> a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it
Drilling tons of math in rigorous ways for excessive amounts of time clearly improves various kinds of outcome measures. It also tends to cause other harms.
If we want to improve intelligence, first we need to agree what intelligence is. Then we can talk about what measures are appropriate or ethical to use to try and improve it.
Even if we just take a somewhat stupid measure, and say "all we care about is a hybrid of IQ and SAT-I scores at age 16"-- there's still the question of whether we care more about moving the top performance upwards or the entire distribution.
If we don't agree what intelligence is, we can't answer questions like this. If we use a traditional measure like IQ as a measure of G factor-- I don't think brain-computer interfaces are going to swing things much and they may even make it worse. (But they could also allow explosions in human productivity or quality of life that are not measured on that scale).
e.g. Smartphones have not made us smarter, but they may sometimes allow us to do smarter and better things.
First, it's hard to rigorously reason about and convert to a quantitative metric.
Second, it would seem to imply that many geniuses in the math and sciences are not very intelligent.
Figuring out what we really mean is really hard.
So often this blows up when anything related to IQ is brought up, a profound generational trauma of american intellectualism gets a small scene to replay its discourse in suffocating detail.
Maybe this is as close to the root cause as we can publicly get? Our insane tendency to avoid productive discussion and stifle true creative activity, all in favor of hollow wordplay (quasi-statistical if the situation requires, not less hollow). Our education - a glorified daycare with rote-learning for line-workers, of which we somehow expect intelligence gains if only we could spend more time instilling it (going against all solid evidence to the contrary, because the doctrine of never having enough education has to be preached).
There is a word for this, and it is a neologism: https://roonscape.substack.com/p/a-song-of-shapes-and-words