| ▲ | literalAardvark a day ago |
| Education helps channel cognitive ability into useful pathways, but you either have something to channel or don't. Though I'd go with innate over genetic: leaves more room for nurture and epigenetics and doesn't make one sound like a white supremacist. |
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| ▲ | mmooss a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| > you either have something to channel or don't Again, any evidence? What exactly is 'cognitive ability'? A hallmark of the lack of substantive argument is vague terms that can mean anything the speaker likes, and by not defining the term they prevent any substantive critique - nobody really knows what they're talking about (and usually, not the speaker either). I highly doubt it's all or nothing. While there are likely variations in anything, they can be quite insignificant. For example, everyone, with tiny exceptions, can learn to speak & understand language, and write & read - highly sophisticated cognitive abilities. And they can improve those abilities through education. These baseless generalities don't show much 'cognitive ability'. |
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| ▲ | literalAardvark a day ago | parent [-] | | There's plenty of evidence for those who want to learn instead of split hairs. I'd start with a search on "general intelligence factor". | | |
| ▲ | paulryanrogers a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Is this the 'g' factor? What studies do you find compelling? Any done after the early 1900s or on adults? | |
| ▲ | mmooss a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So you've got nothing to offer? | | |
| ▲ | foxglacier a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's the scientific consensus not somebody's pet theory. So you don't need to get answers from here, you can get them from Google. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 21 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's the consensus among g-theorists. "The scientific consensus" on cogntive function is Not A Thing. |
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| ▲ | literalAardvark a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I answered your question clearly and in good faith. The rest of your diatribe is US styled epistemic theatre I don't feel the need to engage with, so I didn't. What exactly did your posts contribute? | | |
| ▲ | mmooss 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | You provided nothing but unsupported claims. Nobody else is doing your research for you. |
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| ▲ | zapzupnz a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Are you really lmgtfy-ing on Hacker News? |
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| ▲ | danparsonson a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Though I'd go with innate over genetic.... doesn't make one sound like a white supremacist. Lucky you dodged that bullet, eh? I suppose 'white supremacist-adjacent' is an improvement. |
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| ▲ | literalAardvark 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | That'd be very amusing, since I'm not white. But no, it just happens to be fairly well documented that some people run faster hardware than others for a wide variety of nature and nurture reasons. They also run better or worse neural networks on that hardware, which can be educated, but there's no replacement for displacement. | | |
| ▲ | mmooss 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Plenty of white supremecists and their supporters are not white. Plenty are, and say they aren't. > it just happens to be fairly well documented that some people run faster hardware than others for a wide variety of nature and nurture reasons. Vague statements like that are unfalsifiable. Of course there are variations in performance - that's absolutely undeniable; mostly likely I type faster or slower than you do. The questions are, how big are those variations and how much are they dependent on what the person is conceived with biologically. If you want to claim anything, you need to be much more specific about those issues. |
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| ▲ | foxglacier a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Good on you for admitting it, but this popular way of being intentionally wrong just because some baddies have stuck their flag in the hill of truth is anti-scientific. Everyone's trying to protect their personal image at the expense of honesty. I'm constantly encountering people who have wrong beliefs about this stuff because the scientific conclusions are so well hidden from mainstream writing on the topic. Even the person replying to you seems shocked to hear that intelligence is innate. Blank-slatism and everybody's-a-winner has infected popular understanding of intelligence. |
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| ▲ | zozbot234 a day ago | parent [-] | | Except that raw unadjusted IQ scores for even the "hardest" and supposedly most culturally unbiased test (Raven's Progressive Matrices) have consistently shown a secular gain of about one standard deviation over 30-to-40 years, due to the so-called Flynn Effect; with much of it concentrated at the low end. The whole notion that these tests simply measure some kind of purely "innate" ability is highly implausible to say the least; even more so when you compare across different cultural subgroups and even totally different countries. | | |
| ▲ | raddan a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Not to mention that any test of “innate” ability should not be affected by training or practice, but all known tests of supposed innate ability are. Even Binet (yes, the guy who intended the IQ test) found substantial practice effects; these effects were replicated by Gibson (1969). | |
| ▲ | foxglacier 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's obviously both genetic and environmental. You can limit people with a detrimental environment (extreme example - inflicting brain damage) but cant improve them beyond their their natural ceiling. And yes, tests don't purely measure that innate ceiling. | | |
| ▲ | littlestymaar 11 hours ago | parent [-] | | > It's obviously both genetic and environmental. You can limit people with a detrimental environment (extreme example - inflicting brain damage) but cant improve them beyond their their natural ceiling. The question besides the obvious is how close to their ceiling the average human is (or even the 90th percentile). Because the entire discourse about “ceiling” implies that people are somewhat limited by their ceiling. But if 90% of the people are plateauing at 30% of their ceiling because of environmental factors, it makes little sense to talk about the ceiling at all. | | |
| ▲ | Izkata 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Given the Flynn effect ended in the 90s in several countries, I'd say the western world is close to it. | | |
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