I wouldn't say that any one of these sorts of things is the "gotcha" like lead or whatever, but yeah, I suspect that there are other environmental effects that are making us collectively make bad decisions more often. I don't know.

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