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TimothyScriven comments on Parenting Technique: Increase Your Child’s Working Memory - Less Wrong
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As someone who worked in the area of Intelligence training I am very, very skeptical. For example, there was a burst of optimism about training working memory through Dual N-Back tasks, bought about by a revolutionary paper from Jaeggi et al. Then... not quite nothing but close.
I suspect there's a reason that no braining activity, ever, has been consistently shown to improve intelligence at the construct level. It may be that more specific capacities related to intelligence (like working memory) are improved, and that these affect life outcomes and practical capacity to grasp concepts etc, but this has yet to demonstrated to my satisfaction.
Given your prior knowledge you should be skeptical, but given his experience James Miller should also continue to do this training. It's seems low cost - no more stressful for Alex than other activities that parents often force their children to partake in and with a potential very large payoff.
Also, James and Alex are going much further than the constraints of what a study can realistically expect of people. To use an analogy. Suppose you did a study on whether a bench press can increase muscle mass. Suppose you didn't know that bodybuilders exist. Suppose you ran the study for 2 months, with twice per week bench press sessions. Even with a very large sample size, do you think your results would have supported the possibility of extreme body building? I doubt it. It's very hard to push the average person to the level of training needed to see substantial gains. But it doesn't tell us what is possible.
How much of the research is done on children? Did you train children?
What type of learning do you estimate would have the highest expected payoff for a smart 10-year-old? Also, something is causing the Flynn effect so we know that environmental changes can boost IQ.