I am not yet convinced that (what I think of as) intelligence is fixed by biochemistry.
I have not encountered strong evidence for this assertion. Why do you believe the suggestion of the first paper so strongly? From the inside, it feels as though the ideas controlling my thought are also a very important determiner of my ability to learn, solve problems, etc. I don’t trust my own impression of the way my brain works too much, but I would like some actual evidence one way or the other.
Observing strong correlations between the IQ of twins, for example, is rather weak evidence. For one, samples are small enough that the observations are only relevant at much lower levels of intelligence than I am interested in (or where my inside view of my own cognition is relevant). For two, randomly chosen pairs of people grow up in fairly similar environments, and the problem is exacerbated when the people in question are biologically inclined to seek out even more similar environments.
Oh yes, one can certainly train oneself to think more efficiently/effectively/creatively/etc. But this is not the same as improving intelligence. Think of it as using better software, instead of improving the hardware. But you can certainly think of this as improving intelligence, if you will, but then do realize that what you are doing is training a few key cognitive processes that happen to be useful in many domains. Which is to say, you won’t automatically be better at other mental tasks that don’t happen to require such cognitive processes.
Theories other than intelligence-as-synaptic-plasticity also don’t seem to allow improvement via training. This is because most of them hypothesize intelligence has something to do with the hardware of the brain. This is because the more diverse tests one aggregates, the more correlated the aggregated measure is with g. This together with the fact that tasks with high environmental variance have higher correlation with g, suggests that what aggregation does is cancel out environmental factors. This in turn strongly suggests that our notion of intelligence, or impression of someone’s intelligence, depends on a person’s overall mental ability over a wide range of tasks. We wouldn’t be impressed with a person who could multiply ten digit numbers if she does not also excel at a wide range of other mental tasks.
This is not to say that to be more intelligent, one has be better at everything. Because then why care for intelligence? One shouldn’t be too impressed with intelligence, because the whole point is to accomplish specific intellectual tasks no? Hence my suggestion in the first paragraph to identify cognitive processes influential in the performance of the intellectual tasks you care about.
Note that intelligence is a fitness indicator. We know this from psychological studies of sexual attraction and intelligence, from the fact that g has high genetic variance, from the fact that we haven’t found any genes which influences intelligence significantly. It is too easy to be impressed by intelligence and think that it can solve just about anything, without the training in the relevant intellectual tasks to go with it.
I am not yet convinced that (what I think of as) intelligence is fixed by biochemistry.
I have not encountered strong evidence for this assertion. Why do you believe the suggestion of the first paper so strongly? From the inside, it feels as though the ideas controlling my thought are also a very important determiner of my ability to learn, solve problems, etc. I don’t trust my own impression of the way my brain works too much, but I would like some actual evidence one way or the other.
Observing strong correlations between the IQ of twins, for example, is rather weak evidence. For one, samples are small enough that the observations are only relevant at much lower levels of intelligence than I am interested in (or where my inside view of my own cognition is relevant). For two, randomly chosen pairs of people grow up in fairly similar environments, and the problem is exacerbated when the people in question are biologically inclined to seek out even more similar environments.
Oh yes, one can certainly train oneself to think more efficiently/effectively/creatively/etc. But this is not the same as improving intelligence. Think of it as using better software, instead of improving the hardware. But you can certainly think of this as improving intelligence, if you will, but then do realize that what you are doing is training a few key cognitive processes that happen to be useful in many domains. Which is to say, you won’t automatically be better at other mental tasks that don’t happen to require such cognitive processes.
Theories other than intelligence-as-synaptic-plasticity also don’t seem to allow improvement via training. This is because most of them hypothesize intelligence has something to do with the hardware of the brain. This is because the more diverse tests one aggregates, the more correlated the aggregated measure is with g. This together with the fact that tasks with high environmental variance have higher correlation with g, suggests that what aggregation does is cancel out environmental factors. This in turn strongly suggests that our notion of intelligence, or impression of someone’s intelligence, depends on a person’s overall mental ability over a wide range of tasks. We wouldn’t be impressed with a person who could multiply ten digit numbers if she does not also excel at a wide range of other mental tasks.
This is not to say that to be more intelligent, one has be better at everything. Because then why care for intelligence? One shouldn’t be too impressed with intelligence, because the whole point is to accomplish specific intellectual tasks no? Hence my suggestion in the first paragraph to identify cognitive processes influential in the performance of the intellectual tasks you care about.
Note that intelligence is a fitness indicator. We know this from psychological studies of sexual attraction and intelligence, from the fact that g has high genetic variance, from the fact that we haven’t found any genes which influences intelligence significantly. It is too easy to be impressed by intelligence and think that it can solve just about anything, without the training in the relevant intellectual tasks to go with it.