Why? I’m not a high-powered lawyer who earns thousands per hour and can easily take on new clients if he discovers he has 10 extra hours a week. Nor am I homo economicus—I am quite biased and crazy. (I think this goes for us all.)
Another way of thinking the cards would be
I should mention the implicit model was simplified for programming. What you get from memorizing a card is not just knowing it, but knowing you know it. Even if I don’t remember exactly one of the many quotes in my Mnemosyne database, I know that I know it and it’s in Mnemosyne. Useful for discussions. (Google is not helpful. If you don’t remember an exact long substring, its results are pretty worthless. As I have discovered to my ruth many times.)
first there’s the critique you mention in your FAQ, which seems very damning
As for n-backing versus writing software or learning economics, well, the latter are paradigmatic ‘crystallized intelligence’ as opposed to the ‘fluid intelligence’ that n-backing is supposed to help. I don’t know any good way to calculate their relative values, although it’s obvious to me that n-backing would be most valuable for children. (The Google Group’s uploaded files includes 1 or 2 studies showing that working-memory exercises helped childrens’ grades and behavior.)
Why? I’m not a high-powered lawyer who earns thousands per hour and can easily take on new clients if he discovers he has 10 extra hours a week. Nor am I homo economicus—I am quite biased and crazy. (I think this goes for us all.)
I suspect that a profit-maximizing human as smart as you appear to be who only had the credentials for a minimum-wage job would be working the minimum number of hours each week they could get away with in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves while they used as much of their spare time as possible to cook up something better. At this point converting time to money confuses things because their utility for money drops off so quickly once they have their basic needs covered.
Upon reflection, I revise my opinion to “if your lack of credentials and chutzpah means the best jobs available to you pay minimum wage only, improving your credentials/chutzpah is a more profit-maximizing use of time than intelligence enhancement.” If you’re a student then you’re already working on your credentials and your earning power is going to go up soon, so if you’re going to work for money it makes sense to put it off until then, and you should value your time at something rather close to the amount you’ll make after graduating (assuming you’ve got a typical discount rate).
(Google is not helpful. If you don’t remember an exact long substring, its results are pretty worthless. As I have discovered to my ruth many times.)
Try http://www.diigo.com/ -- it lets you do full-text searches on the pages you’ve bookmarked (along with a bunch of other cool features). At least, if they haven’t removed that in the latest version.
As for n-backing versus writing software or learning economics, well, the latter are paradigmatic ‘crystallized intelligence’ as opposed to the ‘fluid intelligence’ that n-backing is supposed to help.
I know that knowledge of economics is considered crystallized intelligence. I don’t see what this has to do with the possibility that the process of learning something new and wrapping your head around it builds fluid intelligence. If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Well… I suspect we may be having vocabulary issues here. Gf is defined as “the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge.”
If your existing Gc already applies to a situation—say, your algebra applies to the economics you’re learning—then to some extent the problems of economics are not ‘novel’.
It’s only a pure-Gf problem when the problems are highly novel. In that case I find it intuitively plausible that a lot of irrelevant Gc wouldn’t help much.
Example: if I memorize a couple thousand English words (pronunciation & definition) for the GRE for a large increase in my Gc, why should I expect any increased ability to write proofs in mathematical set theory which will initially draw on Gf as a strange and alien subject?
I agree that memorizing words wouldn’t help your fluid intelligence.
If doing your first few set-theory proofs draws on Gf heavily, then strictly intuitively speaking it seems to me that this ought to improve Gf just about as fast as anything. Of course, solid experimental results rank above my intuition—but the dual-n-back result isn’t solid.
If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having?
Yes, you have to understand stuff before your can learn it. And be able to tell the difference between nonsense and things actually worth learning.
Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things?
Yes, it does make you better at learning things. There has been considerable research done on the subject.
If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Basically, no. It’s not that it couldn’t be, just that it isn’t. People’s fluid intelligence is extremely hard to change. Very few things improve fluid intelligence and (unfortunately) learning stuff isn’t one of them. Dual-n-back training does give a modest effect, as does exercise (and particularly cerebellar targetted exercise).
Fortunately, learning stuff will improve your performance at all sorts of activities, even if your fluid intelligence isn’t much altered. Fluid intelligence is overrated.
Dual-n-back training does give a modest effect, as does exercise (and particularly cerebellar targetted exercise).
Could you expand on that? I had not heard that exercise actually affected Gf or that there was such a thing on cerebellar-targeted exercise. I know of occasional results like the prefrontal cortex’s cells enlarging after aerobic exercise, but that’s not an increase in Gf.
Why? I’m not a high-powered lawyer who earns thousands per hour and can easily take on new clients if he discovers he has 10 extra hours a week. Nor am I homo economicus—I am quite biased and crazy. (I think this goes for us all.)
I should mention the implicit model was simplified for programming. What you get from memorizing a card is not just knowing it, but knowing you know it. Even if I don’t remember exactly one of the many quotes in my Mnemosyne database, I know that I know it and it’s in Mnemosyne. Useful for discussions. (Google is not helpful. If you don’t remember an exact long substring, its results are pretty worthless. As I have discovered to my ruth many times.)
Yes, there are others. As my enthusiasm for n-backing wanes, I’ve been falling behind on the other null-results. Here’s a recent one: “Improvement in working memory is not related to increased intelligence scores”.
As for n-backing versus writing software or learning economics, well, the latter are paradigmatic ‘crystallized intelligence’ as opposed to the ‘fluid intelligence’ that n-backing is supposed to help. I don’t know any good way to calculate their relative values, although it’s obvious to me that n-backing would be most valuable for children. (The Google Group’s uploaded files includes 1 or 2 studies showing that working-memory exercises helped childrens’ grades and behavior.)
I suspect that a profit-maximizing human as smart as you appear to be who only had the credentials for a minimum-wage job would be working the minimum number of hours each week they could get away with in order to feed, clothe, and house themselves while they used as much of their spare time as possible to cook up something better. At this point converting time to money confuses things because their utility for money drops off so quickly once they have their basic needs covered.
Upon reflection, I revise my opinion to “if your lack of credentials and chutzpah means the best jobs available to you pay minimum wage only, improving your credentials/chutzpah is a more profit-maximizing use of time than intelligence enhancement.” If you’re a student then you’re already working on your credentials and your earning power is going to go up soon, so if you’re going to work for money it makes sense to put it off until then, and you should value your time at something rather close to the amount you’ll make after graduating (assuming you’ve got a typical discount rate).
Try http://www.diigo.com/ -- it lets you do full-text searches on the pages you’ve bookmarked (along with a bunch of other cool features). At least, if they haven’t removed that in the latest version.
I know that knowledge of economics is considered crystallized intelligence. I don’t see what this has to do with the possibility that the process of learning something new and wrapping your head around it builds fluid intelligence. If fluid intelligence doesn’t help me learn stuff faster, is it really worth having? Doesn’t it seem likely that learning things makes you better at learning things? If this is true, could an increase in fluid intelligence be the mechanism for it?
Well… I suspect we may be having vocabulary issues here. Gf is defined as “the capacity to think logically and solve problems in novel situations, independent of acquired knowledge.”
If your existing Gc already applies to a situation—say, your algebra applies to the economics you’re learning—then to some extent the problems of economics are not ‘novel’.
It’s only a pure-Gf problem when the problems are highly novel. In that case I find it intuitively plausible that a lot of irrelevant Gc wouldn’t help much.
Example: if I memorize a couple thousand English words (pronunciation & definition) for the GRE for a large increase in my Gc, why should I expect any increased ability to write proofs in mathematical set theory which will initially draw on Gf as a strange and alien subject?
I agree that memorizing words wouldn’t help your fluid intelligence.
If doing your first few set-theory proofs draws on Gf heavily, then strictly intuitively speaking it seems to me that this ought to improve Gf just about as fast as anything. Of course, solid experimental results rank above my intuition—but the dual-n-back result isn’t solid.
Yes, you have to understand stuff before your can learn it. And be able to tell the difference between nonsense and things actually worth learning.
Yes, it does make you better at learning things. There has been considerable research done on the subject.
Basically, no. It’s not that it couldn’t be, just that it isn’t. People’s fluid intelligence is extremely hard to change. Very few things improve fluid intelligence and (unfortunately) learning stuff isn’t one of them. Dual-n-back training does give a modest effect, as does exercise (and particularly cerebellar targetted exercise).
Fortunately, learning stuff will improve your performance at all sorts of activities, even if your fluid intelligence isn’t much altered. Fluid intelligence is overrated.
Could you expand on that? I had not heard that exercise actually affected Gf or that there was such a thing on cerebellar-targeted exercise. I know of occasional results like the prefrontal cortex’s cells enlarging after aerobic exercise, but that’s not an increase in Gf.