[loewenskind]

>Isn't there a contradiction here:

I don't see it as a contradiction. I don't feel that we all must be equal (as in: exactly as good at everything as each other). But I feel that deciding "hey, we're not all equal" can be used as a cop out, even if true. That is, if you strive for the possibly impossible goal of making every student a PhD student whatever it takes you probably wont achieve it but you stand a much better chance of making a breakthrough with your under achievers than you would if you just said "60% of the kids in this class have no chance, so why bother".

>If the evidence supports the conclusion, we must accept it regardless of our personal biases.

We must give it credit, but we can still believe that there is more to the story until it can be proven that there isn't.

>In fact I am very close to someone working on this very topic - determining the optimal learning strategy for children to maximize their learning rate.

Awesome. I wish you all success in this most important of endeavors. Don't take my comments personal. I don't know you so I unless you explicitly state your position I tend to address what I expect most people's to be.

[corruption]

We'll agree to disagree then, both on the structure of the minds of people who make true breakthroughs and your views on epistemology :)

I don't take anything personally at all, and hope you didn't either :)

[loewenskind]

I think the main point of our disagreement is around rationalism. You seem to be presenting the point as "whatever the evidence shows now must be accepted". It is my belief that most everything we "know" today is incomplete or even wrong in some fundamental way. From that point of view, if what I think is your view is being "rational" then only the irrational can ever truly further our knowledge.

Now of course when making actual decisions I would go with what the evidence shows today. That's the safest bet. And for breakthroughs, of course I would focus on the "brightest" since that is likely to have a much larger impact [1]. I just hope someone isn't excepting status quot.

As far as my views on the nature of knowledge: my view is that we don't know know enough to even speculate. We're learning more but it's slow going. Language seems to have a big effect on knowledge so personally I wish more research were directed in this area [2]. I think we would learn more faster than we do with current methods.

[1] That is, if I invest a tremendous amount of work and can only get every student to "average" then I could have potentially gained more by pushing the "brightest" students even further. Then maybe they could come up with the breakthrough. :)

[2] It is a hard question due to ethical considerations. The simplest test method is unthinkable as it would mean destroying the lives of some number of people to test the effects of lack of language. Of course it was recently pointed out in an article that appeared here that such methods aren't needed. Any time a child is born deaf to hearing parents there is a strong chance they will grow up without language. But this brings another ethical question: instead of studying them after they've grown up shouldn't we be preventing them from growing up without language? But at the very least we could find as many adults as possible who are already in this state.