Take me for an example. On the WISC-III IQ test, my combined score is 145. There are two composite scores that the combined score is made up of, the verbal score (I got 155, the maximum possible on that test) and the performance score (I got 125). There are also a number of different individual capacity scores. On most, I scored above the 95 percentile. On two or three, I scored right in the middle, and in one (visual short term memory) I scored in the first percentile.
Let me repeat that. I scored in the first percentile for the capacity to keep visual information in my short-term memory. (I scored in the 97th for aural short term memory, and 99.9th for linguistic.) How does that change how I solve problems, how I think about the world? Well, I perform many tasks about twice as slowly (but just as accurately) as others with my composite IQ. I have to use other circuits than most people do to solve the same problems, circuits that aren’t as efficient. Circuits that may even work slightly differently, giving me a different perspective on problems, which may be superior or inferior, I don’t know (likely depending on the individual problem). I strongly suspect that this is a large part of the cause of my intense dislike of school.
At the individual level, I can’t see myself ever choosing for my child to have >99.9th percentile linguistic ability and 1st(!!) percentile visual short-term memory, or really any such spectacularly uneven combination of abilities. (I’m not as extreme, but I remember this quote because I empathise with it: I’m high-math low-verbal, my childhood was the mirror of Scott’s, right down to “I don’t know which bothered me more, the praise from effortless success or the criticism from backbreaking toil to get Bs on my own native language’s exams”.)
At the societal level however, there does seem to be a lot of benefit to a cognitive diversity of minds (I’m thinking of Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell’s cognitive democracy essay, and their referencing Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004)’s use of mathematical models to argue that “diversity of viewpoints helps groups find better solutions”). So I guess one direction this line of thinking could go is how we can get the society-level benefits of a cognitive diversity of minds without necessarily having cognitively-uneven kids grow up in pain.
So I guess one direction this line of thinking could go is how we can get the society-level benefits of a cognitive diversity of minds without necessarily having cognitively-uneven kids grow up in pain.
Absolutely, yeah. A sort of drop-dead basic thing, which I suppose is hard to implement for some reason, is just not putting so much pressure on kids—or more precisely, not acting as though everything ought to be easy for every kid. Better would be skill at teaching individual kids by paying attention to the individual’s shape of cognition. That’s difficult because it’s labor-intensive and requires open-mindedness. I don’t know anything about the economics of education and education reform, but yeah, it would be good to fix this… AI tutors could probably improve over the status quo in many cases, but would lack some important longer-term adaptation (like, actually learning how the kid thinks and what ze can and can’t easily do).
I don’t know either, but I think of Tracing Woodgrains’ Center for Educational Progress and the growing Discord community around it as a step in this direction.
Thurston’s case reminds me somwhat of this old LW comment by pdf23ds:
At the individual level, I can’t see myself ever choosing for my child to have >99.9th percentile linguistic ability and 1st(!!) percentile visual short-term memory, or really any such spectacularly uneven combination of abilities. (I’m not as extreme, but I remember this quote because I empathise with it: I’m high-math low-verbal, my childhood was the mirror of Scott’s, right down to “I don’t know which bothered me more, the praise from effortless success or the criticism from backbreaking toil to get Bs on my own native language’s exams”.)
At the societal level however, there does seem to be a lot of benefit to a cognitive diversity of minds (I’m thinking of Cosma Shalizi and Henry Farrell’s cognitive democracy essay, and their referencing Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004)’s use of mathematical models to argue that “diversity of viewpoints helps groups find better solutions”). So I guess one direction this line of thinking could go is how we can get the society-level benefits of a cognitive diversity of minds without necessarily having cognitively-uneven kids grow up in pain.
Absolutely, yeah. A sort of drop-dead basic thing, which I suppose is hard to implement for some reason, is just not putting so much pressure on kids—or more precisely, not acting as though everything ought to be easy for every kid. Better would be skill at teaching individual kids by paying attention to the individual’s shape of cognition. That’s difficult because it’s labor-intensive and requires open-mindedness. I don’t know anything about the economics of education and education reform, but yeah, it would be good to fix this… AI tutors could probably improve over the status quo in many cases, but would lack some important longer-term adaptation (like, actually learning how the kid thinks and what ze can and can’t easily do).
I don’t know either, but I think of Tracing Woodgrains’ Center for Educational Progress and the growing Discord community around it as a step in this direction.