To make my epistemic state here a bit more clear: I do think IQ is clearly less trainable than much narrower skills like “how many numbers can you memorize in a row?”. But I don’t think IQ is less trainable than any other set of complicated skills like “programming skill” or “architecture design” skill.
My current guess is that if you control for people who know how to program and you run a research program with about as much sophistication as current IQ studies on “can we improve people’s programming skills” you would find results that are about as convincing saying “no, you can’t improve people’s programming skill”. But this seems pretty dumb to me. We know of many groups that have substantially outperformed other groups in programming skill, and my inside-view here totally outweighs the relatively weak outside-view from the mediocre studies we are running. I also bet you would find that programming skill is really highly heritable (probably more heritable than IQ), and then people would go around saying that programming skill is genetic and can’t be changed, because everyone keeps confusing heritability with genetics and it’s terrible.
This doesn’t mean increasing programming skill is easy. It actually seems kind of hard, but it also doesn’t seem impossible, and from the perspective of a private individual “getting better at programming” is a totally reasonable thing to do, even if “make a large group of people much better at programming” is a really hard thing to do that I don’t have a ton of traction on. I feel similarly about IQ. “Getting better at whatever IQ tests are measuring” is a pretty reasonable thing to do. “Design a large scale scalable intervention that makes everyone much better” is much harder and I have much less traction on that.
To make my epistemic state here a bit more clear: I do think IQ is clearly less trainable than much narrower skills like “how many numbers can you memorize in a row?”. But I don’t think IQ is less trainable than any other set of complicated skills like “programming skill” or “architecture design” skill.
My current guess is that if you control for people who know how to program and you run a research program with about as much sophistication as current IQ studies on “can we improve people’s programming skills” you would find results that are about as convincing saying “no, you can’t improve people’s programming skill”. But this seems pretty dumb to me. We know of many groups that have substantially outperformed other groups in programming skill, and my inside-view here totally outweighs the relatively weak outside-view from the mediocre studies we are running. I also bet you would find that programming skill is really highly heritable (probably more heritable than IQ), and then people would go around saying that programming skill is genetic and can’t be changed, because everyone keeps confusing heritability with genetics and it’s terrible.
This doesn’t mean increasing programming skill is easy. It actually seems kind of hard, but it also doesn’t seem impossible, and from the perspective of a private individual “getting better at programming” is a totally reasonable thing to do, even if “make a large group of people much better at programming” is a really hard thing to do that I don’t have a ton of traction on. I feel similarly about IQ. “Getting better at whatever IQ tests are measuring” is a pretty reasonable thing to do. “Design a large scale scalable intervention that makes everyone much better” is much harder and I have much less traction on that.
I think laying out your thoughts on this would make a great top-level post. Starting from your comments here and then adding a bit more detail.