Slashdot Mirror
Intellectual Pursuits May Create Brain Synapses
Bacteriophage writes "There's an interesting news scoop at Science Daily in which some neuroscientists have linked professions to 'brain power.' This may seem to some of you as obvious, the question is if people in 'intellectually stimulating' professions are smart the way they are because of 'nature or nurture,' whether or not they are predestined to take the careers they do, or possibly new synapses are being formed due to on-the-job stimulation."
Now thats to far, jokes plays on the name is fair, kinda like a crosscheck for pushing the crease.
Leave it at that thank you.
first, before my personal experience, a correction: Someone posted that no new synapses are formed after age 3, and that's just plain wrong. Recent medical research has shown that even mature adults form new synapses, and even grow new brain cells, totally shattering the myths. I don't recall where I read this, unfortunately, so if someone has access to MedLine, they could look it up. As to my personal experiences, I recently suffered a severe brain injury. Boy, it is really a shocking experience to go to a neurologist for tests, and they ask you questions like "please name all the words you can think of that start with the letter N, in 60 seconds" and you just sit there totally unable to think of a single one. I suffered from a sort of aphasia, since the damage was to my linguistic center. Sometimes I could remember a word in one language, but not another (I'm bilingual). It was terrible. But surprisingly, I found that playing Boggle on a computer helped me rapidly regain my language memories. It took a few months, but I'm back to about 95% of normal now. So, intellectual pursuits can definitely rewire the brain, and work around damaged circuits. I know from personal experience.
- (http://biomedicine.about.com/business/biotech/
l ibrary/weekly/aa090299.htm)
In this case, they put in a few exra copies of a gene that codes for the protein channels necessary for LTP (Long-Term-Potentiation: the name neuropysch types have for the synapse strengthening that is thought ot be the basis of all learning). The mice got a lot 'smarter': they could go through mazes faster, and they learned new tasks much more rapidly than their genetically deficient peers due to their ability to rapidly integrate information into their brain.The issue is really not as obvious as the above posters seem to be claiming. 'nuff said.
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
My advice: takea neurobiology course instead of a psych course. The biological underpinnings of behavior are being discoverd and soon (decades, maybe, but still soon) psychology will disappear, since it will have been reduced to biology. MAybe by then Evrythign will have been reduced to physcis under GUT anyway...read consilience.
sorry for the rambling...its real late. Just wanted to point out what I am sure is obvious to you in retrospect.
TTFN (ta-ta-for-now, as tigger would say)
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
Just about everyone here has been making the same mistake - they've been equating ability in one area (generally abstract thinking - I mean hey, we're all programmers/thinkers/etc here at /.) with `intelligence'. This isn't just narrow minded - it's plain wrong.
If things were that simple, then how would you rate my Dad's old friend, who's one of the best diesel mechanics you're likely to find - I could `think' rings around him, but I sincerely doubt I could ever be as good a mechanic as him. My ability to think effectively in the abstract doesn't translate particularly well into grasping what's going wrong with a complex piece of machinery that pretty much has a mind of it's own. His ability to understand how bits of the physical world interact with each other doesn't necessarily translate well into grasping how a program works.
Abstract thinking is wonderful stuff, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of the world. The basic assumption behind many of these posts, that the kind of abstract thinking that we all do, all the time, and often get payed lots of money to do, is somehow the only form of intelligence worthy of the name is fundamentally wrong.
To get back on topic . . .
This research doesn't say anything about a causal link between high numbers of synapses in the brain and in intellectually challenging job. Neither does it say anything about the converse.
What the research seems to show (according to the report - I haven't read the original paper) is that people in some types of jobs (engineers and teachers were the examples cited) have higher numbers of synapses in a particular part of the brain. Not the whole brain, merely a particular part. What this suggests to me (though I'm not a neuroscientist) is that that particular part of the brain is primarily where the kind of abstract thinking that engineers/teacher/thinkers in general tend to do takes place. Since I'm not a neuroscientist or pshycologist or anything of that ilk I can't comment on how these results relate to current models of brain function, but I wouldn't be surprised if these were quite important findings - researchers don't normally get excited about stuff that's not important.
Whatever the case, it'd be a really good idea if people got over this - yes you're intelligent and yes you probably have the same kind of synaptic complexity that these people are talking about, but Who Cares!!! It doesn't mean anything in the real world. The only real way to judge intelligence is by what it does, not by how many brain cells made it happen.
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
Yeah. Nature vs. Nurture is like Wave vs. Particle. We need to throw away the naive ontology of the universe and let the observed facts define the categories of being -- even if that requires defining some new categories.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The 'weights' you speak of--actually the rate of firing/strength of impulse transmitted)--might change because new synapses are being created between neurons that are already connected. Personally, I think there is more eveidence that new protein channels are being inserted in the synaptic wall, but many others disagree. Althoguh this alteration of a syapses' stregnth (LTP or LDP) permits the creation'alteration of associations between neurons, I do not believe it is sufficient to explain learning(information storage). Behavioral patterns are modified: say, for example, that your pleasure centers are being stimulated at the same time as you hear a certain high-pitched tone. You will soon display a 'preference' for the tone in question, including the full-blown emotional response produced by hormone prduction that we have all come to know and cherish. However, information that you are able to access consciously is different. I am gonna stickj to my guns and state that one needs the creation fo new synapses to actually learn anything.
Of course, this assertion of function is irrelevant(sorry again...but I had to explain myself). The fact that new synapses are created was demonstrated empirically by a bunch of clever fellows who attached radioactive tracers to molecules associated with synaptic walls and then taking samples (these experiments were all on rats, of course) over a period of time and comparing the amount of radioactivity deiplayed. The average number of synapses/mm^2 from the same region changed quite a bit in response to various stimluli. I dont have a refernce on hand, but check your text. Im sure youll find plenty.
whats a neurobiology?
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
*Disclaimer*, this is not an insult to any employees of the all night chicken shack.
Oh come on, of course it is; you're saying that they are uneducated and/or stupid. Which some are, no doubt. And it's probably a stereotype shared by almost everyone with a more rewarding career.
But I've known postgraduate students (especially those from overseas) to take on part-time jobs as nightwatchmen, store assistants and short order cooks just to make ends meet, so it's not quite a foregone conclusion.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
Most athletes train regularly to stay fit, those of us that don't are suitably impressed at their achievements. Having said that some respond better to training than others and are just naturally faster / stronger / whatever. I don't think intellectual activity is much different, at the beginning of each semester I can be pretty slow ...
:wq
This has been found quite recently (1996 in rats, 1998 in humans) to be wrong. Whole new neurons can be produced throughout adulthood, if necessary, as well as new synapses. This is another case of accepted dogma being just plain wrong.
This is very true. I have a tested IQ approaching 200, but I regularly come in the bottom 1/2 of my year in exams. Why? I just don't give a cr*p about lots of things. I just look at them, and think "What's the point?", while the people who has to read books over and over just to remember them really care about what they do.
I remember my college psy prof. being quite sure that it was all nurture.
Several studies she talked about (which of course i don't remember specificaly) claimed that it's nurture almost exlusively.
Most, however, seem to indicate it's a balance of both... not unlike most things in life.
Hmm. Obviously not nurtured.
Please, Why was this classed as informative? Just don't.
> GO FUCK YOUR MOM BEANERS
well i think we can definitely make a conclusion about the contrapositive of this theory.
-- the opinions stated above aren't those of my employer. in fact, they're probably not even my own. you know what, ju
Almost nothing is entirely nature or nurture.
The way you grow new synapses etc will mostly nature related, but the stimulation is nature.
This is definitly interesting. I can't help but wonder if there's a difference in amount of synapses between different types of "educated professions", for example would a writer have more or less than an engineer. This could become an interesting game, who has more? Programmer or Linguistics prof., Anonymous Coward or Karma Reaper?
This agrees with my own experience. The kids at college who got first class degrees weren't the brightest students, they were the ones who put in the most work.
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
I think a lot of people (wrongly) think the "smartest" people are those in the sciences, like engineering or biology, etc. While it does take a lot of brain power to hash through many scientific problems, I see the real problem as being not giving credit to other areas of expertise.
For example, the art of sale. Now I could sit down and code an RCM module for the latest e-commerce site out there, but could I sell it? No way. I don't have the talent to make people want to buy from me. People who can do that, in my mind, have a gift that I don't. One that is normally not equated with "intelligence", yet in its own merrit is pretty challenging.
Another example, football (pick a sport). I think a lot of geeks think of sporting as just a bunch of dumb jocks, but when you really look at it, all the stuff that's involved in a game like football is no different than you getting on the computer and playing Starcraft, or playing Chess. Its a lot of strategy (of course atleticism does count).
What I think these all have in common (and my point in all this) is that I think the proffesions that are truely "intellectual" proffesions are the ones that make you think on your feet. The ones that make you APPLY what you've learned. If I had to make the same HTML templates all day, every day, it would be no different than flipping burgers, even though I'm doing something with "computers", in the sense that a) I'm not doing anything new, and b) nothing changes so I'm not forced to use any other part of my brain.
I think the reasons there were more synapses in fields like engineering and teaching are because you constantly have to "relearn" what you're doing for any given situation, because every situation has its own set of rules and outcomes. Any job where you have to adapt like this in any way, I can see being one that uses a lot of "brain power".
The analogy to open heart surgery relies on motor neuron responses and other physical aspects. Not a good test of you are Stephen Hawking, of the level of intelligence we possess.
Someone once said, IIRC, intelligence is the ability to think about contradictory things to some useful end. We have no adequate gauge for intelligence, as I am quite confident that some of the smartest people alive consistently, and even on purpose, "fail" tests that they could excel at if they wished so.
Now, I've known many doctors, lawyers, etc., in my lifetime, and they have all been able to, even in old age or complete ignorance of the field, pick up on new concepts and ideas almost instantly. Such as Linux -- I know doctors who have no (as in zero) working knowledge of Linux, but nonetheless have an avid curiosity in it, how it would benefit them, how the development model is significantly different, why it's cheaper, etc.
Maybe intelligence is directly related to our curiosity. Those with more curiosity tend to stay mentally fit, I would imagine. But that's really just speculation on my part ...
I cannot recall them, but I think there is logic, music, linguistics, emotions, reactions, and others I just cannot remember.
They are fundamentally measured, in theory, by the following:
* The capacity to acquire knowledge
* The capacity to apply knowledge
* The ability to combine knowledge to further understanding
* Facilitation of thought and reason. (pretty vague, tho.)
With regard to the number of synapses, you are completely correct. Einstein had a bigger brain by a little bit, but the left and right hemispheres of his cortex (IIRC) was connected, where in normal people it generally isn't. It isn't how many connections you have, it is how they are connected, and how they are used.
There have been recorded cases of people being of genius IQ, yet only having less than a third of their brain.
Nightwatchmen in the UK are not like that, they're generally people who couldn't get a job doing anything else, or people who particularly need an evening job. They don't need any particular skills or experience (or intelligence for that matter). Similar to people who do the night shift work as a cashier in 24-hour "gas stations".
Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction
The laziness you mention is just one manifestation of our "gimme-gimme, now-now" culture. Nobody wants to bother to read the manual. Nobody wants to actually have to learn anything. Delayed gratification is as welcome in the general populace as it is in your average two-year-old.
Computer use has been reduced to an unskilled labor position. That sounds funny, doesn't it? But of course, many of you doubtless say, using a computer is unskilled labor position. Surely I'm not suggesting that it ever was, or that it should be?
Why, yes; that's exactly what I'm suggesting. Think about it. It wasn't all that long ago that you'd have been regarded as either a starry-eyed lunatic or a hopeless simpleton if you had suggested that computer programming, computer administration, or computer use should be counted as unskilled labor, requiring no prior skills or special training. Today, the reverse of this occurs. To suggest that there's anything to it is to foster "elitism", a verbal icon for the tired old idea that hard work and genuine skill can ever produce more competence than can sloth and slackery. Sorry, but it's true.
What's pushing this insanity is the market economy (and the media culture). The pressure to demonstrate stellar revenue growth on each and every corporate quarterly report drives those who pander software to do completely stupid things. They have to sell their goods to people who are completely and utterly unskilled. Why? Because there are more of them, and they've got money, that's why.
Vendors cannot require even average intelligence for the learning and use of their software, lest half their market be cut off from them. Consequently, they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use, thereby restricting all of us to a childish level of interaction with our computers. It's embarrassing. Welcome to America.
It's like trying to read only comic strips and calling this literature. It's insulting. Yes, it takes time, work, and dedication to learn to read well enough to handle the Great Books rather than mere comic strips. But it's also worth it. Reduced to a level a discourse that even a quasi-illiterate child could fathom, our entire society suffers, leaving us all impoverished.
This zero-learning-curve principle for software is hardly the only force driving software manufacturers to previously unimaginable levels of idiocy, but it's a critically important, and the one which explains your own observation. Other factors include the notion that customer is always right, that more features are better, that software can in later releases have post-design features haphazardly accreted onto it like a child's fort at a junkyard, that flexible tools are only for professionals, that it's better to get a bad product out now than a good product out later, and that lack of backwards compatibility drives sales.
Our society is, as you indirectly observe, full of lazy people. They don't want to work for anything. They just want it handed to them on a silver platter, already raised and slaughtered and packaged and cooked and salted and cut up into bite-sized pieces to feed to their kiddies--and themselves.
Well, I've got sad news. Computers require skills. They do not produce jobs for unskilled laborers. But with books on the market with titles remarkably close to "Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in Five Days", or "How to Be a Concert Pianist in Ten Hours of Easy Listening", or "Wiring Your Backplane for Dummies", or "Become an Air-Traffic Controller Overnight", you see what's going on.
Computers aren't for the unskilled. It's not a television. It's not a garage door opener. Sure, you can get those things, but that's just the tip of the iceberg--the iceberg that's going to sink your boat. You can't be a systems adminstrator without prior skills. You certainly can't be a programmer without developing some serious skills. You can't even adminstrate a computer without developing serious skills.
Yet nary a day passes me by that someone whose idea of computers is limited to Word Perfect or Microsoft Word comes to me and effectively asks, "How can I use Perl to program my CGI script to handle a multistage shopping cart with distributed database connectivity, animated vector graphics, secure transactions, robustness in the face of complete systems failure, and online credit card verification -- and which scales to a thousand hits per second?" They have absolutely no programming background whatsoever. I gently (or sometimes, ungently) explain that you can't possibly teach them enough in a day, or three, for them to be able to do this, and no, there is no online tutorial either.
"But surely, computers are easy!" they retort. "The Web is therefore easy. Programming must be easy, too." This whole exchange really pisses them off. They've heard all this from millions of adverts, that anybody can do any of this, and that anybody can get rich quick without years of study. They've heard it so often that they're sure that those few of us who tell them otherwise must necessarily be lying to them. They saw it on TV, so it must be true, and we "professionals" (sorry, that's the old word; the new word is "elistist"; same thing) have to feeding them a line of bull to protect our own income streams.
When someone can't even manage to use Legos, they'll never be able to construct a skyscraper in a day or three of study. You just can't get there from here. Why do they think they should be able to? Because of the Big Lie that anyone can do anything they want with computers without learning squat. Without working. Instantly.
There's a reason people go to school for years to learn this kind of thing, and have professional internships to develop job skills. You can't just expect an illiterate street person to do this job. But people do. They really do. They think managing a computer (being a sysadmin) must be as easy as putting gas in their car, and that programming one must be as easy as adding oil to that car. Well, it isn't. This isn't unskilled labor. It never will be. Time to burst their bubble. This is the kinder thing to do than giving them false expectations of something for nothing.
It will, not, of course, happen. Corporate greed and sound-byte media coverage will see to it that the lies are left intact. But nobody will ever be happy, because lies remain lies.
Stop all reading
Start watching the 3 networks. Watching the history channel is not allowed.
Study hair dressing.
Theory: It's not what I did before, but how many synapses I loose (insert rhyme).
More Coffee Please -d
The theory of weightlifting (that's where people who generally don't read /. pick up heavy things and put them back down again, often paying for the privilege of even _touching_ the heavy things...) is the more of it you do, the bigger your muscles become. By analogy, the more work you do in a given field, the more mental-strength you should receive.
/. makes nerds more aware of the news?
Except the former was tested on lab rats. Was the latter? Did they give some Lab Rats jobs in MIS and others jobs collecting Ratty garbage just to see which ones would have bigger brains and bigger muscles at the end of the month?
And this surprises people, why? Who can't remember High school, where the brainy kids got smarter and the jockey kids got bigger, because the former group sat at home coding all day, trying to hack local banks, and functionally learning how to avoid better mousetraps, while the jockey types were lifting weights.
What's going to be the next _massive_ revelation? Reading
Why moderate up a post when the poster admits he didn't even read the article?
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I have to throw in my $.02. NOTHING is intuitive on computers, this is an outrageous claim by ms (not to start a microsoft bashing ;-)) to make their program seem better. Still, we go around whining IANAL, how many people say I am not a computer programer, why should I know what c:\ means (or /dev/hda1). I don't expect everyone to use vi like I do, I do think that you should read a few manuals, maybe use a GUI like GNOME, but know the basics of managing the operating system. You should know that your not a criminal when windows performs an illigal operation (or you shouldn't think that they are spying on you through your computer, whatever the case may be ;-)) A somewhat friendly user interface should not be intuitive, it should at least be logical. No one should have to click on "save" and have the document print. Although, who really likes the evil spelling checker and caps checking that doesn't ask you and assumes that it's smarter than you? Don't expect your grandmother to be using UNIX and rewriting the linux kernel in her spare time, but teach her what a hard disk is.
"Employee agrees that any ideas, products, or brain synapses developed while employed by EMPLOYER are the sole property of EMPLOYER and EMPLOYEE hereby forfeits any rights or royalties to such."
The was an experiment made by some psych department where they had mice chasing cheese in mazes (I kid you not :-), but as a twist they had two teams of human "helpers" who trained their mice to find the cheese. One team were told that their mice were exceptionally smart, the other that their ones were stupid. :-)
The mice were of course picked at random.
However, the "smart" group of mice did much better than the stupid...
On can speculate if the expectations of the humans "rubbed off" onto the mice and they performed better or worse depending on the "karma" balance being tipped.
My point is, we still have no idea what causes intelligence. Actually, no one has even defined IQ in a satisfactory way.
One of my favourite quotes (paraphrased) is; "If the devil found himself in God's place, he would find himself to forced to take upon him all of heavens attributes". I believe that everyone has a great capacity for adaptation to our environment, regardless of our native abilities.
>If you ask a skilled programmer with years of experience to do open heart surgery, chances are he won't do any better than your average construction worker.
Nonsense, your average construction worker would hem and haw and probably refuse if he can. Your average programmer would hire a surgeon.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
It is connected in normal people. You should read the case studies of people who have had that connection severed. It's incredible how much information flows throws that connection. Certainly Einstein might've had a larger connection between hemispheres than most people.
Your comments on comic-book literacy remind me of a feature in the Toronto Star this fall (big Canadian newspaper). Apparently ~50% of the Canadian populace has day-to-day literacy problems -- they have difficulties leading their daily lives!
In one article, readability metrics were applied to various types of publications. Newspapers were targeted at a level from grade 5 to, if you're really lucky, grade 10. One of the things I remember most about my adolescence is the amazement I experienced every few months at the dramatic increase in my perspective; It's simply impossible to discuss meaningfully at a grade 5 level the things that *must* be discussed for the proper functioning of a nation.
One depressing thing they mentioned was that literacy advocates had largely abandoned the traditional argument that literacy is necessary for democracy, as it is ineffective today. Instead they are harping the economic aspect.
--
Change is inevitable.
Progress is not.
I think one of your basic assumptions is that an operating system can only interact with a user at one level. Unix's basic UI philosophy is to give the user "enough rope to hang themselves with." Who's to say that the length of rope, if you will, is fixed?
I think that a UI that scales for various user proficiency levels would be great! Those of us who are hackers could dip right down into the nitty gritty, and my mom could have big buttons that pop up when you mouse over them. Is this impossible? No. What happens when the level you're at starts to chafe? You move on to the next one, until you're root. Is this a part of the Big Lie? No, it's unfulfilled potential, and until programmers get their heads out of their asses and start coding for *everyone*, it won't happen. But no, we're complacent and lazy, and we get pissed off when people can't understand how to use the tools we make. We blame the users for not knowing as much as we do. That's bullshit.
To force people to study computer science in order to check their email is like making people ponder the essence of the universe for 10 years before you teach them geometry.
I'll agree with you that computers are being billed as something they're not, but I disagree in your (apparent) solution. You say that no one offers a "Brain Surgery For Dummies" book, but I'd like to add that no one makes a "Learn How To Apply Band-Aids In 21 Days" book, either.
Is email complicated? No. Should people have to resort to traditional media to communicate? No. You don't have to spend years studying great correspondence throughout history to write a letter to Grandma thanking her for the sweater, so why should you have to know the basics of TCP/IP to send her email?
No, rank amateurs will *not* be able to write an Amazon.com clone. That's a fact of life. But most people just want their email, browser, word processor, and instant messager.
The sooner we get past the "damn users need to learn more" bullshit and start teaching the better. I'm doing my part. You do yours.
[ And yes, this is nit-picking, but I've read "literature" and cartoons, and I've found cartoons to have a much better handle on things. I'd take Tom Tomorrow and Berke Breathed over Bronte and Milton. ]
-- I can't think of anything witty to put here. Sorry.
Of course, setting up a proper SMTP gateway is something else, but that's why there's such a thing as a professional systems adminstrator.
I want a real time pet-scanner that scans a whole room full of people... Then I want to watch the colorful show on the monitor as I play Mozart in the room, as well as the view of brains in heated conversation...
Amazing magic tricks
Dr. Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education is the leading proponent. Seven of them are musical intelligence, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence, logical-mathematical intelligence, linguistic intelligence, spatial intelligence, interpersonal intelligence and intrapersonal intelligence. He recently added naturalist intelligence as the eighth. This site has a good overview.
My sister, a graduate student in education, had to learn about these ideas for a class. One idea coming out of the theory is that teachers should schedule different kinds of learning activities to suit different students. Some students may gain benefit from building models, others from writing papers and others from from working problems on paper.
I asked a graduate student in education psychology about this theory. He is very skeptical. While we certainly see people with particular talents who learn by different methods, Dr. Gardner's theory seems overwhelmingly based on anecdotes, his random observations and his imagination. It might turn out to be descriptive and useful. While the end product looks formal and authoritative, the underlying research and deduction is weak, if it is there.
Traditional theories of general intelligence, such as a general intelligence factor G, match my experience to some degree, as do the ideas of Gardner. I have some general ability to learn in a wide variety of fields, but I show and feel more aptitude toward some more than others.
For me, my attitude toward this argument on intelligence mirrors my ideas toward many areas of psychology. Many ideas help describe the world of psychology, but they usually have flaws. It leaves us with a few choices. One is to become dogmatic and fight the opposition. Another is to look at how so many psychological theories fail and disregard it all. I choose a third stance. This field often just does not allow for the rigorous, exact measurements of others. It does not mean that all the theories are worthless. We need to keep our wits about us when evaluating them, though. The old using 10% of the brain and left brain/right brain theories may have some small merits, but both have been shown too simple. If we are to continue with psychology being a social scientist, we must act as scientists. Challenge the results. Dispute the theories. Make measurements. Test the alternatives. Do science.
Cut scene A: Neurobiologist and psychologist reading paper. Headline "A mixture of Nature and Nurture determines behavior and potential." Both immediately smack foreheads, saying "Of Course!! Why didn't we realize this before!!??" in profoundly astounded tones. Having seen the blinding light of revelation, they go home.
End cut scene.
Of course everybody knows that a mixture of nature (the kind of natural environment that exists) and nurture (what kinds of interaction occur with this environment) determine evrything about the brain.
The question, though, is where these boundaries should be drawn. How much of what we consider in ourselves to be easily influenced by our conscious decisions is determined at birth? What limits have been imposed upon our learning capacity and how quickly we are able to learn? Are there natural/born geniuses? If so, are they the only kind, or can we create genius if we provide the proper set of interactions? Can we make everyone a potential genius through gene therapy, and how much social engineering would be necessary to complete sucha creation?
it is disappointing that the slashdot community has glanced so superficially at these issues. I thought the idea was to get behind the media hype to the truly new and meaty stuff.
Please do not take this critism too personally--I understand that the post was not meant to be particularly serious. 'Course, that's part of what I'm whining about :-)
Matt
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
The Einstein Factor details a technique he calls Image Streaming that everyone can use to increase the number of connections between your brain cells. Image streaming can be used to "improve your performance in virtually all aspects of mental ability, including memory, quickness, IQ and learning capacity." Win is the author 48 books, and his works are the source of many ideas in the accelerated learning field.
... The Einstein Factor has become a part of my life. Not only do the techniques accelerate your mind, but the book's a good read as well. It's written in a clear manner with informative diagrams, is well paced in its progression and has snippets of intriguing information on topics ranging from quantum physics and the 'ideal realm' to Mozart and the evolution of man's intelligence through the ages (memetic evolution). It's a quality product; a pleasure to spend time with. I'm getting it for my sister as a birthday present. Trust me, you want to get it too."
This review on Amazon.com says it very well:
"the thing about many of the book's techniques: they are incredibly subtle in their effects.
Some other sites dealing with accelerated learning:
Anakin's Brain
Project Renaissance - Win Wenger's home page.
Hot Rod Your Head!
Exploreit.net
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
It is exactly that kind of attitude that is going to get you left behind in the ever evolving computer industry. It reminds me of that commercial where a bunch of aging corporate execs gather dust as the say something to the effect of "The customer will get what _we_ want them to have" (the quote is close enogh to help my point :-) ). A personal computer, or any other end-user technology, has one major purpose, to abstract what would otherwise be overwhelmingly complex process to a set a simple and easy to understand intefaces. To suggest that every user, no matter what function they need their computer to perform, has to devote an unreasonable ammount of time to the study of computer science is insane.
:-)
Do you know exactly how every compenent of your car functions? Unless you are also a mechanic, I would think not. You may be a automotive enthusiast, change your own filters, and know how how to replace a failing alternator or water pump, but any serious work would still need to be perfomed by a professional. The average driver only needs know how to operate ther vehicle and know where and when to get it serviced. I also understand that there are divers who don't even know how to check and add oil. Are we just to to exclude those without experience and revoke their licences when they forget to rotae their tires? Each one of these groups needs to be addressed speratly when deciding on the apporpriate set of interfaces for them. If you notice, car commercials rarely combine "New V24 engine!" with "5,000,000 miles without a tune-up!"
What is the correct response to a helpless user when their engine starts to make noise?
A) Say, "You should know what the problem is. I will not waste my time helping idiots."
B) Point them in the right direction to information and possibly even teach them how to maintain a car.
C) (If you are an automotive engineer) Design a more robust engine that requires less attention and add dummy lights to the dashboard while possibly still leaving analog gauges for the enthusiasts.
Answer:
A) You are arrogant and an eletist. Just because you are an expert in one area does not make you superior to the ignorant.
B) Good, if someone politely comes to you for assistance, help them and hope that they'll learn. If they are rude, they probably suffer from a similar condition that sparks response A (see Script Kiddie and Power User).
C) Just because we can build our own cars from scratch and are willing to take the time to tweak and maintain every aspect, does not mean the rest of the world wants or has the time to. When designing for the general populace, a major goal is to reduce maintinace and learning curves. This also includes consideration for the common fool.
I understand that no matter how much we try to fool-proof something, a better fool will always come along and amaze yet another technical support person who thought they'd heard everything. Fools are one of the few constans in the universe and trying to tell them to read instructions will usually be a futile attempt. We can only do our best to kill^H^H^H^Haccomodate them.
My point? We cannot expect everyone to have the expertese that we have. (You probably realize by now that I am no whiz at speling.) We have to realize that not everyone needs to learn Perl to send e-mail. What we find intuitive can baffle others. Just because someone is slow and/or uneducated does not give us the right to think of ourselves as superior. Like it or not, there are ADHD children who need to be able to use a computer. I have a family member with attetion disorders and it is obvious to me that I cannot not expect everything to come easily and naturally to them.
Although I completely dissagree with your treatement of users, I do find that your description of the ever declining average inteligence of developers frighteningly real. There has been an ovewhelming rush into the computer industry fuled by the promise of money. Too many students flood into the high-demand marketplace without comlpeting a full study in the area that they are supposed to be qualified. They're are to many IT companies that'll pick up just about anyone that boasts "Hey, I'm NT certified!". What I do disagree with is your perception of the problem. The problem is not those taking advantage of time saving technology such as real time syntax checkers, but those who do not have a true and comple grasp of the technology. Just because we have gotten used to emacs doesn't mean eveyone else has to use it. Besides, if you were a _real_ programmer, you would be writing in assembly; everyone today is too dependant upon high level languages, right?
Wrong, the problem is when I see anxious students running off to a young company who is hiring every programmer they can get their hands on, only to come back after a couple of years to try to finish their education when they realize just how little they knew and were unable to progress. The probllem is that too many people are making money designing bad software while other companies make softwae to try to fix the bad software and the companies that are suckered into investing in shaky technology have to form enourmous IS departments, to often with unqualified individuals, to try to manage the bloated system.
I see to many people who are descent MFC programmers but know nothing else. Too much time is spent developing in bare-bones languages like C, when a language like tcl, Perl, or even Java would be much better suited for the project. A developer needs to know about all the tools that are avaliable to him or her and be able to take advantage of the best technology. BTW, Linux is not _always_ the answer. *gasp!*
Clean, robust, well planned, well excecuted, and well maintained projects written by organized and efficient teams are becoming few and far between.
Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
While you got a point - the level of expertise needed to use Word to write a letter is low enough to attract 2/3 of the population (what an elitist way to say it) - you are making it sound all bad. It is definitely not, quick software learning curves are actually making life easier for people!
Are you deliberately misunderstanding this or only feeling unhappy because general public has moved over to your sandbox? :)
For what it is worth, sample of size 30 is generally accepted as "large," and will accurately reflect the whole of the sampled population at
Without more information about this study we can only guess, but I expect that there is a relatively low standard deviaiton in synapse counts (ie, a few more helps a lot) if the population is roughly normally distributed I expect that a 90% C.I. would be something like 10-24%. Now that's blind darts, but a 17% point estimate would be a significant statisical result (ie, contradicts null hypothesis); I'll leave it to the MDs to determine what the threshold for medical significance is... for all I know you might need 8 times as many synapses to be only half again as intelligent.
My point is just that we should not disregard the results just because there were only 16 subjects. 3 subjects, and we would be wasting our time arguing about this.
I think this story is over hyped, and that's because Science Daily basically uses press releases not journalists, so I would take their conclusions with a pinch of salt.
It is not the content of all your post. Thats why I offered the flower of information on the Blade Runner Reference. However dude. We can see your name and Http line, WE don't need it in your Sig with five blanklines. It WAS friendly-like and I hope you continue to post and be a part, BUT It looks to ME like many of the 50+ posts are an attempt at PROMOTION of the casino and nothing else.
Dont worry...soon well be able to stimulate neural growth and any brain damage that doesnt kill you will be mostly temporary.
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
I'll say what everyone else is afraid to say: An intelligent person can, and will, pick up things faster, easier, and with less work. Intelligence is one's ability to think. I've known doctors who can understand computers and who are wonderfully attentive doctors, and I've known average doctors who couldn't use a keyboard if they were at gun-point. An intelligent person will excel(tm) regardless of their field. An intelligent person will be able to make associations, see patterns, devise strategies, and complete tasks with little or no guidance. Someone is not "intelligent on one area". Intelligent people are intelligent in all areas. A car mechanic who is a good car mechanic doesn't have to be intelligent to excel(tm). They just have to have a good memory of patterns and a good ability to see a cause-effect relationship. A good computer programmer is just one who knows tricks, and techniques. Just because he can program well doesn't mean he is intelligent. An intelligent person can do well at all things. He may not have experience, but he will learn quickly, he will see patterns, he will see cause-effect relationships, he will devise new techniques, he will notice things that other people won't and he will excel(tm). With less experience and knowledge than others, an intelligent person will be able to hold his own. An intelligent person will naturally gravitate to the more mentally challenging areas, such as surgery, engineering, science, math, and computers. These things are more based in fact and science than art, or other BS subjects. If an intelligent person goes to something other than the above, he will excel(tm) as well. Intelligent people are, by nature, successful. And don't give me any of this "ambition" crap. People who are quick but not ambitious are failures. How intelligent does one have to be to be a failure?
However, it has also been conventional wisdom that learning requires some kind of change of "brainal" configuration. But I think CW has been that this is done by changing the strengths of synapses rather than the number of synapses.
see my other posts on this article regardiong this topic. As I said there, many researchers think that the strength (weight for you cosi people) is modified by adding additional synspases between neurons that are already connected. Regarding the Research considering the growth of new neurons, check out the press release and the article istelf at nature
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
"New synapses forming" is equal to (an identity with?) the nurture part of nature/nurture.
I tell you...
What's your beef dude? I hate spam. Spam is my enemy. When I get spammed I send the guy a dirty message. So don't accuse me of every spamming anybody. If you don't like my sig line, then that's your problem. It's easy for you to exclude me so you don't have to have to read my comments. Some people must like my comments because I got a three. So take it easy dude. Enjoy your slashdot. Exclude me if you don't like what I have to say. But most of all be civil to others. Treat them as if they were invited guests into your house. Why be rude? I mean life is too short to get so worked up!
AFAIK, your claim amounts to the following:
1. Complex systems are more than the sum of their parts; due to complex interactions and stuff, they possess properties that none of their parts have. These properties are commonly called emergent properties.
2. These properties cannot be predicted from simply knowing the properties of the parts.
3. Therefore, any understanding of a complex system needs to start from the top and go down, and any knowledge gained from reductionist dissection is only complementary at best.
Is this approximatley correct? Assuming that it is, I have no choice but to say that The idea that complex systems are not describable from the bottom up is a silly trend which has only persisted because of our ignorance. An example:
In the late 70's/early 80s (I think...) John lovelock created a system called daisyworld in order or demonstrtae emergent properties in an easily uunderstood environment. He was advocating Gainaism at the time, and wanted to show how high-level properties couold emerge from low-level simplicity.
The system contained as simple earth model, with a normal temperature variation along the surface and an sun that got continually hotter w/ time. The planet contained 3 types of daisies-grey, white, and black. Eventually, the planet got hot enough for the black daisies to survive (since they absorbed the most heat). The more daisies there were, the higher (lower? yeah, lower) the albedo of the planet, the more energy it absorbed, and the hotter it got. As the temperature increased, it eventually go too hot near the poles for the black daisies, so grey and white daisies (which reflected more energy) began to thrive near the equator. The mix of grey, white, and black daisies contiued to change according to the 'needs' of the planet, ending up, eventualy, with only a bunch of white daisies for awhile, and then with all life dying as the sun got too hot.
The point: the temperature was regulated by the interactions of the daisies. The planet adjusted itself to work toward conditions favoring life. Lovlelock referred to it as the planets homeostasis. However, the emergent property of temeoprature regualtion could be predicted by reduction of the system into its componenet parts, as long as you knew all the rule and understood the physics behind. In this case--simplified beyond everything weve ever actually seen along similar lines by many orders of magnitude--we understand everything. The only reason this objection to reductionism has held up this long is becasue of our ignorance concerning otehr complex systems like social behavior, tornadoes, and the brain. Someday, well be able to predict everythig form a knowedge about the atoms involved; were just not there yet.
Sorry If ive been unclear...really, check out consilience if you are interested, or even the web of life by Fritjof Capra, for a more in depth discussion.
"Until all are one."-Optimus Prime (a Buddhist?)
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
"But surely, computers are easy!" they retort. "The Web is therefore easy. Programming must be easy, too." This whole exchange really pisses them off. They've heard all this from millions of adverts, that anybody can do any of this, and that anybody can get rich quick without years of study. They've heard it so often that they're sure that those few of us who tell them otherwise must necessarily be lying to them. They saw it on TV, so it must be true, and we "professionals" (sorry, that's the old word; the new word is "elistist"; same thing) have to feeding them a line of bull to protect our own income streams
/.'er pointed out that you might be getting upset with other people "getting into your sandbox". I can't think of many computer nerds (myself included), that haven't at some point been a little protective of their favorite past-time when a person that they don't agree with has shown interest in it.
I think that another
The point of my post, is that some people honestly think that computers, and computer programming is hard. hard to learn, hard to understand, and hard to do.
Bullshit!
There is nothing inherently difficult about these things if enough time is invested in learning how they work. Computer programming is largely the learning of a language syntax. So many problems have been worked out over the life of the language, that most solutions to them are freely available.
System administration, while perhaps time-consuming, is not as bad as some would like you to think.
The main thing required for all of these things, is time, and a desire to learn them. There is nothing mysterious, or magical about the way that these things operate.
Computers are meant to work, some people just feel the need to complicate them with an aura of difficulty for the sake of their own egos.
And BTW, this is not to say that there aren't a lot of very talented computer people out there (Carmack), but they are as few and far between as the Hawkings of the physics world.
Want something difficult? Try physics. Oh, and troll me all you want, my karma can take it.
Q: What do you think about American Culture?
A: I think it's a good idea.
(adapted from Gandhi)
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! As one of the commonly refered to clueless/lamerz/lusers trapped in MS in order to have 24/7 access to an ever increasing pool of resources which hold the possibility of escape...I find the intellectual elitism of the Unix/Linux community to be overwhemingly intimidating. typical example is the old RTFM, and the obvious 'if I could, would I be asking this stupid question'? (No johhny come lately...) my 2 year plus desire to move up to Linux stood no chance until Comdex demo of Corel revealed a possible bridge ie Simple install, familiar desktop and support which hopefully will allow an escallating learning curve. HOWEVER, only references on /. to this BRIDGE for the unwashed masses who wish to join the community of smarter, more astute Users has been at best 'nil'. In my case, throw in Non affluant (expensive classes NOT an option) and OMG! female over 50 and learning unix or linux, building the appropiate machine and getting walked thru the processes require serious LEARNING LUST and TENACITY. Never-the-less.....This Wannabe shall overcome! ;o)
ah! the internet!! we may still screw up the world but NEVER again will we be able to claim IGNORANCE
Dude, think again. If you look at my posts, you'll see that I've offered up some very interesting opinions. I'm not just some drone.. Come to my website.. Come to my website.. People can think for themselves. I would be the last one to try to force some people to do or read anything they don't want to read. Hell, I'm sick and tired of being submerged to death with advertising; not just in commercials, but movies now themselves these days are walking advertisements. I enjoy slashdot, so I post on it when topics I'm interested come up, and that's the only reason I post.
Interesting information, but I have a couple caveats:
1. The article mentioned that they examined 16 subjects. Sixteen people isn't really enough to draw any sort of conclusions, as the chance of seeing statistical anomalys is just too great. I'm sure it takes a great deal of time to count synapses, so they'll probably continue to study more people in the future. As of now, however, I don't think there's enough data to draw any meaningful conclusions.
2. The article mentioned that the researchers counted two types of synapses in the prefrontal cortex and the occipital cortex. It then says that 17% more synapses were counted in the more educated people. If the 17% increase was observed in both cortexes (plural sp.?), then it would seem to be meaningless. More educated people don't need to see more than others, so the occipital cortex, devoted to "simple visual perception", shouldn't be any different in the two groups. If the increase was seen only in the prefrontal cortex, then that might be significant. Otherwise, it's probably just a statistical thing (only 16 people...).
The researchers probably answered these questions in their study, and the article probably just missed these points. As is usually the case, it's probably more faulty journalism than faulty science.
Matt
My point is that the general public is filled with people who do not wish to learn. They do not have the urge to learn that you point out is needed. They do not want to be forced to take the time for it, which you point out is necessary.
Problem solving that is a pleasurable pastime for programmers and administrators is pure hell for other people. Learning may be fun for us, but it is not fun for them. This is the whole problem. They want to do things that require learning, but they want to do them without satifying those inescapable pre-requisites. They're in over their heads, because they've been sold a big lie.
Our lazy, petulant, anti-intellectual, and completely pathetic public masses demand both tasteless and microwavable TV dinners as well as the software that corresponds to them.
Somehow who hates reading, hates learning, hates puzzles, hates problem solving, and hates logic should not expect to touch a computer without a professional holding their tremulous hand. A computer is not an appliance for dummies, and if you won't pay your dues to actually invest the real time it takes to honestly learn something, you will suffer. Better to hire yourself a secretary and let him deal with it for you.
Did anybody else stumble over this? I don't even want to imagine what's going on at UIUC or at their collaborators institution in Moscow:
...."
:)
1st paragraph: "... said James E. Black, who is part of a team examining post-mortem brain tissue at
3rd paragraph: "... allowed for a systematic count of brain cells [...] in 16 healthy people."
yeah, take 16 healthy individuals, kill them and see what the neuron/synapse count is.
A very unhappy wording for a press release I must say...
Roland
I don't know too much about the brain, but it strikes me that the conclusion of the study doesn't really say anything about intelligence, or even anything about the correlation between profession and number of synapses, given how they measured the synapses. If they took brain tissue from an important part of the subjects' brain, wouldn't it affect the subjects drastically? If it isn't from an important part of the brain, then how can we be sure the finding has any meaning? Just because a certain neuron is being synapsed by a thousand axons doesn't mean that neuron is even being used. The fact that there are a lot of synapses might even demonstrate that that particular circuit isn't being used. We start out with more synapses prenatally then when we're adults. Then our connections are refined, so that a large number of these synapses are removed. This weeding out process is determined by the amount of electrical activity passing through a neuron. The multiplicity of synapses is part of the reason why we can't walk (or do much of anything) when we're born (that, and not having finished myelination.) Paring them down is what allows us to control our musculature. I realize brain synapses are drastically different from neuromuscular junctions, but I think the principle is the same. It's not the quantity, it's how they're connected that makes a big difference, not to mention the type of synapse they are.
I remember reading an article (can't remember where exactly, probably Scientific American or some such) that described this study performed on squids in which the researchers were able to actually see new neural pathways being created based on the environment they put the squids in (e.g. an aquarium filled with chilly/hot water, excess salinity of the water, application of beatings, etc). The gist of the article was that this implied the proverbial "nurture" aspect of development.
This also brings to mind a study in which Alzheimer's (sp?) patients were put on this regimen of mental puzzles and brain teasers in order to test performance (I believe that was the original intent). They found that the patients actually started to get better after doing these puzzles and games for awhile. It turned out that the patients were developing new neural pathways from the mental stimulation.
So, while this latest study is neat and interesting, I guess I just don't see it as extremely earthshaking news, more of a confirmation of other studies.
- Jonathan
Just finished reading _A_Search_for_a_Method_. I understood the words individually, but together...they might as well have been minoan linear B spoken by a cranky gorilla on crack in an unknown sign language for all the meaning I managed to get out of them. How bout a deal: I offer to explain a deterministic philosophy which takes away free will but has a good shot at not depressing you, and you explain Sartre to me.
If you are worried about determinism, read Hume's _A_Dialogue_Concerning_Human_underfstanding. He talks about the problem with the scientific method (very very briefly: we see correspondences between facts often enough and we impose what might well be a fiction of causality. Saying that the scientific method is the best is only applying the method of induciton to the scientific method--that is, it has been right more than otehr methods of predicting the future in the past, therefore it is best. Without causaltiy there can be no determinism, and nobody has thought of anythign devastating to say to Hume's corpse yet)
Have a good evening yourself...And stay away from pigeoins and out of Skinner boxes, 'kay?
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
But this is not the question in the nature/nurture debate. See my other post.
As has been pointed out ad nauseam, this depends on what definition of intellignce you use. It certainly is not obvious that this is the case if one's definition contains the rate of learning or ability to remember information. These two abilities-along with many others-might well have nothing to do with occupation or indeed anything we can do to ourselves short of genetic engineering. Again, see my other post for a refernce to a story describing GA mice which are helping us explore this issue.
We all need to be more careful not to give in to the temptation to oversimplify things, no matter how lazy we feel. Better not to post and dumb everyone else down. This is a disturbing trend on Slashdot. If everyone here stops thinking, where will I go to read neat discussion...?
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
A joke, right? Otherwise: What the Fsck? (coercion to visit followed by a statement that we are free to think for ourselves without that kind of coercion?)
The truth is out there - we'll let it back in after it sobers up a bit. -The Cube
Oh right thanxs. So since I don't get to see what color they are how do I know if they're a white being racist or a black having a joke? Hmm, seems the same can be applied to sexist men / joking women. From now on I propose everyone signs their comments with every detail about them :)
(I always wanted to use "chrissakes" ... ;-)
Why don't you just stop replying to those morons? Okay, your post was funny, but most of the replies are at the same level as the original. PLEASE just stop that. Ignore them. At the moment, there are more replies to the first poster than to the actual story!
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
What the hell's going on mr (/mrs) moderators? The 'First Post Niggers' post went from score 0 to 1-Informative back to zero then to -1. Make up your mind guys -JohnFlux
Now as I have taken my interests into more scientific areas I can't hardly sleep anymore becuase I am always trying to invent some crazy new concept in my head. I can't count the number of things I have thought out completely from beginning to end and the said "well that was fun, lets move on"
The point of all this is that when you work in a high-thought area you really become used to figuring things out and suddenly you find yourself doing it automatically. Therefore it only stands to reason that you would self-teach yourself as you progress.
I guess we could think of the brain like just about any other part of the body, when a body part is put to work alot it (particularly muscle) grows. If our brain is using up all it synapses figuring out things like lines of code in the newest Playstation game or how to build a stunt kite powered by the Biesfield-Brown effect, it has to create some new synapses to do the rest of the thinking.
Incidently it would be a great experiment to test the IQ of a person as they start a job and test it again a about 10-20 years after they start the job. (Sorry if that was in the article I didn't read it)
click "Reply" next to "Change" at the top
We all know the only thing that creates more brain synapses is coffee.
This has been "proven" by the fact that the only time I produce any good code is after about a pot of the stuff.
Speaking of that, I think I hear that my coffee's ready... Maybe when I'm finished drinking I'll think of something interesting to say.
(sigh) Probably not! Nature or Nuture?
The answer is Nature and Nuture.
Well i (like many of /. readers) have stayed awake through a bit of Psych. and all i can remember is that its a mix of the two!!
:))
:))
If we take a "naturally gifted" person and well just let them be, they will be smart, but that dont mean they will get anywhere!
A hardworking, avg. individual, on the other hand can get pretty far by just trying hard enough, given that he/she is not completely brain dead!
I have seen a lot of very very smart ppl. who would like nothing more than to play on some MUD all day and well really not give a crap about what they could be achieving! And then again the same ppl. had the ability to pick up things (algorithms and math. proofs in this case) faster than anyone else!!
I think the brain is like any other muscle in the body!!! you use it and you can keep it in shape and actually get somethhing out of it! then again you could have the best brain and well never do anything with it! (i.e. become a marketer
But you still have to start off somewhere!!!! starting higher just means you can improve faster!!!
it does sound a bit cliche but the idea of nature or nurture being black and white just does not seem completely satisfying. (Hey we avg. ppl need a chance you know... and well the natural ones do have an edge
Non-Deterministic Finite Automata
What if the choice was between a programmer and a watch repairman. The watch repairman may not be as intelligent, but I'd trust his hands a lot more than somebody whose most dexterous act is typing. Intelligence is the necessarily the end-all be-all of talents.
But no, we're complacent and lazy, and we get pissed off when people can't understand how to use the tools we make. We blame the users for not knowing as much as we do. That's bullshit.
:-)
Wrong. I've dealt with people. Thanks to our good friend, the Bell curve, we can see that 50% of people are less than 65% capable of handling a subject when they are educated and drilled on it. RTFM is not something they're willing or capable of doing. If you don't believe that statement, here's a real world example (annecdotal):
I wrote a client for Win32 (basically a port of a Unix client with a tray icon wrapper code for an easy to use UI) to handle updating ml.org, and a couple of other DynDNS websites. It was written because I used Windows on a computer I owned, and had an account with ml.org. The existing clients they pointed to didn't have the features I wanted, so I wrote mine. It was just a client, all the registrations and related would have been handled by ml.org or whatever DynDNS service they wanted. I included a little "feedback" menu option that would send email to me, in case they found a bug, or wanted to compliment me.
Of the few emails I received via feedback (ml.org collapsed in on itself two weeks after I released it), no less than half were "i luv this prog. u rock. my email is joestupid@cantspell.com, my id I chose was 31337rulers, and my pwd was passwrd. wen will my 31337d00ds.dyn.ml.org site be up w00t"
I even received the "Template" email a few times -- basically someone chose feedback, looked at the default things like "Enter email address here," and hit send instead of hitting cancel. Both buttons were right next to each other, too.
People seem to be stuck in this whole "get things done quickly so I can get to doing other things quickly" mindset, and so don't take time to think things through, look around and observe things, or even bother to try to be intelligent. Blaming the programmer for a program that a user can't be bothered to learn, is like blaming a manufacturer of a stick-shifted car model because people can't handle manual transmission.
No, rank amateurs will *not* be able to write an Amazon.com clone. That's a fact of life. But most people just want their email, browser, word processor, and instant messager.
But a computer is not an appliance. You can let a person get away with driving a car around with little understanding of it because it only does one thing: move when operated. It's an appliance with a flowchart that goes through about 8 choices, tops. Even with that level of simplicity, people can still learn a lot more about their car if they bother to observe and be aware of what it going on. With a computer, it's even more important to have some basic understanding available.
In a plane, you have to know if a wind is going to put your plane off its target, otherwise you could be lost without fuel. Operating a computer, if you have just run an attachment without good reason, you could have just given away private data, and destroyed all your precious settings and software. If you don't believe me, look at VCRs. They're very easy to use, but most have 12:00 blink-tagged on the front of them
---
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Obviously, if somebody like this wants to do something beyond the basics, such as run or develop a real web site, they're out of their league. They either have to invest the time to learn how the thing really works, hire somebody else to do it, or forget about it. And honestly, if they don't have an aptitude for the technical, they're out of luck unless they put a lot of work into it.
However, in the coming years, we will see more and more special-purpose computing systems popping up. People are already using them without even knowing it. Yes, this is an absolutely terrible buzzword, but this is what I'm talking about: computing appliances. The refrigerator that has a computer in it that lets you manage your grocery shopping list, and eventually it'll even order your groceries for you over the Internet. You shouldn't need any special training to use a system like that, and yet it's a computer. I could go on about other such applications, but this thread is already off-topic.
My point is just that there are applications for computers that do not and should not require technical aptitude or training, and such devices are going to proliferate in the coming years.
But this doesn't really contradict your core assertion, which is essentially that people shouldn't expect to do complex things with computers without proper training. Eventually, we'll have much more intelligent computers, which can receive a task description in plain English, figure out what the user is really asking for (and because the user will never state the problem precisely, this will always involve a little Q and A), figure out how to do it, and then do it. This is a very sophisticated intelligence I'm talking about here; it's essentially the process followed by human software development efforts: gather requirements, develop a specification, design and implement the program, and then execute the program. Therefore, we need a computer that can think like a human in all the ways used for software development (that's a lot of ways) and has all the revelant knowledge (which is a lot of knowledge, including "common sense"). That's not going to be here anytime soon, so we all still have a little job security. ;-)
>"Teach Yourself Brain Surgery in Five Days", or
> "How to Be a Concert Pianist in Ten Hours of
> Easy Listening", or "Wiring Your Backplane for
> Dummies", or "Become an Air-Traffic Controller
> Overnight"
Agreed, programming is just as complicated as brain surgery. Like-wise writing a novel, painting, designing circuits, etc are just as complicated. However, unlike brain surgery, the theory involved in these pratices can easily be applied.
For example:
Someone without access to a computer is unlikely to teach themselves programming skills. Like-wise, someone without access to construction equipment, labor, a free plot of land, etc is unlikely to teach themselves civil engineering. Similiarly, someone without access to cadaviers and live human patients is unlikely to teach themselves brain-surgery.
BUT, people do have easy access to computers, compilers, paints, canvas, basic electronic equipment, word processors, etc. Naturally, these people become programmers, painters, hardware hackers, authors, etc.
You seem to have a problem with this.
SEE http://www.geocities.com/dothell
I know nothing, but 2c:
Surely, like all beings thought to have evolved over time, it's a case of stick them in the pan and see what survives, other than that - anything goes...
You would have thought that any being that was more able to adapt through it's surroundings (or nurture) would have an evolutionary advantage over one who doesn't (gifted through nature).
Evolution therefore states that, eventually, advances through nurture should evolve? and eventually at all levels.
---
Vote for "Anonymous Coward cannot First Post."
I think the interest in abstract thinking is that it applies better, in general, to all sorts of fields than any other particular one field could. That is to say, my being a computer programmer may not say anything about my ability to work well on cars. But my being a computer programmer might, in fact, indicate something about my ability to think in the abstract and therefore my ability to be able to deduce certain things about how a mechanical system would work, given certain pieces of information. My ability to learn and apply information is improved by keeping my mind active, and may be reflected in the count of synapses in my prefontal cortex.
The word "abstract" is significant here. It implies a sort of reasoning or thinking that is not specific to a particular field. Yes, it takes a lot of time and experience to become a car mechanic, and it takes a lot of time and completely different experience to become a computer programmer, but if the findings of this study indicate a cause-effect relationship in the suspected direction, we learn an interesting fact about potential. Keeping one's mind active in any intellectual field (one that promotes abstract thinking) could improve one's ability to learn to function in any other intellectual field. Of course it will take time to pick up the experience and details of a separate field, but it will flow more easily. You don't have to re-gain the intellect, just the knowledge.
Use a smaller-scale example: A computer programmer who started out learning BASIC, then went on to learn C, and in so doing, begins to understand the commonality between programming languages and how computers actually function. It is now much easier for this programmer to pick up any programming language. Of *course* he needs the reference material and needs to take some time to learn even the basics of the new language, but it's much easier than it was to learn even a language as simple as BASIC for the first time.
This said, abstract thinking is the over-arching "language" of intellectual professions and fields. In any intellectual field, there will be a need to think abstractly to some degree. The ability to think abstractly makes it easier to devise one's own solution when it is not already part of one's knowledge.
So the significance of the new information, then, is related to the fact that keeping one's mind active in an intellectual field *may* actually have a quantifiable effect on one's ability for abstract thinking which can be applied (to some extent) in any field. Of course the cause/effect relationship is still inconclusive.
It's fine and well for intellectual activities to stimulate brain development, but that doesn't mean anything in terms of educating people (especially school kids) if you can't get them *interested* in doing that. If you want to improve education then the question is whether or not you can actually make kids want to use their brains more. Most people I know unfortunately do as much as possible to try do as little thinking as they can possibly get away with, a tendency I find rather disturbing, and the situation isn't helped by the fact that the majority of the media (especially advertising) likes to encourage this mental laziness so that they can rip you off by saying that "scientists prove our washing powder washes whiter" etc etc
The pursuit for easy-to-use and intuitive interfaces is creating a generation of lazy computer users, and worse, a generation of lazy computer programmers that won't survive outside an IDE with context-sensitive help and syntax highlighting. And bad programmers create bad programs.
Roblimo, do you stay up 24/7? I see you post stories at all hours. Myself, I work the 12mid-12noon shift and often, you're posting all night long. What's up with that? Insomnia? Work-aholic? Just curious ;-)
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
If they were young (in their twenties) then this might be interpreted as being a result of fundamental differences in brain structure, but if they were older than that it might simply be that their experiences over time effected the structures.
Probably the only way you could come up with a causal link between synaptic complexity and the `intellectualism' of your profession would be with a long term study, starting with children and following them through to middle age . . . Which is bit of a problem, really - by the time they'd collected enough data over a long enough time to get reasonable results, we'd probably know enough about our brains to make the results moot . . .
In any case, these findings are interesting, but they're hardly earth shattering. I mean, one of the researchers was quoted as saying that they back up observations made on animals - human brains may be vastly more complex than any other animal's, but they're still made of the same stuff, so it's not that surprising they seem to develop similarly . . .
himi
My intellectualism is exponential - it decays exponentially with time after my last caffeine hit . . .
My very own DeCSS mirror.
If you ask a skilled programmer with years of experience to do open heart surgery, chances are he won't do any better than your average construction worker. Vice versa, ask a heart surgeon to spit out some code.
One becomes 'smarter' because of experience. As you work with something all the time, it becomes second nature, and enabling you to learn more complex things based on that. But if you're to learn something completely new and unrelated to what you've been working at for so long, it'd be just as hard as if you'd been digging ditches all your life.
While I'll admit your chances of living through open heart surgery performed under any kind of crash course aren't very good, so this might not make the best analogy, but I for one would take more comfort in the fact that the programmer would have a better retention for knowledge then the night watchman.
*Disclaimer*, this is not an insult to any employees of the all night chicken shack.
Presumably the violin itself has nothing to do with it, so shouldn't we be seeing this also in: * Any other musical instrument * people spending 10+ hrs/day programming * people spending 10+ hrs/day on their Dreamcast I'd hesitate to name someone in that last category as necessarily more intelligent than the general populace because they might have a few more coordination neurons. As an aside, the author you quote makes the mistaken conclusion that brain mass=skill-based intelligence. This has been disproven (know any genius elephants/whales/etc).
No, but you would be able to learn much faster. You would understand a lot of things (like the way blood flows in the various vessels, what happens if one of them is blocked, etc.), without having them explained (at least not to the same level of detail).
I wouldn't trust a programmer to do heart surgery on me if I had the choice, but if I had the choice between a programmer and a construction worker
I have quite often surprised physicians by what I can piece together from my little medical knowledge and my training in thinking straight
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
First of all, what the current belief WAS, up until the last year, was that adults could not create new *neurons* (brain cells), but everyone agrees that adults continue to create new dendrites (branches off of neurons) and synapses (junctions between dendrites and parts of other neurons), although at a slower rate than young children.
. htm , this October...
...
I once found a videotape showing, side by side, time lapse footage through a microscope of an 8-year-old brain and a 40-year-old brain, and man, that 8 year old's dendrites were running circles around the 40 year old's. I showed it to a kid I was tutoring, to try to convince him he had to make the best use of his peak brain-growing years.
But over the last two years, neuroscience has been turned upside down with discoveries that animals, including mammals, DO continue to create new neurons throughout adulthood. The old view was largely an old wive's tale, handed down for several generations. Much like the unquantifiable and meaningless malarkey that we only use 10% of our brain.
from http://www.princeton.edu/pr/news/99/q4/1014-brain
"...Princeton scientists have shown that new neurons are continually added to the cerebral cortex of adult monkeys. The discovery reverses a dogma nearly a century old
'This is an absolutely novel result,' says William T. Greenough, director of the neuroscience program at the University of Illinois' Beckman Institute. 'These data scream for a reanalysis of human brain development.' "
(same reply to the other guy who posted basically the same thing)
Personally I think that the reason you're able to learn faster is because of your genes and how you were raised, and that you get your job in a highly skilled industry because you can learn so fast. Skilled programmers are, on average, smarter than workers at the all night chicken shack, but if you hire a chicken shack watchman as an engineer, he's not going to get any smarter.
The idea isn't that an engineer is smarter than a chicken shack watchman, it's that an engineer who spent the last 20 years being an engineer isn't going to be any better at learning new skills than if he had spent that last 20 years being a chicken shack watchman.
I think that's being a little bit simplistic. I mean just because you've perfected an approach to thinking about a particular group of problems (programming problems, say, or engineering problems, or teaching) doesn't mean you're any more intelligent than you were before you perfected it, and vice versa. And then there's the fact that there isn't any definite link between the number of synapses in your brain and your intelligence . . .
;-)
And hey, since we're talking about intelligence: define it. Come up with a good, consistent definition that properly covers all areas of intelligence . . . and then see if they give you a Nobel Prize or something. Thing is, there isn't really a good quantifiable definition of intelligence, so any talk of `high intellect' jobs and `more intelligent' is on fairly shaky ground.
Sure, you can talk about someone's ability to handle abstract concepts (which is what most people think of as intelligent, and which you probably mean when you talk about high intellect jobs and so forth), but how about a gifted motor mechanic's ability to understand the workings of an engine? How does that relate to `intelligence'? And how does it relate to the number of synapses in a brain?
My point is that looking at this research and reading into it the idea that `intellectualism' => lots of synapses => high intelligence is most likely a load of crap. What this research is more likely to show is what areas of the brain are related to the things that `highly intellectual' jobs entail - and without a much more comprehensive model of how the brain works, trying to take it beyond that is _very_ scientifically risky. It's the kind of approach that has, in the past, lead to things like those crackpots who said Africans are fundamentally less intelligent than Caucasians because the samples they tested tended to have smaller skulls . . .
On a lighter note, it is interesting research, and the fact that they could observe this kind of level of detail means that we're probably getting much closer to being able to understand the mechanisms at work in our brains . . . Which will hopefully lead us to a better understanding of intelligence, and thence on to the ultimate goal of all SF fans - Artificial Intelligence! I want to be able to think I'm talking to a *_real_* woma . . . er, yeah, well, you know what I mean . . .
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
The December issue of Scientific American features the article "The End of Nature versus Nurture", (not available online). The author points to a combination of nature and nurture, taking into account developmental, innate and cultural elements with parallels between human and animal behaviour. According to the article, "Danger comes from extremes of both positions -- the biological determinism od the Nazis and the social engineering of the Communists".