Originally Posted by Val
Originally Posted by Iucounu
Cognitive ability is different because it's not subject to such hard physical limits...

Are you sure of that? I'm going to have to ask for evidence for your entire first sentence.

Brains are physical things. They run via biochemical processes. As far as I'm aware, this means that they have physical limitations too, just like muscles.

Increasing your memory for static things (like the order of some playing cards) is very different from (and much easier than) remembering a bunch of different rules, understanding them in context, applying them as needed, and combining them in new ways. Or discovering new rules.

Originally Posted by Iucounu
...a very short person will be at a serious disadvantage for all time in the long jump.

I believe that a person who isn't cognitively talented will have an equal disadvantage in a subject suited to people who are much brighter.

Developing talent is essential. Being honest about limitations and recognizing them is critically important. These ideas are two sides of the same coin.

Originally Posted by Iucounu
We all gripe here every day about ways in which schools are failing our kids, but they routinely fail most kids IMHO.

I agree. But I think they fail most kids because they don't respect individual abilities. The pace is too fast for some, too slow for others, and right for another group. A huge part of this is the fictitious idea that everyone can or should go to college. To me, it's disrespectful of individual non-collegey-talents to push everyone into college.

My original point was that talent and limits to ability are acknowledged in literally every other area of life: vision, athletics, ability to mimic an accent, ability to play the drums, ability to hit a target with a dart, ability to drive a racecar, art, etc. etc. etc. Why would cognitive ability be any different? I'm not saying that people can't improve. I'm saying that everyone, literally, reaches a barrier that can't be crossed. Those barriers are different for every person in every area of endeavor.

This is actually one area where I completely fail to understand why educators don't get it. I've taught (classes of students and my kids). I still teach. Whenever I'm teaching, whatever the subject, and regardless of the ages of the students, it is immediately and abundantly obvious that differences in talent exist. Most people I meet who lack talent for <whatever> (including myself) tend to be pretty good-natured and realistic about their/our limitations. "I'm not good at this. If I practice, I might get better, but I'll never be as good as <insert name of really good person, who could just be sitting across the room>.

People tell me I'm a good teacher. I always, always encourage the students having trouble to persevere. I really enjoy helping people improve, but I can't give them something they haven't got, any more than a good teacher can turn me into, say, a highly skilled artist or a highly skilled politician. It'll never happen. And that's okay, because I like science better anyway.

So I don't understand why other people (especially educators) can't accept that limitations exist.
I agree.

Science has been politically against the idea of nature side of the nature vs nurture argument. People have gone as far as to threaten scientists discovering evidence in favor of the nature side. A lot of the support for the nurture side was based on a very famous twin study. In 1997, a reporter uncovered the truth about this study (google search for David Reimer, Money, Diamond).

Pretty much every psychology book written before this time and many after this time have sided on the nurture side and have often referred to this single twin study as the basis of proof. Studies on the nature side have been finding a lot of evidence showing talent is more often a result of inheritence than upbringing.

I read the book written by the same reporter who uncovered the story. The book is called "As Nature Made Him, The Boy raised As A Girl".

Steven Pinker has some interesting comments about the politics of the nature vs nurture sides of science in this talk about his book "The Blank Slate".



People like to believe ideas like the Earth is the center of the Universe. Science often finds the truth is not always what most people would want the answer to be.