Comment on Rationality Quotes April 2012

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 03:29:37 GMT

I'm inferring more than you said, which isn't making it easy for anyone to understand me. Sorry about that.

If you think your comment discusses an edge case, and that it's a good general practice to praise/reward effort rather than intelligence, then we are in agreement and this conversation should probably end. If you think it's a good general practice to spend the cognitive effort required to scan the world for situations where each type of praise/reward would most help… then I think we're disagreeing.

Long comment following - summary at bottom.

Dweck's work sounded a strong chord for me. I was an intelligent kid often praised for my intelligence, and often very scared that I would be discovered not to be as intelligent as everyone seemed to think I was (because the world was full of stuff that I wasn't immediately good at). I therefore avoided many pursuits that I thought would lead others to discover their previous overestimate of my innate, fixed intelligence. I think there are many children and adults who live in that place (I think that, for example, there is a lot of evidence in Eliezer's writing that he has a fixed conception of intelligence (eg. http://lesswrong.com/lw/bdo/rationality_quotes_april_2012/68n2). I also think that praise of my intelligence in my youth had a strong influence on my forming that model (fixed intelligence, not being good at something immediately is evidence that you're not as clever as they thought).

After reading Dweck's work I've tried hard to alter my model of the universe. Innate intelligence obviously varies between individuals… but that's not very helpful or important to me, and spending time thinking about it doesn't help me much. As an individual with whatever innate capacity I have I benefit much more by considering the very significant impact my efforts have on what I can understand and what I can achieve. Anyone I meet who praises me for my (innate, fixed) intelligence undermines my efforts to focus on what I can change, so hurts my efforts at self improvement. Anyone who praises me for something I can change (effort, technique, practice, diligence, etc.) helps me to become a better person.

I think this is particularly important with children - watching someone praise a child for a fixed trait now causes me to flinch as if that child had just been slapped.

Summary:
I think it likely that there exist edge cases where praising intelligence will boost performance on some particular following task, but I think that in nearly all cases the person thus praised will suffer over the longer term due to the much greater frequency of tasks that that form of praise hurts. I think that most people in most cases will benefit more from Dweck style praise of effort (more precisely, any trait they can control), and that that's more true over longer timeframes.

Discuss