> I don’t know what this means
A hypothesis or model that’s unfalsifiable broadly means it’s unscientific. You can read the Wikipedia section I liked to, and follow the citation if you want.
“John Horn and John McArdle have argued that the modern g theory, as espoused by, for example, Arthur Jensen, is unfalsifiable, because the existence of a common factor like g follows tautologically from positive correlations among tests. They contrasted the modern hierarchical theory of g with Spearman's original two-factor theory which was readily falsifiable (and indeed was falsified).”
Horn, John; McArdle, John (2007). "Understanding Human Intelligence". In Cudeck, Robert; MacCallum, Robert C. (eds.). Factor analysis at 100: historical developments and future directions. Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0-8058-6212-6.
Musical and artistic ability both have in fact been associated with intelligence by many people for thousands of years; many musicians and artists have been called “geniuses”. I don’t know what intuitive sense you’re referring to wrt music, but you’re certainly not speaking for us all.
> I get riled up when I hear opinions that many lead to support for abolishing gifted programs.
Ah I see! Thanks for explaining; this is a critically important piece for me to understand why you’re reacting so strongly. I don’t support abolishing accelerated programs, so relax; I think you’re making some assumptions and jumping to conclusions. I have heard here on HN from parents reporting there are public schools in California and elsewhere that have been doing away with accelerated academic programs, and many parents and kids are extremely frustrated.
Note the paper I linked to at the top supports you:
“Ability grouping, which is perhaps the next best-supported practice in gifted education, is likewise implemented relatively rarely. This failure of schools to use practices that are known to be effective is not the case in other areas of special education, where the use of evidence- or research-based best practices is often mandated in policy”
FWIW, I was segregated into a small accelerated program in the 5th grade, and dropped into a high school, which came with its own set of problems. They didn’t use the word “gifted”, though, and I’m glad.
My feeling on the why the word ‘gifted’ is bad is two parts: it incorrectly assigns ability only to nature, when we have plenty of evidence that intelligence has many environmental factors, and calling it ‘gifted’ might be dramatically overstating how much smarter the top 5% of kids are compared to the mean or the bottom 95%. I agree there’s some utility in classifying kids, or at least understanding their individual educational needs and letting them go at their own pace. Calling them “gifted” (like the article we’re commenting on explains) sends the wrong message, both in terms of accuracy and in terms of what parents and educators should do about it.
Kids who are classified as ‘gifted’ don’t necessarily perform well in school, the Wikipedia article on g points out. And intelligence factors change somewhat over time. It would obviously be bad to measure all 5 year olds only once and then put them on educational tracks that can’t ever change, to decide who’s “gifted” and who’s not and assume there is zero fluidity, right? But that’s the history of the word “gifted” - it was chosen by someone over a hundred years ago, and it was specifically chosen to underscore the idea that there is an innate and unchanging raw intellectual ability. We know better now, and we should pick terminology to match, right?
BTW might be worth discussing that kids who aren’t “gifted” benefit developmentally from social interaction with kids who are “gifted”. This does make education policy legitimately more difficult.