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James_Miller comments on A Gamification Of Education: a modest proposal based on the Universal Decimal Classification and RPG skill trees - LessWrong
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Comments (80)
That is junk science.
The correlation between IQ and workplace performance is extremely robust and very well established.
See Intelligence: Knowns and Unknowns
Well thank goodness I'm on a holiday and can actually afford to read all that. Nevertheless, such a violent flipflop of opinions would make me dangerously closer to epistemic learned helplessness, i.e. giving up on learning new stuff because of not feeling confident that I can tell good arguments from bad ones when they come from experts after getting burned one time too many.
That is a dangerous state for a rationalist to be in. so would you please be a dear and have a look at that book to figure out how precisely it junk-scienced me and the rest of its readers? It would really help me out and I'd really be grateful for that.
Also, I have a vested interest in believing in the "only deliberate practice matters" thesis. I used to feel having a high IQ obliged me to get excellent results with little effort, and every time that didn't happen I felt disappointed in myself and that I didn't live up to some weird standard. Nowadays I only believe in working as hard as possible for as long as possible, and it serves me much better.
I'm afraid I haven't read that exact popularization, but if it's drawing on Ericsson's research as it sounds like, the explanation is easy enough: Ericsson's points are valid largely because the studies are correlational, do not control for underlying factors or Matthew effects, and suffer from heavy range restriction in he's already looking at people who are selected or self-selected to be elites.
(ie. suppose someone studied MIT physicists with a mean IQ of 150 and discovered that in this group of physicists, Conscientiousness predicted better than IQ which would go on to win Nobels. This is a possible result, and what this has actually demonstrated is "you have to be incredibly brainy to be a MIT physicist in the first place, but once you've gotten that, then other things are also important; which is another way of saying that if we look at the general population, like all the people from IQ 60 to 150, IQ is the overwhelming most important trait" but this is easily popularized to "IQ doesn't matter!")
As a practical matter, it's probably a good idea to believe hard work matters and deliberate practice matters. If you could somehow improve your intelligence, then it might be important to hold correct beliefs about IQ being far more important than practice; but unfortunately, IQ is pretty much fixed and all that's left is to make the best use possible. Given people matched on IQ and other traits, and Conscientiousness will be pretty important.
However, in other contexts, it's very important to hold the correct beliefs about the relative value of intelligence and 'just work harder' - if we were discussing iodization or immigration or whether someone should go into debt for college, for example. Many population-level questions will rest far more on intelligence than other traits.
Understanding which context we're in can be a hard balancing act, and especially difficult when reading papers making statistical claims (did they control for IQ? Should they control? Or for education? Or for range restriction? Or for reliability of their metrics?); I try to be consistent and clear in any discussions of Conscientiousness or IQ which context we're in and which we should value or ignore, but I don't think I always succeed.
Well thank you very much!
.. sigh This may be the first time I find some actual use for compartmentalization, and I can't do it anymore...
Imagine a world where 50% of your results are genetically determined and 50% of your results are hard work. What would be the best strategy for success in that world, assuming that you already have decent genes? It would be working hard. Not working 50% hard, but working 100% hard.
Seems like you found the right strategy for the wrong reasons. You can keep the strategy; you don't have to blindly reverse your decisions.
I dunno, at a certain point the marginal utility of one unit of hard work will be less than the marginal utility of one unit of leisure, and it's well possible that the point at which that happens depends on how genetically good you are.
You should work 100% hard on whatever you're working on when you're working on, but there might still be cases where you should think about the nature/nurture ratio to get the best outcome.
If outcomes are all about hard work, doggedly aiming for a rare high-reward position that requires a large amount of skill, like a quantitative analyst on Wall Street or a professional athlete, can be a good high risk / high reward strategy. But the more you know outcomes to be affected by genetic talent, the faster you'd want to recognize that some goals are beyond you and direct your 100% effort elsewhere if you find your genetic talent lacking, because then the people who also put in 100% effort but have more genetic talent than you will take all the positions no matter how much effort you put in.