Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

My take on this is that intelligence is like strength or other physical qualities. If you are in a hyper competitive area, you need good genes. But not everything is competitive.

Yes, there are absolutely limits on your physical development that you are born with. You won't run 100m under 10s if you're a woman, and you're much more likely if you have recent roots in certain countries. You won't get to play professional basketball unless you're quite a lot taller than average. If you're going to win Mr Olympia, you need to possess the kind of body that can be turned into a hunk of muscle.

But you can do better than most people at almost everything by practicing. You can cut your 100m time just by losing the gut. You can practice throwing the ball in the hoop by yourself. You can lift weights and you'll get more muscular.

Intelligence is no different. If you're going to be a research mathematician, it's going to be incredibly tough competing with the smartest kids in your generation. But if you just want to appreciate quantum physics or complex numbers, it's actually quite low hanging fruit that you will figure out if you want to. Most people do not figure out complex numbers despite it being taught at every high school.

The thing with intelligence, and I suppose we mean the mathematical kind, is it's invisible until you interact with people. If you're very weak or fat there's reasons to do something about it. If you just don't know how vector calculus works, chances are you won't get outed.

Our culture in the West also has a static view of intelligence, the opposite of Dweck's growth mindset, which really harms everyone who should be encouraged to practice getting smarter. The loss of not stopping people without world class brains from pursuing math professorships is greatly outweighed by the loss of everyday people not improving strengthening their thinking skills.

I wholeheartedly subscribe to this. I was never super smart, mildly above-average in both primary, secondary, high school and university too. You could say I always matched the challenge, but not much more.

All the time, there were people around me who were significantly smarter than me, grokking things easily, learning faster, remembering better. Ie my roommate during whole campus was a guy who passed whole high school without the need to study at home, he just remembered it all and did homework just before the classes. there were tons of guys like him. I had to study every day, not too much but consistently. He didn't perform much better than me re grades on university, but he didn't have to work as much.

But here lies the rub - I could easily surpass people like him, even better ones, by just putting in enough time and learn things. In many topics that didn't interest people like him, I was much better. Much smarter folks than me were fired from university since at some point stuff became too hard to just visit seminars and they completely lacked the habit to spent time to learn hard stuff, even by far the smartest guy in whole 120-member class had to put in significant time to learn it for exams to pass.

I kept working on myself, learned various languages (ie right now battling with french), re-discovered topics that forceful learning in high school made me resent (geography, history, biology, physics) and discovered stuff on my own by backpacking around the world (more history and how everything interacted, cultures, food, appreciation of people sometimes vilified back home like Muslims) and just generally stepping far away of my comfort zone for decade and a half, right after finishing university. Now when I look back (and/or meet some of them), I am much more whole and experienced person, when we meet and their kids come and show me some backward place on globe I tell them some stories I've experienced in that region and a bit about their culture and history (don't want to sound condescending, I love them, and my roommate remained my good friend and has very senior management position).

I completed backwardish unknown university and for last decade work among graduates form best European universities. There is very little difference amongst us.

Its truly what IIRC Chaplin said - success is 10% talent and 90% hard work.

I thought that intelligence is pretty static by almost(or all?) measurement tools we have. Is that not the case? Not to say that our measurement tools might have serious issues but then you enter the unanswered question of making very concrete what intelligence is.

At the same time it is static and subject to a small test training effect and test-retest variance.

If measured as IQ, the variance tends to be around 5 points on most tests.

Yes and no. Lifestyle has an impact on intelligence. You probably can't train yourself into a higher IQ, but you can many things that will dimish it (not sleeping well, bad nutrition, drugs, stress, etc.)

So if you've led a non ideal lifestyle in the past, you might be able to increase your intelligence by making less mistakes, relative to your current abilities.

Intelligence maybe is static, but Wisdom is not. So you should allocate some points to it, unless going fighter build.

The most trivial brain training exercises routinely show major increases in IQ scores. Those who favor a static hypothesis (and they seem to be the majority) like to simply assume these are fake gains. But without ground truth, there's no way to know. You'd also be surprised how few studies there are that have people directly practice IQ test taking.

The static hypothesis seems to rely on common sense rather than hard evidence. It's rare for somebody who seems dull to become a genius all of a sudden. And when it does happen it's easy to assume they seemed dull rather than actually were.

There is no disconnect between intelligence being simple yet hard to improve. Losing weight is very simple. But it's hard. Obesity is only slightly less heritable than IQ (both highly heritable), yet we know for a fact it's 100% controllable by the individual (unless one is strongly against the notion of free will).

Can you source some peer-reviewed research that shows this? Everywhere I look the baseline seems to be IQ scores can't be trained save a tiny few points. And 3 IQ points don't really make a genius out of someone smart.

Free will has nothing to do with not being able to do something because physical constraints are placed on a person. e.g. A person in a wheel chair does not have more or less free will then someone who can walk. Even though the latter clearly has more freedom in a certain sense.

Are IQ tests what we really mean when we mean someone is intelligent? What about that kid who can't do calculus one year, then the next year they can? Haven't they gotten smarter?

Yes unnormalized IQ scores of kids increase when they get older. That's why only the normalized to their age IQ score is reported. I won't get seduced into a discussion about whether IQ is really intelligence. It's the best proxy we have that's all that matters for this discussion.

But it can make perfect sense that your rank doesn't change within your cohort. The better you are above your cohort, the more encouraged you are, and the more help you'll get from the system. So in that sense it can be the case that it's very hard to change your intelligence.

That's an assumption. It could be true or not. If true you'd expect steadily increasing IQ stores for people who are slightly above average, which is not what happens. The same effect should be observed in weaker students if it's true. I'm not interested in conjecture. I'm looking for peer-reviewed papers.

I struggle to remember the paper, I'll post it here if I think of it.

In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.

Alternatively, one could claim many simply don't want to lose weight. Then it should be fair game to claim many don't want to improve their intelligence.

Dual n back studies are a good starting point. Could go through gwern's article [0]. Which I very much disagree with, but it does cover a lot of research. He essentially concludes the active placebo studies that produce as many gains as dnb prove dnb doesn't work. But without ground truth there's no way to know these active placebo gains are fake. Many of these active placebos are other cognitive training methods, it's perfectly plausible they may not be placebos at all. IMO we can only conclude that if dnb does work it isn't uniquely great.

Another thing to remember - if we want to determine if it is possible to improve intelligence we should care about maximum gains not average gains. Again, without ground truth, one cannot simply claim big gainers are meaningless outliers that can be discounted. There may not be anything producing 2 SD on average (though plenty showing much more than the 3 points you mention), but many such improvements have been recorded.

Imagine weight was something we couldn't observe or understand. Based on statistical science, many may similarly conclude it is impossible to change it.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/DNB-meta-analysis

> In case of losing weight, it very much does. You don't even need to do anything, you need to not eat (as much). Given high heritability of obesity it may very well be that some genetic configurations make it harder to stop eating. Plenty of studies show that most fail at dieting. Statistically speaking, it may be impossible to lose weight for most. So if you don't believe in even soft free will, you may as well conclude it is in fact impossible for these people to lose weight.

That's way too much black and white thinking. It's pretty safe to say most obese people would like to lose weight. They just don't want to sacrifice the things they are doing, either consciously or subconsciously. This is orthogonal to free will. What you are talking about is the whether the conscious mind can win over the subconscious mind. That's called discipline. Not free will.

That's fine we can call it discipline (which some in the weight loss debate believe is impossible to cultivate, not myself). The point is, if there is indeed a conceptually simple way to increase intelligence, there's no inherent contradiction in most being unable to do it and statistical evidence looking the way it does.

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