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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

About this:

"This new paper found that among kids whose mothers had a college degree, those who waited for a second marshmallow did no better in the long run—in terms of standardized test scores and mothers’ reports of their children’s behavior—than those who dug right in."

Since "standardized test scores" tends to measure IQ, it seems this can be re-phrased as "those who did well on the will-power test did not necessarily do well on the IQ test, and vice versa."

In other words, raw will-power is not correlated with raw IQ. Which I think I already knew? I've certainly known some athletes who were probably not as smart as me, but who definitely had more will-power than me.

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Now that I think about it how is athleticism not considered a parameter of IQ? If you can learn to shoot a basketball 10x faster and with more accuracy than me, isn't your brain learning faster than mine?

Motor skills and muscle memory vs brain thinkings stuff (logic, analysis, problem solving, etc). I don't know what the difference is between the two in terms of how much brain activity and ability they require, but it seems like there would be a difference.

Motor skills and muscle memory both originate from the brain, just a different area than brain thinkings stuff. I would assume shooting a ball would require more brain activity than solving a math problem because more senses are involved.

It always perplexed me why the people who were great at math could not figure out how to spin the ball of the backboard and score from anywhere on the court without athleticism required.

I'm sure they could, or at least approximate it to a close degree.

But even if you determine the proper amount of force and launch angle for a given position, that doesn't mean you'll be able to actually execute. Also, of course, basketball isn't played in a vacuum. No defender is going to let you sit there and calculate the proper trajectory or let you shoot the ball unimpeded.

A much better example would be pool - and in fact, pool is often used as a teaching method for basic geometry (angles/reflections/etc) and physics (elastic collisions).

> A much better example would be pool - and in fact, pool is often used as a teaching method for basic geometry (angles/reflections/etc) and physics (elastic collisions).

It gets even more interesting once you start adding spin to your shots! Unfortunately, my physics skills are relatively lacking, so most of my pool knowledge/skills don't have much of a mathematical basis.

I was rethinking this, what about the corner 3? Shooting it wide open/with a defender running up against you looking to block.

Because very precisely throwing a ball using the human muskulo-skeletal system is an extraordinarily difficult and complicated problem, not easily amenable to symbolic analysis.

Even stating the problem precisely (on paper) requires PhD-level physics/math, there are dozens of moving parts involved, the timing of various actions must be perfectly choreographed, and the system is constantly changing.

Because IQ is a very specific thing.

It doesn't mean you know a lot or are good at high school maths.

IIRC an ideal IQ test would be something you could take even if you can't read and haven't learned maths and it will tell you something about your general problem solving skills.

And as we all know, people can be excellent problem solvers without being very athletic at all, so mixing that into the score would actually make it less useful.

You don't need to know how to read or know math to shoot a basketball and the problem is well defined. Put ball through hoop.

Someone who in principle has a very high "Athletic Quotient" may be relatively bad at this depending on how many times they've attempted it before the test.

A good AQ test would hopefully control for this? Though my understanding is that IQ doesn't control very well for practice either. It's a hard problem.

Goes both ways: you don't need to be good at sports to be an excellent problem solver in the office.

> Because IQ is a very specific thing.

IQ is definitely not a specific thing at all, unless by that you mean “IQ is what gets measured by IQ tests”.

We have better and simpler tests to measure and predict various types of athleticism, in any age group.

Maybe the people who devise IQ tests are bad at sports? I’m only partially joking.

It was indeed developed by an Ashkenazi.

Please don't; the cost of the genre dwarfs the benefit of the factoid.

They also seem to be strongly suggesting that those who perform well at this test of will power are no more likely to be successful than those who don't when controlled for economic background.

In other words, people who have more resources available don't optimize for immediate reward as much.

Sometimes willpower just means you've ignored the sunk cost fallacy.

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