Can a School Make Your Child Smarter?

Or have the genetic determinists proven that it is impossible?

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, people used to believe that education would lead to an enlightened society of intelligent citizens who would make better decisions. Thomas Jefferson was a famous proponent of such a perspective,

"Although I do not, with some enthusiasts, believe that the human condition will ever advance to such a state of perfection as that there shall no longer be pain or vice in the world, yet I believe it susceptible of much improvement, and most of all in matters of government and religion; and that the diffusion of knowledge among the people is to be the instrument by which it is to be effected."—Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816. ME 14:491

"I do hope that in the present spirit of extending to the great mass of mankind the blessings of instruction, I see a prospect of great advancement in the happiness of the human race; and that this may proceed to an indefinite, although not to an infinite degree."—Thomas Jefferson to Cornelius Camden Blatchly, 1822. ME 15:400

Two hundred years later, after free public education has extended beyond the three years endorsed by Jefferson to thirteen years, we are seeing more skepticism around the benefits of education than ever before. The spirit of the times is quite different than it was when Jefferson was manifesting the Enlightenment in the U.S.

School Doesn’t Work and Academic Outcomes are Genetic

Freddie DeBoer has an essay "School Doesn't Work" summarizing the ineffectiveness of a wide range of educational interventions. He states,

“Sometimes I will go looking at Wonk Twitter to see what the white boys there are cooking up in the education space. . . . Maybe they should get in touch with their inner 10 year old and arrive at the right answer: some kids are smarter than others, and that can’t be changed . . . ”

Economist Bryan Caplan's book The Case Against Education that makes the case that schooling is mostly signaling rather than adding human capital.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming consensus these days is that intelligence is largely inherited. The right has leaned in this direction for some time.  Last year two different left-leaning scholars came out with a similar message, Marxist Freddie DeBoer’s The Cult of Smart and behavior geneticist Katheryn Paige Harden’s The Genetic Lottery.  

Between the emphasis on genetics, on the one hand, and the ineffectiveness of most education, we have reached a point at which many people believe that most K12 spending is a waste of money; Scott Alexander somewhat facetiously suggests that we give everyone the $150K (now more like $200K) we currently spend on each child so they can buy a cabin rather than waste time in school.

Are our genetic destinies so completely determined that education is a waste of time? Here I agree with DeBoer, Caplan, and Alexander that school is mostly a waste of time. Unfortunately education has become conflated with schooling. School is the only mental model that most people have for educating.

But Human Cognitive Performance Can Be Improved

But clearly human performance can be improved. Anders Ericksson, the researcher most responsible for researching "deliberate practice" as a technique for improving performance, one of the world's leading researchers of expert performance, has been arguing against the genetic determinists for decades. He notes

Burgoyne et al. (2016) found a substantial correlation between test scores of cognitive ability and chess performance for beginners and less-skilled players, but the relations were no longer significant for highly-skilled players. There is an accumulating body of evidence for a gradual disappearance of correlations between performance on cognitive ability tests and domain-specific performance as domain-specific mechanisms are acquired and then mediate the superior expert performance.

The correlation between IQ and chess ability (or any activity that is cultivated through the extended application of deliberate practice) gradually weakens.

For an interesting example of the use of techniques to extend expertise, the journalist Joshua Foer wrote an article on a memory contest, then decided to learn techniques for competitive mnemonics and winning the USA Memory Championships the next year, setting a USA record by memorizing a deck of cards in 1 minute 40 seconds. While I find memory to be the least interesting aspect of cognitive performance, intelligence is correlated with memory span. Foer advocates for the use of deliberate practice to improve performance - because it led him to achieve at a world class level.

To take a real world success in learning how to learn: Gary Gruber had a measured IQ of 90 in 5th grade. His dad, a high school teacher, began tutoring him and later Gruber got a Ph.D. in physics and then developed a leading SAT prep book series to share his approach to doing well on tests (the SAT is highly correlated with IQ results). Gruber claims that he simply did think the way that you were supposed to think in order to score well on the IQ exam, but that it was possible to train people to think that way. He also advocated for a form of deliberate practice in problem solving technique.

As a relevant aside, at one point Gruber discovered that different ethnicities tended to get different kinds of SAT questions wrong. He proposed a targeted SAT coaching program to Bill Honig, California Superintendent of Public Instruction, focusing on coaching by ethnicity, but Honig wouldn't touch it because it would have been too controversial.

Laszlo Polgar believed that anyone could become a genius, deliberately sought out a like minded woman to marry (Certain that "he could turn any healthy child into a prodigy," he "needed a wife willing to jump on board."), and later decided he would prove it by making his children into chess geniuses after his first daughter became interested in chess. The result: His three daughters became the 1st, 2nd, and 6th best female chess players in the world. Judit is regarded the best female chess player in history, ranking in the top 10 globally (men and women). Polgar believed that innate talent was nothing, that success is 99% hard work (cf. deliberate practice). His wife said after the girls had grown up, "everything he promised has happened."

Siegfrid and Therese's Engelmann's Give Your Child a Superior Mind: A Program for the Preschool Child is dated but provides a perspective more similar to Polgar's. They mention that the parents of geniuses such as Pascal, Bentham, and J.S. Mill (who did have a mental breakdown later, from which he recovered) deliberately cultivated their intellects from a young age (Norbert Weiner is another, not mentioned in the book). The Engelmanns state (my bold face of critical points):

"A wide variety of teaching methods can achieve reasonable results.  . . . But they all have one thing in common. They help the child to believe that he is capable and can succeed. Unless the learning task is presented in this way, a long-range learning program will fail. . . .

The platitude, “Learning involves the entire child,” is true. The child makes up rules about everything in his world, including himself. Self rules are particularly important because they deal with the competence of the rule-maker. They influence his entire output of rules. . . . The human animal is the only one on earth so intelligent that it can actually learn to be stupid."

They go on to provide a detailed approach to creating young geniuses.  While broadly construed I'd say they are on the right track, some of it is definitely cringe-worthy.  Although the Engelmanns repeatedly emphasise the importance of love and support, I'm concerned that some parents following this approach would damage their child by being too performance-focused from too early an age (it can get much worse than J.S. Mill's mental breakdown, including suicide and mental illness).

How Can We Reconcile Evidence that Intelligence is Largely Genetic with Evidence of Improvements in Cognitive Performance?

Judith Rich Harris's The Nurture Assumption makes the case that parents have little influence on child outcomes compared to genetics and peers.  But she wrote a follow up book No Two Alike, on why the personalities of identical twins differ as much as they do.  There are two key mechanisms she uses to explain this:

A.  A socialization system, which amounts to cultures or subcultures.

B.  A status seeking system, through which individuals from a young age seek to optimize their status by identifying niches within which they can compete successfully.  

Harris acknowledges that parents can have a significant impact by deliberately placing their child in particular peer subcultures. 

One of her arguments against parental influence is the fact that children tend to prioritize the language of their peers over that of their parents (along with most other behaviors) - immigrant children from around the world grow up speaking the language of their new home nation. But she notes that parents can select or organize groups of peers in order to have a profound impact. She cites the example of reviving the Hebrew language into a living language in the 20th century as a deliberate orchestration of an initiative by adults to transform even the linguistic culture of young people.

It is more difficult for anyone from the outside to determine how someone else can best identify social niches for status optimization, but certainly providing children with an advantage relative to a peer group will make them more likely to enjoy the status benefits from doing well vis-a-vis that peer group (assuming the peer group values that particular advantage).

Regarding niches, Sophia, Polgar's daughter who "only" achieved 6th in the world, later quit chess.  Why compete when your sisters are #1 and #2?

But if you are Judit, chess is pretty rewarding.

Susan Polgar, the oldest, won her first tournament, in a “girls under 11” category in Budapest, when she was four years old. Insofar as her peer group was “girls playing chess” she occupied a niche as the best from a young age. Sophia, the second daughter, was always behind her. Judit, the youngest, was raised in a household with her two older sisters as extraordinary peers - and ultimately outdid even Susan.

For an even more interesting of cultural influence: 20th Century Hungarian mathematicians became so well known for their exceptional mathematical ability they were described as “The Martians” (Paul Erdős, Paul Halmos, Theodore von Kármán, John G. Kemeny, John von Neumann, George Pólya, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, and Eugene Wigner, Franz Alexander, Peter Carl Goldmark, John Harsanyi, Peter Lax, George Olah, Egon Orowan, John Polanyi, Valentine Telegdi, and Cornelius Lanczos).

Hungarian mathematics was seeded through a national competition, launched in 1894 four decades before other such national competitions, along with math journals to which high school students contributed.  There were two famous mathematics teachers who trained students for the competition and to contribute to journals.  They also created a culture of mathematics problem solving.  The social dynamic was crucial,

The Minta was the first school in Hungary to put an end to the stiff relationship between the teacher and the pupil which existed at that time. Students could talk to the teachers outside of class and could discuss matters not strictly concerning school. For the first time in Hungary, a teacher might go so far as to shake hands with a pupil in the event of their meeting outside of class.

A description of Fejer, the most famous one, 

"Fejer would sit in a Budapest cafe with his students and solve interesting problems in mathematics and tell them stories about mathematicians he had known. A whole culture developed around this man. His lectures were considered the experience of a lifetime, but his influence outside the classroom was even more significant"

Most of the famous 20th century Hungarian mathematicians can be traced to this intense early 20th century social culture of math problem solving.  I see the social dynamic resulting from the combination of warm, respected adults and an adolescent peer culture in which problem solving became a social activity as key to the production of so many geniuses.

Mathew Crawford was a math genius from a small community in Alabama who as a teen helped coach a group of his peers to a National MathCounts title, a feat never achieved before nor since. MathCounts is usually won by large and wealthy states such as California, Texas, or Massachusetts. Kansas is the only less populated state to win such a competition. Later Mathew co-founded The Art of Problem Solving. When he moved to Dallas, his program tripled the number of Math Olympiad qualifiers in two years and his students won six International Mathematics Olympiad gold medals - whereas none had been won by Dallas candidates prior to that point. He created world-class math problem solving cultures in both Alabama and later in Texas.

Crawford is explicit about culture as the secret to his success - he deliberately creates a math peer culture in which kids think, talk, and argue about challenging math problems for hours at a time. Floor to ceiling white boards where they can stand and talk about the problems, much as adults do when working, is key to his technique as an educator. In his words: “A culture of joy in hard work achieves results that most people think impossible.”

The Biological Foundations of Cultural Transmission

One of the most important recent books on human culture is Joseph Henrich's The Secret of Our Success.  While not explicitly about education, he is acutely aware of the mechanisms of cultural transmission,

Young learners all the way up to adults … automatically and unconsciously attend to and preferentially learn from others based on cues of prestige, success, skill, sex, and ethnicity. From other people we readily acquire tastes, motivations, beliefs, strategies, and our standards for reward and punishment.

I see this as a recipe for educational design.  From a young age, your child is biologically programmed to be a status optimizer within a given cultural milieu seeking niches for optimizing social status (including love and attention as good things!).  In order to do so, they will reflexively imitate the behaviors of those who are regarded as prestigious, successful, and skillful in their social group, and whose sex/gender and ethnicity cues are something that she can emulate successfully.  

Again, kids are sponges, but they are carefully observing who and what to imitate. Indeed, I see academic classes, curriculum, pedagogy, and the entire vehicle of schooling to be a minor factor in education relative to peer culture and niche optimization.

Peer culture need not be age peers necessarily - in Henrik Karlsson’s piece on the “Childhoods of Exceptional People” he emphasize the importance of being raised in an intellectual milieu,

A lot of care went into curating the environment around the children—fascinating guests were invited, libraries were built, machines were brought home and disassembled—but the children were left with a lot of time to freely explore the interests that arose within these milieus.

These people (including Montaigne, Pascal, Mill, Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, etc.) were raised by parents who were keen to immerse their children in environments in which interesting people were constantly around thinking and talking about ideas.

Today, teens with access to the internet who choose to devote themselves to achieving excellence for the sake of optimizing status among a chosen community of peers can learn extraordinary amounts without any classroom environment at all. Read here about Mr. Beast’s self-education to become one of the world’s leading media companies starting at 13. One of the first viral videos on YouTube was an electric guitar version of Pachelbel’s Canon played by Jeong-Hyun Lim (Funtwo), a self-taught guitarist. Both optimized their respective performances for a niche in which they were rewarded. Formal instruction was irrelevant and unnecessary.

In the best circumstances, a school is a place where your child is exposed to a peer culture that supports learning. In the worst circumstances, the peer culture so undermines learning that all of the academic instruction becomes largely irrelevant.

Ideally your child is not only in a positive peer environment, but also one within which he or she may find a healthy, positive niche in which to optimize.

How Might Parents and Educators Think about This Evidence?

Harvard's David Perkins makes the case that much of what we regard as "intelligence" is a matter of dispositions towards thinking. Thus while it may or may not be the case that we can increase "g," the underlying factor that is believed to result in high IQ scores, we can improve the ways in which minds think.  From a summary of his work:

Three dimensions of intelligence are identified: 1) neural intelligence: neurological speed and precision; in large part genetically determined, 2) experiential intelligence: extensive common knowledge and skill and specialized knowledge and skill; learned, 3) reflective intelligence: strategies for memory, problem solving, mental self-monitoring, meta-cognition; learned. 

I see Perkins' distinction here as analogous to Ericksson's finding that there is a gradual disappearance of the correlation between IQ and superior expert performance (i.e., with training experiential and reflective intelligence become proportionately more critical). See Perkins' "Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence" for more (though it is dated).

Thus contra the genetic determinists, whether or not “g” can be increased (I like David Perkins’ analysis above), parent interactions and parent orchestration of learning environments can make a significant difference in outcomes. Gary Gruber could not have gotten a Ph.D. in physics without years of deliberate practice in math problem solving. Joshua Foer was not born a memory champion.

Of course genetics are part of the story - Polgar and his wife were certainly intelligent.  But it is ridiculous to believe that Polgar's deliberate, well-designed effort to develop intelligent children, and targeting chess as an outcome metric, had no relevance to nurturing the greatest female chess player in history.  Mathew Crawford did not put some kind of mind-enhancing substance in the water as his world-class success as a math competition coach (decades later with different human beings) followed him from Alabama to Texas.

How I Think about Cognitive Development as a Learner

Coming from a working class family, where my mother was a high school dropout and my father an elevator repairman, I have experienced exceptional social mobility. Much of my extended family remains working class, and some suffer the social dysfunction of the underclass, including violent crime, substance abuse, welfare dependency, etc.

But some of my earliest memories of my father are of him explaining electronics to me when I was 5 or 6 - he was at trade school learning about amps, volts, ohms, etc. and was eager to explain to me. I could barely follow what he was saying, but I tried as hard as I could to do so. It was a form of intellectual immersion.

Later, once I learned to read, I became a voracious reader. My best friend and I were competitive about it and documented how much we were reading - by the time I was 11 I was reading a 200 page book every night. He and I also shared a 90 minute bus ride each direction to and from school. We began to play chess on the school bus. We couldn’t afford a fancy magnet chess set, so when the pieces bounced all over the place we had to remember their positions and put them back in place. Eventually we decided just to play mental chess instead. So in addition to whatever happened in school (which I found mind-numbingly dull and irrelevant), I spent almost every day reading 4-5 hours and playing mental chess 2-3 hours.

I went to Harvard, a fact which was meaningless to my family - my father only knew that I went to school “back East” somewhere. Twenty years later when my half-sister was applying to colleges was when my mother discovered it was hard to get into Harvard. I stayed one year before transferring to St. John’s College, where all classes where taught Socratically rather than via lecture (I hate being lectured at, no matter how famous the lecturer).

There we would read and discuss classic texts, including philosophy such as Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel as well as scientific classics, including original works by Galileo, Newton, and Einstein. Whether it was Aristotle’s Metaphysics or Einstein’s 1905 paper on Special Relativity, I would read the text the first time and barely understand it. Then I’d read it a second time and gradually make more sense of it, carefully attending to which passages I understood, which ones I did not understand, and how to figure out the remaining passages. Then I’d read it a third time, and like a jigsaw puzzle usually manage to put most pieces in place. Then in class we’d discuss the text and I’d integrate my understanding with the perspectives of my classmates. I loved the gradual process of making sense of difficult material like this, at first on my own and then socially.

After St. John’s, when I applied to graduate school, I got a perfect 800 on a GRE without studying. I then began arguing with economist Gary Becker and got him to become my advisor for my dissertation, though I had very little economics background. I thus have a recommendation letter from a Nobel laureate for the academic job market. I’ve since met about a dozen Nobel laureates, a dozen billionaires, and a dozen government ministers from around the world.

Meanwhile I have family who are members of the underclass - and some of them would likely test poorly on IQ exams. It seems likely to me that my years of intellectual immersion with my father, constantly seeking his approval with intense focus; then later years of competitive intellectual activity with my best friend; then years of competitive intellectual immersion at St. John’s, all made a difference. Certainly I rarely experienced any intellectual stimulation in conventional schooling. Some of my family members, who were not so cognitively different from me when I was young, optimized their lives for very different niches - often with little or no intellectual activity as an adult at all.

How I Think about Cognitive Development as an Educator

All classes are taught by means of Socratic dialogue at St. John’s. For the past thirty five years, I’ve spent most of my time as a Socratic educator working to create intellectual peer cultures where they were previously absent, and working to immerse young children intellectually. Early in my career I was measuring intellectual gains on the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WGCTA) and achieving remarkable results. Later I used the SAT and AP exam performance. Despite creating one of the top performing high schools in the US, I was pushed out because I did not have standard educational credentials.

In one of my early classroom experiences, I had a student who explained after a semester,

“At the beginning of the school year I viewed things in basically one way. I didn’t try to see things in different angles or different ways. One way had always been enough, had been all I cared about. I talked a lot, a whole lot. I still do, but it’s different now. Before, I talked to get my point across or to argue. Now I talk to inform others of my feelings or thoughts, to make sure I have a clear understanding of what someone else has thought and to add new ideas. I now talk to learn. . . .

I used to be the kind of person to do things without much thinking, but now I think about what I’m doing too much.”

Her scores on the WGCTA moved up from the 1st percentile (most likely because she didn’t try) to the 85th percentile. But she also seemed more thoughtful and intelligent after the semester. She is one of hundreds of students I’ve observed in which greater thoughtfulness resulted in significantly increased test scores.

Because all of my schools have been small, entrepreneurial projects, I don’t have the quality of data needed to convince skeptics that a cognitively rich program can develop children’s minds. Thus when Ryan Nohea Garcia, a friend, asked me if I would advise him on his daughter’s education seven years ago, I happily agreed. I figured “seeing is believing,” and that if I documented student progress over time a few more people might find the results compelling. After a few conversations with him, I began having Socratic conversations with his daughter, Alana, when she was four.

My series of Alana videos are designed to show how it is possible to develop a child's thinking abilities.  I knew in advance that I could help her develop as a thinker. She is now 10 and has completed a college level Python course. She is beginning Harvard CS50, Introduction to Computer Science. She is writing her third book.

Last year she attended a 1517 Fund gathering (originally created to invest in Thiel Fellows, founded by Mike Gibson and Danielle Strachman, the founding directors of the Thiel Fellowship).  She was, at 9, by far the youngest person there.  She was engaging the others, mostly ages 16 -25, asking questions about their entrepreneurial initiatives, confidently and thoughtfully conversing with much older, highly capable young people. 

Because the peer environment becomes ever more important as she matures, I was delighted that she joined my virtual school, The Socratic Experience, last fall. She is immersed in a social environment in which is it normal, fun, and cool to be discussing ideas. Social intellectuality is the norm.

I would not say that her parents and I increased her raw processing power, but I would say we deliberately supported her development as a thoughtful questioner in the top 1% of children her age with respect to this thinking disposition. She also has an exceptional ability to focus on abstract ideas and to follow long chains of reasoning.

Can a School Make Your Child Smarter? Or Dumber?

What does this have to do with genetics and intelligence?  The normal understanding is that "school" has something to do with learning.  For those with the right cultural background, such that they enter school ready to optimize their status by means of competing for status by means of academic performance, then that is what they do - and certainly both Jewish culture and Confucian cultures prime children for this kind of competitive performance.

But if a child does not have that cultural background, or innate advantage, then they are biologically programmed to identify another path for social status.  If they gain more status by means of being the class clown, the class athlete, the bully, the lover, the playground leader, etc. they will put more energy into those behaviors.  Feedback loops then develop, and for some children cognitive development becomes a low priority with few or no paybacks.  It is individually rational for them not to develop their minds.

Insofar as "school" has become a globally universal mechanism for controlling young lives (the UN Declaration of Human Rights declares elementary education should be compulsory, and multilateral institutions attempt to enforce this), all large scale educational research is premised on school = education.  But as Carol Black, the screenwriter for The Wonder Years TV show notes, studying children in school is like studying orcas at Sea World.  I regard almost all educational research as inconclusive garbage insofar as it is premised on schooling.

For instance, many people are excited by Bloom’s “2 sigma” finding, that students tutored one-on-one using mastery techniques performed two standard deviations better than students in a classroom environment. One reading of this is, “Wow, tutoring is powerful.” Another is, “Wow, classroom instruction is garbage.” Of course tutoring is better than classroom instruction. But for one of a thousand other possibilities: Laura Deming, an unschooler who got into MIT at 14, developed the habit of waking up early with her dad, then doing 2 hours of math, 2 hours of piano, and 2 hours of reading in the morning, then walking and talking with her dad in the afternoon. “Tutoring” had nothing to do with it, but an exceptional ability to focus combined with daily conversations with an exceptionally curious and engaging father no doubt did.

Schooling is a cultural monoculture that is far more damaging to human cultures than is agricultural monoculture on natural ecosystems.  To shift from the Sea World metaphor, imagine studying Monsanto treated industrial wheat farms in Kansas and suffering from the illusion that one understood plant life.  The fantastic botanical possibilities of the Amazon rainforest would not be remotely imaginable in such a world.  That is where we are with respect to education (see my "Ten School Designs" for a more expansive vision).

I see compulsory mass schooling as systematically degrading human intelligence, especially for those who don't happen to have the cultural prerequisites or individual propensity to fit into the schooling system.

Richard Heir in The Neuroscience of Intelligence provides what might appear to be a rock solid case for the primacy of genetics in intelligence.  But he and others are impressed with the fact that heritability increases with age:

"The heritability estimate of general intelligence was 26% at age 5, 39% at age 7, 54% at age 10, 64% at age 12, and starting at age 18 the estimate grew to over 80%. "

This well-known phenomenon is known as IQ "fadeout," because many promising pre-school interventions that seemed to raise IQ in disadvantaged populations later "fadeout."  But when I think about this fadeout effect, I think,

"Of course.  If a particular child is not adapted to schooling as a modality of learning, or if they do not find a social niche optimizing strategy that includes being a geek, they will not develop that part of their capacity."

Consider the fact that only 33% of students are engaged by grade 10 (Gallup) and 75% reported negative feelings in high school (Yale).

Heir, who is a pioneer on imaging the neuroscience correlates of IQ, is also excited by the fact that the brains of high IQ people look different.  When I read this stuff I think,

"Of course!  The bodies of people who are into fitness also look different from those who do not develop their physical capacities. Why shouldn't those who focus on cognitive activities develop brains that look different?"

 When he notes that there are genetic markers that are also correlated with these brain differences, I think, 

"Of course!  Those people who are genetically adapted to a fitness landscape based on schooling in our culture are going to be the ones who choose to optimize for geekdom socially.  Of course we will find correlations between genetics, IQ, and brain organization!".  

Again, none of this is to claim that there is no genetic influence on intelligence.  Nowhere above do I say that.  But I do believe that we live in age in which:

A.  Genetic information is exploding.  Yeah!

B.  Universal government schooling for the past century has dramatically narrowed our understanding of learning, education, and human development.

C.  Many people are now concluding that we have reached the limits of what is possible in education.  They therefore prematurely conclude outcomes are genetically determined instead of concluding educational monoculture was a disaster.

D. A vision of deliberately designing subcultures in which status hierarchies and the child's niche optimization strategies lead to the most positive cognitive outcomes is not on anyone's roadmap.

E.  Personally, I'm focused on developing cognitively rich subcultures in which thinking is a joyful way to interact as part of day-to-day behavior both among parents and their children as well as among child peer groups.

To summarize how I think parents should internalize all of this:

You want your child to be in an environment in which positive behaviors, including cognitive development, are rewarded socially.  Within that, your child will find her own niche for optimizing her social status, and it is your job to love and support them unconditionally no matter how different it is from your own vision for your child (while also monitoring and orchestrating their social environment so that they don't end up seeking out harmful, damaging, or negative niches for social status optimization).

For those genetic determinists out there, note:

1. I am not claiming that we can increase “g” (maybe, maybe not).

2. The mechanisms I focus on, enculturation and niche optimization, including the use of deliberate practice, are distinct from schooling-as-usually-conceptualized. Thus I see all school performance research related to the development of intelligence as irrelevant. The summaries of the ineffectiveness of schooling by Caplan and deBoer are largely accurate and yet largely irrelevant to the question of cognitive development.

3. These mechanisms plausibly account for different personalities in identical twins (see Judith Rich Harris, No Two Alike). To the best of my knowledge, no one has proposed a better account. Why should such mechanisms also not impact cognitive functioning?

Thanks to Nicole Nosek for inspiring the occasion for me to write up these thoughts into a coherent form.