Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Outliers, Tiger Moms, and Nature

All this stuff about whether having a good memory is correlated with high IQ is beside your original point, though. You don't need to do an experiment as complicated as this to confirm or refute your claim, which was: "there's a point [and earlier you put this point at 14 digits of backwards recall] beyond which practice won't help in the face of insufficient talent."

I've put in the 14 digits you mentioned earlier, because without some specified point, there is a danger that your claim becomes uninterestingly true: for example, if you take someone who is so severely learning disabled that they cannot communicate a sequence of digits, practice won't help that person to demonstrate backwards recall of 14 digits; but that's not a very interesting example of "insufficient talent". You clearly intended something more like "most people of around average IQ will not be able to learn to recall 14 digits in reverse, regardless of how much they practise". That's an easily testable claim. I expect it's false, for the reasons I already described drawing on the article, but I don't know for sure.

In this nature vs nurture field, it seems particularly easy to allow loaded language to get in the way; that's why it's important to make claims precise. Nobody doubts that humans have different capabilities, and nobody doubts that many of those capabilities can be improved by practice. Cf my earlier comment about "parenting does matter, but genes constrain possibilities" being probably true, but maybe no more true than "genes do matter, but parenting constrains possibilities".

No argument there.