[fmora]

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.

[philwelch]

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]

>>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]

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?

[fmora]

My experience has always been that people that do bad in school is because they simply don't work at it. Or that they've neglected years of school and suddenly studying really hard will not make up for all the years of neglect.

Cramming at the end of a semester will not help you at all. It has to be slow and incremental. Baby steps and it has to be consistent. If you keep this up for years eventually you get to a point where it seems that you are learning so much faster than everybody else but it really is just that you have been at it for years already and learning new information using the context of all the previous information makes it a lot easy to learn.

[philwelch]

At most schools that might be true. But it beggars belief that, for instance, any human being could graduate summa cum laude (or even magna cum laude) with an engineering degree at MIT when hundreds of lifelong hardworking and genuinely smart individuals try and fail at that feat every year. (Substitute for MIT any top-flight engineering program.)

[dcx]

I agree. It's inspiring to believe and act like anyone can do anything. But this boils down to the nature-nurture debate - how much of what you do is "built in"? Experimentally this always seems to come out in the 30-70% range. Given evolution, it's pretty much axiomatic that some people are better than others at certain things. It's hard to believe that hard work alone can defeat every sub-optimal genetic combination out there.

(I've met some of the people you describe also.)

[loewenskind]

"Talent" certainly seems to play a role (though "hard work + less talent" will beat "little work + more talent" more often than not unless the talent difference is extreme), but what is talent exactly? What is the nature of it?

I was watching someone take one of these online IQ tests and they were doing a question where you had to add up a bunch of numbers and tell if the result was even or odd. The person reached for a calculator. I laughed and said what the answer was. That person might have thought I was some kind of math genius. In reality, as a software developer I've learned a lot of interesting shortcuts for these kinds of things. I know that if I represent the numbers as base 2 that there is only one bit that has an odd value. I know that even numbers don't have this bit set and can thus be ignored (0 + n = n = id function). I also know that adding an even number of odd numbers gives and even number and an odd number of odds gives an odd. So given this knowledge I don't need to add up anything, just count the odd numbers. Which I can do quite quickly. The thing that made me so much more efficient than the other person was knowing a trick.

Is this the nature of "talent"? If Joe Plumber plays golf for 10k hours and Tiger Woods 10k, could the reason Tiger is so much better be that he knows these "tricks"? He knows how to make his 10k hours be more effective?

>You've never meet--or even heard of--those people?

I have (in the context of programming). The thing that always struck me about them was that they seemed to be working far too hard.

[loewenskind]

>Everyone who's tried to teach has noticed that some people pick things up better than others.

Obviously. Is this a problem with the students themselves, the teachers, the teaching strategy/material or some combination of those things? I think it's rather short sighted (not to mention far too convenient) to just assume it's the student and move on.

[philwelch]

We've spent decades if not centuries looking for better teaching strategies and materials, and we haven't leveled the playing field. Sure, we've made improvements--but after those improvements, even if the slower kids catch up with the quicker kids, the quicker kids get even farther ahead.

How do you even expect to find teaching methods that disproportionately benefit the slower kids over the quicker kids anyway?

[loewenskind]

>We've spent decades if not centuries looking for better teaching strategies and materials

Have we? Then why is the system so incredibly awful today? Why is it for a wide variety of subjects we are using methods that are known to be inferior?

>How do you even expect to find teaching methods that disproportionately benefit the slower kids over the quicker kids anyway?

We know so little about how the brain works, it could be that the method we have today promotes one kind of brain "layout" (if you will) but some other method might promote a different kind.

We just don't know yet. And deciding something based on this lack of knowledge is premature to say the least.

[philwelch]

We're considering the thesis that all human beings (with the possible exception of people with those with certain medical problems) have the same intellectual potential.

We observe that intellectual performance, as far as has ever been measured, varies tremendously by individual. Basically we have a curve of observed intellectual performance.

We also know that we can improve teaching methods. Of this there is no dispute. We can also surmise that the optimal set of teaching methods, applied and distributed in the optimal manner, will influence observed intellectual performance. We can make another curve of how far it's theoretically possible to improve someone's intellectual performance.

We have no idea what the shape of this second curve is. Of the infinite possible shapes it could have, how bloody likely is it that it's exactly the complement of the first curve?

[loewenskind]

>We observe that intellectual performance, as far as has ever been measured, varies tremendously by individual.

In the ways we have measured, yes. The issue here, I think, is that person A who excels to extreme levels in e.g. math doesn't excel at everything. In fact, the better he is at math the worse he might be in different subjects (Einstein example). So when we measure how well people do aren't we just measuring how good they are at passing our tests?

There does seem to be correlation for people who manage to do well at our system and people who end up successful. I'm just not convinced this is the whole story.

[nandemo]

> 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]

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.

[tome]

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.

[nandemo]

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...

[corruption]

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]

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.

[nostrademons]

"And how can you compare beauty to potential to learn?"

There's a big difference between potential to learn and actually learning. Yeah, everyone probably could, if they spent enough time at it, attain Ph.D levels of intellectual achievement. But they won't. At some point, they'll say "This is stupid. I have better things to do with my life," and go do those.

"Even in races the difference between the top world runner and his peers is not by much."

There's not much difference between the top world runner and his peers. There's a huge difference between the top world runner and you or me. The people at the top of the field are already putting in as much effort as is humanly possible. On top of that, they have talent. There're lots more people who also put in as much effort as is humanly possible, but find they're still nowhere close to the top. Usually, they get discouraged by this and choose a passion where their effort gives them a bit more reward.

"Genetically speaking we humans are pretty much identical."

That all depends on how broadly you define "identical". We share about 99.9% of our genes with other humans. We share about 98% with chimpanzees. Most people would say that there's a fairly large difference between a human and a chimpanzee.

In a broad sense, yeah, virtually everything alive is practically identical. A human and an ebola virus are made of the same elemental building blocks, and the roughly million-fold difference in their size and complexity is peanuts compared to the breadth of the universe or the minisculeness of the Planck length.

But most of what makes us human is the ability to discriminate, the ability to look at details and pick out tiny differences. So yeah, there's probably a few milliseconds separating the top two sprinters in the world. But those few milliseconds might as well be an eternity for them. The difference is probably irrelevant for a layperson, but it matters a lot for someone in the sport.

There's a distinction between "everyone is equal" and "everyone is equal at everything they do". The former is a way of defining equality - I find it a pretty useful way, but I recognize that this says more about me than it does about the world. The latter is just factually incorrect.

[fmora]

I would just add a couple of more nines to that 99.9%.

[nostrademons]

You would be wrong then:

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/project/i...

I'm also wrong about the chimpanzees - recent research suggests that they share only 95% of genes with humans, not 98% - but at least I'm not off by a few orders of magnitude.

[fmora]

Read it, it doesn't state up to how many significant digits that percent is accurate so it doesn't prove I'm wrong. They may have just shorten it for brevity.

[corruption]

Even if you did, a SINGLE base change can cause large differences in function. Thats one change out 3 billion, which is many more 9's.

[corruption]

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/

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.

[loewenskind]

>Both claims are provably false if you have a quick look at the literature.

Which literature? You're doing a bit of a (probably unintentional) bait and switch here if you mean the article you submitted. The article talks about learning rates of rats. Rats don't have language. How does having language change the picture [1]? We can't answer that, and therefor we can't know how applicable information about rat learning rates is to humans.

[1] Language certainly makes us more intelligent but there's also been studies that suggest that language may also dampen certain inherent abilities. In other words, maybe some people are born with drastically more "powerful" brains but language removes their advantages effectively evening out the field.

There is way too much we don't know about all this stuff for anyone to have such firm opinions on the mater. Certainly such limiting ones of "well, you're just not smart enough to ever be able to do this".

[corruption]

We are both making a claim. He has provided no evidence at all, and obviously hasn't read the literature.

The claim here is that the variance in learning rate is absolutely tiny. Think about this. He's basically claiming that despite a large known population variances in IQ and MA, there is no variance in learning rate. Despite research showing ritalin increases learning rate in a large fraction of society, this increase was meaningless. Despite verbal learning test normative data showing non zero variance, the variance is still zero.

There is a large body of literature comparing learning rate in different populations in both human and animal models. Take any study on learning rate, even the ones comparing "normal" to abnormal. Go to the methods and find the variance for each group. See it's non-zero, but often so large that differences between groups is hard to see.

Now, if you accept that learning rate has a non-zero variance, and also that learning rate decreases over time (well supported in the literature as well, and no I'm not going to find papers) and that time is finite, then the only conclusion you can make is that some people have a much higher chance of doing well academically. Not only that but there will be some people who despite trying will never be able to do well.

I don't see how stating this shocking to anyone at all - in a population of some 7 billion, there are millions of people >3 standard deviations from the mean.

[loewenskind]

>He's basically claiming that despite a large known population variances in IQ and MA, there is no variance in learning rate.

If this is what he's claiming it's obviously silly. A more plausible claim would be that the rate at which one could learn may be close to equal provided an optimum teaching method is used on a case by case basis.

What I mean here is: I think all the literature you're referencing about learning rates doesn't conclusively prove that it's the students at fault. It could be the teaching method. I've experienced first hand that some people who seemed to not "get it" for some subject could in fact understand it quite well when it was presented in a way they understood (perhaps they didn't see the relevance, perhaps they didn't have the proper frame of reference to understand the normal explanation or a poor grasp of those references).

For me it's just too simple to say "everything's fine, those people are just too stupid. Bad genetics". What if it's not? Then we're throwing away a lot of potential unnecessarily. And part of the reason I suspect this to be the case (to some unknown degree) is because plenty of teaching methods that are still in use are not even the best known method (e.g. how most schools teach a second language).

[fmora]

I do agree that some people may have higher learning rates than others but the differences are too small to matter. I will even agree that there may be outliers, a super tiny amount of the population (although I've never met one, and some that are considered true geniuses have some serious mental deficiencies). Overall the differences when it comes to the general population are too small to be that much significant. The people getting phd degrees have in general the same degree of potential learning ability as the general population.

If there were really that big of a difference between their potential ability to learn as opposed to the general population than they would be passing this down to their kids. Since you claim that the difference is so large than with careful breeding we should be able to produce a super race of geniuses within a couple of generations. That is not how evolution works.

Improvements are infinitesimally small and I don't see why would intelligence be any different. We all evolve as a species, not as individuals. I do not get the sense that we have been getting that much smarter based on our overall written history of the past thousand years.

The reason why some choose to pursue a phd and some don't is the same as why some choose to pursue a career as a painter, musician, writer and why some just choose to be a blue collar worker. It is what they feel passionate about. Some don't feel passionate about anything.

Culture and environment also play a major role and this is really what makes a difference between people choosing to do a phd or not. If you or your peers tell you that you cannot get a phd and believe it then it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.

There are differences in rates in learning but they are not large enough to matter. Culture and environment play a major role.

Edit: Not even Einstein could be called an outlier. He was a bright person but I hardly believe that his potential ability to learn was that much higher than yours or mine. He was even considered mediocre by many of his professors. It really was luck that he happened to be born at the right time in history to be able to make the contribution he did. Even he had to ask one of his mathematician friend for help when doing the mathematics for relativity. (you need to read his biography).

Newton considered a giant of physics was considered a pretty ordinary student. He didn't amaze anybody by showing a high potential for learning during andy of his school years nor did anybody imagine that he would come to make such huge contribution to physics.

[corruption]

Please read the literature. There is plenty of evidence that directly contrasts your viewpoint from the last 50 years.

And by the way, your second point is directly contrasted by the article I linked to.

[fmora]

I read a couple of paragraphs. Is one thing to do a study on rats then to do a study in humans. This doesn't disprove my claim.

Edit: Also, it seems that you are implying that the differences are so huge that we should have a lot of retarded people walking around us. The proof that the gaps in intelligence are small should be obvious by simply looking at your environment. There are people getting phd's from all corners of the world. China, Japan, USA, Mexico, Europe, Africa, Australia. How did those same genes that enable people to get phd's get to places so far away as China or Japan which have been isolated for so long? Even for thousands of years? The thing is that those genes have been there all along for thousands of years.

I think I already agree that there are differences but I do not agree that the differences are huge. Otherwise some of these groups of people, like china or japan who have been isolated for thousands of years, would have serious intelligence differences as the rest of us.

Another example is the Mayans, also isolated for thousands of years from Europe. Independently invented the zero and developed a Mayan calendar unequal on precision until recently. Many of their descendants have gone on to get PHD's. If there were really large differences then some groups of people would not even be able to get PHD's.

Again, the there are differences but they are tiny. Yes, there are studies saying that there are huge differences between groups of people but frankly many of these studies are questionable and sometimes they almost seem to carry a hidden agenda.

[bmallerd]

Please don't cite evolution without fully understanding your claims. Evolution USUALLY works through tiny changes, but in certain situations the changes are dramatic and sweeping. If your proposed experiment was carried out, I would expect such a sweeping change. Further I would posit that a pre-mating barrier would form (in the form of contrasting mating rituals) and speciation would occur after sufficient time.

TLDR: Don't claim that Science supports your view if you don't really understand the theory.

[chegra]

Auto Generate your PhD: http://chegra.posterous.com/auto-generate-your-phd-thesis

I wrote this code as a laugh when I was doing my Master Dissertation.

[pgbovine]

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 ;)

[philwelch]

"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.

[fmora]

I worded that wrong. I meant to ask whether there are elitist in Hacker News.

[roel_v]

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.

[fmora]

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

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/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.

[rimantas]

You did not read all the books not written about millions of people who did hard work and were not successful anyway. You are also mixing different things there — success ant intelligence. Do you feel you are smarter than us saying we are full of BS? Is that the best argument to support your point of view you can get?

[wazoox]

Well it's quite a complex problem really. It's pretty much obvious that some people run faster, some others swim faster, some see better, etc. On average, some people of a given origin perform slightly better on a particular task ( west african at running) in a way not related to the environment (they don't train differently).

Obviously this difference is extremely slim (though enough to make a difference when looking only at the very end of the bell curve, for instance 100-meters world-class runners). It exists nonetheless.

I don't see that there aren't similar differences between individuals in intellectual abilities, emotional, etc. I, for instance, never ever worked at school. Not once, up until 15 or so. Up until late in high school, I was usually the smart guy, the best in class, doing absolutely nothing out of the classroom. My friends who were working as little as I did (sitting next to me in the back of the class, laughing at my jokes, etc) where very bad performers, with notes half mine or less.

Unfortunately, my utter laziness and lack of discipline got me after some time. I'm almost unable to work at anything that doesn't genuinely interest me. That's why I'll probably be unable to ever get a college degree, because you need to at least attend the most annoying courses, and I just couldn't.

At some point, for the hardest problems (or to be top-world-class) you'll need to be both gifted and hard working. At the same time. See Edison, Einstein, Newton, etc.

[dagw]

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.

[loewenskind]

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.

[bmallerd]

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?

[eitally]

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]

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]

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]

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.