7 ms·

This supports my thesis that all human population has the potential to be as smart as any phd graduate. All you need is to put the work required to get there. i

by fmora 16y ago

This supports my thesis that all human population has the potential to be as smart as any phd graduate. All you need is to put the work required to get there. i.e. put thousands of hours into it and you will become a master of your field. For whatever reason a lot of people have been down voting me for saying this. They believe that not everybody can obtain a phd. That only some people are capable of becoming educated to the level of a phd. I wonder if it is because hacker news is filled with elitists. Am I offending egos by saying that a person in a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as a person that currently has a phd? Is it that educated people like to believe that they somehow are special and separate from people that did not go to college? Granted that if you went to college you will be more educated than a person that did not. But that uneducated person can reach the same level of intellect as you if he wants to, as long as he/she decides to invest the amount of work required. We are all stupid monkeys. Pretty much all of us have the same potential to learn. Frankly it completely stomps me that people would think otherwise. I took it as universal knowledge that all humans have almost the same potential to learn. Yes there will be variations but all in all they will be statistically insignificant. Apparently I was wrong in my belief and some people think that only a chosen few can become as highly educated as a phd.

eitally 16y ago
fwiw, I agree with you (minus individuals who are mentally handicapped due to congenital problems) and whenever I've posited the same I've been rebuffed, too. I don't know why.
- orangecat 16y ago
  Just so I understand your position before disagreeing with it: you're claiming there are exactly two levels of human intelligence, and if you're not mentally retarded you have exactly the same potential for intellectual achievement as everyone else in that class?
  - jamesbritt 16y ago
    That was my reading of the assertion, and similar claims that everyone, excepting the obviously retarded, can potentially (assuming effort + time) achieve the same level of intellectual mastery. Is it somehow impolite, or demonstrably incorrect, to assert that there are people who are in fact stupid? Or people who are quite functional but not particularly bright? That there are people who, through no fault of their own, could never achieve certain intellectual goals no matter how much time or effort because they are simply not mentally capable? Life experience tells me otherwise.
  - rsaarelm 16y ago
    I picked up the same idea too, and it does seem problematic. I can sorta buy an idea of there being some kind of Turing-completeness equivalent property for human minds, where all minds who have this property can in principle do the same mental work, given enough time. What I don't buy is all people being able to do the same degree of mental work in the same time, which is basically what the PhDs for all stance seems to require. If it would take someone 30 years instead of 5 to learn the stuff required to finish a PhD thesis, it's not practical for that person to pursue a PhD. The developmentally disabled, stroke patients and others are unignorable cases of people who need much longer than others to learn things. It's a pretty big stretch to assume that the learning speed would be so close to same for all the rest of the people that there wouldn't be any significant fraction of people who learn so slowly that pursuing a PhD isn't a practical option for them.
corruption 16y ago
It would be nice to believe that, but I would posit that output per unit of input differs. Given infinite time, anyone could obtain a Ph.D, but some people just find it easier than others. Those that find it easier are much more likely to do something great than someone who finds it extremely difficult and time consuming. I know doing maths and statistics at university that there were many spending more than 40 hours a week studying and still obtained poor grades AND more importantly had less understanding than others doing no study. Claiming that we are all equal is nice, but ignores the fact that the fundamental relationship between time invested and output is not constant between individuals. Some of us run faster, some of us are leaner, some of us have beauty, some of us greater knowledge acquisition rates. There's nothing elitist about it in my opinion. I'm never going to be michael jordan, just like I'll never be Terrence Tao or Knuth, and I'm okay with that!
- fmora 16y ago
  You will never be a michael jordan but if you practice hard enough you will become close. That is my point. The differences that you are talking are superficial differences. And how can you compare beauty to potential to learn? Beauty is on the eye of the beholder. Even in races the difference between the top world runner and his peers is not by much. Genetically speaking we humans are pretty much identical. Which means that all of us are given almost the same amount of tools to exist in this world. >>I know doing maths and statistics at university that there >>were many spending more than 40 hours a week studying and >>still obtained poor grades AND more importantly had less >>understanding than others doing no study. This is just an anecdote and you are using this as your entire argument to disagree with me. I find this incredibly disturbing. The first thing that a genius will tell you is that he had to work really hard at it. That nothing was free. He had to spend hours upon hours working at it.
  - corruption 16y ago
    Minute differences in genomes lead to large differences in phenotype. Ever heard of databases of SNP's or CNVs? A single base change can make a world of difference. Actually, I'm not basing this on anecdote, as there is a ton of literature to back me up here. The first thing I searched for is quite remarkable for a single generation: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r44140388u23t768/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/r44140388u23t768/ But, without going to the extensive literature, are you seriously claiming that the rate of learning is EXACTLY the same for every human, or that the variance is so tiny that differences are negligible? Both claims are provably false if you have a quick look at the literature.
pgbovine 16y ago
I wonder if it is because hacker news is filled with elitists. wow, i'd be careful about throwing this stone on HN. this place is filled with anti-elitists --- e.g., high school and college drop-outs, self-taught hackers, anti-formal-education zealots, and generally f* the system type people. if you're accusing them of being elitists, then your definition is pretty broad ;)
- fmora 16y ago
  I worded that wrong. I meant to ask whether there are elitist in Hacker News.
- philwelch 16y ago
  "Elitist" is a funny word. The anti-elitists you describe certainly don't believe in an official society elite delineated by academic degrees, but a natural elite of talented individuals, wherever they may come from, is a different matter.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
heed 16y ago
I'd agree that everyone has potential to master anything, but that potential isn't equal. That is, I don't see everyone having the ability to master something in the same time frame. This might be due to differences in aptitude, and or the lack of the ability to practice efficiently, and possibly other variables.
philwelch 16y ago
For the record I think a lot of people who run hot dog stands are a great deal smarter than a lot of Ph.D.'s. Formal education and intellectual training are not the same thing. Very few people have the inclination or desire to accomplish intellectual greatness, though, and that's enough to keep most people out regardless of ability. When you only look at people who have that inclination and desire, many people openly admit to lacking ability compared to others. The idea that all humans have the same potential to do anything is, frankly, something people tell their children as an encouragement to work hard, but is not really true, or honestly believed by adults. Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional athlete or a tenured physicist. Everyone who's tried to teach has noticed that some people pick things up better than others. I'm not talking about the people who aren't interested or don't care or don't work hard enough--even among the motivated students, some do better than others. And no matter how hard you work to pick up the people who are behind, they can't quite catch up. And if you invest just as much effort in the better students they only get further ahead. Consider the evidence. How likely is it, really, that there exists some undiscovered, magical way of evening the divide?
- fmora 16y ago
  >>Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional >>athlete or a tenured physicist. Many of the people that think this way always think that it has to do with talent. The thing is that the road to get there is paved with thousands of hours of hard work. That people can be lazy and make excuses I do no dispute. However, we all have the potential to do almost anything we want, as long as you are willing to work for it. The differences that you are talking about have to do more with environment and culture.
  - philwelch 16y ago
    No, even if you only look at the people who work really hard for a very long time, some of them do better than others, and some of them just plain don't make it. I'm not talking about the guy that watched TV six hours a day instead of studying--I'm talking about the guy that works his ass off and doesn't keep up with the top of the class. You've never meet--or even heard of--those people?
nandemo 16y ago
> Am I offending egos by saying that a person in a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as a person that currently has a phd? Is it that educated people like to believe that they somehow are special and separate from people that did not go to college? I'm not trying to prove your thesis is false, but that sort of argument is not conducive to interesting debate. You're preemptively psychologizing people who disagree with you. And it's not like you're saying something obviously true -- so that people who disagree with must have hidden motives. On the contrary, your thesis goes against our everyday experience, not only because we know people who are stupider than us, but also people who are much smarter than us.
- fmora 16y ago
  You said: -------> On the contrary, your thesis goes against our everyday experience, not only because we know people who are stupider than us, but also people who are much smarter than us. <------- This reminds me of how a couple of hundred years ago it was obvious that the earth was flat and how we were the center of the universe.
  - nandemo 16y ago
    I said: I'm not trying to prove your thesis is false. I'm saying that your thesis is not obviously true. So instead of assuming people have a hidden agenda, you need evidence to convince people that your thesis is true. But I'm repeating myself...
  - tome 16y ago
    It reminds me of how water is wet and how fire is hot. I think you'd be better off introducing some supporting evidence if you wish to discuss your hypothesis that everyone has the same potential for intellectual greatness.
fmora 16y ago
This my response to all the people that have disagreed with me and have asked me for proof. There have been studies like "The Bell Curve" book were they attempt to demonstrate how intelligence varies among people. You can read more about the book here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve Basically it supports the view of many people here that there are great variations of intelligence among people. An article that counteracts this type of belief to some degree is this one: http://minority-health.pitt.edu/archive/00000515/01/Intelligence,_Race,_and_Genetics.pdf http://minority-health.pitt.edu/archive/00000515/01/Intellig... I'm not trying to make this a talk about race but unfortunately these are the closest things I could find that talk about human intelligence overall. As a young person I used to believe that some students in my class were really indeed smarter than most of us. They always seemed to get good grades. I used to think that you were either smart or not and that there was nothing you could do about it. As a young mind thinking like this was very destructive. Who knows how I got out of it but I finally discovered in high school that just by studying regularly I could achieve good grades even if I were not smart. That I could get as good grades as the smartest kids in class and that sometimes I was "the smart kid". Though I knew that it was only because of the hard work I put in. I've seen a lot of friends doing really bad at school and that once they started putting some real work their grades started to improve. The only time that I've seen work made no difference was with kids that had mental disabilities. Eventually by reading the biographies of several successful people like Buffet, Edison, Einstein, Newton, Trump, Galileo and books like "All The Money In The World" by Peter W. Bernstein And Annalyn Swan I came to the conclusion that what really makes the difference is hard work. All of the successful people that I read about had one thing in common, they worked really hard to become successful. I have to admit that I'm still highly surprised that people would disagree with me on this one. I'm still in shock. I know I'm going to get down voted for this but I'm highly suspicious that a lot of people like to believe that some people are smarter than others to make themselves feel special. Honestly I think is complete B.S. and I'm calling you guys out on this one. You guys are all full of B.S. Most human beings posses the same level of intelligence. Thinking that only some people are smart enough to do certain things is like poison. I certainly do not want to be around people that think like that since if you do they will poison you too. And yes, I won't let let door hit me on the way out.
- deleted 16y ago
loewenskind 16y ago
I agree with the basis of your theory but I think it is a bit more complex than this. Previously I was in the "language first" camp, but a recent submission here has modified my beliefs on that. But I still think certain things must be learned in childhood to have a chance at reaching your maximum potential. For example, as far as I understand, unless you learn a language as a child you will never be able to get to native speaker level no matter how long you are immersed in the language (though you can probably get so good that only a native speaker would notice your mistakes). I also think saying "if you work hard enough" is a bit of an oversimplification. Technically I believe that's true, but practically people first have to realize that they actually can learn X. For example, if someone was always taught X poorly they may assume they are incapable of learning it and, therefor, wont ever put in the work required (assuming the effort would be wasted). I do think every non-mentally handicapped person has the same potential as a child [1], which is why investing heavily in teaching (and teaching of teaching!) is so critical. An average teacher can teach average people pretty well, but an outstanding teacher can teach anyone. I think a lot of people today assume those that "don't get it" are just genetically of lesser intelligence. In my experience their brains are just wired differently and because of that it takes a different strategy to get them to have the "aha!" moment. I think the reason many people believe that some people are just genetically stupid is they look at e.g. what's happening politically in the US, how some of these people can't be reasoned with, make life changing decisions based on pure emotion, etc., etc. and just assume "well, they're simply too stupid to be capable of anything else". I think these people simply haven't learned how to learn nor how to reason. It may well be too late to reach them now but I think there was a time that each and every one of them could have been. And that's important to know when planning the future. [1] Same potential as in: everything child A can learn/do adds up to the same value as everything child B can learn/do even if child A and B both excel at very different things. In other words, I think people's mind are different, I just don't think some people are genetically "stupider" and nothing can be done about it. In fact I consider such thinking self defeating and even dangerous.
dagw 16y ago
I basically agree, but only to a degree. I agree that essentially everybody is smart enough to get to PhD level in any subject. I've seen a couple of examples myself of people with no innate ability and average intelligence get a PhD in math simply by working really hard and really wanting it. That being said I think it takes some sort of innate smarts to take it several levels above that. To be the person who comes up with the sort of fundamental breakthrough that only shows up once a decade or so. That takes something beyond simply putting in the work, and I don't think everybody has that potential.
roel_v 16y ago
People who have the stamina to finish a big project are already, by that measure alone, 'special'. Not that many people can slog on for so long working on something with an ill-defined goal and no clear steps to perform to get to that goal. Apart from that I still don't think you're right. Take an extreme example: someone with a mental deficiency. I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's possible to find people in a home for the disabled who are, intellectually, in absolute terms incapable of getting a degree. With that as the 'lower' value, intelligence of others is a sliding scale all the way up to the geniuses of our world. Somewhere along this line, there is a cutoff point at which it becomes possible to get this degree. So, it must logically follow that there are a number of people who are not capable of getting it. One can debate on where that cutoff point is. I think it's over the median iq of all people, and that's a prudent estimate. That would mean that 50% of people (I'm not saying this is the cutoff point, I think it's higher, just to illustrate the point I'm making) are incapable, in absolute terms, of demonstrating the intellectual capacity that is needed to get this degree by today's standards.
bmallerd 16y ago
This is like saying if you fed everyone the EXACT same diet as Yao Ming, the world would be full of 7ft+ people. A central tenant of evolutionary theory is that there is intra-species variation (serving as the raw material for natural selection to act upon). The brain is also a physical trait subject to variation. Is it so hard to believe that variations in the brain's structure leads to variations in ability?

by fmora 16y ago

eitally 16y ago

fwiw, I agree with you (minus individuals who are mentally handicapped due to congenital problems) and whenever I've posited the same I've been rebuffed, too. I don't know why.

orangecat 16y ago
Just so I understand your position before disagreeing with it: you're claiming there are exactly two levels of human intelligence, and if you're not mentally retarded you have exactly the same potential for intellectual achievement as everyone else in that class?
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  That was my reading of the assertion, and similar claims that everyone, excepting the obviously retarded, can potentially (assuming effort + time) achieve the same level of intellectual mastery. Is it somehow impolite, or demonstrably incorrect, to assert that there are people who are in fact stupid? Or people who are quite functional but not particularly bright? That there are people who, through no fault of their own, could never achieve certain intellectual goals no matter how much time or effort because they are simply not mentally capable? Life experience tells me otherwise.
- rsaarelm 16y ago
  I picked up the same idea too, and it does seem problematic. I can sorta buy an idea of there being some kind of Turing-completeness equivalent property for human minds, where all minds who have this property can in principle do the same mental work, given enough time. What I don't buy is all people being able to do the same degree of mental work in the same time, which is basically what the PhDs for all stance seems to require. If it would take someone 30 years instead of 5 to learn the stuff required to finish a PhD thesis, it's not practical for that person to pursue a PhD. The developmentally disabled, stroke patients and others are unignorable cases of people who need much longer than others to learn things. It's a pretty big stretch to assume that the learning speed would be so close to same for all the rest of the people that there wouldn't be any significant fraction of people who learn so slowly that pursuing a PhD isn't a practical option for them.

corruption 16y ago

It would be nice to believe that, but I would posit that output per unit of input differs. Given infinite time, anyone could obtain a Ph.D, but some people just find it easier than others. Those that find it easier are much more likely to do something great than someone who finds it extremely difficult and time consuming. I know doing maths and statistics at university that there were many spending more than 40 hours a week studying and still obtained poor grades AND more importantly had less understanding than others doing no study. Claiming that we are all equal is nice, but ignores the fact that the fundamental relationship between time invested and output is not constant between individuals. Some of us run faster, some of us are leaner, some of us have beauty, some of us greater knowledge acquisition rates. There's nothing elitist about it in my opinion. I'm never going to be michael jordan, just like I'll never be Terrence Tao or Knuth, and I'm okay with that!

fmora 16y ago
You will never be a michael jordan but if you practice hard enough you will become close. That is my point. The differences that you are talking are superficial differences. And how can you compare beauty to potential to learn? Beauty is on the eye of the beholder. Even in races the difference between the top world runner and his peers is not by much. Genetically speaking we humans are pretty much identical. Which means that all of us are given almost the same amount of tools to exist in this world. >>I know doing maths and statistics at university that there >>were many spending more than 40 hours a week studying and >>still obtained poor grades AND more importantly had less >>understanding than others doing no study. This is just an anecdote and you are using this as your entire argument to disagree with me. I find this incredibly disturbing. The first thing that a genius will tell you is that he had to work really hard at it. That nothing was free. He had to spend hours upon hours working at it.
- corruption 16y ago
  Minute differences in genomes lead to large differences in phenotype. Ever heard of databases of SNP's or CNVs? A single base change can make a world of difference. Actually, I'm not basing this on anecdote, as there is a ton of literature to back me up here. The first thing I searched for is quite remarkable for a single generation: http://www.springerlink.com/content/r44140388u23t768/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/r44140388u23t768/ But, without going to the extensive literature, are you seriously claiming that the rate of learning is EXACTLY the same for every human, or that the variance is so tiny that differences are negligible? Both claims are provably false if you have a quick look at the literature.

pgbovine 16y ago

I wonder if it is because hacker news is filled with elitists. wow, i'd be careful about throwing this stone on HN. this place is filled with anti-elitists --- e.g., high school and college drop-outs, self-taught hackers, anti-formal-education zealots, and generally f* the system type people. if you're accusing them of being elitists, then your definition is pretty broad ;)

fmora 16y ago
I worded that wrong. I meant to ask whether there are elitist in Hacker News.
philwelch 16y ago
"Elitist" is a funny word. The anti-elitists you describe certainly don't believe in an official society elite delineated by academic degrees, but a natural elite of talented individuals, wherever they may come from, is a different matter.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

heed 16y ago

I'd agree that everyone has potential to master anything, but that potential isn't equal. That is, I don't see everyone having the ability to master something in the same time frame. This might be due to differences in aptitude, and or the lack of the ability to practice efficiently, and possibly other variables.

philwelch 16y ago

For the record I think a lot of people who run hot dog stands are a great deal smarter than a lot of Ph.D.'s. Formal education and intellectual training are not the same thing. Very few people have the inclination or desire to accomplish intellectual greatness, though, and that's enough to keep most people out regardless of ability. When you only look at people who have that inclination and desire, many people openly admit to lacking ability compared to others. The idea that all humans have the same potential to do anything is, frankly, something people tell their children as an encouragement to work hard, but is not really true, or honestly believed by adults. Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional athlete or a tenured physicist. Everyone who's tried to teach has noticed that some people pick things up better than others. I'm not talking about the people who aren't interested or don't care or don't work hard enough--even among the motivated students, some do better than others. And no matter how hard you work to pick up the people who are behind, they can't quite catch up. And if you invest just as much effort in the better students they only get further ahead. Consider the evidence. How likely is it, really, that there exists some undiscovered, magical way of evening the divide?

fmora 16y ago
>>Not everyone is talented enough to be a professional >>athlete or a tenured physicist. Many of the people that think this way always think that it has to do with talent. The thing is that the road to get there is paved with thousands of hours of hard work. That people can be lazy and make excuses I do no dispute. However, we all have the potential to do almost anything we want, as long as you are willing to work for it. The differences that you are talking about have to do more with environment and culture.
- philwelch 16y ago
  No, even if you only look at the people who work really hard for a very long time, some of them do better than others, and some of them just plain don't make it. I'm not talking about the guy that watched TV six hours a day instead of studying--I'm talking about the guy that works his ass off and doesn't keep up with the top of the class. You've never meet--or even heard of--those people?

nandemo 16y ago

> Am I offending egos by saying that a person in a hot dog stand has the same potential to get a phd as a person that currently has a phd? Is it that educated people like to believe that they somehow are special and separate from people that did not go to college? I'm not trying to prove your thesis is false, but that sort of argument is not conducive to interesting debate. You're preemptively psychologizing people who disagree with you. And it's not like you're saying something obviously true -- so that people who disagree with must have hidden motives. On the contrary, your thesis goes against our everyday experience, not only because we know people who are stupider than us, but also people who are much smarter than us.

fmora 16y ago
You said: -------> On the contrary, your thesis goes against our everyday experience, not only because we know people who are stupider than us, but also people who are much smarter than us. <------- This reminds me of how a couple of hundred years ago it was obvious that the earth was flat and how we were the center of the universe.
- nandemo 16y ago
  I said: I'm not trying to prove your thesis is false. I'm saying that your thesis is not obviously true. So instead of assuming people have a hidden agenda, you need evidence to convince people that your thesis is true. But I'm repeating myself...
- tome 16y ago
  It reminds me of how water is wet and how fire is hot. I think you'd be better off introducing some supporting evidence if you wish to discuss your hypothesis that everyone has the same potential for intellectual greatness.

fmora 16y ago

This my response to all the people that have disagreed with me and have asked me for proof. There have been studies like "The Bell Curve" book were they attempt to demonstrate how intelligence varies among people. You can read more about the book here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve Basically it supports the view of many people here that there are great variations of intelligence among people. An article that counteracts this type of belief to some degree is this one: http://minority-health.pitt.edu/archive/00000515/01/Intelligence,_Race,_and_Genetics.pdf http://minority-health.pitt.edu/archive/00000515/01/Intellig... I'm not trying to make this a talk about race but unfortunately these are the closest things I could find that talk about human intelligence overall. As a young person I used to believe that some students in my class were really indeed smarter than most of us. They always seemed to get good grades. I used to think that you were either smart or not and that there was nothing you could do about it. As a young mind thinking like this was very destructive. Who knows how I got out of it but I finally discovered in high school that just by studying regularly I could achieve good grades even if I were not smart. That I could get as good grades as the smartest kids in class and that sometimes I was "the smart kid". Though I knew that it was only because of the hard work I put in. I've seen a lot of friends doing really bad at school and that once they started putting some real work their grades started to improve. The only time that I've seen work made no difference was with kids that had mental disabilities. Eventually by reading the biographies of several successful people like Buffet, Edison, Einstein, Newton, Trump, Galileo and books like "All The Money In The World" by Peter W. Bernstein And Annalyn Swan I came to the conclusion that what really makes the difference is hard work. All of the successful people that I read about had one thing in common, they worked really hard to become successful. I have to admit that I'm still highly surprised that people would disagree with me on this one. I'm still in shock. I know I'm going to get down voted for this but I'm highly suspicious that a lot of people like to believe that some people are smarter than others to make themselves feel special. Honestly I think is complete B.S. and I'm calling you guys out on this one. You guys are all full of B.S. Most human beings posses the same level of intelligence. Thinking that only some people are smart enough to do certain things is like poison. I certainly do not want to be around people that think like that since if you do they will poison you too. And yes, I won't let let door hit me on the way out.

deleted 16y ago

loewenskind 16y ago

I agree with the basis of your theory but I think it is a bit more complex than this. Previously I was in the "language first" camp, but a recent submission here has modified my beliefs on that. But I still think certain things must be learned in childhood to have a chance at reaching your maximum potential. For example, as far as I understand, unless you learn a language as a child you will never be able to get to native speaker level no matter how long you are immersed in the language (though you can probably get so good that only a native speaker would notice your mistakes). I also think saying "if you work hard enough" is a bit of an oversimplification. Technically I believe that's true, but practically people first have to realize that they actually can learn X. For example, if someone was always taught X poorly they may assume they are incapable of learning it and, therefor, wont ever put in the work required (assuming the effort would be wasted). I do think every non-mentally handicapped person has the same potential as a child [1], which is why investing heavily in teaching (and teaching of teaching!) is so critical. An average teacher can teach average people pretty well, but an outstanding teacher can teach anyone. I think a lot of people today assume those that "don't get it" are just genetically of lesser intelligence. In my experience their brains are just wired differently and because of that it takes a different strategy to get them to have the "aha!" moment. I think the reason many people believe that some people are just genetically stupid is they look at e.g. what's happening politically in the US, how some of these people can't be reasoned with, make life changing decisions based on pure emotion, etc., etc. and just assume "well, they're simply too stupid to be capable of anything else". I think these people simply haven't learned how to learn nor how to reason. It may well be too late to reach them now but I think there was a time that each and every one of them could have been. And that's important to know when planning the future. [1] Same potential as in: everything child A can learn/do adds up to the same value as everything child B can learn/do even if child A and B both excel at very different things. In other words, I think people's mind are different, I just don't think some people are genetically "stupider" and nothing can be done about it. In fact I consider such thinking self defeating and even dangerous.

dagw 16y ago

I basically agree, but only to a degree. I agree that essentially everybody is smart enough to get to PhD level in any subject. I've seen a couple of examples myself of people with no innate ability and average intelligence get a PhD in math simply by working really hard and really wanting it. That being said I think it takes some sort of innate smarts to take it several levels above that. To be the person who comes up with the sort of fundamental breakthrough that only shows up once a decade or so. That takes something beyond simply putting in the work, and I don't think everybody has that potential.

roel_v 16y ago

People who have the stamina to finish a big project are already, by that measure alone, 'special'. Not that many people can slog on for so long working on something with an ill-defined goal and no clear steps to perform to get to that goal. Apart from that I still don't think you're right. Take an extreme example: someone with a mental deficiency. I don't think it's a stretch to say that it's possible to find people in a home for the disabled who are, intellectually, in absolute terms incapable of getting a degree. With that as the 'lower' value, intelligence of others is a sliding scale all the way up to the geniuses of our world. Somewhere along this line, there is a cutoff point at which it becomes possible to get this degree. So, it must logically follow that there are a number of people who are not capable of getting it. One can debate on where that cutoff point is. I think it's over the median iq of all people, and that's a prudent estimate. That would mean that 50% of people (I'm not saying this is the cutoff point, I think it's higher, just to illustrate the point I'm making) are incapable, in absolute terms, of demonstrating the intellectual capacity that is needed to get this degree by today's standards.

bmallerd 16y ago

This is like saying if you fed everyone the EXACT same diet as Yao Ming, the world would be full of 7ft+ people. A central tenant of evolutionary theory is that there is intra-species variation (serving as the raw material for natural selection to act upon). The brain is also a physical trait subject to variation. Is it so hard to believe that variations in the brain's structure leads to variations in ability?