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Feb 23, 2022Edited
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I just can't imagine the face. Is it like, you look at the photo and can't tell it's really a dog? Or like an "if this was abstract art I would say they buried a face in there"?

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When I first glanced at the photo never having seen it before, the face was so ghastly and jarring, it was like a demon baby's face grimacing on a dog's body. Then my eyes drifted up to the caption, back down, and the face was never seen again.

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Feb 23, 2022
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I may be missing something important, but it seems to me that some people in this debate are making a "base rate fallacy".

Specifically, the article "Why Brahmins lead Western firms but rarely Indian ones" complains that few Brahmins lead Indian companies. Out of 20 wealthiest Indian companies, not even one is led by a Brahmin!

Okay, so how many Brahmins are there in India? According to Wikipedia, they make 5% of the population, in other words, one in 20. So, under perfect equality, you would statistically expect 1 out of the 20 wealthiest Indian companies on average to be led by a Brahmin. And it is not one, it is zero. Perhaps my math is wrong, but I think that even under perfect equality, where would be about 30% chance that a randomly selected group of 20 people would contain zero members of a 5% minority. (Someone please check my math.)

So the actual question is why Brahmins are *overrepresented* in American companies (compared to other Indians), not why they are underrepresented in Indian ones (because most likely, they are not). I think it could simply be a selection effect of Brahmins being more rich and being traditionally the educated ones -- this is why they are more likely to pay to study at an American university, and then some of them get a great job opportunity and stay here.

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Feb 22, 2022
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What happens if the sensitivity reader suggests a change and the author says no?

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Feb 23, 2022
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The second paragraph doesn't mesh with what I get from the article; do you think the writer's case is atypical?

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Most authors don't have much money to burn, the idea that they're spending money "voluntarily" on this is difficult to believe even for the woke ones.

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I can't imagine much for most books. Probably because of the economics of publishing, most books are barely touched by editors. If you write a non-fiction book and want to have it fact checked you have to pay for that yourself.

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The author in the article refused all sensitivity reader suggestions, and ended up having to change publisher for her book: https://unherd.com/2022/02/how-sensitivity-readers-corrupted-literature/

She may be an usual case, given this was an already published and successful book, that had become controversial and was being reviewed for changes before publishing a new edition. Maybe they pushed harder because of the (apparent) controversy, but also, she had much more leverage.

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"Had to" seems a bit strong for the written fact. I thought it was interesting that the author wrote "Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split." Clearly authors don't always think/know they have power in these situations but it isn't clear to me that they wouldn't have actually published the book.

Having said that, those suggestions did seem pretty nuts.

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The book was already published by Picador, but because of heavy criticism they stopped selling it and planned a new version – "to be revised in consultation with sensitivity readers". This article was about this new version.

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I can't speak to the general case, but Naomi Novik, one of my favorite authors, wrote a cringing apology for using the word "dreadlocks" in a context having nothing to do with race after being informed, I conjecture by a sensitivity reader working for her publisher but might be wrong, that the term was not politically correct. Judging by her writing she is not herself particularly woke, so I interpreted that as a response to incentives.

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Sure, but the point is precisely that they're using them all at the first place. They may not be literally doing the censoring, but publishers using them means they intend to censor their works for woke reasons.

It's kind of silly to suggest that they would pay for this work to be done but not actually care about what the readers say, unless you want to argue it's some kind of weird act of signalling or something.

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Not him, but I'd say maybe 9/10 "sensitivity advisors" of any kind are virtue-signalling.

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The difference is that guns are mechanical devices about which one can make objective claims, while 'sensitivity' is entirely subjective.

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Feb 23, 2022
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Apparently men can be pregnant too, don't you know? Please re-write your comment to reflect that. "Voluntarily," I might add.

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But you can ask a dozen women about their experiences with pregnancy and get a dozen different responses. It is the same problem as with 'sensitivity readers'. Given the near infinite number of identity politics subcategories that people claim to belong to these days, how could a few such people even begin to pretend to represent them all fairly?

The whole thing is an absurdity.

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Don't compare it to a gun editor - compare it to a traditional editor who says things like "the story would flow a lot better if Chapter 18 was before Chapter 17, and Chapter 19 seems like a waste so you should cut it".

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This matches my understanding. Authors may choose to self-censor based on the reader's recommendation, but the ones I've been aware of were advisors with no power to actually censor the work. Even in the linked description it's not clear to me that "censor" is an appropriate term for what happened. Same for the "context" warning from Facebook.

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Feb 22, 2022
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Agreed US didn't come off looking great there. Why not a cowboy?

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I can only guess, but I think the elephant in the room is Native Americans - if you do Native American people will complain about appropriation (unless the model happens to be NA), but if you don't do Native American you'll get complains that you're excluding that part of history.

My guess is that they intentionally went "non-historical" to try to bypass the whole issue - they were hoping to invoke the more universal 'American ideals' embodied by Superman rather than a specific historical period that might get bogged down in complaints of racism.

(Still probably either Cowboy or 'Hamilton-esque' costume would have done better)

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Feb 23, 2022
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Weren't many cowboys black anyway?

It's a shame that the old melting pot idea seems to be no longer current. The idea of a cowboy is very American, even if the actual historic incarnations were obviously of some specific subgroups of people.

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I suspect this is the reason (and of course both “Cowboy” and “Hamilton-esque” would get tagged as symbols of white supremacy).

The thing is, every single one of those costumes is probably some sort of stereotypical, appropriated, simplified, out of context, sacrilegious or whatever. The difference is the other countries don’t care - it looks cool, it’s for a silly fun beauty contest, have at it. But the US entry is absolutely going to be scrutinized by woke scolds, and the poor model will be the main character on Twitter for a day for even a slight misstep, and so must be as inoffensive as possible.

The woke world is less fun, because having fun distracts from being ideologically pure and is thus always held in suspicion.

EDIT: and in the comments over there, even the Superman outfit is getting accused of appropriation since the original artist was Canadian. The real problem seems to be that it’s a crappy costume, literally looks off-the-rack from a cheap Halloween store, and the model looks bad in it.

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I was hoping that Australia would have an entry with one of those hats with the corks, a string vest, shorts and a can of fizzy lager. Oh well.

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If I were the Australian contestant I'd just go with a pair of red Speedos and a lifesaver's cap. Maybe some zinc cream on the face.

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Silly indeed, but better than the Swiss guy.

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Feb 22, 2022
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I think it may also be conflating "normal" low intelligence with what were considered genetic defects. Down Syndrome and whatever we call Mental Retardation (apparently "intellectual development disorder" in the new DSM) or similar issues.

Low IQ is not the same thing as genetic disorder.

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Note that there’s also a AI Governance curriculum for a track running parallel to the Alignment course! https://docs.google.com/document/d/1F4lq6yB9SCINuo190MeTSHXGfF5PnPk693JToszRttY/edit#

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Thanks, I've added it in.

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Great links, really appreciate the AGI stuff. Thank you.

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#13 can someone help me out here?

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My experience was that I started by seeing the face (on the bottom of the dog's head), switched after a few seconds to seeing the dog, and now I can't see the face at all no matter how hard I try. I think dog is stickier than face, if you've already seen the dog it's probably hopeless.

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I think I was able to see the face after first seeing the dog, but I had to cheat by using the back of my hand to cover up my view of the dogs eyes and top part of the picture. Once the image was no longer obviously a dog, I think my brain was a bit more free to interpret shadows as spooky face-like. The face I ended up seeing had the dogs collar as an eye, the dogs nose as the spooky face nose, a shadow to the left of the dogs nose as the other eye, and the underside of the dogs muzzle as a creepy gaping mouth with visible teeth. It sort of reminds me of the redead from Zelda Ocarina of Time.

Also, I've been a longtime reader, and just recently a subscriber and now first-time commenter. Thanks for all your great writing over the years Scott, and congrats on the marriage!

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Similar experience here. I saw the face, then read the caption and could only see the dog. I was eventually able to recover the face by covering the dog's eyes and top part of the image.

The light patch to the left of the dog's nose is the profile of the face's nose (the face is looking somewhat down and to the viewer's left), and the dog's nose is one of the face's eyes. The reddish patch of the dog's collar is the face's left ear.

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This was my experience too I think the brain is really well trained on eyes, such that if it "latches" on to a pair of eyes the rest of the face takes shape almost immediately

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thank you for explaining where the face is! Until reading this, I did not see any face at all.

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After reading the comments I scrolled back up to see the face and found that I can catch a glimpse of the face as I quickly scroll up, but the moment it stops it turns back into a dog.

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Interesting, I just scrolled back up quickly, and I thought I caught a glimpse of a face. Scrolling down quickly, I didn't get the impression of a face. I gave it a break for a minute, and scrolled up again quickly. Thought I saw a face. Gave it a break. Scrolled down quickly, didn't see the face.

Has it got to do with what part of the pic (bottom vs top) that we see first?

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I can switch back and forth with relative ease but notice that when I do there is a change in muscular tension in my upper right back accompanying the switch.

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wait... so you saw the face first? I am having trouble seeing the face, but based on (https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr) the face still only takes up a small portion of the picture. And the face is floating on a dogs body? Why would this be seen before a dog when the rest of the picture has all the context of a dog??

..and i wonder how this correlates with dog ownership..

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I think if you scroll down the dog is more obvious and if you scroll up you'll be more likely to see the face. Start with the image off screen in both cases.

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Yep.

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For me it the exact opposite. It took time to flip from dog to face and now it won’t flip back

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Not hopeless - I was in the same situation as you, but switched back to face after turning the image sideways and upside down on my phone.

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I’m in the “completely hopeless” camp. I wonder if it might be because I’ve owned dogs, similar to that one (mostly Labs) my entire life. Even if I cover up the dog’s eyes, there is just way too much else in the picture that immediately pattern matches to “black dog laying on the floor” for me.

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Wait, really? I didn't see the face at all at first, but after looking at the image that highlights the facial feature locations, I can freely "see" it by focusing on those for a bit

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I can see the face again by rotating my head 90 degrees.

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...same as you, I started by seeing the face, from second look on I could only see the dog and was not able to see the face again. But then I accidentally looked at the picture in small (thumbnail) and there I can only see the face, not the dog (even if I have both the large picture and the small one next to each other, I see a different thing in either of them) :) pretty weird :)

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If you're having trouble seeing the face: squint so hard your eyes are almost closed and focus on the white parts of the dog's face, which are the highlights of a face mostly in shadow.

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Does it resemble jar-jar binks? Like, with 2 eye stalks on top of a head with a mouth on the front of a head sticking out? That's the closest I saw when squinting at the lighter area

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No. It's white-face clown, with sloppily-applied black makeup around the mouth.

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I saw the dog first, and was only able to see the face once I concentrated on seeing the dog's nose as an eye. The small white triangle to its right as a nose was also a feature that helped transform the image

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I think this worked, but unfortunately also caused me to forget everything I knew about Georgism.

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Don't know if this helps, but: the dog is looking straight at us with a chill expression. The human face is looking down between the dog's legs and looks horrified / hopeless. Edit: the whitest part of the photo is the human's left cheek and the dog's left upper lip.

It took me a non-trivial amount of seconds to see the dog, but now I can see whichever I want to see.

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I could only see the dog at first. Squinted. Now whenever I squint I can see a face. I don't think it's what others are seeing though. Illustration overlaid on the image may prime you to see what I'm seeing: https://drive.google.com/file/d/142RY870sOU4frFFnU8G0dqOk-hUaBcn1/view?usp=drivesdk

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Can confirm that is not what I was seeing. It's weird / nice how easy it is to see faces everywhere.

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This is the face I see, which was explained to me from Measure's comment above. https://i.imgur.com/g9rzRLd.jpg

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This is the face I am seeing https://imgur.com/SRDcnOr

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Yes this is the face

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This is still a dog's nose for me. I'm not able to see any faces anywhere (including the ones illustrated into the photo in other links).

Maybe it has to do with some individual priming? I had a dog with a vaguely similarly shaped face, maybe that's the reason it's instantly recognizable as dog-and-nothing-but-dog for me.

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This rings potentially true to me. I can't really see the face either, even after reading some descriptions and looking at a cropped image or two. (I usually experience these optical illusions in a more typical way.)

I'm a big fan of dogs, and I think they're a more salient feature of any dog-containing image for me than they are for the average person. It's hard for me to see the nose as anything other than part of a dog, even when it's cropped out of context.

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It became easier for me to see the face once I switched my screen to grayscale.

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I never saw the face. I spent two or three minutes staring at that damn dog, and I began to think it was a joke. I'm wondering it isn't due to being told that you'll see a face before you focus on the dog, that you see a face. Anyway, it's interesting that so many people did see a face when all I see is a dog. Of course, I have abundant personal experience that I don't perceive patterns the way other people seem to. I suspect I'm quite neurodivergent in that I don't perceive things the way other people claim to perceive them.

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Unlike what most comments describe here, I could not see the dog! I stared for at least a literal minute at the photo in the post (here, above), and I just could not find the dog’s head. I thought it was some kind of creepy AI-generated photo or something.

(I couldn’t really see a face, either, it just looked like a headless dog, and the place where the head should be kind of sort of had some shadows that might suggest a face in a creepy-enough nightmare.)

But I literally spent a minute looking for the dog’s head and couldn’t find it. Then I opened a link from one of the comments here and the dog was obvious. Now I can’t turn it back into nightmare fuel.

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1. In education, always bet on the null.

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Of the many purported benefits of extracurricular activities, I don't ever recall hearing that they were supposed to improve your academic performance. I don't know how it could; it sucks time and resources away from classes, with the goal of giving a broader range of experience and skills beyond book learnin'.

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I definitely heard that music was supposed to increase your IQ and I think people extended that to academic achievement.

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Yes, here in Brooklyn there's this whole layer of the local economy where art and music etc lessons are sold to bourgie parents, usually expressly under the theory that they will help them become STEM geniuses.

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It increases your IQ if your IQ test includes reading sheet music and identifying diminished fifth intervals by ear. Which, I mean, why not?

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...because it doesn't correlate as well with g as the stuff IQ tests actually test, and it isn't culture-fair which most modern IQ tests strive to be?

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What is the value of "g" supposed to be?

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Feb 23, 2022
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For a good, complete summary, look up “Spearman’s G” on wikipedia. For a brief, bad summary, it’s how “generally intelligent” you are, measured by success on various tests in different domains. Doing well on one of them predicts doing well on others, which is why G is interesting; it also seems to track to what we usually mean by “smart”.

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I find it amazing that you're continually in the comments crticizing this stuff when you lack even the most rudimentary, 'two minutes on wikipedia' level of understanding of the topics you're criticizing.

Literally how can you possibly express any kind of judgement about IQ and IQ testing (or intelligence research generally) when you don't even know what g is and why it matters.?

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The claim that it doesn't correlate as well with g is not-even-wrong, in that it depends on how you measure *g*. There's no God-given concept of g that is not subject to arbitrary choice-of-test issues. If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music. That the normal g does not do so is a prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is "better", one which is not supported by any literature I could find.

(I do agree that intuitively, music tests don't measure what we want IQ to measure. But you don't get to use *g* as a get-out-of-arbitrary-test-choices-free card, it doesn't work that way. You must instead argue on the object level that nobody cares about music.)

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Feb 23, 2022
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Just because you can't measure something perfectly doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Take "aggressiveness." There is no God-given concept of it; any measure of it will involve choosing a test. But some of those tests will be better than others, and an "aggressiveness test" which focused mainly on irrelevant physiological characteristics would be a bad test.

So the question then becomes: what makes a test for intelligence better or worse? What grounds the "prescriptivist claim that the standard choice of IQ tests is better"?

Spearman's g is one compelling answer to that question. When we test people's aptitudes across various domains, we find that there are some domains, like visual-spatial reasoning and logical inference, where if someone does well in them, they are likely to also do well in lots of other domains. We call those domains "g-loaded". To measure g, we can generate a score from a particular person's aptitudes - critically, placing a higher weight on those domains which seem more "g-loaded". No test will perfectly measure g, but some will come closer than others, by prioritizing heavily g-loaded tests.

A battery with lots of music tests would be a poor measure of g, since music ability correlates only mildly well with skill in other domains - it's not heavily "g-loaded". In fact, Spearman included a music test in his original analysis, and found it to be the least g-loaded out of all the domains he investigated! Interestingly, math was second-worst; the strongest predictor out of his list was "classics". Selection effects may be involved here, but there's reason to believe linguistic skill is actually very g-loaded.

I hope this goes part of the way to explaining why the concept of g actually does help justify a choice of tests to measure IQ. It's not about what we *care* about; it's about what talents tend to predict being multitalented, and music just so happens to be a poor predictor of that.

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"If your IQ battery includes a lot of music tests, then the g of that battery WILL correlate with the ability to read sheet music"

I don't think you understand 'g'. But the whole point of g is that its a GENERAL intelligence factor.

IQ tests predict performance on most cognitively demanding tasks i.e. stuff completely outside of IQ test questions. That's the whole point of g. It's not simply 'correlates with other IQ questions'.

Reading sheet music almost assuredly does NOT correlate very well in this way, and it probably does not correlate nearly as well with life outcomes as IQ does.

IQ tests are not constructed arbitrarily, and I find it bizarre that you could have possibly 'checked the literature' on this subject and then say something like this.

It's not that 'nobody cares about music', it's that music simply does not have the predictive validity of IQ tests. If you have no predictive validity, then there's zero point of psychometrics. Being good at identifying the next pattern in a series tells us that you'll probably be good at most things that require abstract reasoning. Being good at reading sheet music does not. That's it. That's all there is to it.

Your appeal to 'god given' concepts is totally bizarre. Nothing is god given, everything is ultimately a social construct. But nobody ever takes this as a refutation of anything else. There's no god given definition of species, it's just an arbitrary category we made up on the basis of arbitrary criteria. But it's extremely useful, so we use it.

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Why not? No, why SHOULD it include that? Do you actually know that the purpose and rationale behind intelligence testing is?

You're acting like it's some arbitrary thing that includes anything and everything for no good reason. Which means you don't know the first thing about the subject.

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Minor warning - I more or less agree with your points, but I think "you don't know the first thing about the subject" is neither kind nor necessary here.

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Okay, and how do you feel about repeated criticisms of a topic that this person is ignorant of? Would you feel the same if it were a person declaring climate change is BS and then asking what the greenhouse effect is?

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Given the tenor of the comments here, the purpose of general intelligence testing is to provide a permission structure to dismantle the welfare state.

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Freddie DeBoer's "The Cult of Smart" is about how much kids already bring their general intelligence with them to school without it being affected that much by school, and I suppose it could be said he wants to "dismantle" the status quo in order to replace it with communism.

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where i went to school, music was a during the day class, not extracurricular

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Where I went to school it was both; "Music" in the curriculum covered things like music theory and the occasional bit of singing or playing the goddamn recorder, but if you wanted to actually learn a musical instrument properly you'd be paying for private lessons. Pretty sure it's the same way in most parts of the world.

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Yeah! At my school too

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that seems to be far-fetched. However, many people think that music training improves fine motorics in young children and ability to concentrate and persistence in older children. I find these things plausible, as many skills can be improved by intensive training and I do not see why fine motorics or concentration would not.

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Then you aren't paying attention. The trope that chess, or music, or art, or Latin, will not just improve your chess class grades but your general grades is older than most of the people here. Literally when I was in middle school and joined the school chess club, one of the justifications we were given for it was that it'd improve our grades by helping us learn to think. (I don't remember if the teacher in charge actually intoned "Studies show..." but I'm sure someone along the way did.)

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Feb 23, 2022
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I think it's probably true in the sense of "you train your brain on something" but not true in the sense of "general brain function improvement." I think chess can actually improve your ability to think about chess and areas of similar types of thinking, such as strategy games, spatial location, etc. I don't see any reason at all to think that playing chess would increase your verbal score on the SAT, and probably not your math either.

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Feb 23, 2022
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We probably agree more than disagree. I'm thinking in terms of pretty narrow skills that transfer between games, and maybe other areas. Thinking about the interactions of pieces and planning out chess moves can extend beyond the literal game of chess (obviously in terms of something like 3D chess, but also in other games at least). Less narrowly, you can learn to read your opponent's goals and playstyle, and identify if someone is being aggressive verses reactive as one example.

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I am not sure what the cut off is for how similar a task has to be, but a lot of top ranked auto battler players (Hearthstone Battlegrounds, TFT, Autochess) seem to be able to quickly reach top rank when they try other auto battlers.

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Do you think there's a meaningful difference between phonics vs. whole language? For that matter, are there any such teaching-technique differences that convincingly beat the null?

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Don't know, but the phonics people I know are really adamant that phonics is more efficient/faster.

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Stories are fun to read. Phonics are boring. Do enthusiasm & motivation matter?

Edit: Phonics are well-suited for the prison-guards they call teachers.

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Most of the hostility towards phonics I've seen has come from teachers who are all in on whole word. Also, I actually remember being taught phonics, and it was fun, so this take is very confusing.

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A healthy skepticism of American pedagogy, among the least successful of human endeavors, is all I need.

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Motivation was certainly crucial for me, so I'm trying to find that with my own kids.

I had very little interest in reading until my parents subscribed us to Nintendo Power magazine. I probably spent 30 minutes studying and re-studying every page over the course of a month, trying to discern everything it was telling me.

That said, working through those pages at first required a lot of phonics, sounding words out. I was taught the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes (which really doesn't require that much teaching), and I went from there. I haven't encountered the "whole word" thing but it seems like it would be more teacher-intensive, not less.

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From educators I have talked to, phonics is more robust in that it can teach a larger fraction of the population to achieve basic literacy than other techniques. More efficient/faster for the average or median student is less certain.

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I think it's reasonable to _not_ bet on the null when it comes to the question of "which of these two rather different methods for teaching X is better for teaching X?"

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I mean, even if one technique is faster, that's no guarantee that it matters five years down the line. I've read phonics people claim that this makes a lifelong difference (https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-how-schools-teach-reading). I'm genuinely curious if this is true.

I can imagine how hard this is to measure too, but also how high the stakes are. If phonics means that 3% of the adult population has substantially higher reading proficiency, that's really important.

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I'm pretty sure it made a significant difference to me. I couldn't read at all before a remedial reading tutor started me on phonics in third grade. But phonics didn't teach me to read "better;" it's a trick for getting over the first hump of being able to read at all - which, for some reason comes naturally to some people but definitely did not for me.

I went straight from completely illiterate to reading at twelfth grade level in about two months of systematic phonics - but obviously I already had a lot of other foundational skills in place.

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Whole language is underspecified. If, as suggested in that article, it means trying the whole task, combining multiple cues, then there is a theoretical argument that it is a mistake. Instead you should strengthen the cues separately, called "deliberate practice." Phonics is only about isolating one cue, which might be a mistake, but the others already exist in speech, so may not really need practice.

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and parenting

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"Sehr gut. Setzen."

I mean, why should it improve skills in other subjects? Why would piano lessons be of any help in my later career as a, say, social scientist that earns his or her money by correlating things with other things? The causal path from exposure to outcome is not obvious at all. And the elephant in the room is selection bias, because these poor children of these rich parents do not just get piano lessons, but all kinds of extra training, including academic training, and they have access to better colleges and universities just because they can afford it.

PS. The time spent with piano lessons and exercises must also be taken into account; if you use that for, say, matrix calculus, you'll be even better at math or whatever areas in which matrices are used.

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In case it comes up, the German for the command "Sit" is "Platz".

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Only to dogs, not to school children.

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Some learnings clearly cross over and affect other subjects. Learning any one programming language spills to others and possibly into general communication ability. Learning(or at least understanding) calculus helps you to model physical phenomena in your mind. Statistics applies to many scenarios throughout life in an automatic even intuitive way(academic and not). Presumably, philosophy provides a basis for understanding and evaluating aspects of history and social science both of which can still be learned without it.

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A lot of the very smart people I know in grad school play a musical instrument, and probably learned it early in life. Of course this proves that correlation is not causation. However, this tells us why the belief that learning music earlier in life probably leads to better fluid intelligence or something is quite intuitive, and almost common sense; at least based on the ample evidence around me. Perhaps research in education is important because it can help disabuse us of our "intuitive" notions.

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That seems like it would be highly confounded by tiger mom parents who make their children learn musical instruments.

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28: The snopes link you posted has been updated, suggest you strike that paragraph

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