Quote:
Originally Posted by Alawen
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I just read through all of his notes while thinking about your idea of motivation as the real distinguishing factor. On a complete tangent, I like his ideas about the purpose of democracy.
I'm trying to wrap my mind around your general model of how the human brain works. Are you saying that turning on one burner of the stove is a different thought process than turning on a different burner? Or just that finding my keys is different from locking the door? In either case, essentially no commonality at all and that learning something is not useful for learning any other thing however related?
Regarding your idea that despite some possible biological differences, everything really comes down to motivation, isn't that a bit rhetorical in practical terms? You seem to be saying that person A isn't really smarter than person B, he just wants to think more. How is that functionally different?
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I guess I am not saying this very well. What I am saying is I believe what the brain learns is extremely specific and there is not much transfer. Learning about American history doesn't help you with mathematics. Learning about integration by parts won't help you with whether power series converge. And so on.
But at the same time we clearly see correlations between various intellectual tasks. On average people that are good with math DO know more about American history than people who aren't. And if you believe the brain is specific, the only logical explanation is that a brain that has been exposed to math is more likely to have been exposed to american history. And the mostly likely reason for that is that this person chose to study.
Also my theory makes vastly different predictions than g. For example g predicts that black people are dumb: every IQ test has blacks about 1 standard deviation below whites. On the other hand my theory predicts that blacks would simply rather play basketball. And in fact IIRC there are studies that black children raised by white parents have comparable IQ scores to white children (don't quote me on that).