I don't think people on HN need more intelligence. After 120 IQ points, it doesn't make much of a difference to winning a Nobel Prize. I think what people need here is an increase in their willpower to see boring stuff through to the end.
If you follow that link, you'll find that in the study referenced the researchers made up their own more or less ad hoc tests of "ability" precisely because "most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)." It seems to me this study supports the idea that IQ is irrelevant to winning a Nobel Prized past a threshold instead of refuting it.
"Roe devised her own high-end intelligence tests as follows: she obtained difficult problems in verbal, spatial and mathematical reasoning from the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, but also performs bespoke testing research for, e.g., the US military. Using these problems, she created three tests (V, S and M), which were administered to the 64 scientists, and also to a cohort of PhD students at Columbia Teacher's College. The PhD students also took standard IQ tests and the results were used to norm the high-end VSM tests using an SD = 15. Most IQ tests are not good indicators of true high level ability (e.g., beyond +3 SD or so)."
Seems a decent try at it to me. But a better indicator that IQ is predictive of success is
Can psychometrics separate the top .1 percent from the top 1 percent in ability? Yes: SAT-M quartile within top 1 percent predicts future scientific success, even when the testing is done at age 13. The top quartile clearly outperforms the lower quartiles. These results strongly refute the "IQ above 120 doesn't matter" claim, at least in fields like science and engineering; everyone in this sample is above 120 and the top quartile are at the 1 in 10,000 level. The data comes from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), a planned 50-year longitudinal study of intellectual talent.
Ability Differences Among People Who Have Commensurate Degrees Matter for Scientific Creativity
Still though the correlation with making money and intelligence is really low (I think I read it was 0.2%). And what if wether or not you are happier might be inversely proportional to how intelligent you are?
I'm just saying that being happy with your life should not be based on winning a Nobel prize.
This is where I am. All of the techniques in the article sounded familiar to me because, thankfully, I do them intrinsically. What I need are ways to stay interested in a given project. Any suggestions?
The author juxtaposes his recommendations against his unnamed professor's claim that intelligence is genetic and fixed at birth, pointing out that there are broad classes of behaviors that can improve our intelligence -- but he neglects half of the response to his professor's genetic predestination view, namely the whole host of physical/chemical/biological factors impacting both brain development and cognition later in life.
As just an example, I was recently impressed by a study (http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/270/1529/2147...) demonstrating improvements on both a memory task and an intelligence task through creatine supplements. The explanation suggested by the authors (and it looks like some other literature as well, though I haven't really dug into it yet) is basically that creatine is part of a mechanism for rapid ATP synthesis, that the ion pumps in your neurons run on ATP, and that if you're sometimes "fuel-limited" (their word) creatine levels matter, in the same way that oxygen and glucose do. This make sense, but I was quite surprised to read this, I think in part because I'm used to seeing my brain as being a relatively static thing. Stepping down a level of abstraction, and thinking about the instant to instant chemical resource needs of individual cells and gates is kind of eye-opening. And for all I know there's hundreds or thousands of other documented effects, where increasing or decreasing the presence of some reagent associated with running ion pumps, or growing axons or synthesizing neurotransmitters has some measurable effect on intelligence.
I would point out that Rae 2003 was conducted using vegetarian subjects. When you run tests on normal subjects, no benefit is found. To quote what I've said the last few times creatine came up http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#creatine :
> I’m not a bodybuilder, but my interest was sparked by several studies showing IQ boosts (such as Rae 2003; however, Rae 2003 was only in vegetarians, who are known to be creatine deficient (much like B vitamins, creatine is usually gotten in one’s diet from meat), and the other studies are likewise of subpopulations. Rawson 2008 studied young omnivores who are not stupid or sleep-deprived, and found no mental benefit. The summary of the DNB ML discussion was that Rawson 2008 is a broad null result for healthy young omnivores who aren’t idiots. Vegetarians, idiots, the sleep-deprived, and old people may benefit from creatine supplementation.
Thanks for pointing that out, and linking to those notes. As it happens, I'm vegetarian and often sleep deprived, so I still might try the creatine thing.
You can probably induce similar effects (in the reverse direction) by entering states of dehydration or low blood sugar. I've observed that dehydration can be a big cause of poor performance on my part.
"Following training of working memory using the dual n-back test, the subjects were indeed able to transfer those gains to a significant improvement in their score on a completely unrelated cognitive task. This was a super-big deal."
I think this is so important for our young generation b/c everybody is trying to "hack" or "game" the system. The problem is that you don't actually internalize things by hacking your way through
So it depends on your goals. Let's take a computer science degree for example: if your goal is to do investment banking and having a CS/engineering degree from a top university really puts you apart from all those econ/business majors in the finance interviews (which it does), sure hack your way through CS/EE: you're not planning to go into that field anyways so copy-change homework and study past tests to hack the system and get a good GPA. But if you're doing CS to be a software engineer, you DON'T want to hack your way through, you'd want to "do things the hard way" and really learn the material.
I think your definition of "hack" is confusing with respect to this forum. Hackers are people who understand the system so well that they can manipulate it to their advantage. Good hackers have done things the hard way and use those experiences to make things easy in the future.
I'm no authority but I'm gonna have to disagree. Hackers as understood on this forum are people who find the shortest path to an intended outcome. This usually takes a novel way of looking at the system. But it by no means requires a complete understanding of it. Hacking requires a clever insight that allows you to quickly accomplish your goal. Total understanding is usually too time consuming for the hacker.
You can hack collage just like any other complex system. The #1 secret to a inflated GPA in collage is knowing which teachers take and which ones to avoid.
I knew one teacher who basically gave every student an A in his advanced math classes. "Ok so everyone has an A, but we have 2 weeks left and I have more material I would like to cover so please show up." Not only that but he actually knew how to teach so you where ready to use the material in the future.
Unfortunately I knew a history teacher who like to base essay questions off of obscure references in the ~3,000 pages of text you where apparently supposed to memorize for the test. In his words two A's in the same class was a sign he was going soft.
Yeah, the TL;DR thing really grates on my nerves. Are we so miswired now that we can't take the time out to read 4,500 well-written words on a subject, and instead need it condensed to a list appropriate for Twitter? Is there really no other value in the entire essay other than the list items themselves?
For me, the TL;DR summary helps me get the gist of the article and then decide whether I should read the whole thing or not.
If I just go ahead and read, and after 1200 words, the author promotes inhaling magnet dust or sleeping 4 hours each night as a way to improve intelligence, the entire article is a complete waste of time and I will be annoyed.
The summary, as presented here, firmly places the article in my "read when I get home" queue.
Go read How to Read a Book. The second level of reading is about skimming, picking up the general point of something, then deciding if it's worth a careful, analytical (and perhaps synoptic) reading. I don't think this article deserves it, so I didn't give it the full time to read everything, and since I've read other stuff in this area before, I think the bullet points really do sum it up.
The article focuses on the motivations behind these advices and how to apply them in practice. A big part of thevalue of the article comes from this and your bullet list fails to account for that.
Are we so not-interested in other things that we take several other articles' worth in time to read a single one, when a concise summary could get the point across just as well?
Why stop at using 4500 words? Why not put it in an hour-long Youtube video, and not provide a description / transcription?
I had absolutely zero idea what TL;DR meant until I saw it here and looked it up. I agree with you, this article was extremely well-written and I feel that just summarizing the key points doesn't really help you to understand what the author was trying to convey. It's unfortunate that we've trained ourselves as a society to participate in info-snacking (gorging ourselves on as many tiny bits of info as possible). This is why there's so much short-form content. As opposed to circulating great content like this article (and subsequently discussing it), we go out of our way to publish less-circumstantial lists ad nausea that make us feel like we've done/learned something.
Ultimately, you will be the only person capable of deciding whether a particular thing was worth your time or not, and you can only decide that in hindsight, having experienced it. The finest accumulation of the greatest reviews of a work will not make up for the fact that you might glean some valuable tidbit from it that nobody else noticed.
You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose. Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject?
For example: I'm sitting here thinking about my argument and wondering if I'm really just full of shit, but then I suddenly remembered a bit of "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", where Feynman talks about some of his experiences in Brazil, and how the teaching at the time resulted in students that had memorized everything but understood very little.
And it strikes me that this relatively recent addiction to summaries is very similar to that kind of Brazilian education.
You also have to accept that you simply aren't going to ever be able to know everything about everything that you'd like to; you will have to make choices, pick and choose.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. You seem to be arguing against something nobody (certainly not me) said.
We all know that only by actually reading something will you know if it was worth the effort. The problem is that, for any non-trivial subject, there is more material available, and more material being generated, than anyone can cover in endless lifetimes.
Some form of curation is needed just to even know what exists, let alone to know what's worth reading.
Accepting that, would you then rather memorize a pile of summaries and tidbits and factoids, or would you rather take the time to read and consider a complete discourse on a subject?
Where does this false choice come from? I do not want to memorize a pile of summaries, and it's in fact impossible to consume a complete discourse on a (non-trivial) subject. Those are not the only options.
What I want are some heuristics to help guide me on what to read. Summaries are one tool; recommendations are another. HN discussion threads yet one more. Few people would pretend that any of these substitute for reading the source material.
I'll grant that there are people who consume summaries as a ploy to feign erudition, but honestly I don't think that's the motivation on HN when people ask for a tl;dr.
In fact, if someone were to try to read everything and not use summaries, etc. as a guide they would end up with very little understanding because, odds are, they would be consuming a fair amount of shoddy material to the exclusion of better content.
An interesting comparison. Largely accurate, I think, but I do want to make a counter-point:
reading a summary != memorization
The problem with students who only memorize is that they are incapable of creation. They can answer a set of questions, but not use what they know to respond to something new. A summary, in the best cases (far from always achieved, of course), is all that is needed to get a thinking brain from zero to the conclusions the full text would bring you to. Any gaps can be logically deduced and filled through mental effort, ideally more quickly than it could be told. Especially if one already has experience in the area.
Memorization, meanwhile, creates gaps, and provides no tools to fill them.
I'm not sure about the counter-point. I'm trying to think of the cases where I might agree, and about the only one I can think of is the summaries of papers in scientific journals, where the reader is already pretty familiar with that specific subject. (And I'm really undecided about even that.)
I think context -- all of the nuances and subtleties and justifications and reasonings surrounding a statement -- is pretty important, and without that context, you still end up with gaps. They're just, maybe, slightly different gaps than you get from memorization.
I tried to spring a trap on some unsuspecting HN'r downthread to make this point. If you just take the bullet points -- say, "2. Challenge yourself" -- by themselves, then you miss out on the point that repeatedly doing the same challenging activity doesn't get the desired result. And if you get that point by reading some of the comments here, then you might miss out on why it's important to take on different challenges, and therefore what kind of challenges would be most beneficial. And, if you skim the article, you might miss out on the author's justifications for these suggestions in the first place, which would leave you stumped if someone asked you why novelty mattered.
It's true that you could go back and fill in these gaps, or possibly even derive answers to them on your own, but if you're going to expect to do that, why not just read the thing in its entirety to begin with?
Why only scientific journals, and not scientific blog posts? Or anything of a technical nature, really? The only major differences there are degrees of implied legitimacy based on the source. And once you've reached "anything technical", is art technical? Opinion with supporting arguments? An enormous amount of HN news falls into that category.
For this one in particular, I'm pretty familiar with the recommendations - reading the article was generally a waste of time, though I admit it was well made. The main useful chunk to me was the news of supporting studies, the link to multimodal techniques, and the list itself, as I've read everything else a dozen other places. As can be said, likely, for many other people who have actually researched intelligence-improving techniques.
I'll wrap up with an anecdote, as that's all that this line of debate can really sustain: for this article, the list really did tell me the most important parts. I would have found the other info eventually, and I have no urgent need for it, so not finding it here by skipping the article wouldn't have significantly changed anything for me.
> I think context -- all of the nuances and subtleties and justifications and reasonings surrounding a statement -- is pretty important, and without that context, you still end up with gaps. They're just, maybe, slightly different gaps than you get from memorization.
And indeed the larger problem is that sometimes summaries take on a life of their own, independent of the context which grounded them.
Not every summary is necessarily a TL;DR. Even for the most diligent reader, a cogent explanation of what exactly the author believes to be the most important information can help clarify and distill knowledge.
Its called an abstract and I'm glad that you can't publish any peer reviewed science paper without it. You can only read a mind blogging tiny fraction of all the information out there. Even in a narrow field of specialization its hard to read everything relevant.
Whats better? Reading 10 articles in depth or reading 9 articles in depth and 10 abstracts? I'm pretty sure, the latter is better for point 4.
I really wish, abstracts where standard for longer online posts. Maybe, there should be a field for abstracts in the HN submission form.
In fact that exact strategy is specifically addressed in the article. The answer is yes, but only until you get good at it. Then you need to move on to something else.
I wanted to see if I could hook anyone into responding who hadn't bothered to read the whole article, because they read the summary points instead. I was hoping to make a point in a sneaky, underhanded way.
If somebody were to have read only the summary points and agreed with your post, you would have caught somebody who misunderstood the article because they didn't read it...but how do you plan to "hook" the people that skim articles and extract the summary points themselves? Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well?
I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both.
> Aren't they just as susceptible to misunderstanding the content as well?
Yep! The only distinction between skimming and reading a summary is that skimming at least gives you the opportunity to spot something interesting, stop, and read it fully.
I also wouldn't confuse speed-reading with skimming, so long as the speed-reading gleaned as much from the text as slower reading would.
> I believe that summaries [and skimming] are definitely useful and do not detract from the spreading of information or the gaining of knowledge. In fact, I would say that they contribute to both.
I disagree. I think that they are dangerous tools -- useful occasionally, but too easy to abuse. I'm being more vocal about it nowadays because "TL:DR" has recently become a "thing", and I'm concerned that larger numbers of people seem to be considering it acceptable to skip reading a 10-minute article in favor of reading a 10-second summary of it. Rather than debate that here though, I'd just point to my comments elsewhere on this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2563051
I take exception to the 'Think Creatively' item. It's kind of like making a to-do list with 'lose 20 lbs' as a line item. Much easier said than done.
That being said, I think one of the best ways to improve your creative thinking is to work directly with other people that YOU consider to be creative thinkers. At my previous job I always enjoyed working with the CEO, sales, and marketing folks because they almost always approached problems from a completely different angle than I would. Experiencing how others ideate is very mind opening and often times humbling.
#4) Do things the hard way. It's hard for me to agree with this. In principle, I want to bemoan the decline of my ability to spell as a result of auto-correct. But I think that casts an unfair negative light on the idea of doing things "the easy way".
Think about math. There is no question that the Arabic numbering system makes doing math easier. Why should I to go back to scratching out base-60 cuneiform? I can challenge myself just as easily by pushing on to more powerful and abstract mathematical concepts made possible by timesavers like the Arabic numbering system.
I'm sure that having access to high-level languages limits my understanding of the bits and bytes. But I can use these new tools of abstraction to do things that I would have found impossible if I were writing machine code. I'm not sure I see the value in doing things the hard way, when my brain will be challenged enough probing the depths of what these new innovations have made possible. I think the author misses one crucial part of intelligence - intelligence, insofar as it is about abstract thought, is positively correlated with the sorts of things I can do without thinking about them.
The author of the article is actually promoting the concept of "use it or lose it" with this point. Labor-saving can become excessive if it robs you of any opportunity to exercise your body or mind. She's really suggesting that you don't always reach for the calculator for simple math problems or hop in the car for short trips.
Simple and easy are not the same thing. Please stop being lazy and bother to learn the words you are using. It is simple to do, just read the dictionary. This really isn't easy tho, you have to cross reference other words, take time to do so, bother to remember, and so on - lots of effort.
My ability to spell actually improved with auto-spell checkers. In school I was very bad at languages, after writing few years with instant feedback of spell checkers I make less errors now and I think it's because of instant feedback of spell checkers.
So while I think that the article is good it has some points I don't agree with.
Doing math in base-60 would have a number of benefits over base-10. 60 is highly factor-able, after all (this is probably why it was chosen as base for some numbering systems, e.g. time).
Had you compared Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, I'd agree with you.
I don't agree with the downvotes here. I tend to think people downvote short comments without really attempting to understand the value they're bringing to the conversation. Conversely, people assume a long comment is insightful.
It is a reasonable explanation that any increase in intelligence is just the subject getting better at the tests that are measuring intelligence. If you take the same IQ test over again, you're likely going to score a bit higher. But this certainly doesn't mean the act of taking the test made you smarter. You're simply getting better at using the tool used to measure intelligence.
This made sense at least before the most recent study cited with the Dual-N-Back training. You're going to be hard pressed to explain that away.
I've suspected this for a long long time - when I was a young kid (around 5 years old) my oldest sister was at university studying psychology with an emphasis on child development - so for years I got bombarded with "intelligence" tests to the point where I could do them very easily and I used to get extremely high results in IQ tests in my teens. However, I've never thought I was particularly brighter than anyone else, just that I had done a lot of these silly tests and had acquired the skill of doing them.
I've thought about this quite a bit (I was motivated by those experiences to go into AI research - which I did for six years) and I'm not convinced that the kinds of problems used in the tests I did map too well to "real world" problems - in essence all of the difficulties have already been abstracted away. Of course, I have no evidence for this but the fact that the logical/symbolic approaches to AI failed to live up to their early promise more or less supports my views.
Did he acquire the ability to spot patterns and connections, or did he just spot the patterns and connections by getting used to the tests? It's very possible that the ability to identify patterns was an innate part of him, an "intelligence" he already possessed, which allowed him to benefit from repetition.
The author raises a number of interesting questions after citing several path-breaking research studies. Why, indeed, aren't school systems adopting some of these techniques known to improve children's learning and problem-solving ability? Quite a few mathematicians have written critiques of United States practice in teaching primary and secondary school mathematics, informed by practice in other countries, for example Hung-hsi Wu,
All those mathematicians think that the United States could do much better than it does in teaching elementary mathematics in the public school system. I think so too after living in Taiwan twice in my adult life (January 1982 through February 1985, and December 1998 through July 2001). Taiwan is not the only place where elementary mathematics instruction is better than it is in the United States. Chapter 1: "International Student Achievement in Mathematics" from the TIMSS 2007 study of mathematics achievement in many different countries includes, in Exhibit 1.1 (pages 34 and 35)
a chart of mathematics achievement levels in various countries. Although the United States is above the international average score among the countries surveyed, as we would expect from the level of economic development in the United States, the United States is well below the top country listed, which is Singapore. An average United States student is at the bottom quartile level for Singapore, or from another point of view, a top quartile student in the United States is only at the level of an average student in Singapore. I've been curious about mathematics education in Singapore ever since I heard of these results from an earlier TIMSS sample in the 1990s.
The article "The Singaporean Mathematics Curriculum: Connections to TIMSS"
by a Singaporean author explains some of the background to the Singapore math materials and how they approach topics that are foundational for later mathematics study. I am amazed that persons from Singapore in my generation (born in the late 1950s) grew up in a country that was extremely poor (it's hard to remember that about Singapore, but until the 1970s Singapore was definitely part of the Third World) and were educated in a foreign language (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil) and yet received very thorough instruction in mathematics. I hope that all of us here in the United States can do at least that well in the current generation.
P.S. Another reply mentions the Flynn effect (secular increase in raw scores on IQ tests from generation to generation in most countries worldwide), and links to the Wikipedia article. Thanks for bringing that up. Being aware that the Wikipedia article on that subject has been subject to edit wars that have gone to the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee,
that has had the influence of better informed and more impartial editors. There are several good discussions of the Flynn effect in recent books on IQ testing, and citations to those can be found in Wikipedia user space.
I have no doubt that math teaching methods in the US are terrible, in general. And I am very open to the possibility that Singapore does it much better. But however poor Singapore was in the past, it is now 3rd in the world in per-capita PPP GDP while the US is 7th (according to the IMF; $56,522 vs. $47,284).
Furthermore we should always expect the top countries to be small ones; if each state in the US (pop. ~300m) was considered individually, it seems very likely that several would be more highly ranked than Singapore (pop. ~5m). Seeing as that those states are much more alike to the rest of the US--in terms of culture, government, etc.--than is Singapore, shouldn't we be looking to them for guidance on how to improve the rest of the US?
Actually, if you read http://pirls.bc.edu/timss2007/PDF/T07_M_IR_Chapter1.pdf , Massachusetts and Minnesota are also benchmarked independently, Massachusetts is #4 globally (page 4 of the pdf, 34 of the document). Also, the level is slowly increasing in the US and slowly decreasing in Singapore. Finally, a lot of countries are missing in these rankings, so these are not true global results.
Personally, I don't think the situation is nearly as gloomy in the US as a lot of my fellows seem to. It's a characteristic of nation citizens to be over hard on certain aspects of their community.
As a matter of fact, if the US school system is partly or significantly responsible for the productivity and creativity of adult residents, I'm pretty satisfied with it on the whole. I'm not sure studying to tests produces the best outcomes. I'm more interested in novel problem solving, invention, and innovation, and typical international standardized tests don't suss that out especially well, do they?
Moreover, it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore. It makes sense that some small countries might outperform the US at testing in the same way that you expect some small countries to have a higher per capita gdp. Unless I miss my guess, we could cherry pick some communities in the US that do better on either than Singapore.
This article about US test scores, after adjusting for demographics, was discussed on HN before, although I can't find the link just now:
It's extremely interesting, and I haven't seen anything that impeaches it.
That's not to say that I think the US school system does not have huge room for improvement. That's clear, and I'm hopeful that continued technological development and research will provide amazing breakthroughs. Moreover, we're not even using some of the best methods that are already available; research suggests the Montessorri method is advantageous, and indeed my own son was trained at one, and we were much happier with the result in comparison to his time at a public elementary school.
But it's not necessary to down talk where we're at to motivate improvement. What I don't want to see is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. US schools get some things right. Students come out believing they can do anything. They're not afraid to try new approaches. I'd rather not end up with test taking automatons who are mainly expert at memorization and thoughtless skills drills.
> But it's not necessary to down talk where we're at to motivate improvement.
It is necessary if the general perception of where we're at is much better than where we're actually at. I think the U.S. still has a very strong cultural air of superiority which perhaps is no longer justified (if it ever was). The first step to solving a problem is to realize that it exists, and the U.S. educational system is only recently coming under scrutiny because of repeated criticisms of it.
> Students come out believing they can do anything.
I'm uncertain about this -- both whether it's true, and whether it's beneficial if true.
> They're not afraid to try new approaches.
Actually, there's a growing murmur of dissent that, at least in the special case of "gifted" children, the constant praise of their intelligence leads to a fear of failure which, in turn, leads to a fear of trying things which others might try without hesitation.
>Actually, there's a growing murmur of dissent that, at least in the special case of "gifted" children, the constant praise of their intelligence leads to a fear of failure which, in turn, leads to a fear of trying things which others might try without hesitation.
Citation needed. Speaking as a giftie myself, and someone who has many friends who went through various gifted programs, this is not my impression.
Googling for "praise effort not intelligence" will turn up a bunch more references, but most of them (at a glance) are referencing the same work by the same individual(s) (Dweck, et al). I didn't have this saved in my pinboard, so I had to go find it again.
I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for themselves. (snark snark snark) :-)
> I have to snark a little about a giftie not investigating this for themselves. (snark snark snark) :-)
Hah. well, you are the one talking about effort being more important than intelligence. I, on the other hand, have always been lazy. I was in the program through ability alone.[1]
I mean, clearly effort matters. But ability matters, too. Otherwise I'd be working at the 7-11 like my parents said I would if I didn't go to college.[2] Of course, if you can't do anything about innate ability and you can do something about effort, "praise effort not ability" makes sense, as you should try to improve the thing that can be improved, right?
On the other hand, I think effort has limitations, too. As a kid, I was pulled out of the "gifted" class one hour a day to work in the "special ed" room. Handwriting. My stepmother made me spend probably five hours a week practicing my handwriting at home on top of that. To this day I can't write a legible sentence.
I think key is to put effort in to areas where that effort makes a difference. Consume all the low hanging fruit before you start scaling a sequoia looking for pine nuts.
[1] the ability to do well on standardized tests, that is. I've never had to learn to work a cash register, so it's gotta correlate to something useful, but I'm first to say that I'm really not all that bright.
[2] Actually, considering my schedule variance, I wonder if I could hold down a job where the primary performance metric was "did the guy show up on time?"
I am also very familiar with the gifted education community and numerous families of people who have been identified as gifted learners, and the research finding reported in the article submitted to open this thread rings true, based on my experience.
Back in the day, I was also in my school's gifted programs and I had a fear of failure. But, it was because my family was poor. I knew that I was solely responsible for my attendance at college and that academic scholarships were my "golden ticket" for that. Similarly, some of my friends feared sports injuries because athletic prowess was their ticket to college.
someone who was put into a "gifted and talented" program at a public school. Usually the entrance criteria is based on how you do on a G-correlated standardized test. "Giftie" was the traditional derogatory term for those students.
Agree, I have two kids in public elementary school and have no complaints about what and how they learn math. I think the problem in the US is the huge difference between schools. I happen to live close to a very good school but not everyone is as privileged. From what I've heard the difference in school quality goes up in the higher grades, which I can easily believe.
I wrote: (the language of schooling in Singapore has long been English, but the home languages of most Singaporeans are south Chinese languages like my wife's native Hokkien or Malay or Indian languages like Tamil)
And then you replied: it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore.
I especially noted the language diversity of Singapore to respond to something I have read over and over and over throughout the years when Singapore is mentioned in discussions of educational comparisons, namely the false idea that Singapore is "homogeneous" in any meaningful sense for the provision of primary education. It is not. Singapore is, as far as I know, the only country in the world with four different official languages (Modern Standard Chinese, Bahasa Malay, Tamil, and English) from different language families (Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Dravidian, and Indo-European) and surely one of the very few countries during my lifetime in which the typical person grew up in a home in which NONE of the official languages were spoken at home. Since before independence, the primary language of school instruction in Singapore has been the official language, English, that was at the beginning LEAST likely to be spoken by any school pupil at home. School officials in the United States whine about a minority of pupils who speak Spanish at home, even though they surely also speak English in the broader community (as my neighbors from Spanish-speaking households do). Try to imagine the United States and its level of educational achievement if most school pupils had first of all, when entering school, to learn a new language that they don't speak at home to their parents and rarely speak to classmates when outside of school. That is the amazing achievement of Singapore. (Something similar and only a bit less amazing happened in Taiwan over a just slightly longer time span, when a majority population that spoke Taiwanese or Hakka watched a younger generation grow up as Mandarin-speakers.)
That's not to say that I think the US school system does not have huge room for improvement. That's clear, and I'm hopeful that continued technological development and research will provide amazing breakthroughs. Moreover, we're not even using some of the best methods that are already available
We largely agree on these statements of yours. On my part, I think "research" (on educational methods that already work in other places) are like to have more impact on primary education than "technological development," but I'll take improvements however they come.
I see I omitted to mention in my first post here, an omission I will now correct, a link to a study of PISA results
showing that advantaged pupils with highly educated parents in the United States fare particularly poorly in comparison with pupils enjoying similar advantages in other countries. What's really shocking about international educational comparisons is how badly the top-end students in the United States do, as was also shown in the data graphs linked to in my first post,
It is not. Singapore is, as far as I know, the only country in the world with four different official languages...School officials in the United States whine about a minority of pupils who speak Spanish at home...
This is a somewhat disingenuous comparison. A fair comparison would be to compare Indian Americans who speak {Konkani, Hindi, Marathi, etc} at home to a similar Indian Singaporean. Similarly, one should compare Chinese Americans who speak {Chinese language} at home to Chinese Singaporeans.
The vast majority (about 4/5) of the gap between the US and Singapore is well explained by race. Asians (100% of Singapore, 4.8% of the US) tend to significantly outperform others (0% of Singapore, 95.2% of the US).
If you want to look at top schools, we should look not at Singapore, but at Texas and Connecticut. After all, Asians from Texas and Connecticut outperform Asians in Singapore (by roughly the same gap that Singapore outperforms the Asian American average).
I've pointed this out to you a number of times. Why do you continue to ignore it?
>it's hard to know what to infer when comparing a giant, multicultural country with a small, much more homogeneous one such as Singapore.
That's nothing. I remember a few years ago at this forum someone put forward a report that compared the US with a list of contries with the Vatican at the top.
Interesting. Mind if I e-mail you with some questions about schools adopting some of these techniques, and about gifted programs, and homeschooling? I'm hugely interested in all this and you seem to be very informed here.
I am thankful for these links as well given that I am attending my local school district's "Parents Math Night" tonight. It's a presentation about the K-12 math curriculum. Sadly, I suspect that any points of contention will be between alternatives which I will consider to all be lacking in some fundamental way. After seeing what's happening in my ostensibly excellent public school system, I want to compare it with the Montessori school up the street.
To summarize a few of the articles you linked:
Students do better at math in East Asia than in the US because East Asian math teachers know math and American math teachers don't.
My own experience bears this out. I once taught in a program to help public school teachers get certified to teach mathematics. I simply couldn't believe these teachers had college degrees. I was teaching geometry, and none of them could go to the board, draw a circle with a compass and label the center point A. It took them two weeks to learn that the center of a circle is in the middle, not on the circumference -- and, believe me, I tried to explain it. Of course, none of the teachers could add fractions either. These teachers were impressive people -- it's not easy to play parent, social worker, and cop to fifty teenagers at a time -- but they were absolutely uneducated. It seems that education majors aren't taught the rudiments of the subjects they're meant to teach. Teachers wish they knew math and they're grateful to anyone who will teach them -- they were so grateful to me that I was terribly embarrassed. I don't know what's going on in education departments, but it's a real disservice to teachers and students.
I would be interested to know where in the US this was. I was once in a Statistics program in Ohio with a bunch of students who were working towards their Masters in Education, and they were solidly in the middle-lower end of the class but the upper end was taken up by dept. students anyway.
Just because the average quartile in the US falls in the bottom quartile in Singapore doesn't mean that the top quartile falls into the average quartile in Singapore.
While on average here the system is pretty bad, the US also tends to produce the people that end up making some of the largest contributions to science and math.
There is very good education available here, it simply isn't available to everyone. The outliers are still performing on a very high level.
What I find interesting here is that you focus a lot on mathematics instruction in your comment. In my opinion there's much more that influences learning outcomes and outcomes on test results than math instruction techniques, namely student self-theories and various systems having to do with the existing educational paradigm. I believe those factors are involved and a culprit for sub-average results equally much if not more.
He focused on mathematics because that's his current field of expertise.
I'm not sure what you mean by "student self-theories and various systems having to do with the existing educational paradigm", but axiomatic mathematics instruction leads directly into analysis, problem solving, and general logic; while that doesn't justify an educational curriculum consisting solely of mathematics, it does make it very important.
I agree that mathematics in general leads to what you say (instructional techniques aside), but I'm rather arguing that it's not necessarily the mathematical techniques that are the primary thing at fault (however I do agree that it is massively lacking and misguided, as he is saying), but rather that more generalized instructional techniques and learning environments and structures are equally at fault. Students don't test poorly solely because the math instruction was that much poorer than elsewhere, but rather that the student, to due a good number of factors, wasn't inclined to learn, and rather "get by through whatever means" (or whatever other reason), as is so common in our society. That doesn't lead to exceptional skills in analysis, problem solving, or general logic.
Lastly, judging by his HN about page I wouldn't say his field of expertise is specifically mathematics, but rather that he has much broader educational expertise.
IMO, the biggest problem with education is how crackpot the teacher teaching system is. They seem to have no more scientific basis than Postmodernism, despite the fact that they actually research something that can be research.
There's a book called "Why Don't Students Like School: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom". The author explains (more or less) why Direct Instruction is so much more successful than other, newer, faddish techniques. Actually, Direct Instruction is also a bit faddish, and could certainly be improved by a more scientific approach.
Unfortunately, teacher trainers think that drill work is boring, and anything that recommends drill work must be wrong, because it is (to them) unpleasant. Maybe not as unpleasant as studying stuff you don't understand (which is what happens if you don't drill), but they don't have to accept reality.
The problem with school education is that it isn't aware of the moral context in which it operates. Herding children into classrooms and telling them what to learn is a horrible thing to do.
And, under threat of punishment, once can't learn efficiently, anyhow.
Yes, and not only the moral context. A school's job is to help turn little animals into citizens by introducing them to the broader world. How does shoving them in a box for 8 hours a day where they have to sit in one place make any sense if that's your goal.
Interesting. Just purchased that book. I imagine I will be able to answer some of the below questions after I read it, but as of now I am wondering the following:
Recently I have heard that "Direct Instruction" is very effective, but I'm very skeptical as to what it is effective for. What exactly can you teach through that method, and what can you not? What does that method absolutely skip over? For example, through it, can you learn critical thinking, rhetoric/debate skills, rationality & logic, philosophy? Does it help students learn about themselves (self-discovery) -- how they think, learn, what their interests/passions are, what drives them? Does it help them find truth for themselves? Or, does it ignore all these and even more than our system today try to fit every personality into the standard box?
Does it at all care for each individual student or is it comprehensively uni-directional, from instructor to student?
DI is not a perfect method. It's a little crackpot itself. But it's both empirically better than all the other fads and as sexy as Bush in a bikini, so it more or less killed empirical study of education. Now there's a bit of a revival of quantitative education studies, but it's too short term in it's scope (a good teacher doesn't just help the students pass the next test).
IIRC, studies showed that DI did actually help the good students, the bad students, the mediocre students, the rich students and the poor students.
It also helped "higher order" skills.
I think that from a cognitive psychology perspective (though I'm not an expert), this is because the brain needs to learn fundamentals before it can work through more advanced things.
As for "self discovery", I think students are pretty good at that themselves. Current fads just pile on the homework though (because "testing doesn't teach anything"), which in my view is a big development killer.
I'm not a DI fan. I'm not a fan of capitalism either. But if you don't know why something works, you shouldn't just dismiss it for being unattractive.
Excellent post. It's made me realise how much I have been taking the easy road lately.
I used to always be looking into new areas to learn about new things and really pushing myself, but I realise now that lately to solve a problem I reach for a familiar way to solve it, because it's easier and faster. This could be the reason why I am getting less satisfaction with solving problems lately.
"Join the Dual N-Back, Brain Training & Intelligence forum & mailing list at Google Groups for some interesting discussions on dual n-back, memory, intelligence and the brain"
From what I saw, society reserves creativity to artists, writers, composers, and other "creative types". For some reason creativity has become associated with creating useless inventions that no one will ever buy; sometimes people see creative person as a loner who spends days and nights on drugs throwing paint around or mumbling crazily.
In reality, creativity is, perhaps, our only advantage when trying to not get killed by other animals. Picking up a stick and fighting off a larger animal -- great example of creative solution. It's novel.
Before, no one ever thought to pick up a stick. Perhaps sticks were viewed as merely lying there, to be carefully avoided in case somebody steps on one. Maybe those who tried to pick up sticks were viewed as crazy, sinful by some sort of primitive Republicans (not that Republicans now are more evolved :)... I mean, who cares about sticks, animals were usually fighting with their own teeth, hands, or horns (I wish I had a horn).
It's not until an animal with a stick has beaten the shit out of another animal without a stick for calling him crazy, that the sticks became a useful tool.
I mean, face it -- we're just animals, and without creative approaches to our problems we wouldn't be talking about this on a giant electronic mind-network-thing.
I really enjoyed this article. I wish she had given specific tips on how to think more creatively. She mentioned what happens "when" you think creatively, but did not really go into the "how."
What does zero mean? what does one mean? does addition make sense? can you take the limit of something? What if something blows up to infinity?
So... try cars. zero being no car. one being a "standard" car. say a honda civic. how much honda can you take a way and still be a car? like taking the limit at zero. There are crazy efficient cars with tiny little internal combustion engines and bicycle wheels that get 100+ mpg but piss poor acceleration. hmm. what would a car be at the other end? a ferrari? Do cars associate? do cars commute? :)
Creativity isn't painting. It's looking at the same crap you look at all the time and playing with it. Math has a lot of tricks for labeling things, then seeing what shows up when you try do stuff with the labels. New dimensions will pop out.
The subtitle for this piece is '5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential'.
Shouldn't that be -realize- your cognitive potential, or maximize the utilization of your cognitive potential or some such? What good does it do to maximize my potential?
PDD-NOS – Pervasive Development Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, is not necessarily a mild form of autism. The meaning is in the name. It means that the diagnosed doesn’t fit more specific diagnoses such as Kanner’s autism or Asperger syndrome.
Even though someone who’s autistic fail to show intelligence through a test, I believe they still may be very intelligent and can show this better through training.
I personally still believe reasoning skills can be trained by learning new heuristics at least.
My addition (6): observe others, be inquisitive about other people. This will not only help you appear smarter to others (believe it or not, there is such thing as behaving/appearing smart), but will also help you with networking because (a) people respond positively when someone displays genuine interest in them (well as long as you are being nonthreatening) and (b) smart people tend to seek out others like them.
Haven't read the entire article yet, but(this is off topic), highlighting any word on the website shows a "Learn More" tooltip which automatically loads more info for the highlighted text. Awesome.
Wow. I'd never have discovered that if I hadn't read your comment, so thanks. I'm not sure how useful it would be in general but for an article like this quickly looking up terms seemed pretty neat (e.g fluid intelligence).
I always slack when it comes to number 5 (networking). I'm always busy with something "more important" and kinda have to force myself to get out and meet people.
