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.
They have physical limits, sure-- and I've referred to them before on the board-- but ones like electrochemical transmission rates etc. are pretty much irrelevant in my opinion to discussing ability, in a non-disabled human, to learn to think abstractly. Vague mentions of memory limits also prove little to me, and certainly not that we have reached the limits of humans to learn. Muscles are completely different; muscles move through a predetermined range and have an easily understood physical functions and limits. Brains and minds are not nearly as well understood, and we don't know their limits; we can only observe how brains and minds perform on tests after being taught with methods that continue to change with each passing generation.
Since we teach better than we did hundreds of years ago (I hope we can agree on that), and more people think at a high level than hundreds of years ago, and our limits haven't been shown to be discovered, I don't see value in assuming we've reached limits.
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.
Sure. I don't understand why you assume that those things can't be learned to some extent too. AFAIK there is a pretty healthy industry around teaching people to think divergently. To at least some extent, you can learn rules about learning rules. See the Creative Whack Pack and similar ideas, going all the way back to divining solutions to problems in animal entrails. In addition, as an ex-software developer, I can tell you that a person can definitely increase (and I mean greatly increase) an ability to memorize rules too, in terms of total capacity and speed of learning.
Why does it make more sense to think that those things are not learnable? I mean, I wouldn't assume that evne going back to the tensor calculus example. We humans didn't evolve brains to do calculus-- except maybe in Soviet Russia for a while there, where they were pretty hard on their engineering students. We mutated to have better language facilities, which allowed the development of logic, from which everything else flowed.
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.
I think that cognitive talent is part biological, and part environmental. Stimulation increases intelligence. A biological advantage is an advantage, but that doesn't mean it's the only possible advantage.
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.
I firmly believe that I could take any ordinary baby and turn it into one heck of a college applicant, starting early enough. I agree with you anyway, but more because the world needs garbage people and only has so many research positions to give. That means, to me, that the ones who show the most intellectual achievement should get the best chances to continue doing so, but it doesn't imply to me that we do an optimal job of optimizing talent today-- for anyone.
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.
I agree that every person has a limited ability to take in new information in any situation and do something useful with it, and that those limits are different for different people. I just don't think we are all that close to optimizing development. Limits at any point in time are just a snapshot of a person's developed potential. I also think that not enough is done for most kids very early on, when stimulation is probably most important.
Anyhoo, it seems like we don't disagree much on the college issue, just on the reasons. I really think anyone
could go to college if they were taught correctly, and that in a perfect world, everyone would. It's not a perfect world.
