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Now you're getting it. The world can't be fixed. It can't even be survived. But it can be a nice place to live.
The worst people in the world, the Stalins and the Osama bin Ladens, try to be heroes but they're as flawed as anyone else. If they start to succeed those flaws can manifest in horrifying ways. They often destroy imperfect but necessary things in attempts to build perfect things that can't exist, like true Communism or functional political Islam. Humility and temperance are called heavenly virtues for a reason.
That even though I decided that my morality would never demand that I be a hero... there nonetheless just isn't a coherent, enduring shape that fits my soul that doesn't make that the thing I ultimately want for myself.
Reading that, I'm not sure whether you're grieving because you've given up on that belief or because it's true. I hope the former. The desire to be a hero is dangerous - a hero needs villains. As Nietzsche said, he who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't do what you can, but we all fall short of perfection. We all burn fossil fuels, for one thing. A bit of humility is in order.
It's not your job to save the world. That's God's job, and if that job has driven God crazy it would explain quite a bit.
I think you're onto something. I think, for this purpose, "child" means anyone who doesn't know enough about the topic to have any realistic chance at successful innovation. A talented 16 year old might successfully innovate in a field like music or cooking, having had enough time to learn the basics. When I was that age kids occasionally came up with useful new ideas in computer programming, but modern coding seems much more sophisticated. In a very developed field, one might not be ready to innovate until several years into graduate school.
A 16-year-old Salafi will be strongly influenced by his Salafi upbringing. Even if he* rebels, he'll be rebelling against that specific strain of Islam. It would take a very long and very specific journey to take him toward California-style liberalism; given the opportunity to explore he'd likely end up somewhere very different.
*My understanding of this particular Islamic school is hazy, but I doubt our student is female.
A child who's educated in a Salafi school has two choices - become a Salafi or become a failed Salafi. One of those is clearly better than the other. Salafis, like almost every adult, know how to navigate their environment semi-successfully and the first job of education is to pass on that knowledge. It would better if the kid could be given a better education, but the kid won't have much control over that (and wouldn't have the understanding to choose well). Kids are ignorant and powerless; that's not a function of any particular political or philosophical system.
I think in general it's best for children to learn from adults mostly by rote. Children should certainly ask questions of the adults, but independent inquiry will be at best inefficient and usually a wrong turn. The lecture-and-test method works, and AFAIK we don't have anything else that teaches nearly as well.
Later, when they have some understanding, they can look around for better examples.
Yeah, that's the idea I was going for.
I propose a test - if apologizing for or clarifying a controversial position is obviously a bad move, you're dealing with Level 4 actors. In such cases, your critics don't care about what you believe. Their narrative calls for a villain, and they've chosen you.
I think there are more limits than that because plausibility matters. The set of positions Ibram X Kendi could plausibly take is very different from the positions available to Donald Trump. Too big a reach and you'll look insincere, opportunistic, or weak. It's easy to alienate your social coalition and much harder to gain acceptance in a new one.
You seem to be steering in the direction of postmodernism, which starts with the realization that there are many internally consistent yet mutually exclusive ways of modeling the world. Humility won't solve that problem, but neither will a questioning mindset.
Every intellectual dead-end was once the product of a questioning mind. Questioning is much more likely to iterate toward a dead end than to generate useful results. This isn't to say that it's never useful (it obviously can be), but it rarely succeeds and is only the optimal path if you're near the frontiers of current understanding (which schoolchildren obviously aren't).
The best way to get out of a local maximum that I've found is to incorporate elements of a different, but clearly functional, intellectual tradition.
I don't know about Moldova, but it seems obvious that the creation of modern Israel depended on the idea that the Palestinians could be managed and equally obvious that it hasn't worked out that way. The only real endgames are genocide or leaving and personally I'd vote for leaving.
In 14 centuries of Islamic history from Spain to Indonesia, with limited travel and much regional variation for most of it, there will be many opportunities to find examples that match our own culture's Current Thing. Some Muslims are hypocrites; some Westerners look for homosexual subtext where none was intended. Many Muslim empires have risen in vigor and fallen in decadence. Still, the orthodox position is clear - homosexuality is both sinful and illegal. I've seen a Jew eat pork and laugh it off; it would be a mistake to make pork a key component of an appeal to militant Jews.
More to the point, in this era gay rights are associated with the West at its most liberal, which is exactly what Islamists oppose. Activity that might have been tolerated a thousand years ago is now perceived as a Western obsession and its practitioners as enemy sympathizers.
Trying to replace enemy leadership with more congenial leadership never works. You reliably get a corrupt puppet government and an insurgency. The only exception is after a comprehensive defeat of the enemy (i.e. post-WWII Germany and Japan), which begs the question (in the sense that this tactic would allow us to win only in cases where we've already won).
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of the food supply in the Middle East and North Africa used to come from Russia and Ukraine (link). Actions targeted at increasing food security in the region won't solve the political issues, but probably would turn down the temperature of the region. It would also help with the immigration crisis in Europe. It's not an easy or quick solution (growing food takes time, and the scale of the problem is staggering), but it's hard to see how peace would come without food.
Sun Tzu says that the keys to victory lie in knowing yourself and your enemy. When I got to #4, it became obvious that you know very little about Islam. There are no LGBTQ+ safe spaces in Islam. A relevant wikipedia page says "Homosexual acts were forbidden (haram) in traditional Islamic jurisprudence and therefore were subject to punishment. The types of punishment prescribed for non-heterosexual activities include flogging, stoning, and the death penalty, depending on the particular situation and the school of thought." The major Muslim countries are signatories to a UN counter-statement opposing gay rights. See here for a consensus statement of the Australian National Imam's Council, whom I would expect to be much more liberal than the average Palestinian, saying, "From the time of the Prophet until now, all scholars of every time and era, have agreed that the practice of homosexuality is a forbidden act and a sin in Islam." It's just a complete non-starter.
Me - Ph.D. in solid state materials chemistry. Been out of the game for a while. Less understanding of physics than some other commenters but have a different perspective that might be useful.
My first thought is that they have a minority phase; the samples are likely ~99% LK99 and ~1% unknown phase with weird properties. You can see it in the video; part of the specimen is levitating but a corner of it isn't.
The second thing I would do is try to make a bunch of variants with slightly different compositions to identify the minority phase.
The first thing I would do is try to make versions with different amounts of hydrogen. Hydrogen is ubiquitous, diffuses readily into and out of most materials, and is invisible to most materials analysis techniques, but it can have a profound effect on a material's properties. If you get different properties by annealing the sample under high-pressure hydrogen*, you're on the right track.
*For safety's sake you would typically use forming gas, a non-flammable mixture of hydrogen with nitrogen (or sometimes argon). Ammonia is also sometimes used but is more dangerous.
Strongly upvoted. A few comments:
I think of a human being as a process, rather than a stable entity. We begin as embryos, grow up, get old, and die. Each step of the process follows inevitably from the steps before. The way I see it, there's no way an unchanging upload could possibly be human. An upload that evolves even less so, given the environment it's evolving in.
On a more practical level, the question of whether a software entity is identical to a person depends on your relationship to that person. Let's take Elizer Yudkowski for example:
- I personally have never met the guy but have read some of the stuff he wrote. If you told me that he'd been replaced with a LLM model six months ago, I wouldn't be able to prove you wrong or have much reason to care.
- His friends as family would feel very differently, because they have deeper relationships to him and many of the things they need from him cannot be delivered by an LLM.
- To Elizer himself, the chatbot would obviously not be him. Elizer is himself, the chatbot is something else. Uniquely, Elizer doesn't have a demand for Elizer's services; he has a supply of those services that he attempts to find demand for (with considerable success so far). He might consider the chatbot a useful tool or an unbeatable competitor, but he definitely wouldn't consider it himself.
- To Elizer's bank it's a legal question. When the chatbot orders a new server, does Elizer have to pay the bill? If it signs a contract, is Elizer bound?
- Does the answer change if there's evidence that it was hacked? What sorts of evidence would be sufficient?
- If asked, AI-lizer would claim to perceive itself as Elizer. Whether it actually has qualia, and what those qualia are like, we will not know.
A lot of the nonprofit boards that I've seen use a "consent agenda" to manage the meeting. The way it works is:
- The staff create the consent agenda and provide it to the board members perhaps a week in advance.
- Any single board member can take any item off the consent agenda and onto the regular agenda.
- The consent agenda is passed in a single motion. It always passes unanimously, because anything that any member thinks merits attention has been moved onto the regular agenda (where it is separately discussed and voted on).
It doesn't do much for governance directly, but fewer time-wasting consent votes can make room for more discussion of issues that matter.
In the US, parties still aren't recognized by the Constitution. Every election is a choice between all of the people who qualify for the ballot for each office. Several groups of like-minded politicians quickly emerged, and over time these became our major parties.
It's not uncommon for an American candidate to run as an independent (i.e. not affiliated with a party), although they hardly ever win.
To the extent that I understand what you're saying, you seem to be arguing for curiosity as a means of developing a detailed, mechanistic ("gears-level" in your term) model of reality. I totally support this, especially for the smart kids. I'm just trying to balance it out with some realism and humility. I've known too many people who know that their own area of expertise is incredibly complicated but assume that everything they don't understand is much simpler. In my experience, a lot of projects fail because a problem that was assumed to be simple turned out not to be.
I get your point, and I totally agree that answering a child's questions can help the kid connect the dots while maintaining the kid's curiosity. As a pedagogical tool, questions are great.
Having said that, most people's knowledge of most everything outside their specialties is shallow and brittle. The plastic in my toothbrush is probably the subject of more than 10 Ph.D. dissertations, and the forming processes of another 20. This computer I'm typing on is probably north of 10,000. I personally know a fair amount about how the silicon crystals are grown and refined, have a basic understanding of how the chips are fabricated (I've done some fabrication myself), know very little about the packaging, assembly, or software, and know how to use the end product at a decent level. I suspect that worldwide my overall knowledge of computers might be in the top 1% (of some hypothetical reasonable measure). I know very little about medicine, agriculture, nuclear physics, meteorology, or any of a thousand other fields.
Realistically, a very smart* person can learn anything but not everything (or even 1% of everything). They can learn anything given enough time, but literally nobody is given enough time. In practice, we have to take a lot of things on faith, and any reasonable education system will have to work within this limit. Ideally, it would also teach kids that experts in other fields are often right even when it would take them several years to learn why.
*There are also average people who can learn anything that isn't too complicated and below-average people who can't learn all that much. Don't blame me; I didn't do it.
Being honest, for nearly all people nearly all of the time questioning firmly established ideas is a waste of time at best. If you show a child, say, the periodic table (common versions of which have hundreds of facts), the probability that the child's questioning will lead to a significant new discovery are less that 1 in a billion* and the probability that they will lead to a useless distraction approach 100%. There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world, and it takes intelligent people many years to understand them well enough to ask the questions that might actually drive progress. And when people who are less intelligent, less knowledgeable, and/or more prone to motivated reasoning are asking the questions, you can get flat earthers, Qanon, etc.
*Based on the guess that we've taught the periodic table to at least a billion kids and it's never happened yet.
I think a better way to look at it is that frequentist reasoning is appropriate in certain situations and Bayesian reasoning is appropriate in other situations. Very roughly, frequentist reasoning works well for descriptive statistics and Bayesian reasoning works well for inferential statistics. I believe that Bayesian reasoning is appropriate to use in certain kinds of cases with a probability of (1-delta), where 1 represents the probability of something that has been rationally proven to my satisfaction and delta represents the (hopefully small) probability that I am deluded.
Wars are an especially nasty type of crisis because there's an enemy. That enemy will probably attempt to use your software for its own ends. In the case of your refugee heatmap idea, given that the Russians are already massacring civilians, that might look like a Russian artillery commander using it to deliberately target refugees. Alternately, they might target incoming buses to prevent the refugees from getting out of the Ukrainian military's way and make the Ukrainians spend essential resources on feeding and protecting them.
Does the Russian military even have the tech dependencies that would make them vulnerable to cyber attacks? I think they're pretty analog.
I spent about 20 years in academic and industrial research, and my firm belief is that almost nobody spends nearly enough time in the library. There have been hundreds of thousands of scientists before you; it is overwhelmingly likely that your hot new idea has been tried before. The hard part is finding it; science is made up of thousands of tiny communities that rarely talk to each other and use divergent terminology. But if you do the digging, you may find a paper from Egypt in 1983 that describes exactly why your project isn't working (real example). Finding that paper two weeks into the project is much better than finding it five years later.
The US has at least 16 intelligence agencies, but we still went into Iraq.
Oddly, it's probably easier for Putin to get credible information about Ukraine's military than about his own. Fewer people have an interest in lying to him about Ukraine.
Richard Hanania's Public Choice Theory and the Illusion of Grand Strategy is worth reading on this general topic, although it's mostly about the Iraq war.
He doesn't use these words (that I recall, and I'm only partway through), but the behavior of states is less like rationality and more like autism. What I mean is that states act on internal motivations that are only very weakly coupled to the objective strategic reality.
Putin probably didn't have access to reliable information about the capabilities of his military vs. Ukraine's military. How could he? What General would dare tell the Tsar that the Russian army sucks? Who would dare tell the General? I'm sure the soldiers and junior officers knew they had problems, but probably had little idea how their capabilities compared to the Ukrainians' capabilities.
On the other hand, Putin probably knows as much as anyone about the highest ranks of Russian politics. He sees those people all day, and it's almost inevitable that they constitute the community that matters to him.
Re aliens - Fair enough. Some very simple alien, perhaps the Vulcan equivalent of a flatworm, may be well within our capability to understand. Is that really what we're interested in?
Re machine learning - The data for machine learning is generally some huge corpus. The question is whether we're even capable of understanding the data in something like the manner the algorithm does. My intuition says no, but it's an open question.
I'd like to add two pieces of evidence in favor of the weak unlearnability hypothesis:
(1) Humpback whales have songs that can go on for days. Despite decades of study, we don't really understand what they're saying.
(2) The output of machine learning algorithms (e.g. Google's Deep Dream) can be exceedingly counterintuitive to humans.
Whales are our distant cousins and humans created machine learning. We might reasonably suppose that actual aliens, with several billion years of completely independent evolution, might be much harder to understand.
We actually do pretty much the opposite of that in the U.S. Student loans have a Federal guarantee, so the incentive is to sign people up for as much education as possible. If they succeed, great. If they fail, they'll be paying off the loans until they die at which time Uncle Sam will pay the balance. With compounding interest, the ones who fail are the most profitable.
we don’t have a step-by-step checklist to follow in order to use informal mathematical arguments
If we did, the checklist would define a form and the mathematical arguments would become formal.
Terrence Tao uses the term post-rigorous to describe the sort of argument you're talking about. It's one of three stages. In the pre-rigorous stage, concepts are fuzzy and expressed inexactly. In the rigorous stage, concepts are precisely defined in a formal manner. In the post-rigorous stage, concepts are expressed in a fuzzy and inexact way for the sake of efficiency by people who understand them on a rigorous level; key details can be expressed as rigorously as necessary but the irrelevant details of a full proof are omitted.
the current generation of physicists seems to have lost the way in some important (but hard to pin down) sense
My impression of physics (1) post-1970-or-so is that it's lost the balance between theory and experiment that makes science productive. Hypotheses like "superstring theory" or "dark matter" are extremely difficult to test by experiment (through no fault of the physicists' own). Physicists have tried to to make up for it with improvements in theory, but without experiments bringing discipline to the process it doesn't quite work.
In one sense, this is good news. Physicists have reached the point where it is extremely difficult to observe a physical phenomenon they can't predict, which is very similar to saying the project is almost complete.
(1) Here I'm speaking mostly of particle physics. Condensed-matter physics has been much more successful over the past 50 years or so. Other disciplines may vary.
I think most of this is just aging, and is normal. I associate that "challenge the world as hard as you can" mentality with testosterone and with teenage boys (who are very high in testosterone). It's a good mindset to have when you're starting out and need to make a place for yourself in the world.
At 29, you have (hopefully) established yourself a bit but are still young enough to be attractive to women. Your instincts are probably telling you (through the medium of lowered testosterone) that it's time to settle down and raise some kids. Circle of life and all that.
I should mention that, like many people who were raised religious and lost their faith, I miss it. It was comforting to believe that the world was in good hands and that it all could work out in the end. I had friends at church. Many of them were attractive females.
Losing my religion felt less like an act of will and more like figuring out the answer to a math problem. It wasn't something I wanted, rather the opposite. I fought it for a while, but there's no cure for enlightenment. I've tried to go back to church, but it just doesn't work when you don't believe in it. I no longer see God there, just some schmuck wearing felt.
I guess this can take a pretty nasty and irrational form, but I see this continuous with other benign community bonding rituals and pro-social behavior (like Petrov day or the solstice).
I agree, I just think that community bonding rituals have such a strong tendency to lead to ingroup-vs-outgroup conflicts that I am much more skeptical of the whole idea than you seem to be.
Part of this is my perception that generally neither group is entirely right about every issue, and therefore no group I pick will have my wholehearted support. This is acceptable; compromise on less crucial matters is often the price of working toward your most important goals. Having said that, I think it's important to remember what your important goals are and to periodically ask yourself whether the gains are still worth the compromises. Durkheimian worship is rather directly contrary to this sort of cost-benefit analysis.
Or it could just be that I'm Aspergian, and my normal modes of thinking are highly anti-correlated with religion.
I think most people on LW fall into one of two groups:
- People who were raised in the urban liberal milleu. Religion simply isn't part of their worldview; their attitude toward it is not even unbelief. For them going to church is like raising alpacas; they are aware that some people do it but they don't see much value in it, it doesn't fit into their lifestyles, and it would take a rather long intellectual journey to convince them to do it themselves.
- People who, like me, were raised around religion. As LWers are generally thoughtful people, we have generally considered religion to our satisfaction many years ago. Each of us had a particular journey but I suspect my conclusions are, if not typical, then not highly atypical either:
- My understanding of neuroscience has convinced me that consciousness is fundamentally dependent on the brain. I don't believe in an afterlife (cryogenics and mind-uploading ideas notwithstanding).
- Since I do not expect to face divine judgement, I am not greatly concerned about the existence or nonexistence of God. I think of theology as much like an ant trying to understand presidential politics. Understanding is highly unlikely and the ant has better things to do.
- The Durkheimian "society worshiping itself" phenomenon is real, common, and by no means limited to religion as traditionally defined. It is often wildly irrational and is pretty much the opposite of what LW aspires to.
If you're trying to reach the first group, I would recommend trying to bring them into contact with organized religion via some sort of common interest (probably effective altruism). The second group is generally going to be much harder to reach.
Just for context, I'd like to point out that the SAT has been revised and renormed since 1994 (twice IIRC). Current test scores are not straightforwardly comparable to the scores discussed in the book and in the post.
One of the most important decisions in war is when to stop. Humans evolved fear to solve this problem; there's a point at which soldiers will de-escalate the conflict (i.e. flee the battlefield rather than stay and die). However, signalling fear makes you a target so people don't discuss it candidly. I am concerned that military leaders may, in the calm of the office, design AI that has no provisions for de-escalating conflict; this seems very likely to lead to nuclear war.
Perhaps. OTOH, even the Atari 2600 was already a consumer-grade mass-market product; gene sequencing is only now getting there.
To be honest, there are a few other times and places where technological progress has been even faster like Japan between 1865 and 1945 or Shenzhen between 1975 and 2020. Nevertheless, such meteoric rises are a vanishingly small part of human history. There are lots of places and industries where the last 40 years have seen only very modest improvements, quite a few where the trend has been to modest decline, and some where the decline has been horrible (e.g. Lebanon, Yemen, Zimbabwe). In my extremely subjective, non-expert opinion, the rationalist community's expectations for technological progress are reasonable for computer technology (until recently) but are unreasonable compared to recent trends in industries like energy, transportation, agriculture, construction, medicine, and many more. In other words, it has a strong bias toward optimism.
Moore's Law had processing power doubling every 18 months to two years for decades; the Atari 2600 of my youth had 128 bytes of RAM; the comparably-priced machine I'm typing this on has 8 billion. No other technology has ever improved by seven orders of magnitude in four decades AFAIK. The economic shifts that came with that made California (and more specifically the Bay Area) what it is today, and my point was that California is highly atypical.
On the other hand, I totally agree with the view that progress has overall slowed down. I think the difference is how you measure; measures that favor IT (e.g. information available) will show very different trends than other measures that may more reasonably reflect the impact of technology on human life (e.g. life expectancy, total energy use, inflation-adjusted mean family income). And even in the tech sector, most places weren't as changed as California.
I don't think we have serious disagreements; we're just describing different parts of the same elephant.
It seems like many disagreements ultimately stem from different estimates about the options available. Examples:
- If you think "human society, but on Mars" is a realistic option, Elon Musk looks like a visionary. If you think it's a fabricated option, he looks like a fool (but at least he seems to be having fun).
- If you think "industrial society, but without world-destroying levels of fossil fuel use" is a live option, you might be right. But you could be wrong. It could be a fabricated option.
- Leftists (stereotypically) view "current levels of wealth, but evenly distributed" is a real option. Conservatives (stereotypically) view self-interest as a major driver of wealth creation, and think that wealth creation without wealth inequality is a fabricated option.
I suspect that most people in this community will be prone to viewing all of the above as live options (rationalists, in my experience, have a strong bias toward optimism (1)). I personally lean in the other direction, but I've been wrong before.
(1) Yes, this is technically irony. It stems from a training data problem. The rationalist community's training data vastly oversamples the tech industry in California between (circa) 1970 and 2010. That time, industry, and place saw the most dramatic technological revolution in history and is in no sense representative of human experience.
I basically agree. A heuristic lets System 1 function without invoking (the much slower) System 2. We need heuristics to get through the day; we couldn't function if we had to reason out every single behavior we implement. A bias is a heuristic when it's dysfunctional, resulting in a poorly-chosen System 1 behavior when System 2 could give a significantly better outcome.
One barrier to rationality is that updating one's heuristics is effortful and often kind of annoying, so we always have some outdated heuristics. The quicker things change, the worse it gets. Too much trust in one's heuristics risks biased behavior; too little yields indecisiveness.
I think we need to distinguish between some related things here:
- Rote learning is the stuff of katas, multiplication tables, etc. It's not rationality in itself, but reason works best if you have a lot of reliable premises.
- Developing heuristics is the stuff of everyday education. Most people get years of this stuff, and it's what makes most people as rational as they are.
- Crystallized intelligence it the ability to reason by applying heuristics. Most people aren't very good at it, which is the main limitation on education. AFAIK, we don't know how to give people more.
- Fluid intelligence is the ability to reason creatively without heuristics. It's the closest to what I mean by "rationality", but also the hardest to train.
- Executive function includes some basic cognitive processes that govern people's behavior. Unfortunately, it is almost entirely (86-92%) genetic.
I can think of a few skills that, while not "rationality" in themselves, make it much easier to reason effectively. Numeracy is one. The innumerate can't really see the difference between a million, a billion, a trillion, and a godzillion.
It helps to have, in memory, a set of references to compare to. For example, there are about a third of a billion people in the United States. Therefore a billion dollars is roughly $3 each, a trillion dollars is roughly $3,000 each, and a million dollars is roughly nothing (.3 cents) each.
A working knowledge of history is also helpful, as is a rough understanding of manufacturing.
Varying the problem helps, as does varying your approach to the problem. Studying math generally involves many years of working progressively complex problems. But this is different from a "kata", which is a set of moves rigorously repeated in a specific order and invariant manner*.
Psychologically speaking, a kata functions to take a set of moves that the student consciously understands and build muscle memories that can execute the moves effectively at the sub-second timescale of a fight. Reasoning uses different cognitive systems, although once a behavior is consciously understood it is often useful to practice until mental subroutines are developed that enable quick, unreflective execution of the behavior.
*There will be some variation as the student goes from not being good at the kata to being very good at the kata, but that variation is unwanted. The better you are at the kata the less variation there is.
Perhaps, but it would surprise me if you don't have hundreds of common sudoku patterns in your memory. Not entire puzzles, but heuristics for solving limited parts of the puzzle. That's how humans learn. We do pattern recognition whenever possible and fall back on reason when we're stumped. "Learning" substantially consists of developing the heuristics that allow you to perform without reason (which is slow and error-prone).
Math problems are like "katas" for rationality. The difference is that, once you've solved a problem once with rationality, you can solve it again much more easily from memory without engaging your rational facilities again. Therefore you don't get the benefit from repeating the same exercises again and again.
There have been dozens of stories like that; George W Bush got elected on the strength of his education "reforms". Long-term experience justifies a strong belief (confidence over 90%) that the results will ultimately turn out to be due to a combination of selection bias (cherry-picking) and test fraud. The links are just examples; I've been offhandedly following education research and reform for decades. There's a lot more evidence where that came from, and it tells a very consistent story.
Education simply isn't a green field - the space of potential solutions has been fairly thoroughly explored (for the set of non-medical solutions that are broadly consistent with Western values and American cultural practices). If you are active in this space without learning that history, you are almost certain to repeat it.
The evidence indicates that throwing more effort/money at how we do education does not improve IQ scores (for which SAT scores are a thinly-veiled proxy, except that every decade or so they make cosmetic changes to the SAT methodology) or student outcomes. Attempts to rethink education have failed. And IQ is generally useful enough that it is strongly correlated with outcomes we want.
If you're used to the tech sector with rapid change every decade, moving into the human services sector is going to be a very depressing experience. The low-hanging fruit was picked centuries ago and there hasn't been any real progress in the last 50 years.
Pretty much. If an intervention is well outside of the set of experiences of your population, there's probably a reason for that. Perhaps it's just too new, but it's likely that it's inconsistent with the way the culture usually functions (its values as actually implemented) and/or has fairly obvious side effects.
The simplest and most useful answer is that heritability tells you the amount of variation that environmental factors don't control*. Traits with very high heritability** are generally going to be worse targets for intervention than traits with low heritability.
*In the range of environments over which the data was collected. The heritability of a trait as measured in Somalia or North Korea may be much lower that as measured in America. You can interpret this as meaning that there is much more hope for useful intervention in Somalia or North Korea, although the practical difficulties may be considerable.
**Some relevant traits are nearly 100% heritable, unfortunately. This includes executive function, which governs working memory and impulse control. Any non-biochemical intervention aimed at improving these traits is unlikely to succeed.