How can we make smarter people?

Great Debates
1

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=156632

In this thread, we lament that for every metaphorical candle of insight lit, there are many metaphorical ‘Darkness: 15 foot radius’ spells cast. So, as a thought experiment, what can we do to make more smart people and fewer dumb people?

*A proviso: I am dividing people into two camps: those willing to learn, and those unwilling. A person who believes that all black/Jewish/religious people are wonky in the face of evidence is in category two.

It’s a harder problem then it sounds. Public education can’t make everyone learn at all, let alone making them want to learn more. Is intelligence genetic? Should we request that smart people make frequent donations to sperm banks?

So, any ideas?

2

You just need to synthesize some sort of chemical which makes teenage girls/guys wildly attracted to the guys/girls with the best grades. Within a generation, we’ll be a race of superhumans.

3

I’m not sure whether intelligence is more of a factor in what Robert is talking about than moral character is. A man who is good hearted might be as likely or more likely to be accepting of black/Jewish/religious people than a man who is merely intelligent.

4

Turn off the TV for a generation.

5

Interesting that you posed this as “making smarter people” rather than “making people smarter”. Any intentiong there, or am I playing too much on symantics?

If it’s the former, then genetic engineering will probably solve that in the not too distance future. If it’s the latter, then, I fear you’re stuck with what we’ve had for the last 50k-100k yrs.

6

Racism is not a lack of intelligence, and intelligence is overrated, given the relatively small role that knowledge actually plays in our lives. (This is why the most interesting modern philosophy is concerned with the difficulty of recognizing and acknowledging what is simple [Heidegger] and/or obvious [Wittgenstein].)

Racism is an emotional/psychological blockage, intimately related to certain personality disorders and sociopathology. Its essence is an inability to acknowledge another human being as one’s own other, hence the sociopath and the racist’s lack of empathy and proclivity toward violence.

This is not ignorance (a lack of information); rather it is an inability to see something, in particular, something about one’s self. It is based not on ignorance or stupidity, but on fear of self-knowledge.

7

Careful, Robert.

It is my experience that it isn’t just Intelligence that matters here. There something else. I call it curiousity. It could be motivation, discipline or whatever but I have met many smart people who don’t really think or want to learn about items outside of immediate, practical application to their lives.

Take my wife… (will refrain from joke :wink: )

I love my wife. She is a wonderful person and partner. She is also very smart. I used to be a college math prof. and have had to teach her things that she needed to learn for her job. She is very quick at learning complicated skills.

Complete lack of curiousity about the world or history.

Here is an incomplete list of what she believed when I first met her.

  • The South won the Civil War. (heck, might be true…came out watching ‘Glory’)

  • Germany and U.S. were allied against Russia and Japan in WWII. (this one came out in Saving Private Ryan when she wondered why the enemy was speaking German)

  • Civilization has been around forever, not just a few thousand years (this one came out when she took a liking to playing the computer game Civilization)

  • Has no idea of world Geography/where countries are.

Again, I believe she is smart as a tack but has had/has no desire to learn things that don’t have immediate and rewarding affect in her life.

She is not alone. I have met many very smart people like her.

8

Alright. I’ll call it the willingness to learn new things, then. Is it identifiable, and can it be reinforced.

Re making people smarter vs. making smarter people:
Yes. I do view the nimrods around today as lost causes. Conversely, the majority of us here don’t need to be subjected to policies, because we can learn.

I may be making an unwarranted assumption. I believe that the ability to think, “Hey, black people aren’t different then white or Asian people. Grandma was teaching me wrong.” is a function of intelligence. Is this true? Do intelligent people who interact with a variety of other people daily end up less bigoted?

9

I think it is something that happens when a child is very young… a switch that either is flipped or is not. Maybe the child is born with the natural curiosity… maybe we learn it somehow. But it seems like, in the types of people we’re talking about, they just never seem to get the concept that “Knowing stuff” has a value all its own. So what if I know that lake Titicaca is between bolivia and peru… serves absolutely no value in my everyday life. People would look at me strange if I told them this while buying a cheeseburger. Aside from the fact it’s a fun word to say, this piece of information is totally useless… therefore, there’s no need to learn it?

A kid’s favorite question is “Why?”. Until someone convinces them to stop asking it, that is.

10

Well let’s look at the root of the word “Ignorance” IGNORE It’s not a matter of not having the information. It’s a matter of not facing it once you have it. Lack of information is not ignorance, willfull denial of information is ignorance. So yes, I do think it is possible to make less ignorant people. Ignorance can strike any intelligence demographic. I don’t think intelligence is even one of the highest goals to be achieved, though we hold it in very high esteem these days.

We want people to be more open minded. That is the goal. Reductionism is very good for this, everything is reduceable, and if you understand how it’s reduceable inevitably every idea can be explained to a child or someone who is not all that bright.

Erek

11

Phnord: Amen, that’s one of my pet peeves. It strikes me as a huge disservice when a parent tells their kid “Because I said so”

Erek

12

Better parents.

13

I think you’re playing with semantics. I am not to sure what you need to play with symantics, but to play with Symantec, you need a copy of Norton’s Anti-Virus or control of the company…

:smack:

14

Parents are children who were raised by parents, at some point these better parents of which you speak must have been raised by unfit parents.

In otherwords better parents are an effect of people becoming “enlightened” as opposed to the cause of it. Though it won’t hurt the future generations.

Erek

15

Simple enough. Every male except for me, stop breeding. Sure, the population of the earth will decline rapidly (I can only breed so much in such a short amount of time)… But the people we DO have left will be brilliant.

16

I think the main problem is that a lot of people don’t WANT to be smarter.

Firstly, there’s a decidedly anti-intellectual streak in the media. Look at the portrayal of smart people in movies/televison: Either they’re cold and inhuman (Lillith on * Cheers) * or evil with a God complex (various mad scientist movies) or they’re socially hopeless nerds. Conversely, there is a marked glorification of the stupid. * Dumb and Dumber * and the like are popular movies. * Forrest Gump * was about a stupid man who’s smart in “the way it counts,” as many movies are. Stupid people are portrayed as more down to earth and realistic, whereas intelligent people are stupid in crucial ways: empathy, social interraction, or realistic planning.

Secondly, a resistance to reading. According to a book I recently read, a poll revealed that only 1 in 6 Americans have read one book in the last year, even when “book” is loosely defined to include Harlequin Romance novels, and self-help manuals. Newspaper readership has declined at least thirty percent since the 1960s.

Rarely do you see a character in a movie or television show reading anything, other than flipping through a magazine. People who do read in movies/TV are often portrayed as anti-social or desperately lonely.

I remember talking to a man in the little country general store I worked in. “Why should I learn how to * read.” * he said in a tone of disgust. “Who cares about the stuff in * books.” *

Thirdly, the most popular source of information, television news, does not encourage thought or debate. Its programs have slowly morphed into entertainment TV, due to slipping viewership. Headlines and politics are crammed into a few moments, in order to have time for lenghty human interest stories, and numerous weather reports. The written media has been “dumbed down” to tabloid-style reporting with less “big words” and space-taking eye-catching graphics.

My husband, an instructor at our local university, asked his mostly-adult students how many of them had watched the news or read a newspaper in the last week. Only a handful said that they had, but during discussion of current issues all had firm opinions on the issues, mostly parroting second-hand and sometimes incorrect information gleaned from what their pastor or co-worker thought. Our society is becomming pitifully uninformed but loudly opinionated.

Fourth, there’s a resistance to losing cherished beliefs. Christians may refuse to learn anything about evoloutionary theory, or study science, believers in psychics may resent and refuse to listen to those who would debunk them, and UFO enthusiasts close their eyes to “government sell-out” scientitists’ views.

17

It’s not only a question of making people smarter, or making smarter people, which by the way there IS a difference as John Mace said.
Where are the so called smart people NOW ?

Are they at the top of government and business?

Is their intelligence tapped? Do they steer the course of human evolution?

If not, why not? Where are they?

Does intelligence spread like a virus from the gifted.

There have probably been many gifted people whose intelligence died with them, or wasn’t potentiated.

It may be the case that highly intelligent people also have a higher rate of suicide
Is it possible to raise the general intelligence of a population ? Are humans smarter now then they were five hundred years ago, a thousand ?
What do we use as a barometer? What do we compare human intelligence to?

The human dead? Other animals?

As humans we can compare our intelligence one to the other, but we have nothing to compare it to outside our own imagination.

We may be amongst the dumbest in the universe. But it doesn’t matter outside our own house, does it? If it doesn’t why does it matter inside? Because we believe that greater intelligence leads to a better life, more comforts, more challenge, ….and it’s a competition

Does one need intelligence or smartness to be wise, to have wisdom?

We are probably all dumb at something; there are some things that each of us would have a great difficulty learning.

18

smarter people recognize the inherent slavery and contradictions the system creates. so by not playing the game smart people are not selected. so it is a contradiction that when I recognize the hypocrisy of not being selected, I do not kill myself, yet i dont. Why?

:smiley:

19

Lissa,

Very good points, although IMHO I don’t think it’s so much as people not wanting to be smarter, better informed, more knowledgable, etc. as it is having the time and/or the motivation to be smarter, etc. That is, I think people, given enough time and the right motivation would be inclined to make the effort to learn more.

The problem I see is finding the time and/or the right motivation. American’s tend to unvalue intellectual pursuit for it’s own sake, and to overvalue other pursuits based on their “utility” or “monetary” value. I’m not necessarily saying that this a good or bad thing about American culture. But if we can somehow find a way that allows people to incorporate the value of intellectual pursuit for it’s own sake (by combining it with American’s valuing pursuits that are practical/money making), then I think we (as American’s) have a better chance of making people smarter.

We do this already, to some degree, in the US. Many people who go to college do so in order to improve their chances of living the life they want (i.e. college education is seen as an investment to increase the chances of getting a good job).

But one problem with this is that once someone finishes college, there’s no incentive to continue one’s education afterwards. I’m a big believer in life-long education, and if we can somehow convince people that’s one’s education/pursuit of knowledge doesn’t end once you graduate from high school/college, etc., then I think more people would begin to value intellectual pursuits for their own sake.

Having said that, I’m not overly optimistic that one can achieve this (at least on a large scale). I think that there has been and always will be be a small minority of people who value intellectual pursuits for there own sake versus the mass of humanity who do not. Better to nuture this small minority (in whatever way possible) to “keep the lights burning”, so to speak.

For those interested, I’d recommend reading Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture. While I don’t entirely agree with his assessment and some of his conclusions, he does provide some interesting examples and suggestions for trying to stem the decline (or at least preserve those things worth preserving).

20

People want to be smarter
It’s just that people naturally gravitate toward what they’re good at
By that i mean that people get positive reinforcement with less effort by doing what they’re naturally good at.
Conversely, we shy away from what makes us feel uncomfortable.

And assimilating/accomodating new information creates discomfort.
We can tolerate and even seek such discomfort when we are comfortable enough in all other aspects of life (meaning we have adequate food, shelter, a sense of safety, belonging, love, etc)

So, to make smarter people, first ensure that their needs are taken care of
create circumstances where a person need not be concerned with racism, being assaulted, starvation, bullying, etc.
Create circumstances where learning is more comfortable, and a more logical progressive step in life.