Aren't there plenty of Ph.D.'s who can't fix their cars? Sure, but the majority of them could learn if they were so inclined.
Inclination is a key component of effective intelligence. Saying "I could be good at math if I was inclined towards it" is basically equivalent to saying "I could be a big hit at parties if I was more charming" or "I could have a good jump shot if I cared about practicing."
The truism in this article seems to be something like pg's hypothetical:
Imagine if aliens came to Earth, and told us that they'd destroy our planet unless all the Physics PhDs got became experts in French Literature, and all the French Literature PhDs because experts in Physics, and they gave us a year to do it. The physicists would not be happy, but the French literature experts would really be scared.
I've been thinking a little about that example. And I really don't think it gets at the core of the issue. The problem with that example is that academic disciplines, whether it's due to an inferiority complex or what, have decided to model themselves so much after the hard sciences, so that of course the hard science experts are going to be able to study any of those disciplines and acquire a PhD. It's because the programs were modeled after the hard sciences.
Take a different example: if aliens came to earth and demanded that all PhD physicists get as good at sculpting, drawing, and designing as the world's foremost artists; and all the artists must acquire PhD's in physics. I'm not sure who would do better as there's not a clear hierarchy between the disciplines. They're different fields, catering to people with different interests and talents.
Indeed, among the physicists we might also find those who are moved to tears by Baudelaire, and among the critics of French literature those unafraid of contour integrals.
For every Terence Tao there are a thousand Nameless Toilers. So intelligence, for most people, is not a rocket to ride but a bar to clear.
Then, given enough of a brain to be taught, the more important question: do you have the stomach to learn?
I'm not sure sculpting/drawing are the best examples. You can't learn them by memorizing information, you need the motor skills as well. I'm sure they'd do well at designing to the extent that it can be learned from books.
The extreme example would be Mozart and Gauss. I don't think either one could have become one another, even though both of them possessed one-in-billion IQs.
So the joke is that the physicists have the hubris to think that French Literature isn't hard, right?
It would be an incredible feat for anyone to learn French in a year (well enough to critique its great literature) and also become expert in the existing body of knowledge of literary criticism. Much less a physicist, who probably dreads writing a 10-page conference paper because there's too much prose in it.
Most adults can learn a new language in ~6 months; the real test is how much substance is in each topic. Anyway the real joke about Phd's in Literature has to do with the perception that it's total BS. The great example of this is so-called ‘postmodern generator’ written by Andrew C. Bulhak using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. Using this software (http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo) NYU Physics Professor Alan Sokal’s generated a brilliantly meaningless article which was accepted by a cultural criticism publication, Social Text Vol. 46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). (Sokal, A., 2007, http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/, accessed May 13, 2007)
1. There are very different learning curves in different fields, but you have to remember that all of your competition in a given field is on the same curve.
2. Physics relies on specialized skills, while French Literature relies on generalized skills.
3. The basics of literary skill are reading, writing, and speaking. You practice those every day and have been for all of your adult life. How much time have French Literature PhDs been putting into math skills?
He fails to draw the real crucial issue out -- by pretending that all children have equal abilities, we try to force them all onto a track that only a third of them will do well on.
A high school student is in a much better situation with a realistic assessment of his abilities. If you struggle with math, you aren't much of a conversationalist, and you have trouble remembering things, you would do well to find a career that you can succeed at through nothing but persistence and hard work. Also, you shouldn't borrow $50k to go to college.
This comes perilously close to "the soft bigotry of low expectations". What you are saying is true, your assessment of your abilities need to be grounded in reality, but it's also true that if you think you can succeed through hard work, you are much more likely to do so, regardless of the actual nature of intelligence. See research by Carol Dweck et al. This is an instance where the truth really can hurt you.
He wasn't talking about an academic career. Most people don't go to college for an academic career, they go because they think it'll lead to a nice private sector career. If that's unlikely to happen because of your aptitude, it'd be good to know that before wasting all that money on college. Most people don't need college, they need a vocational school where they can learn a trade or skill.
Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?
I thought I was bad at math and lived under that shadow for a very long time. Then I grew up and realized I'm actually very good at math, I just had terrible teachers/source materials.
All of these generalized statements are questionable by dent of gross simplification.
Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?
Here is one of my favorite quotations about mathematics teaching, used as my signature tagline on the first online forum where I used the screen name "tokenadult":
"The proper thing for a parent to say is, 'I did badly at mathematics, but I had a very bad teacher. I wish I had had a good one.'" W. W. Sawyer, Vision in Elementary Mathematics (1964), page 5.
Yes, the book from which the quotation comes is very good, and very good for learners with a visual learning style.
Are you sure? I thought this, too, but just checked out my home state's University (Minnesota). It's a typical big state school and tuition and fees for 4 years are pushing $45K. I was surprised because I assumed total tuition was closer to $30K.
Texas at least. tuition at the University of Texas is $4600 a semester full time. Pretty much every public university in Texas is about the same or better.
I had people from out of state going to my school, because they said it was cheaper for them to pay out of state tuition there than any of their state schools.
University of Kansas clocks in at $29k for four years; UIC in Chicago is about $25k (plus some fees that might bring it closer to 30). UMN does appear to be pretty expensive relative to other schools for in-state tuition, but it's a quite reputable school so maybe they've earned a premium.
Hm. When I look at UIC's tuition calculator, it's giving me
$6757 per semester for undergrad engineering tuition and fees per semester. Over 8 semesters, that's ~54K. Other departments are slightly cheaper but all were over $6K/semester.
That's more time than I really wanted to spend on this topic, but I do find it interesting that even state schools can cost way more than I would have suspected.
>Is the putative student "bad at math" or "bad at math the way it's taught in high school, perhaps even by a certain teacher"?
It could also be a mismatch between someone's personality and the sort of math kids get taught. I did poorly in most of my math classes in high school and college. After failing a few classes, decided I was hopelessly "bad at math", and left the topic alone. A few years I took an abstract algebra class on a lark and really enjoyed it. In hindsight, I did poorly in my earlier math classes because I was undisciplined and really disliked memorizing disconnected tricks and formulas. Abstract algebra, on the other hand, was more elegant, conceptual and fun to learn. Doing well in one class punctured my myth of inability and gave me the confidence to properly learn linear algebra (and take some other interesting classes).
I see a lot of statements here that are presented as fact that I don't believe are substantiated (and in fact are contrary to my experience), such as However, clawing one's own way out of abject poverty is best achieved with a healthy dose of both motivation and "g." and An individual with low "g" is going to struggle at both book learning and auto repair.
I have seen people who appear to all extents and purposes thick as two planks do marvels with engines. I have also seen people come out of poverty due to purely personality trains (such a disinclination to spend money and a fear of poverty) rather than any particular intelligence. Obviously we are talking about otherwise normal people, not those who are pathologically mentally challenged.
As to the whole "Not each child is secretly a genius", I don't know who thinks that anyway. It is entirely proper that a parent sees and seeks the best in the children but I don't think many really think their children are geniuses. And you don't have to look too hard at the children of academics to understand that a better aspiration for your children is to for them to be fulfilled and content adults. While intelligence can somewhat help with that, I don't see this as a stunningly obvious correlation.
I see a lot of statements here that are presented as fact that I don't believe are substantiated (and in fact are contrary to my experience)
Agreed. For the benefit of readers of HN, I'll try to touch base with some of my main factual disagreements with Ferguson. His text appears below in quotation marks (except that some quotations from other authors in my replies also appear in quotation marks) and my replies follow each block of quoted text.
"A number of scholars, including L.L. Thurstone and more recently Robert J. Sternberg, have argued that intelligence has been defined too narrowly."
Thurstone is deceased, but Sternberg is alive and well and still doing research. And his books are very worthwhile for thought-provoking challenges to mainstream g theory. (I should point out that I don't think I agree with most of Sternberg's proposed alternative theory, but I appreciate his books
for their collections of articles by different authors.)
"Gardner, a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who won a prestigious MacArthur Foundation "genius award" in 1981, has had enormous influence, particularly in our schools.
"Briefly, he has posited that our intellectual abilities are divided among at least eight abilities: verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal."
Everyone, including Gardner, agrees that much of the controversy surrounding this proposal came from labeling these abilities "intelligences" rather than "talents" when his book was first published in the 1980s. There is no doubt whatever among any serious neuropsychologist or cognitive scientist that human mental abilities are expressed in part as modules, but the dispute of the submitted article is whether the modules can be connnected by an over-arching general ability, summed up as g.
"More important, especially for education, it implicitly (although perhaps unintentionally on Gardner's part) promises that each child has strengths as well as weaknesses. With eight separate intelligences, the odds seem good that every child will be intelligent in one of those realms."
Gardner, indeed, never makes such a promise, and Gardner is surprising NOT in the camp of persons who personally believe in high malleability of human abilities. Rather, Gardner thinks learners have a rather fixed endowment of ability set primarily by genes, but influenced by opportunities for developing in one domain or another. Some of what is said about Gardner's framework in schools doesn't closely match what Gardner claims in his own writings.
"The movements that took flower in the mid-20th century have argued for the essential sameness of all healthy human beings and for a policy of social justice that treats all people the same."
My actual observation of the real-world behavior of schoolteachers is that they are second to none in making excuses for poor educational results on the basis of inherent limitations in learners. It may indeed be politically correct among educational administrators to claim that all children can learn, but most teachers believe--and in unguarded moments say--that many learners in their care cannot achieve more than they already do.
"the idea that redefining the way we treat children will redefine their abilities and future successes."
Surely how children are treated by others matters for something. It may be, as Judith Rich Harris has suggested through her research, that peers are more influential on children than parents are, but I've not recently heard anyone advocate a policy of deliberate neglect of children.
"(Perhaps that's what leads some parents to put their faith in "Baby Einstein" videos: the hope that a little nurturing television will send their kids to Harvard.)"
Some parents surely believe something along these lines, because the baby videos sell fairly well. There were better baby books (and phonograph records?) long before Gardner first published, so I doubt he had much to do with this. And, again, Gardner himself does not have this view of child development.
"It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of Gardner's work, both in repudiating that elitist, unfair concept of "g" and in guiding thought in psychology as it applies to education."
And it would be difficult to overestimate how much Gardner's personal views are misrepresented by some people who claim his backing. A really good book for understanding Gardner as of the year 1993 is
Bock, Gregory & Ackrill, Kate (Eds.) (1993). The Origins and Development of High Ability. (Ciba Foundation Symposium 178). New York: Wiley.
The The Origins and Development of High Ability is a symposium volume collecting commissioned articles. Each article is followed by fascinating verbatim discussion transcripts in which the authors draw out the implications of one another's ideas. Gardner argues strenuously for a much limited view of malleability there than I thought he personally held.
"The only problem, with all respect to Gardner: There probably is just a single intelligence or capacity to learn, not multiple ones devoted to independent tasks."
The evidence that Gardner appealed to in his first book, such as brain-injured patients with selective deficits in learning, is a familiar line of evidence for cognitive modularity. A good recent discussion of cognitive modularity can be found in What Intelligence Tests Miss,
a book I've cited to HN before by a psychologist well familiar with the mainstream psychometric tradition and its limitations.
"To varying degrees, some individuals have this capacity, and others do not."
Is the statement here that some people have NO capacity to learn?
"To be sure, there is much debate about Gardner's theory in the literature, with contenders for and against. Nonetheless, empirical evidence has not been robust. While the theory sounds nice (perhaps because it sounds nice), it is more intuitive than empirical. In other words, the eight intelligences are based more on philosophy than on data."
I can agree with this statement that Gardner's grouping of "intelligences" has not been firmly established (just as I agree that Sternberg's triarchic theory of mind is not firmly established either) without being forced to think that g theory is the most accurate description of human cognitive abilities.
"By contrast, a wealth of evidence supports the existence of 'g,' which, contrary to the claims (or wishes) of some people, remains a strong predictor of academic performance, job performance--particularly in highly technical careers or those requiring decision making--and other markers of 'success.'"
High IQ scores (what Ferguson is really talking about when he mentions g) are fairly strongly correlated with success in school. Success in school, in turn, is reasonably strongly correlate with success at entry into certain occupations, and those occupations in turn are somewhat correlated with high income and other marks of "success." But the direction of causation is not completely clear, because many highly able young people of low family income are unable to pursue higher education,
and a sociologist who examined the data from the Terman longitudinal study suggested that the Terman study subjects were underachievers compared to their advantageous socioeconomic status (Ceci 1996, citing Sorokin (1956).
"Another issue with the theory of multiple intelligences is that too many of the categories correlate too highly with one another to be separate intelligences. Cognitive performance on skills related to verbal-linguistic, logical-mathematical, and visual-spatial tasks, as well as many memory tasks, tends to be highly related. In other words, it goes back to 'g.'"
But many skills related to actual item-content performance on IQ tests are poorly correlated one with another, especially at high levels of IQ. Terman discovered this as he developed a new edition of his Stanford-Binet IQ test: "However, when our correlation arrays [between Form L and Form M] were plotted for separate age groups they were all discovered to be distinctly fan-shaped. Figure 3 is typical of the arrays at every age level.
"From Figure 3 it becomes clear that the probable error of an I.Q. score is not a constant amount, but a variable which increases as I.Q. increases. It has frequently been noted in the literature that gifted subjects show greater I.Q. fluctuation than do clinical cases with low I.Q.'s . . . . we now see that this trend is inherent in the I.Q. technique itself, and might have been predicted on logical grounds. (Terman & Merrill, 1937, p. 44)"
"The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music;"
This will sound totally bogus to anyone well acquainted with skilled musicians, as I am as the husband of a piano teacher.
"Only bodily-kinesthetic--the ability to manipulate one's own body with dexterity--may truly represent a separate cognitive ability, probably stemming from cerebellar activity involved in fine motor control."
There do seem to be good grounds for claiming that "athletic ability" or "coordination" or whatever you call it is orthogonal to the skills tapped by IQ tests, but it is plainly brain-based, and has as much claim to be called a cognitive ability as any of the skills underlying the tasks required in a typical IQ test.
"Finally, as Waterhouse noted in her exchange with Gardner, the theory of multiple intelligences has little value for clinical testing of intelligence or the prediction of future performance. 'G' alone is highly predictive of both academic and work success."
Here is where we especially see that Ferguson sets up Gardner as a straw man, rather than grappling with current authors who expand the theory such as Stanovich. There is much evidence
that high-IQ individuals can make spectacular, harmful cognitive errors, because IQ tests don't tap important human cognitive abilities that Stanovich sums up as "rationality."
"Despite some naysayers (think of Richard E. Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count, published this year by Norton),"
Notice the total absence of response to Nisbett's recent book. I'm reading it, and I appreciate Nisbett's reexamination of primary research studies that have been debated in the IQ literature for years.
"evidence from behavioral-genetics studies has long shown that environment plays a much smaller role than inheritance in the development of intelligence."
This is just a flat-wrong statement. The consensus of geneticists is that no more than half the determination of intelligence is set by genes, and that's without systematic efforts to vary environmental influences in directed ways. There are still environmental interventions with huge impact that have rarely been tried.
I'll stop here in the interest of time for my personal life. I agree with some of what Ferguson says below the quoted statements, and disagree with some more.
PARTIAL REFERENCES
Bock, Gregory & Ackrill, Kate (Eds.) (1993). The Origins and Development of High Ability. (Ciba Foundation Symposium 178). New York: Wiley.
Ceci, Stephen J. (1996). On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Terman, Lewis & Merrill, Maude (1937). Measuring Intelligence: A Guide to the Administration of the New Revised Stanford-Binet Tests of Intelligence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
The danger here is that you can only talk conclusively about what you can measure, and imagination, which seems to me the most important component of genius, is intrinsically hard to measure. If g is in practice dominated by another quality i that no one can measure, then whatever we say about g is beside the point.
I think the bigger danger is perpetuating the typical American cultural belief that people are with smart or stupid. Contrast actual American achievement with eastern cultures where they consider intelligence to be more of a skill that can be refined through practice.
The author is rebutting feel-good pop psychology, which I suppose needs to be done for balance, but you can't argue with the achievement gap, and there are solid studies showing that praising kids for "working hard" leads to better achievement than praising them for "being smart."
eastern cultures where they consider intelligence to be more of a skill that can be refined through practice
Which cultures are you referring to? I'm Chinese-American, and the impression I got from my parents is that they believe everything is genetically determined.
I'm Brazilian-American so I know nothing of eastern culture first hand. This is just something that I recall reading many times in discussion of the performance gap between American and other students around the world. Do you believe your Chinese parent's views on the subject are representative of the predominant cultural beliefs in China?
I've lived the vast majority of my life here, so I can't speak for the average Chinese person in China. But based on all the Asians I've ever met in the US, it's a pretty clear yes.
The US is the most progressive nation in the world in terms of promoting ideals of racial and gender equality, which naturally results in more people believing in "genetic equality" as well. As such, I'd be very surprised if there were another nation/culture that downplayed the genetic influence on intelligence/aptitude as much as in the US, where people are taught that anyone can do anything if they want it badly enough. (e.g., "The Secret" book and dvd's)
I agree that some forms of intelligence must be able to be learned, in the sense that it may involve employing the right algorithm (NlogN rather than N^N). There must be a software component involved that can be updated and accelerated through experience. In fact, that seems to be what experience is.
Even if there is an absolute physical property of the brain that we could call intelligence, it would be foolish to think we could measure it through the results of a pencil and paper test.
Alan Kay's version is punchier: "Point of view is worth 80 IQ points." (Wikiquote says this is from "talk at Creative Think seminar, 20 July 1982" and links to Andy Hertzfeld's notes at http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story... for evidence.)
Both of the major sides here -- those who think g doesn't exist, and those who think g exists and is important -- tend to have some corresponding prescription for the school system. What's often ignored is that we barely know anything about this with any certainty, and the idea of someone being able to design a rigid school system that works for everyone is ridiculous. And even if g does exist, how important is it really? I'm reminded of amichail's scary idea of forcing everyone to take IQ tests.
I remember a day student at the boarding school I went to. He wasn't a genius. He didn't say much. He had to wake up in the wee hours of the morning to do farm chores. But dammit, he applied himself, did his work, and pulled down straight A's without making a whole lot of fuss about it.
100% of the kids aren't gifted. But something like 80% of them in the US could be performing above the current "average" level with the right encouragement.
"Christopher J. Ferguson holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Central Florida and also trained at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He has been active in publishing research papers on violent and aggressive behavior in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly books and has done clinical work with adults and juveniles in correctional settings. Currently he is an assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M International University. His research interests include violent criminal behavior, positive and negative influences of video games and other violent media and refinements in meta-analytic techniques."
The author of the submitted article doesn't even have high-quality training or high-quality publications on the issue he is writing about in the submitted article. The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling, rather than any reference to newly discovered data or fresh analysis of familiar data. I'd usually expect better of an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education.
The submitted article consists mostly of name-calling
About 95 percent of your comment is ad hominem.
The article is stating a fairly bland truism, ie, that children vary to some degree based upon native intelligence. It's hardly worth saying except in the context of the educational world, whose occupants seem to share a near-religious professional belief in the unlimited malleability of the human mind.
Thank you for your reply. I actually fully agree with the principle that it shouldn't matter much at all who says something, as long as there are facts to back up what the person says. I have said so before here on HN.
But on two recent occasions, I have seen submissions that were so flat wrong (this is the second occasion) that it would take serious work to reply to the wrong factual statements in detail, and meanwhile I felt it important to buy time by registering immediate factual disagreement with the author by the general statement that the author is not an acknowledged expert on the issue discussed in the submitted article. In both cases, I kind of half expected that someone who agreed with the author would refer to verifiable facts that might support the author's conclusion, but in neither case did that happen.
The kind of reply that takes time and effort to make to a factually mistaken submission I have made in another place in this thread. Yes, in principle anyone or no one might have a correct statement about a matter of fact to add to one of our interesting discussions here. I hope that if people have statements of fact to make about controversial issues such as how much human genetic limitations constrain the improvement of education, then they will take care to cite verifiable sources for the crucial factual statements and join issue with those who disagree with the factual statements.
Search for ad verecundiam for a discussion on the matter. Really, what he's doing is an opposite of argument from authority, and I think the author suggests that is 1) Sometimes appropriate, and 2) Sometimes ad hominem.
In my eyes, the PhD-holding article-writer is sufficiently credentialed to write mild articles on mild subjects. To say he's wrong because he didn't go to a sufficiently good school is a rather obvious personal attack.
For what it's worth, I initially typed in "your comment is 95 percent name-calling" to parrot him, but then changed it. I mean, it was just so laughable that he went on and on about the guy's fricking school. and then made the insane charge that the author was mostly name-calling. Geez.
While pointing out someone's credentials is not an ad hominem attack, it isn't a refutation of their position either.
In fact, it's rather lame. (It is perfectly appropriate to point out "he's arguing from authority and has none", but the second part is, strictly speaking, unnecessary.)
Either he's got a good argument or he doesn't, and that's true even if he's Hitler. (I like to skip to the end.)
<em>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music...)</em>
This is total nonsense. The author has apparently never watched the early episodes of any reality TV show of the "looking for a star" variety -- there are plenty of examples where the interest is enormous, but affinity is nonexistent. Nor has he ever met someone with great talent for music but who couldn't bother learning the basics (and this comes from personal experience).
Probably the most poorly-written article I've read this week. But it's basically correct. Learning ability in individuals is highly correlated across different skills, and is very stable over the individual's life. It's also correlated to reaction times in tests of basic reflexes. And the dynamic range of the correlated bits (g) across the population is not small. I've yet to encounter a serious denial of these points.
Taken separately, nature and nurture are necessary but not sufficient conditions on achievement. They're also both heritable. And we know that g is heritable. It seems likely that between nature and nurture, the former is more important, but I'm not aware of any compelling evidence for this.
>The remaining intelligences have nothing to do with intelligence or cognitive skills per se, but rather represent personal interests (for example, musical represents an affinity for music; naturalistic, an affinity for biology or geology) or personality traits (interpersonal or intrapersonal skills, which correspond best to the related concept of emotional intelligence).
Hidden in the article is a sneaky mismatch of definitions. Isn't it a tautology to argue that intelligence is singular by using a narrower meaning?
Does this sound bitter to anyone? One of the other commentors is right - it doesn't cite any proof for its argument, much less anything that detracts from the opposition.
And who doesn't know people who don't seem traditionally intelligent in the academic things that, as the author suggest, give "success" -- but who are extraordinarily graceful, skilled athletes, great with their hands, can fix anything, or always know the perfect gift and the way to make anyone smile and feel good?
Those people are a good case for "multiple intelligences" and granting them that acknowledgement isn't just High IQ Guilt. Not paying attention to those different, seemingly natural abilities is to be blind.
It just seems that certain academics are extremely uncomfortable because it's not as easily measured. (Why is IQ measurable? Why, because there's a test for it!)
Inclination is a key component of effective intelligence. Saying "I could be good at math if I was inclined towards it" is basically equivalent to saying "I could be a big hit at parties if I was more charming" or "I could have a good jump shot if I cared about practicing."