I remember how it was -- JR
Brain Training Doesn’t Work
Scott H. Young
But "knowing stuff" helps
Will mastering chess make you more strategic? Does playing Sudoku speed up your mind? Do brain teasers help you think more logically?
Sadly the answer is: probably not.
From a 2016 review by Simons et al.:
“[W]e find extensive evidence that brain-training interventions improve performance on the trained tasks, less evidence that such interventions improve performance on closely related tasks, and little evidence that training enhances performance on distantly related tasks or that training improves everyday cognitive performance.”
Another study tracked participants over two years of working memory training. They found that the training had no impact on measured intelligence. The authors concluded, “These results question the utility and validity of [working memory] training as means of improving cognitive ability.”
Likewise, Giovanni Sala and Fernand Gobet performed a meta-analysis on whether studying chess and music affects academic or cognitive skills. They found only minimal effects. Some studies supported benefits from training, but the higher quality the study, the weaker the effect. Summarizing their review, the authors remark that, “this pattern of results casts serious doubt on the effectiveness of chess, music and working memory training.”
It’s easy to see why people are attracted to the idea of brain training. Intelligence is associated with nearly every positive life outcome people experience. A procedure that increases intelligence with only a small amount of daily effort would be life-altering.
Brain training also makes sense if you hold a false (but seductive) view of the mind — the idea that the mind is like a muscle.
The earliest takedown of the mind-muscle metaphor dates to Edward Thorndike. In 1901, he began a series of studies that showed practice on quite similar tasks didn’t lead to improvement in unrelated tasks. Thorndike interpreted his results in terms of identical elements: post training, performance improves on tasks that overlap in the stimulus or response required, but not beyond this.
Summarizing his view, Thorndike wrote, “the mind is so specialized that we alter human nature in small spots.”
Psychology has progressed considerably since Thorndike’s day. Yet the idea that skills are specific is a consistent finding in psychological research. In their 1989 monograph, The Transfer of Cognitive Skill, John Anderson and Mark Singley argued for what amounts to an updated version of Thorndike’s identical elements model. Skills transfer to the extent that the knowledge and procedures used between tasks are the same. If skills rely on different methods or ideas, training in one won’t help with another.
Thorndike’s identical elements model, and modern theories such as Anderson’s ACT-R, show why brain training doesn’t work. But are there any other ways to get smarter?
Does Education Boost Intelligence?
Brain-training fails because it focuses on a very narrow kind of task. Judging a good chess position and good business decision don’t use the same procedure. Thus learning strategy in chess doesn’t make you more strategic or effective in business.
Education doesn’t necessarily suffer the same shortcoming because it aims to impart a much broader set of skills. Algebra might only be suitable for problems that use algebra, according to the identical elements model. But there are lots of problems you can solve with algebra! Similarly, learning to read may not transfer (directly) to other skills, but reading can be a gateway to acquiring knowledge in practically any field.
Stuart Ritchie reviewed studies on the impact of additional years of education. He found that an extra year of schooling was typically associated with 1–5 more IQ points. These studies often rely on a quasi-experimental design. The authors studied situations where a sudden, unexpected change in policy resulted in some people getting more education than others. Testing people just before and after the cutoff let them tease out the effect of education without a formal experiment.
The optimistic take on this research would be that education improves general thinking by equipping people with diverse cognitive tools. This breadth has power. Even if a particular task is only helped by a subset of school training, many years of schooling make an overlap between skills and tasks increasingly likely.
The pessimistic stance would be that education trains you at narrow tricks that work for passing tests — sitting still for a prolonged period, guessing well when you don’t know the answer, watching out for trick questions, etc. — and these tricks also help on IQ tests.
Applications for an Identical Elements View of Learning
My perspective is that the only way to become smarter is by learning. The basic units of learning are specific, but when added together, these specific chunks can become impressive proficiency.
A concrete analogy would be language learning. Fluency isn’t a muscle you improve. It results from knowing many words, grammar, and pronunciations and using that knowledge quickly and unhesitatingly. It can be impressive to watch someone at a mastery level converse in a language you struggle with. Still, there is nothing more to it than this — if you knew everything she did, you too would be fluent.
Similarly, intelligence in real life is about having the vocabulary of methods and knowledge to deal with a wide variety of problems. Each unit of learning may seem unimpressive on its own, but combine enough of those units, and the accumulation is wisdom.
But to achieve this possibility, we must let go of the false promise that broad-ranging skills can come from practice on narrow tasks. Brain training is a dead-end, but learning is timeless.
https://betterhumans.pub/brain-training-doesnt-work-34613651234d
******************************************************Teacher Sues Ohio School District After Being Fired for Refusing to Use Preferred Pronouns
Chivalry isn’t dead, apparently.
Although in 2022, chivalry means not holding a door open, but banishing women who refuse to hew to the fashionable ideology of the day from the presence of other women.
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade, major law firm Hogan Lovells hosted a conference call “billed as a ‘safe space’ for women at the firm,” according to then-employee Robin Keller. (One wonders if Hogan Lovells, whose reported invitation language seems to suggest a lack of awareness that we now are a culture of pregnant persons, faced ire for excluding biological females who now identify as male.)
“It might have been a safe space for some, but it wasn’t safe for me,” writes Keller in The Wall Street Journal.
For the crime of expressing out loud her pro-life views, Keller lost her job.
Sadly, the exclusion of pro-life women is apparently, even in our “enlightened” era, an acceptable form of discrimination.
Never mind that there’s always been a robust percentage of women who identify as pro-life (in fact, a third of American women say they are pro-life, according to a 2022 Gallup poll). Never mind that being the sex which experiences pregnancy is supposed to give your views on abortion more weight.
Keller’s experience highlights how insane certain settings can be for pro-life women.
After a series of speakers denounced the Dobbs decision in her law firm’s conference call, Keller writes, she chose to speak out.
“I noted that many jurists and commentators believed Roe had been wrongly decided. I said that the court was right to remand the issue to the states. I added that I thought abortion-rights advocates had brought much of the pushback against Roe on themselves by pushing for extreme policies,” she recalls in her article, published Nov. 29.
Then Keller, clearly no coward, dared to touch the third rail of woke politics: Discussing the clear racism of abortion.
“I referred to numerous reports of disproportionately high rates of abortion in the black community, which some have called a form of genocide,” she writes. “I said I thought this was tragic.”
Within hours, Hogan Lovells suspended and even attacked Keller.
In a statement to Above the Law, a law blog that covered the incident in July, Hogan Lovells wrote that an employee’s comments had been found by other employees to be “inappropriate and offensive.” Above the Law also published an internal email in which Hogan Lovells accused Keller of having made “anti-Black comments” and stated that “racist actions and statements are contrary to our culture.”
Ah, yes, the racism of wanting black babies to be born.
Keller, who headed the U.S. business restructuring and insolvency practice at Hogan Lovells, herself wrote that “The outrage was immediate” after she spoke on the call.
“The next speaker called me a racist and demanded that I leave the meeting. Other participants said they ‘lost their ability to breathe’ on hearing my comments,” Keller adds. “After more of the same, I hung up.”
Reached by email for comment and asked whether the firm wanted to confirm or deny Keller’s account in the Journal, Hogan Lovells spokesperson Ritchenya Dodd said, “We fully encourage our people to share their views on important issues that matter to them, but we expect our people to conduct themselves in accordance with firm policies. We value our differences, which make us stronger as a firm.”
Yes, clearly, the firm “value[s] our differences.”
Let’s take a moment to look at the facts about abortion and race. According to Kaiser Family Foundation, looking at 2019 abortion data, 38% of abortions were performed on black women. So nearly 4 out of 10 abortions are provided to black women, despite the fact that blacks make up about 14% of the U.S. population, according to the Census Bureau.
I may not have read “How to Be an Antiracist,” but I’m pretty sure that these numbers suggest that abortion disproportionately affects the black community.
“What is racist is the fact that African Americans have the highest abortion rate,” said former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson in 2020.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece, Alveda King, who had two abortions, now advocates pro-life policies.
Oh, and let’s not forget that the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was so racist that even that abortion giant has given up trying to defend her (after doing so as recently as 2016). Surely it’s not irrelevant that abortion’s most fervent champion in American history was a huge eugenics proponent?
But even if Keller hadn’t exposed the racism of abortion norms in America to her co-workers, it’s not clear she would have been OK.
In the era of cancel culture, as corporations continue to become woke, it’s anyone’s guess whether it’s safe to voice your views on abortion at the workplace, even if you do so politely and even if you’re in possession of a uterus.
A friend of mine, who works in a corporate setting, told me that on the day of the Dobbs decision, a female colleague said on a call that today was a dark day for all women—or something along those lines. My friend, despite being pro-life herself, didn’t feel comfortable saying anything beyond that different people had different views on the topic, and then changing the subject.
My friend is likely far from alone in self-censoring, especially at the workplace, given that few are easily able to handle being fired or facing other financial or reputational consequences.
To give an insight into the hostility some employees are facing, consider this Aug. 23 letter printed by “The Ethicist,” a column printed in The New York Times Magazine.
The ethical dilemma? Well, the letter writer is worried that her colleague and self-described friend of almost nine years is pro-life, but not public about it.
“Especially after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, though, I struggle with having a friend who supports what I think is a restriction of my rights to make my own choices about my body,” writes the advice seeker, adding:
“I struggle with the idea that she is able to protect herself from the fallout of people knowing she is anti-abortion when implementing her views would take away rights that many people see as vital to living a life with dignity.”
The horror.
Amazingly, it is The New York Times columnist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, who ends up having the more “moderate” take, advising that “Your friend’s view on the topic [abortion] shouldn’t hurt her professionally.”
But the anonymous letter writer isn’t alone in her extremism. In July, shortly after the Dobbs decision, Jennifer Stavros opined in a Telegraph column that it was fine to not have pro-life friends: “We do not owe you friendship when you don’t believe that we deserve basic human rights.”
“Theologian, Nobel Peace Prize-winner and pro-choice advocate Desmond Tutu famously said, ‘If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have sided with the oppressor,’” Stavros wrote.
What’s clear is that leftists are trying to set a new standard: Either be pro-abortion or face the kind of ostracization formerly reserved for racists, Nazis, and other oppressors. Don’t think you can hold down a professional job and still be pro-life. Don’t think you can have friends and still be pro-life. Don’t think that your gender gives you any more freedom to hold pro-life views and still be an accepted member of society.
That’s chilling. Robin Keller may be one of the first persons post-Dobbs to face professional consequences for her pro-life views, but if leftists have their way, she won’t be the last.
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Australia: The war against boys is having a damaging impact on the education gender gap
For more than three decades women have outnumbered men at Australian universities.
The education gender gap is widening, with boys trailing girls from primary school to university, but there appears to be little concern about correcting the imbalance.
If men were outnumbering women at university since the 1980s there would be an outcry but no one in authority seems terribly troubled by the fact that, according to University Admission Centre analysis this year, being male is “greater than any of the other recognised disadvantages we looked at”.
There are a multitude of programs to correct the gender disparity in the few areas where male students do better, such as engineering, to encourage greater female participation.
Some universities even lower entry requirements for girls to boost female representation but there are few, if any, schemes to address the education gap for male students.
For boys one of the biggest areas of concern is literacy, where by year 9 they trail girls by about 20 months, according to NAPLAN data — which also shows reading standard for this cohort fell to a record low, with 13.5 per cent of boys unable to read at the minimum standard.
Writing about the gender literacy gap, the Centre for Independent Studies’ Glenn Fahey warned that “boys in Australian schools are at a decisive educational disadvantage”.
Best-selling author and clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson has long argued that the decline in men’s academic performance is bad not just for boys but for society.
He explains the situation in educational institutions is far worse than basic statistics indicate. “There are whole disciplines in universities forthrightly hostile towards men,” wrote Peterson, who says anti-male sentiment in academia is demoralising and demotivating young men.
Indeed the war against boys, and masculinity, is evident even in boys’ schools. Messages about “toxic masculinity” and “male privilege” are unrelenting, as they are in popular culture.
Can you imagine the outrage if the term “toxic femininity” was used to describe traits synonymous with womanhood?
We must stop treating young men like they’re born guilty or that their natural masculine instincts are detrimental to society.
We have a great deal more to fear from weak, inept men than strong, capable ones.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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