I've been interested in brain training and nootropics for a very long time. The conclusion I've come to is intelligence is pretty much fixed, current psychopharmaceuticals are of very, very, very limited usefulness, and most of the differences in intelligence we see between people are caused by genetic factors not education or rearing. This was immensely disappointing for me - I'd literally give everything I own to be moved up a few standard deviations, but it does seem to be the case. I'll be the first in line for any effective enhancement, but we do not have them now. The most likely approaches for increasing the intelligence of humans are things like embryo selection and genetic engineering of embryos - biotechnology can only do so much after your brain is done growing.<p>Iterated embryo selection looks like it will lead to humans smarter than any human who has ever lived - perhaps they will be clever enough to figure out how to upgrade an old fogey like me. As an aside, I'm not sure people understand how ridiculously cheap iterated embryo selection will be provided some very conservative advances in biotech, ethical mores will be unlikely to suppress it - even if international treaties are put in place.
The idea of intelligence has always made me leery. I have a little brother who placed second in a state competition (musical instrument) for kids who almost doubled him in age before his tenth birthday. People like to say he's a genius, but only my family knows the truth: two hours of piano a day, four on weekends, since before he was even in kindergarten. I don't really believe in intelligence.
As a species (or society) do we have clear objectives in mind when we seek to 'increase intelligence'? Is it higher productivity? more progress? enhanced capability? faster learning? Aren't there lots of low hanging fruit that we haven't taken yet? First, shouldn't we try to eliminate the things that are known to cause decreases in intelligence? Or, do we not know what those are?<p>Also, having been around a lot of 'highly intelligent' people, I have found that many are still not very effective. Most still make bad choices, have poor judgement, adhere to dogma, can't think laterally or fluidly, lack curiosity, lack discipline, lack self-reflection, etc. Is it possible for a 'smart' individual to easily get better at those things?
I feel like the whole argument is based on "your true IQ is the highest score you'll ever receive on a test", which is a statement that by definition would make improvements in IQ impossible.[0]<p>I still don't understand why, if everybody in the control group only change around the error ratio and the test group on average advances beyond the error ratio, that doesn't show an improvement. According to the authors what <i>would</i> show an improvement?<p>[0] they don't say this outright in the paper, but the SAT discussion clearly allude to this form of thinking. They don't even entertain the idea that practice might be the reason for a large increase in a persons SAT score, but rather say, the highest score is representative.
It's more important to increase effectiveness than intelligence anyway. An IQ 20+ points greater causes reduced credibility, which is why people with IQs over 150 are under-represented in "elite" professions like finance, law, consulting[1]<p>[1] <a href="http://michaelwferguson.blogspot.com/p/the-inappropriately-excluded-by-michael.html?m=1" rel="nofollow">http://michaelwferguson.blogspot.com/p/the-inappropriately-e...</a>
There is a legitimate concern in here about the methodology of testing intelligence-training interventions, but it's not quite clear what exactly the thing is that "is a myth", and I followed a reference at random (Jaeggi et al, 2008) and arrived at a study whose methodology was fine.<p>(EDIT: Whose methodology passed my cursory inspection but was terrible in a subtle way.)
The abstract mostly seems to state "increased intelligence is currently too difficult to measure, so we wouldn't know."<p>Which is fair. But "is a myth so far" suggests disproof, not proof that it's not currently true. As they repeatedly show, it would be very difficult for them to prove that, since they'd have to usefully measure delta in intelligence.
What is really most concerning about these studies is that the intervention too resembles the metric in order to believe they don't teach to the test. It's like treating depression by teaching people how to lie to psychiatrists. If you're measuring intelligence by performance on little 10-minute puzzles, and you show an improvement by teaching people to solve puzzles, I'm not really impressed. If you show an improvement in puzzles by teaching people guitar, giving them a drug, or sending them to basic training, I'll invest in your company. On the other hand, if you measure intelligence by job performance or some other life measure, and you show an improvement with puzzle games, it doesn't seem quite so unfair.
The article kinda states that being sick can reduce your intelligence.<p>That to me alone means by staying healthy we stay more intelligent. ie. Get more sleep.<p>I think the title is quite misleading.
It seems more and more apparent that large sections of modern science are quackery. Will we fix this somehow and look back on this era from the future, and wonder about the many millions spent on serious people in white coats who basically produced random noise with a dash of prejudice and a touch of click-bait?