Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!markh From: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) Newsgroups: comp.ai Subject: IQ is not static, genetic differences inconsequential. Message-ID: <3612@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> Date: 30 Jul 89 02:13:24 GMT References: <3549@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <4431@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <3558@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <504@dcdwest.UUCP> Sender: news@csd4.milw.wisc.edu Reply-To: markh@csd4.milw.wisc.edu (Mark William Hopkins) Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Lines: 84 * In article <3558@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> I wrote: * * There is nothing that IQ tests measure that is built into the architecture * of our brain in such a way as to remain static throughout our lives. It is all * learnable and teachable. * To assert that IQ is genetic is dangerously wrong for precisely that * reason, that it denies us our human endowment. In article <504@dcdwest.UUCP> benson@dcdwest.UUCP (Peter Benson) writes: * I have seen studies that note a significant correlation in * IQ between twins raised apart. If it is all 'learnable and * teachable' then there would be no such correlation. I do not quite see how the lack of a correlation must follow from what I said above. Making the *inference* is the same as asserting that differences in IQ are genetic, which was the question being raised in the first place. Making the *assertion* you made, though, is not. In fact, I do not even see how the conclusion that "all people are the same" must follow from our being able to invest conscious energy into raising the level of our own genius to any humanly achievable level or even from our having the same maximum capacity -- despite the fact that some people seem to persistently infer it. Therefore, I argue that whether it is learnable or teachable has no bearing on what correlations might exist, if any, but only that the correlations are not static. In fact, I'd go further and state that the positive correlations can even be MADE into negative correlations, if one twin from each of a large number of pairs is taken aside and given special training. So back to my original point: whatever intelligence I possess that is over an beyond what is regarded as normal intelligence is solely the result of my own special training in the learning process itself. If anyone else had used the same technique over the same extensive period of time they would have achieved the same results to the pretty much the same extent. Maybe a little less in virtue of my unusual ancestry, but nothing that couldn't be made up for in due time. ------------------------------------------------------------ * Our human endowment, I surmise, is the exceptional ability for * humans to learn new things. In my experience, every human I * have met has that ability, although some are quicker than * others and some have more persistence than others. Examine the consequence of what you said. To learn WHAT new things? Like: learning how to learn? Learning how to learn raises your ability to learn (including learning how to learn). If so, then you have come around to what I've said all along -- that nothing measured by the IQ test (or any intelligence test) is built into the architecture of our brain in such a way as to remain static throughout our lives -- that it is all learnable and teachable. * I don't know whether the quickness or persistence is innate or * learned. The significance of what I have said all along is that it is not only learnable but is teachable. As far as I am aware, this is not a commonly accepted fact of the psychological or cognitive science communities, though there are many successful programs out there developed in the last couple years essentially based on this observation. It a totally new observation concerning the nature of human intelligence. Past a certain threshold, which I claim to be the ability to comprehend a human language and generate it, genetic differences are no longer of any consequence. The reason being that the ability to infer at arbitrary levels of abstraction must already be present in order to learn and use a human language -- an ability which underlies the origin of all other forms of human intelligence. ------------------------------------------------------------ * How similiar are large computer programs using these measures? (genetic similarity) * how similar are different versions of the same program? * Especially the one that has the factor of 2 speed up over * an earlier version by revising one small loop? Would they be different programs if the program, itself, was responsible for its own improvement? That's where the analogy lies.