Why can’t we have both? A plasticity pill wouldn’t inherently destroy your work ethic. Having this useful ability, without the crippling shortcomings of youth (mostly various forms of inexperience, not to mention developmental/hormonal distractions) would be one hell of a combination.
Well, at the moment we can’t have both because brain plasticity pills don’t currently exist. If someone asked me tomorrow to optimise the education system, “educate people at the point in their lives when that education would be most useful to them” would come considerably higher up the list than “invent brain plasticity pill”.
The win from skilled use of childhood plasticity maxes out at around 15 well-filled years of highly plastic learning. The win from a pill maxes out at a lifetime thereof. So if a pill were close to technologically plausible, it would be a much better use of effort.
Assuming it’s possible to get the ‘plasticity’ gains without a significant trade-off. Childhood brains are so flexible because they’re still developing; concordantly they don’t have a fully developed set of cognitive skills.
By way of analogy, concrete is very flexible in its infancy and very rigid in its adulthood. The usefulness it possesses when rigid is based on how well its flexibility is utilised early on. If you come up with a method to fine-tune the superstructure of a building on the fly later on in its lifetime, cool beans. If all you come up with is a way to revert the whole thing to unset concrete, I’d rather focus on getting the building right first time.
Childhood brains are so flexible because they’re still developing
Hmm. I don’t trust that. It sounds too much like a just-so story.
What I know is that most species have a learning-filled childhood followed by an adulthood with little to learn.
I also know that evolution hates waste—it will turn a feature off if it isn’t used. So if anything the relatively high human ability to learn in adulthood looks to me like neoteny.
Concrete is a poor analogy—rigidity is not an advantage to adult humans!
I think rigidity fits well into the Aristotelian framework.
Too rigid and you hold fast to wrong ideas. Too plastic and you waste mental effort challenging truths that should have been established.
Yes, we don’t want to be too rigid in our beliefs, but there’s a high opportunity cost to mental thought. I’ve run into too many hippies who are “open-minded” about whether or not 1=1. We have to internalize some beliefs as true to focus on other things.
I worry some in this community are so used to getting others to reconsider false beliefs they forget there’s sometimes a good reason to sometimes have rigid beliefs. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
By the way, if I recall correctly, in the proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, moss was originally intended to be a good thing, but most people now take it to be a bad thing.
Re: rigidity and humans, I suspect you would find it very difficult if you continued to adjust your speech patterns to accomodate every irregular use of the English language you’d heard since the day you were born. Your ability to rapidly learn language stopped for a reason. In that sense, rigidity is pretty advantageous.
I suspect you would find it very difficult if you continued to adjust your speech patterns to accomodate every irregular use of the English language you’d heard since the day you were born. Your ability to rapidly learn language stopped for a reason.
I’m tempted to call this a just-not-so story.
Not only do I disagree with the general point (about “rigidity” being advantageous), but my sense is that language is probably one of the worst examples you could have used to support this position.
It strikes me as wrong on at least 4 different levels, which I shall list in increasing order of importance:
(1) I don’t think it would be particularly difficult at all. (I.e. I see no advantage in the loss of linguistic ability.)
(2) People probably do continue to adjust their speech patterns throughout their lives.
(3) Children do not “accommodate every irregular use [they have] heard since the day [they] were born”. Instead, their language use develops according to systematic rules.
(4) There is a strong prior against the loss of an ability being an adaptation—by default, a better explanation is that there was insufficient selection pressure for the ability to be maintained (since abilities are usually costly).
So, unless you’re basing this on large amounts of data that I don’t know about, I feel obliged to wag my finger here.
I’m tempted to agree. When adults spend as much time focussed on learning to speak a language as children do they learn faster.
I read a good, if not new, article about this recently. It’s relevant to a couple posts in this thread, but I figured this was as good a place to insert it as any.
I’m happy to concede the point on childhood learning, but maintain that educational reform is significantly more implementable than brain plasticity pills.
I’m happy to concede the point on childhood learning, but maintain that educational reform is significantly more implementable than brain plasticity pills.
Absolutely. Plain plasticity does very little without a quality learning environment in place. (And a quality learning environment is one of the most powerful ways of fostering brain plasticity!)
Why can’t we have both? A plasticity pill wouldn’t inherently destroy your work ethic. Having this useful ability, without the crippling shortcomings of youth (mostly various forms of inexperience, not to mention developmental/hormonal distractions) would be one hell of a combination.
Well, at the moment we can’t have both because brain plasticity pills don’t currently exist. If someone asked me tomorrow to optimise the education system, “educate people at the point in their lives when that education would be most useful to them” would come considerably higher up the list than “invent brain plasticity pill”.
The win from skilled use of childhood plasticity maxes out at around 15 well-filled years of highly plastic learning. The win from a pill maxes out at a lifetime thereof. So if a pill were close to technologically plausible, it would be a much better use of effort.
Assuming it’s possible to get the ‘plasticity’ gains without a significant trade-off. Childhood brains are so flexible because they’re still developing; concordantly they don’t have a fully developed set of cognitive skills.
By way of analogy, concrete is very flexible in its infancy and very rigid in its adulthood. The usefulness it possesses when rigid is based on how well its flexibility is utilised early on. If you come up with a method to fine-tune the superstructure of a building on the fly later on in its lifetime, cool beans. If all you come up with is a way to revert the whole thing to unset concrete, I’d rather focus on getting the building right first time.
Hmm. I don’t trust that. It sounds too much like a just-so story.
What I know is that most species have a learning-filled childhood followed by an adulthood with little to learn.
I also know that evolution hates waste—it will turn a feature off if it isn’t used. So if anything the relatively high human ability to learn in adulthood looks to me like neoteny.
Concrete is a poor analogy—rigidity is not an advantage to adult humans!
I think rigidity fits well into the Aristotelian framework.
Too rigid and you hold fast to wrong ideas. Too plastic and you waste mental effort challenging truths that should have been established.
Yes, we don’t want to be too rigid in our beliefs, but there’s a high opportunity cost to mental thought. I’ve run into too many hippies who are “open-minded” about whether or not 1=1. We have to internalize some beliefs as true to focus on other things.
I worry some in this community are so used to getting others to reconsider false beliefs they forget there’s sometimes a good reason to sometimes have rigid beliefs. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
By the way, if I recall correctly, in the proverb “a rolling stone gathers no moss”, moss was originally intended to be a good thing, but most people now take it to be a bad thing.
In what way does it sound like a just-so story?
Re: rigidity and humans, I suspect you would find it very difficult if you continued to adjust your speech patterns to accomodate every irregular use of the English language you’d heard since the day you were born. Your ability to rapidly learn language stopped for a reason. In that sense, rigidity is pretty advantageous.
I’m tempted to call this a just-not-so story.
Not only do I disagree with the general point (about “rigidity” being advantageous), but my sense is that language is probably one of the worst examples you could have used to support this position.
It strikes me as wrong on at least 4 different levels, which I shall list in increasing order of importance:
(1) I don’t think it would be particularly difficult at all. (I.e. I see no advantage in the loss of linguistic ability.)
(2) People probably do continue to adjust their speech patterns throughout their lives.
(3) Children do not “accommodate every irregular use [they have] heard since the day [they] were born”. Instead, their language use develops according to systematic rules.
(4) There is a strong prior against the loss of an ability being an adaptation—by default, a better explanation is that there was insufficient selection pressure for the ability to be maintained (since abilities are usually costly).
So, unless you’re basing this on large amounts of data that I don’t know about, I feel obliged to wag my finger here.
I’m tempted to agree. When adults spend as much time focussed on learning to speak a language as children do they learn faster.
I don’t quite agree with this, at least as a general rule. (Red King, etc.)
I read a good, if not new, article about this recently. It’s relevant to a couple posts in this thread, but I figured this was as good a place to insert it as any.
I’m happy to concede the point on childhood learning, but maintain that educational reform is significantly more implementable than brain plasticity pills.
Absolutely. Plain plasticity does very little without a quality learning environment in place. (And a quality learning environment is one of the most powerful ways of fostering brain plasticity!)