= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Lumifer comments on Things I Wish They'd Taught Me When I Was Younger: Why Money Is Awesome - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (234)
I find it a fun game trying to think of things that money can't buy (but that it is possible for people to get in other ways). It's difficult to think of a lot of answers, especially allowing for strategies like hiring someone to train you to become the kind of person who gets x. The best answer I've been able to come up with is specific anything, such as the friendship of a specific person.
IQ seems to be the one obvious thing. A variety of inner emotional states. A lot of personal achievements. Things like honor.
You can't buy IQ points directly but you can buy things like the CFAR bootcamp to improve your thinking abilities.
On practical level 3 things can limit your intelligence:
1) Available time to spend training
2) Unclear information about which training might help
3) Money to pay for that training
You don't believe there is a cap for IQ that's basically fixed by adulthood?
Do you think that with enough training you can raise someone's IQ from, say, 80 to 120?
It depends very much on the specific person. I think there are plenty of people for which a single heath care intervention can change IQ from 80 to 120. Interventions that an expert with a 2014 level of knowledge could think of.
Do I think I know how to turn the average IQ 80 person to an IQ of 120? No, I don't.
Do I think that if you would give me twenty billion dollar and twenty years that I could research with that money how to turn the average IQ 80 person to an IQ of 120? Maybe. I would consider that plausible.
Adults?
It is well-known that a bunch of things (e.g. iodine deficiency) will suppress your IQ. And yes, there are (genetically) bright kids made stupid by their environment (deficiencies, malnutrition, trauma, etc.) and in a counterfactual universe where these deficiencies don't happen the kids would grow up to have higher IQ.
But almost all of IQ suppression happens in childhood and I don't know of "single heath care interventions" which would raise the IQ of an adult from 80 to 120.
What kind of interventions do you have in mind?
You consider that plausible based on what evidence?
Think e.g. about the economic effect of converting the stupid part of some country's population to smart people. It is enormous and would completely dwarf the 20Bn price which is what, a rounding error in the US Federal Budget?
Rounding error or not, it's not easy to get research funding in that kind of quantity. $20bn is about twice the annual budgets of Stanford, MIT, and Caltech (including the JPL) put together, or about NASA's annual budget (in late 2000s dollars) at the peak of the Apollo program; we're basically talking in terms of creating a major research university out of thin air and devoting it to one problem for two decades. I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that you could develop some quite interesting things with that level of resources, although I'm not neuroscientist enough to speak of intelligence research as such.
In any case, contingent on such a program existing, I think I'd expect its bottom line to be dominated by implementation costs, not R&D. Education on a mass scale isn't cheap. Neither are most medical procedures.
Anything that moves someone from level 10 pain to painfree has probably that effect. If I put a 120 IQ person on level 10 pain I doubt they will get over 80 points on an IQ test.
The mnemonsyth data is laying around for years without anyone analysing them to find more effective algorithm for human learning.
Paying some quant who actually knows something about statistical modelling to take on the task is relatively cheap. Probably less than 100,000$ for a result that matters significantly for improvement of general cognition.
That's an example of a very obvious area to invest money if you care about cognitive enhancement. As a result I don't see the world in a way where a lot of people are seriously trying to advance cognitive enhancement who are understanding the landscape well enough to direct funds to obvious areas. I think it's even worse if you look at nonobvious but potentially good ideas that cost a bit of money.
I do approve of CFAR but we don't live in a world where they have billions of dollars.
Oh please. And how is that relevant to this discussion?
I think you're confused between IQ, learning, and memorization. These three are all different things.
Personally, I don't expect much from the data. From reading through scores of papers comparing minute differences in spacing and getting contradictory results and small improvements, I get the impression that once you've moved from massed to spacing (almost any kind of spacing), you've gotten the overwhelming majority of the benefits, and the rest is basically frippery which needs a lot of domain expertise to improve upon. I understand Peter hasn't looked at the Mnemosyne data much either because it didn't indicate to him that the fancier SuperMemo algorithms were much help.
But I could be wrong. I haven't worked with the Mnemosyne data very much beyond looking at correlating scores with hour of day and day of week; I've been waiting for the data to import to SQL to work with the whole dataset.
(So far I'm up to 81%... I'm hopeful that the 1TB SSD I just ordered will help speed things up a lot, and then I can host the SQL on Amazon S3 or something for anyone who is interested; a quick estimate is that it'll cost me ~$5-10 a month or $60-120 a year to host, but I figure that I can solicit some donations to help cover it. If nothing else, it'll save Peter a lot of time and effort in uploading the raw logs for each person who asks him. EDIT: the SSD sped things up even more than I expected: processing time goes from months to ~25 hours. So I deleted it and am fetching a fresher dataset to process & distribute.)
What do you think are the prospects of a SRS that uses a forgetting curve specific to the individual, by relying on past performance? Has this been tried or considered?
You can already modify the forgetting curve yourself in most SRS based on your needs via a constant. Unless an automatic algorithm goes with the personal best past performance, I expect a continuous decay of performance using such an algorithm for most individuals. I think Anki already automatically modifies intervals of individual cards based on your past performance i.e. the experienced difficulty and instances of forgetting, for example. New cards are not affected by past performance, as far as I know.
Both Peter and Damien think that the further SuperMemo algorithms provide no benefit.
As far as I know they make they don't make that judgement because of data but because they have a feeling the the algorithm isn't better.
Piotr Wozniak who actually did run the data claims:
I don't think that's it's certain that Piotr is right. On the other hand if he's right that's on a scale that matters a great deal.
If you are better at estimating when a card will be forgotten you are also nearer at the point where you do deliberate practice that might make you better at learning.
The second issue is daily memory performance variation. I'm not sure but I think there might be days when the brain doesn't work well at storing memories. If you answer 200 cards on such a day and they get sheduled into the future and you get 20 of the first 30 cards wrong when they get tested again it would make sense to reshedule the rest of the 170 cards to a time closer to the present.
We do have practical issues that the present algorithm doesn't handle well. You can't tell the present algorithm that you want to really know all the facts in a deck at a particular date when you write an exam. Having a stable mathematical theory that can predict when a card would be forgotten can help towards that end.
You might also think about the kind of tools that psychologists use to measure a trait like unconscious racism in the present. Words or images get flashed for short time durations. You might measure unconscious racism the same way through testing people long-term memory for the ability to remember related information.
If you both have the tool of flashing images and the tool that measures the effect of unconscious racism on long term memory you can start asking questions such as: "Which unconscious racism metric changes first and which lags behind?"
The Mnemonsyth data doesn't allow us to answer that question but it can provide a foundation on which the mathematical theories for long-term memory can build that help you to run that experiment.
It can be the basis for learning stuff about the way the human mind works that you can't get by gathering 50 participants and putting them into an fMRI while you ask questions.
Scientific progress often comes from progress in underlying tools and frameworks.
I'm not sure what data he has run; skimming that page doesn't help much. I know he has no dataset comparable to the Mnemosyne dataset because I sent him my initial results a few months ago and he told me so, so it can't be based on that.
Is there anything remotely like that going on in a non-trivial fraction of the population? The closest I can think of is sleep deprivation, but I'd be very surprised if the effect of non-extreme cases of it is more than 10 IQ points, let alone 40.
Purely from introspection, I would bet that sleep deprivation costs me less than 10 points of IQ-test performance but the equivalent of much more than 10 IQ points on actual effectiveness in getting anything done.
My introspection had similar results about sleep deprivation and mental performance before I tried Anki. Now that I've actually measured my performance with the software, I know it can be as low as 50 % of my peak performance measured in latency of recall when even slightly (2-3 hours) sleep deprived. Of course, Anki measures memory, not IQ.
This experience made me update significantly in the direction that my introspection, at least in the case of mental performance, sucks. My social life has suffered as a result of this realization.
Stanley Coren put some numbers on the effect of sleep deprivation upon IQ test scores.
There's a more detailed meta-analysis of multiple studies, splitting it by types of mental attribute, here:
A Meta-Analysis of the Impact of Short-Term Sleep Deprivation on Cognitive Variables, by Lim and Dinges
I've finally managed to upload the data; see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mnemosyne-proj-users/tPHlkTFVX_4/oF61BF44iQkJ
OTOH Lumosity data has been being studied.
Sort of. The data isn't open. There are studies that they published based on the data but it's hard to know how much they cherry picked the studies they decided to publish.
There a huge commercial incentive to make Lumosity training appear better than it actually is.
Spaced repetition system data has other advantages. I don't really care about whether I get better at the task of completing a random Lumosity game. On the other hand getting better at remembering any fact that can be displayed via Mnemonsyth or Anki is a valuable. I would also think that there the performance at Anki correlates with other learning tasks.
SRS data provides you a variable that tells you how good you are at a given information at saving information to your long term memory and it gives you information about how good you are at accessing information from the long term memory.
To recap what we mean when we say IQ, IQ is about how your g-value is relative to other members in your population. What's that g-value? If you take a bunch of different cognitive tests from different cognitive domains that don't depend on "knowledge" and run them through principal component analysis, the first factor that you get is g.
The problem with a regular IQ test is that it takes an hour to complete and that hour doesn't provide additional benefits. If I spend an hour a day with Anki, I do don't do it to determine my cognitive performance but I do it to learn. That means there a possibility of getting a good cognitive score for free.
Another problem with regular IQ tests is that you can train to get better at a particular IQ test. You score better at the task but the test focuses on specific skills that don't generalize to other skills.
Having the large pill of SRS data should allow us to correct for the training effect if we want to do so. We might also find that we don't even want to correct for the effect and the effect generalizes to other domains. SRS has the advantages that we do always get new cards with new information that we want to learn and that diversity might increase the generalizability of SRS training effects.
At the moment I do have an Anki deck which the point of learning the sounds of the IPA. I have a Anki deck with I use to learn to distinguish colors better. I have a deck for french vocabulary. I have decks for biochemistry.
Should Anki usage provide training effects in all those domains, I think there a good chance that this will also increase g.
Can it be done? Is it possible to learn this power? Not from a Jedi.
Using a years-long bootcamp with a brainwashing-type regimen, studying IQ-test questions and strategies day-in and day-out, maybe. Not that there are any studies to the contrary (under such conditions).
I'm talking about actually raising IQ, not about passing tests better.
And here I thought IQ is that which is measured by the IQ test. That, or people are missing a lot of disclaimers and caveats when providing IQ scores when asked for IQ.
Well, if you want to get technical, the IQ in the expression "I'm talking about actually raising IQ" means the underlying general intelligence factor g which is unobservable directly. The results of IQ tests are estimates of that underlying factor g and for different IQ tests these estimates might be pretty good, pretty bad, biased, etc. In particular, if a particular IQ test looks strange to you, its estimate of your g is likely to be biased downwards and, vice versa, if you prepared very diligently for a specific test, its estimate is probably biased upwards.
IQ as often measured is made up of both fluid and crystallized intelligence, and you can certainly raise your crystallized intelligence. (I find learning pretty much anything to be easier now than I found it ten years back, probably due to me now having more background knowledge to draw on and connect things with.) It's the fluid part that's the problem.
Having a highly developed work ethic works too for older people.
Yes, but that's not interesting. What's interesting is whether developing a work ethic works for older people, i.e. whether you can raise conscientiousness. And that's a completely different issue.
I could pay lawyers to threaten with lawsuits people who criticize me. (Only the influential ones.)
I could bribe some bloggers and journalists to write nice things about me. They would be free to refuse the deal anytime, but my lawyers would threaten them against ever disclosing our deals explicitly.
I could pay an assistent to make a list of all things I ever promised, and to remind me of them. Also, whenever possible, to discretely remind me to not promise anything. Another assistant to evaluate everything I say or do, to point out things that might seem dishonorable.
It is very much like a joke that tar is a great baldness cure - if poured on heads of those people who call you bald. Honor and public image are not the same.
Both these actions would significantly reduce your honor, though they might improve your PR image.
Hiring assistants to do IQ-related tasks doesn't raise your IQ for the same reason that purchasing a notepad to jot down things you can't remember doesn't raise your IQ.
Purchasing a notepad does raise your ability-to-do-memory-bottlenecked-things, though, which might be just as good for your purposes.
IQ - I could hire excellent tutors to make myself more intelligent, though definitely only to a certain point. More to the point, I could hire smart people to think of good ideas for me. I'll concede that I couldn't buy the experience of thinking like someone smarter than myself.
emotional states - Hire some psychologists to figure out what experiences causes people to have them, then buy those experiences.
personal achievements - This one I'll give you; you can't buy achieving something for yourself.
honour - This is a very vague term to me.
As far as I know you can't raise your IQ significantly by training.
There is a lot of data about how much can you raise your SAT/GRE/LSAT/etc. scores by tutors and training and that amount is limited, plus most of the gain is test-specific and not properly a rise in g.
That doesn't buy you IQ, that buys you solutions to problems. That's a different thing.
Let's see how that works for achieving moksha (= becoming enlightened) :-D
This is a temporary effect and not guaranteed even then, but psychedelic drugs are definitely a thing you can buy.