Tetronian comments on The Need for Universal Experience Classes - Less Wrong

-8 [deleted] 19 October 2011 12:38PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 19 October 2011 06:47:20PM *  5 points [-]

They were talking about the Lottery. Winston looked back when he had gone thirty metres. They were still arguing, with vivid passionate faces. The Lottery, with its weekly payout of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention. It was probable that there were some millions of proles for whom the Lottery was the principal if not the only reason for remaining alive. It was their delight, their folly, their anodyne, their intellectual stimulant. Where the Lottery was concerned, even people who could barely read and write seemed capable of intricate calculations and staggering feats of memory. There was a whole tribe of men who made a living simply by selling systems, forecasts and lucky amulets.

This is fictional evidence--are there real examples of otherwise unintelligent people being able to perform intricate calculations in specific domains? Most of the people I know who play the lottery don't think about the probabilities involved, which is probably why they're playing the lottery in the first place.

I disagree.

As a college student, I second shend's statement that high schoolers are lazy. It's one thing to engage students who are interested in their studies and enjoy thinking, but engaging the average high school student is much harder.

Comment author: gwern 20 October 2011 01:35:21AM 7 points [-]

I do not know if this is strong enough evidence for you, but I offer the following text dump for consideration; from "The Predictive Value of IQ":

...Nuñes (formerly Carraher) has done a series of studies over the years investigating the mathematical skills of Brazilian street children (Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1985; Carraher, Carraher, & Schliemann, 1987; Nuñes, 1994; Nuñes, Schliemann, & Carraher, 1993). The example of Brazilian street children is an apt one for the illustration of the construct of practical intelligence, because as Nuñes points out, the survival of these children is threatened on a daily basis. If the children are unable successfully to run a street business, and lapse into crime, the chances of their being murdered are quite high. Nuñes has found that the same children who can do the mathematics to run a successful street business are often failing math in school or otherwise show only minimal competence in math in academic settings. Similar results have been obtained by Ceci and Roazzi (1994), suggesting the findings are generalizable across investigators. As pointed out by Anderson, Reder, and Simon (1996), one needs to be careful about the exact conclusions one draws from studies such as these. For example, the exact computations required in one situation may not be the same as the computations required in another. But in terms of [End Page 25] adaptive functioning, the point is that the people who are best able to adapt in one circumstance often are not those best able to adapt in another.

In a related study conducted near Kisumu, Kenya, we found that children's knowledge of the use of natural herbal medicines to combat illness is significantly negatively correlated with scores on tests of crystallized (Mill Hill Vocabulary in English and a comparable test in Dholuo, the home language) abilities (Sternberg, Nokes, et al., in press). In other words, practical intellectual skills were actually inversely associated with academic intellectual skills.

Lave (1988) also did related studies among Berkeley, California, housewives. She found that the same housewives who had no trouble doing comparative price calculations in the supermarket (before the introduction of unit pricing) were unable to complete most of the problems on a standard paper-and-pencil test of mathematical knowledge given in a classroom.

Investigating a different population, Ceci and Liker (1986) found that men's handicapping abilities for predicting outcomes of horse races were unrelated to their IQs. Moreover, successful handicappers had an average IQ of only about 100, despite the complexity of the handicapping task.

Ceci and Bronfenbrenner (1985) looked at quite a different task. They gave children a time-estimation task either in a classroom or at home. Strategies and quality of performance were very different in the two settings, suggesting that the context in which the judgments were made had a major impact both on how they were made and how well they were made.

In a very different context, Fiedler and Link (1994) reported that IQ positively predicted leadership performance under conditions of low stress but negatively predicted this same performance under conditions of high stress; in contrast, acquired knowledge of the kind that is essential for practical intelligence positively predicted leadership performance under conditions of high stress but negatively predicted under conditions of low stress.

Also somewhat relevant http://xa.yimg.com/kq/groups/190222/1077302733/name/Kwon is a brain imaging study of Korean Go players; the expert professional Go players averaged IQ of 93, the control group 101.

Comment author: lessdazed 20 October 2011 02:02:58AM 1 point [-]

From the Go paper:

Conclusions The results of our study revealed that Baduk experts develop structural fronto–cingulo–striato–thalamic connectivity, as evidenced by increased FA of WM tracts, as compared with those of non-experts. These structures are associated with cognitive processes that include spatial perception, attention, working memory, executive control, and problem solving (Chen et al., 2003). In addition, the experts' increased FA in inferior temporal areas indicates that, unlike the situation in controls, task-specific templates had developed in experts' neural mechanisms, enabling the efficient operation of tasks related to playing Baduk (de Rover et al., 2008). Right hemispheric dominance in Baduk experts also suggests that the involved tasks are mainly spatial processes (Thomason et al., 2009). Therefore, this study demonstrated that brain training, such as that required to become an expert Baduk player, might cause structural changes in the brain that are particularly helpful with regard to engaging in such foundational tasks as learning, abstract reasoning, problemsolving, and self-control.

So, they got (? or chose the profession because they were?) good at a number of specific tasks that are components of IQ, but they aren't good at IQ measuring tasks overall.

Comment author: gwern 20 October 2011 03:52:42PM 1 point [-]

This Go paper is one of the things I point to as evidence that while strategy games may benefit you cognitively early on, there are diminishing returns and they probably set in well before expert skill levels.

Comment author: KPier 20 October 2011 12:27:51AM *  2 points [-]

As a college student, I second shend's statement that high schoolers are lazy.

Do you think most high schoolers are more lazy than most college students? If so, is this because people actually develop more of a work ethic by college, or because lazy people never even make it that far?

I think most people are probably lazy, if by "lazy" we mean reluctant to consider ideas outside their comfort zone or seek knowledge for its own sake. But I haven't seen any reason to believe that laziness is more prevalent in high school than in the general population.

It probably is more prevalent in high school than college, just because the college application process, especially to selective schools, strongly selects against laziness.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 October 2011 12:58:40AM *  2 points [-]

I don't have nearly enough evidence to have high confidence in this conclusion, but I think high schoolers are intellectually lazier simply because of the selection effect of the college application process. I have noticed (warning: anecdotal evidence!) that college students (myself included) tend to procrastinate a lot more, but that may only be because they have increased freedom to do so.

But I haven't seen any reason to believe that laziness is more prevalent in high school than in the general population.

And you might be right--I don't think it's an easy task to convince the general population to think, either. (Plus, "general population" includes people who don't have a high school education.)

Comment author: Barry_Cotter 19 October 2011 07:15:31PM 2 points [-]

-are there real examples of otherwise unintelligent people being able to perform intricate calculations in specific domains?

I can't speak to their intelligence, but if you hang out with sports nerds for long enough you will encounter one with an encyclopediac grasp of it, play by play recall of numerous matches, nigh on eideitic recall of statistics, and sophisticated ability to relate and manipulate said statistics. Intellectual curiosity and intelligence may be linked but it's not a necessary link.

Comment author: lessdazed 19 October 2011 08:03:36PM 0 points [-]

I second shend's statement that high schoolers are lazy.

I third it, I just don't think that's much of a barrier to getting them to think.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 October 2011 03:21:16AM *  3 points [-]

Can you elaborate on this? As far as I can tell, laziness is definitely a barrier to thinking about thinking. For example, if I wanted to teach a group of students about a cognitive bias, they would have to do some reading about it or at the very least listen to a presentation or lecture. But a great deal of students simply don't want to put forward the effort to read a passage or listen to a lecture, and would rather just sit there and stare at their desks.

(This is not idle speculation--in early 2010, when I was in high school, I read Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks and was so amazed by the material that I taught a ten-minute lecture on it to a 12th grade history class and three 9th grade biology classes as an extra-credit project. When I talked to people afterward to get feedback, what shocked me the most was how many people were only idly listening and not thinking about what they heard.)

Comment author: lessdazed 30 October 2011 07:26:58AM *  0 points [-]

For example, if I wanted to teach a group of students about a cognitive bias, they would have to do some reading about it or at the very least listen to a presentation or lecture.

I'm thinking that there is probably a way to get them to gamble and lose money (grades?) for employing a bad heuristc (best), or having those who think most clearly make the most money.

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