I guess it’s fairly obvious that an entire state can’t be a total dump, but in case anyone believes all the negativity about New Jersey, I just thought I’d point out that it has some really beautiful areas.
I’m not from there and have never lived there, but I’ve been to lots of very nice towns in New Jersey. I don’t know the exact numbers, but just to give people an idea, real estate taxes of around 12K per year wouldn’t be unusual at all. And that would be in a nice, but not super exclusive town.
This is why we have stories like the “Tortoise and the Hare.” To help people understand the wisdom of life’s journey. If you are a great test taker at 17, fantastic. But getting there first, doesn’t mean you might not be joined by others who arrive later.
You’re right. I guess I was just trying to say that it can’t be a total dump, because if it were, people wouldn’t pay that kind of money to live there.
But I do know some people who have left the NYC metro area because they got fed up with paying the crazy taxes.
I think the message “you can achieve anything if you work hard enough” resonates more with people than “you need aptitude along with hard work if you really want to excel.”
181: "Natural or innate ability is a one-dimensional aspect that easily measured and ranked by standardized testing."
This is not to deny that natural or innate ability is important. But it is not so simple to measure and rank, including separating confounding aspects like previous educational opportunities. There are also multiple dimensions, since some talented artists are horrible at math, and vice-versa.
EDIT: @NeoDymium Yeah, and I agree that it’s healthy to instill in people a feeling of hope and control over their future, but I can also see this backfiring if it’s taken too far. You don’t want kids who are honestly trying and not doing well to feel like they’re lazy or doing something wrong.
@ucbalumnus Most standardized tests are actually very well correlated with general intelligence/IQ, which correlates really well with…well, practically everything. But it’s true that there can still be variations, .i.e. people who are better at math than they are at spelling.
As a teacher of 14 years, I can confidently say a lot of people overstate it. In the long run, hard work trumps almost everything, and (outliers excepted) the vast majority of us fall into a range of “natural ability” that is far, far, far narrower than the range of work ethic, privilege, opportunity, and educational experiences.
The misconception, I think, is that hard work can literally trump “almost everything”. It can be the primary determinant in lots of areas, but not always. There are some people who will never, ever be able to earn a PhD in mathematics, for example. There are others who show up to every class and go to all the office hours but still flunk out of engineering. And the problem here is that society pens the blame on them for “not trying hard enough”, when in many cases they actually were giving it their all. It creates an unhealthy mentality, to always blame people for their shortcomings, even when they’re the result of things beyond anyone’s control.
Sometimes laziness or some other malleable factor is why someone isn’t succeeding, but you can’t apply this as a blanket case. Not only do the statistics support this, but we intuitively get it for other areas; we understand that Tim Tebow will probably never start another game in the NFL, and I understand that I simply am not cut out for professional basketball. Academics shouldn’t be any different. Hard work is a necessary, but not always a sufficient criteria.
We can bring up outliers all we want–and even I admitted their existence–but that won’t make professional sports any more analogous to education outcomes.
A lot of people seem to accept that “working hard” won’t turn someone into a great artist if they lack innate talent, yet they don’t apply that concept to other fields. I don’t understand why it would be any different.
It also depends on what task we’re talking about. Doing physics research is one of those areas where you need a certain level of talent or you’re out of luck. In other cases, like learning how to read or some vocations, barring disabilities pretty much everyone can pick it up given enough time.
However, they are confounded by prior educational opportunities and experiences, even for those which purported to measure scholastic aptitude or some such. Of course, most standardized tests are designed to test specific learned things, so the things that they are actually testing for confound to an even greater extent any measure of general intelligence that they may indicate to. Also, how does one measure general intelligence to find the correlation with standardized tests without using a test or other measure that itself is confounded by prior educational opportunities and experiences?
The sports analogy is interesting … to a point. My anecdote is based on personal experience in my neighborhood that has a state championship swimming team. People actually move here to get their kids on the team (which is crazy, imho). Anyway, my D is a smart kid but not physically gifted for swimming. She excelled early on (4-7 years old) because she “got it” and had a competitive spirit. She overcame her physical limits by working smarter and harder. On the other hand, our neighbor’s kid was afraid of swimming early on yet she was the most physically gifted athlete I’d ever known personally (e.g. I put a tennis racket in her hands and a couple of tries later she was rifling the ball back to me, incredible). I told her parents, “let me teach her how to swim”, and see what happens (I just gave her the basics of swimming). At the next swim team season, with better training from the team coaches, she blew away everyone in the county and state, setting records, etc. The problem was that she lacked the mental edge to keep excelling later on when the other kids overcame their physical limits. Basically, you only get a Michael Phelps when the mental/physical combination is built into one individual.
I guess that what I’m trying to say is that exceptional performance in sports is more that just physical or mental gifts. There’s a balance required. In the academic world, the balance is between mental ability and competitiveness. In the business world, the balance is between mental ability and risk taking.
These are all good questions. However, they were asked and more or less answered by social scientists over a 100 years ago. In fact, several interesting statistical techniques were invented in the process. Of course, there aren’t any final answers with anything as complex as the brain, but the field has some pretty well established and operationally useful/reliable ways to define and measure general intelligence.
For example, even performance on simple cognitive tasks like remembering a phone number and simply repeating it or repeating it with the digits backwards has a reasonably high correlation with these measures. Researchers study how performance on such tasks vary with increased formal schooling or cultural familiarity in order to isolate effects like the ones that you are worried about. There are certainly still open issues and controversies, but more at the interpretive level rather than the empirical level. It’s not just a bunch of people shooting from the hip.
Most fields require some of each (and talent may be specific to the field), but they may require them in different amounts and proportions. How much of each is needed depends on whether one is aiming for elite level achievement or just ordinary good achievement.