Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block...
Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve.
Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true - assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research - even if it is true (a phrase he uses a lot).
Since not one of his arguments depends on Herrnstein's scientific claims being false, the issue of science denialism never comes up with Chomsky. He lets his opponents have everything they "ask" for empirically ("even if it is true") and refutes them on other grounds.
This must partly be because (ironically?) he's smarter than most people (including most other progressives) and therefore wasn't about to walk into the trap the left finds itself in 50 years later - a trap which must be tightening, if an article like the OP appears in the New Yorker of all places. But there must be more to it than this. I think the progressives who find themselves having to challenge this research as false (rather than inconsequential and insignificant, as Chomsky does), actually share many of the ideological and meritocratic assumptions that Chomsky writes about - for example the assumption that wealth and power must necessarily flow to those with higher IQ. They don't want to give up this assumption because they belong to the meritocracy themselves (or are part of the class that identifies that way). Because of this, they can't accept Chomsky's argument much more than the Herrnsteins can.
Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism.
Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these people mean, but don't say out loud for the fear of instant character assassination by being called out for racism is that they don't want brown people in their countries.
New Yorker bought into this, unfortunately. The author does not want to "help" racial minorities, she wants to label them dumb, an needing compassion, which in reality will lead to even more strong ostracism, and stigmatisation. Nobody have to be "scientifically established to be dumb, and biologically inferior." That's right out of 3rd reich's playbook.
If we discover facts that we internalize as uncomfortable along the way, it wasn’t the discovery that made those facts exist. Politics can take over after science reveals the facts, but (ideally) not before.
I find it extremely likely that, across all research, that we will find actionable information about what interventions are helpful (and which are not) and blinding ourselves to that in the interest of comfort is undesirable IMO. These could be nutritional, societal, economic, or other and these interventions could serve to lift billions of humans to a better condition.
There are a small minority of people who find distortions of the truth aesthetically displeasing and finding things out pleasing, these people often become scientists. (I'm not one of them really, I get off on feelings of smug superiority I get by disagreeing with the "ignorant masses")
This is frowned upon, because there is no bottom to this race downwards. Anyone can accuse anyone else of being a horrible, rotten human being who just puts up a tolerable facade.
You say this as if human beings are entirely unfamiliar with the use of facades in everyday life (need I mention most women's familarity with "the nice guy"), more so in those domains where power and position are at stake.
Shifting the argument to "bad faith", "closet X", "stealth Y" is exactly that: It says nothing about whether something true, only that "it helps the bad guys."
So we shouldn't try to find out the truth, lest it be against our interests? That doesn't bode well at all.
The idea that racism is wrong because we all have equal capabilities is preposterous to begin with, why, you might as well justify sexism in that way.
Nobody challenges that women are physically weaker then men. Trying to point to this, and scream out of loud as part of some fetish is preposterous, and trying to justify sexism.
Nobody denies that genetics exist. Waging a sneaky campaign to seep into scientific publications to legitimise racism, and attempting to "scientifically pronouncing somebody dumber than others" is preposterous, and is racism.
This vexation of finding scientific basis for somebody's inferiority is exactly what German, and American Nazis did in nineteen thirties, while hiding behind the fig leaf of "doing real science."
I have encountered multiple people in my personal life who are offended by the idea that women are physically weaker than men.
There is also plenty of evidence of this in the raging debate surrounding transgender (specifically male to female) individuals and their physical advantages competing against non-transgender women.
So yes, I would say there are many who challenge that notion.
Yes, this is a huge issue in progressive ideology that is trying to take a local maxima of least-resistance arguments.
There are solid arguments why M2F individuals are not problematic in sports, but "there are no differences" is not one of them. Better ones include, the inherent differences are much smaller after hormonal changes most m2f people undergo, or that elite tier athletics are already self-selecting for the most genetically extreme people anyways, further reducing the difference.
We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.
Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.
So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.
Are you saying we should be extremely skeptical specifically of arguments that justify the positions of those in power, but not other arguments?
Or are you saying that we should be extremely skeptical of all arguments equally?
This could really be articulated in any way you choose, but no it doesn't follow that "we should be more skeptical of arguments that facially seem to support the powerful at the expense of the weak" is an irrational or wrong position.
This is conflating two wildly different things.
Unless you're assuming that power is inherently unequal?
For instance, there is a strong progressive assumption that the male/female divide if it were truly fair would be 50/50 in all industries (or at least the ones they focus on, e.g. comp sci).
But you can't on the one hand make bold statements about expected outcomes and then remain blind to the science of group differences. These issues would be far simpler if solved by focusing purely on individual achievement.
"If... society can be organized more or less in accordance with the "socialist dictum," then nothing is left of Herrnstein's argument"
So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
That is not a stance Chomsky holds nor the vast majority of socialist. How have you become so anti-socialist without even knowing what socialism is?
Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.
Here's a glimpse at how our ruling class views the role of prison in our society:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman
I'm sure you witnessed and were subjected to terrible things. I would be careful though of concluding the problem was with "socialism" rather than powerful people abusing their power to maintain and amass more power. That dynamic is pretty universal and happens under any system with psychopaths in charge. Whenever it happens under one "-ism" people from other "-isms" will use that to point out how flawed the opposing ideology is. But really, all the system determines is how hard of a time the psychopath-in-charge has pulling the levers of power. We just put a psychopath in charge of our Democracy here in America 4 years ago, and his term ended with him instigating an insurrection on the country's Capitol in an attempt to maintain power, bringing an end to 240+ years of peaceful power transitions. It can happen anywhere.
TLDR; the American ruling class will pretextually raid your home and throw you in prison if you opposed their agenda of invading foreign countries and segregating the population by race. Not only will they put you to work and not pay you anything, they will actually charge you for the privilege of imprisoning you (again, for pretextual reasons), making a profit off of your misery. I guess we can conclude this is Democracy?
Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?
Yeah, read up on the way secret police worked in ex-communist countries and come back.
> Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?
My own experiences. Have you ever lived under a totalitarian socialist regime? Have you had to suffer for ideological persecution?
> So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
note im not approving or disapproving of his stance, but merely stating a fact
chomsky has many times stated his beliefs and they are quite different what someone like say, stalin or lenin would espouse [1]
i dont really think im making a controversial statement am i?
It's disrespectful to throw Chomsky in together with something that he's spent his entire life to very prolifically oppose, namely authoritarianism.
https://iea.org.uk/but-that-wasnt-real-socialism-part-3-vene...
No. But do I think that their "interpretation" is even close to charitable and that there's a even faintest chance that we'll get somewhere from that starting point? No, not a chance.
The author is of course the author of some "abolish the NHS book/report" as well. Do you honestly believe that this sort of such stuff is represented by anything other than monied interests?
"[W]hat’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created […] The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact."
That seems to prove my point, irrespective of whether the IEA is a right-wing thinktank (yes, it is).
That’s the argument Murray makes in his latest book, i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.
This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance).
This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case).
As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.
> As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one.
> (of which only a small bit relates to race)
It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.
If it is definitional to your worldview, then replace it with a scientifically sound one.
The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
“That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious. But just because there's a lot of variation in many traits among humans mean there's variation in all of them, in fact we all have the same organs with the same functions, the same number of chromosomes, the same metabolic pathway to produce energy from food, etc. There are as many things that don't have variations in humans as thing that do. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a genetic impact on cognitive ability, but this argument is really poor one.
> Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
When almost all your citations in your discussion about the link between “races” and intelligence, are taken from at best biased studies (from South Africa, Rhodesia or Southern US under segregation) when it's not openly racist (Richard Lynn, which has 20+ citations in the book!).
If you want quick look at the quality of the sources used in this book, I highly recommend you to watch just the five minutes starting at 1'52'28[1], about the “single best study of Negroid intelligence”.
http://joelvelasco.net/teaching/2890/brownlisthumanuniversal...
Also genetically aren't all the different distinct populations found around sub-Saharan Africa anyway, with everyone else in the world all sharing a single genetic group that has very little genetic variance within it?
Is this obvious? I can't imagine what kinds of attributes you're talking about. I think if they were significant ones (courageousness, curiosity, etc) they would probably have really profound political effects you don't see in reality.
Even a minute difference in something like this would change the mechanics of the formation. So stuff like Alexander's globe-spanning conquests would suddenly become impossible as he hit a different population regime where his tactics don't work anymore, or the Mongols would hit some barrier where they would start losing all their battles because people weren't reacting the way they should, etc.
In reality, of course, empires like the Roman one absolutely depended on the fact that the same social systems and techniques worked just as well in modern day scotland as they worked in modern day Iraq - a legionnaire was a legionnaire, whether they came from egypt or wales, and they could and were moved around and interchanged.
But aside from that, it seems like everything you wrote is pure conjecture and even if some of it was true, that absolutely does not prove a point about there being no genetic component to intellectual diversity.
P 2. An empire is a state that employs some policies across its entire territory.
P 3. Multi-ethnic empires with strong cohesion have existed.
So if you take 1, and 3, you see that for both to be true, people have to have very standardized reactions to policies across ethnic 'lines'. I state it with certainty because it's obvious.
Counter-example: people within a single ethnicity have a huge range of reactions to policies (based on all sorts of things, whether or not genetic).
In fact, the whole purpose of the phalanx as a combat organization is to remove the weight of individual actions: you don't need “courage” (whatever that means[2]) to stand in a phalanx, because you're clumped up with every soldiers, and you have nowhere to flee (and btw those soldiers are your neighbors and relatives, so fleeing would destroy all your social life back home, putting an enormous social pressure on soldiers).
[1]: https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... [2] https://acoup.blog/2021/02/05/collections-the-universal-warr...
But, it doesn't mean that every attribute varies this way. That's exactly what I'm arguing against actually.
About psychological traits you mention, there's so much cultural influence I don't think genetics would have any visible impact even if it was a factor (I'd be surprised if genetics played zero role here, but I expect the genetic-induced variance to be much lower than the culturally-induced one).
It is.
None of the controversy over the book is about that orbital-level view.
I’m not making any statement about the conclusions in the work.
I’m making a statement about the controversy around the work, from observing that controversy, including reading extensive material from people objecting at the time it first became controversial.
The controversy was never over the broad idea that different populations have different distributions of different attributes.
It is by no means "the general argument" of the Bell Curve, and saying that pretty transparently shows that you have not read it. You are, of course, excused by the fact that the book has been the target of relentless smear campaign by media and many academics, which resulted in painting completely wrong image of what the book actually is about.
Bell Curve is almost entirely concerning the American society, and only in passing mentions issues and results from different parts of the world. The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ. Moreover, which will probably be shocking to people who only know Bell Curve through second hand accounts of people very loudly denouncing it, for the most part it explicitly restricts itself to results and data from the population of white Americans only, to show that these correlations are not a result of some sort of insidious ethnic or racial discrimination, as they also exist within white population. Only in last part of the book ethnic and racial disparities are mentioned, mostly to show that these are pretty much what you would expect if you assumed that correlations of intelligence and outcomes within population of white Americans are the same if you extend your analysis to population at large.
Except the data they use is not IQ (they are using AFQT Score because that's the available data) and they are artificially constructing an equivalent IQ. The original data doesn't even fit a bell curve (because there's no reason a given test should). For some reason, unjustified in the book, they assume that the AFQT score depends only from genetic factors and not from any kind of social determinism. The fact that the book liberally jumps from AFQT score to IQ to “genetic factor” is an enormous issue which completely destroys the credibility of their work.
Also, in their book it is “to a large degree, explained by their IQ”, because they controlled for almost no social or environmental factors: only the “parental socioeconomic status” (also a made-up metric) is taken into account.
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/MG265/...
They literally say that they believe AFQT measures the same thing as WAIS (a standard IQ test) is measuring.
Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.
Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either).
And btw, the study you quote explicitly rules out the conversion done in the book:
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
No, because everything else we know about IQ, especially the existence of positive manifold, strongly suggest that it will also correlate at lower IQs too. You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.
Alas, there have been other studies done, and it turns out that indeed, AFQT/ASVAB score and IQ correlation does in fact extend to areas on the left side of the distribution too, exactly as expected. To reiterate: this correlation exists across entire spectrum, not only among high IQ people. If anything, the correlation at high IQ is lower than expected, because of range restriction effect.
> Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone
Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
It can, though. The problem is that the population of military test takers is not representative of population at large. For one thing, its average intelligence will probably be higher, due to relative scarcity of mentally disabled people. However, if you know the parameters of IQ distribution among military test takers, you can easily convert AFQT/ASVAB to IQ.
Oh yes it is. Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud. Doing so in any hard-science topic would earn you an angry comment from your reviewers.
> Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
Oh, and I guess Herrnstein and Murray didn't publish that book? Because they definitely do so in The Bell Curve: They are literally plotting AFQT and SES (their bogus “socioeconomic factors”) against social outcome and since AFQT has a higher correlation than SES, they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
And if you read my previous comment, you'd notice that the AFQT -> IQ is only a part of the issue in the Bell Curve, the bigger part being how they assume AFQT -> genetics because they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics. (The last steps being an ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve so it's not really a surprise…)
No, extrapolating outside of study sample is the entire point of doing science. Of what use science would be if we could not do that? Imagine, “no, you can’t say that this vaccine is effective, at best you can say that it was effective in the sample of subjects being included in that study, but you can’t extrapolate that outside the sample, that would be a rookie mistake”. This is, of course, absurd. We do science precisely so that we can make useful predictions in day to day life, outside of studies.
> they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
> they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics
I don’t think they do, and it is contradicted by what you wrote in this very comment, where you say they claim genetics is “decisive factor”. This clearly makes no sense under assumption of equality/identity of concepts — you wouldn’t say that A is a “decisive factor” in B, if A and B are the same thing.
> ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve
Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
It's not about not extrapolating to individual subjects outside of the test group, it's about not extrapolating to categories which aren't represented. That's why we don't conclude a vaccine is effective on all mammals after a trial on mouses! We experiment on humans, and we even try to get as much diversity as we can (age, gender, preexisting conditions etc.) so the result can be generalized to the entire population.
> I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
The argument made in The Bell Curve is that genetics is the single most important factor. I wrote “alone” not because there is not other factors, but because according to the authors there is no other factors as important.
> Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
It's not. At least not according to the usual definition of “scientific knowledge” which imply some degree of consensus: this research field is strongly divided on that question, with a clear ideological split. BTW, even the mere existence of g is questioned.
To me that sounds like reasoning along the lines of the physics professors answer: "First, let's assume that all cows are spherical..."
Not always a useful assumption.
Generalizations are necessary for a human to function. Something like 90% of all daily activities are repetition and you would become psychotic if you tried to make a conscious effort to evaluate and re-evaluate everything all the time.
This goes for how we view people too, obviously. Especially those that we do not know.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't try, just trying to argue that it would be inhuman to expect us to succeed every time.
I agree. This is a major counterargument to this notion that this type of knowledge is not useful. Not even mentioning that it is freaking interesting and it will always spark curiosity in a lot of people.
The identification of differences between groups seem to be commonly conflated with the act of unfairly discriminating against a group with prejudice based on differences (perceived or real), which is kind of absurd when you think of some of the more superficial and obvious yet real differences. You clarify this very succinctly, but it is still abstract, and I find many people tend not to understand until given a more concrete example... this I find challenging to do without being prejudged as some kind of racist or sexist, so unfortunately I just don't bother any more, the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.
I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested or said what bothered them. (https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt...)
Broad, sweeping statements about groups of people have been used to discriminate all over the place. They've been used to justify not teaching certain kinds of people, or to justify myths that certain groups of people "should" always be a certain way because of the majority trendline.
The people that built these myths sometimes did so (or do so today) with pseudoscience. So, for some who have heard this kind of nonsense their whole lives (maybe it was used to discriminate against a parent), actually valid + careful scientific research can sound like the same old nonsense.
We're currently in the middle of several highly emotional political debates, which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data, particularly into the correlation of IQ and interests with race & sex. Sure, genetics don't determine an individual's life, but they do influence population averages, so if genetics explain/predict sex & race differences in careers and education, we could hopefully resolve those debates.
Another example of this is the association between violence and (1) computer games, and (2) sex/testosterone. The first one, albeit "intuitive", was debunked using science/statistics, and the second one most people just assume as "obviously" true (and noone claims sexism!) (although AFAIK it's scientifically debatable).
Again, genetics don't determine an individual, but they do influence the population & sub-groups.
There's already quite a lot of data on the subject. Here's a 30 year meta-study from 2005 for example.
https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...
The problem described in the article is that people are preventing/defunding further studies.
Computer science or video games are an example. The demographics allegedly show very prevalent sexism here that is allegedly responsible for said difference.
The self-reflection about how other fields have similar one-sided demographics with the opposite sex isn't interesting on the other hand. On the contrary, that realization is ignored, because it would endanger the sexism story. A look at the pipeline is also just ignored, even if demographics are one-side before discrimination even could occur.
I don't believe that some people believe their own conclusions though. The bad thing is that states and governments now try to correct something that is based on false assumptions. This is nothing else than totalitarian and absurd behavior.
This seems absurd to me. As an example, I figure that the reason that there are more male construction workers than female construction workers is not sexism- it's that men largely have more physical strength and a greater inclination or preference for highly physical and dangerous work than women.
Would you call this sexism? Why should it be the default assumption that men and women have equal preferences to self-select jobs exact equal proportion for each and every profession?
To me too, I didn't mean to endorse that view, but it is the ruleset a lot of policies are based upon.
Clear evidence that one group differs from another doesn't provide any useful information for dealing with individuals.
Like make up a characteristic where women differ statistically from men, but have the difference be about 1/2 the standard deviation for either group. Lots of women will be closer to the average for men than the average for women, and vice versa, there's no useful generalization to make from the clear evidence.
And lo and behold, most human characteristics are similar to this pattern, with clear distinctions available between groups and of no value in making decisions about individuals, because of intragroup variation.
This isn’t necessarily true.
For example, I know that two-year-olds are far more sensitive to missing naps then eight-year-olds are.
This changes how I structure time and environment around a two year old so that he is the statistically more likely to behave. If I don’t do that, I set them up for individual behavioral failures.
> there's no useful generalization to make from the clear evidence.
Unless the selection is on the tail ends. https://darrendahly.shinyapps.io/app1/
Someone playing with electricity in 1800 was doing scientifically insignificant research. 100 years later, electricity was a major industrial force.
We are just entering the era when genetic manipulations of not just embryos, but adult organisms will be possible. One day, this technology will be used on humans as well. Even if the U.S. forbade such research, other countries likely won't. 20 or 30 years from now, progressives will have to find answers to technology that can tune various parameters of human beings, maybe including some cognitive abilities.
That's exactly what Chomsky's article is not.
She seems quite aligned with Chomsky on that front actually.
From the OP's article, she seems to be very aware that her research is reflective of current society and should be used to better/change it.
Chomsky mentions that such research could be useful e.g. for improving education - Harden seems to agree there.
"In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times, arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to inform education policy."
So yeh, I don't think they are necessarily talking at cross purposes (despite the 40+ year time delay :P).
(First HN comment, be cool to hear back what you think!)
(Welcome!)
How do you increase your authority if you know that races are not all of equal ability?
1. Lie and publicly express that you think all races are of equal ability at all things.
2. Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc.
3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
4. Demand that racists must be rooted out and further and further scrutinized for microagreassions, etc.
5. Demand more unconstrained power, money and authority to 'fix' this.
6. Go back to step 1 and continue the loop till you have absolute power.
> Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc. >Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
We have widely studied and reported on reasoning for why some races do worse on tests in america, and the answer is not inherent differences in race, and it has very reasonable scientific backing. The reason is racist policies that made it harder for some groups to succeed. This is a real thing in American history. It's the same underlying reasoning why many rich coastal enclaves in liberal areas also do better on standardized tests - better access to opportunity and support.
> 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
Its pretty hard to ignore the american history of racism, from slavery to redlining to KKK to modern day voting laws. And its pretty easy to connect the dots to how those MASSIVE issues affect people in 2021.
That is the old dogma. Today progressives insist on giving certain classes of people more opportunity than others.
That is why "equality" has been replaced by "equity" in progressive propaganda.
--- --- ---
America has a vast history of racism that is providing people with neither equal nor equitable opportunity.
That is the thing to remember.
America has a vast history of racism that is providing people with neither equal nor equitable opportunity.
I don't ask for anything special despite my ancestors being treated like crap. My ancestors were discriminated against, yet now my children are seen as benefactors of a "history of racism" despite our ancestors being literally subject to that racism.
It's a farce, and a thinly veiled excuse for modern racism.
...and it's very telling that progressives have abandoned the notion of equality.
Democracy needs education and clear discourse. Citizens in a democracy are to be treated fairly and as equals before the law. If we cannot even ensure these principles, democracy is in a decrepit state indeed.
I wonder what exactly remains as a political commitment to the people.
On the one hand, I've had to deal firsthand with the phenomenon Paige-Harden is talking about, in hiring discussions and faculty meetings. It's infuriating and bizarre to see the level of denial that arises among people who ostensibly are extremely intelligent and well-educated. It reaches a point where my only conclusion has been that these individuals are completely out of touch in an ivory-tower sense, that they have no idea what happens in clinical settings, and the problems that arise in terms of phenomena that are obviously congenital disorders or near-disorders, even if they don't have a label per se.
On the other hand, I think the behavior genetics community is in a bit of denial itself, about the strengths of its models and reliability of its conclusions. The field has found itself in a no-mans land the last decade or so, in that the revolution promised by the genome area instead stripped the field of results: the findings of the twin era, when faced with molecular genetics, largely evaporated. This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication.
This all leads to a general sense within the BG community and without that the models and findings of behavior genetics are based on very big assumptions, assumptions that seem to fall apart when looked at through a microscope. They might have some validity in a broad brush sense — in the sense that yes, there are some sets of genes that collectively lead one to have higher functioning cognitive ability, and some that lead to impairments — but the tricky details most people wrestle with are mismodeled. Comparing one end of the bell curve to the other is doable; less doable is comparing adjoining areas of the curve. There's also the strange complexity of life, which is largely absent from these models. A common pattern is for some BG conclusion to be drawn in the literature, and then everyone has very clear, prima facie evidence — on the news, in everyday experience, and so forth — that clearly contradicts it. The BG community wrestles with it, comes up with some contorted explanation for why there's no contradiction, and then silence.
The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement. What it concerns itself with are characterizing with abstract descriptions — "additive genetic variance", or "polygenic risk" — people as if they are static objects. It's not oriented toward identifying something specific or manipulable, like a neurophysiological pathway that can be changed, or the products of specific genes. Even when research is oriented toward potential change, as in environmental interventions, genes are still treated as something fixed and unchanging, background that is to be covaried out because it's not something we should do anything about.
So, even though I think the left-leaning segments of academia definitely go overboard in how they approach behavior and genetics, there's some sympathetic groups who largely reject it for other reasons. They see the field as fuzzy and unreplicable in a levels-of-analysis sense, if not sample-to-sample sense, and are skeptical of the overall worldview implicitly being promoted.
I need to reread the Chomsky piece; it's dense and full of excellent points. But part of what it points to is the fundamental problem with seeing individuals in society in terms of reward or punishment for what they are, rather than in terms of the obligation of society at large toward improving other individuals.
The real crisis looming on the horizon isn't the failure of the left to appreciate behavior genetics. It's the failure of everyone to appreciate the implications of a civilization where we will soon be able to alter our genes at any stage of life, as well as the neurobehavioral structures that are downstream from them. Where does the moral obligation lie then? With the individual or society? What value is there then in abstract quantifications of variance due to the individual at birth, and variance that occurs later?
Why would you say that? I think you implied you work in this field, so maybe you do know better than me. But from my perspective, you are incorrect. Not only a lot of SNP's are replicating, but we also have the definitive method to test causality, which is applying PGS intrafamily.
> The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement.
Ok, now I am definetely sure you don't work in the field. Wtf? Of course it is immensely valuable to know that cluster X of genes influences condition Y. Nowadays, drug discovery is a pretty messy process without any direction except trial and error. If we can previously know which genes are first implied in this condition, then we can reason what they are probably doing (using previous knowledge of them) and from there work in a possible solution.
Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes.
The fact that this area is controversial suggests to me that it is worth exploration.
I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.
This belief of mine is considered heretical amongst leftist colleagues (I’m a liberal myself on almost every issue). As a college we act as if everyone can pass. Years of administration telling the math department that our passing rate is too low have led me to pretty much pass everyone who takes the final exam. Last semester 80% passed but only around 50% deserved to.
It’s too bad, because I don’t think anyone should be able to leave high school without understanding compound interest-sorta vital for participating in a modern economy. Also, it’s not like we can stop loaning money to the innumerate, even if that might be the ethical thing to do.
If you could do that, you could probably pass Algebra II.
Of course, one may learn calculus from a book, which was what many of us did in that class.
Context: Recently there was some controversy about Oregon graduation requirements [0] and social media represented the issue much differently than primary/secondary sources.
0: https://apnews.com/article/health-oregon-education-coronavir...
Shows, also, the silliness of this argument. Some people can pick up calc at age 10 no sweat whatsoever. Others struggle mightily with the basics in their 30s. Should we as a society invest 1000x the resources in the strugglers to ensure they can achieve the same understanding?
There's no need for everybody to reach the same level of understanding, but I think the pandemic has shown the importance of teaching as many as possible the basic concepts of calculus. "Flatten the curve" doesn't mean much when you've never heard of integration. The same applies to climate change. People will have more faith in mathematical models if they think it's something they could have done themselves if they really wanted to (overly optimistic judgement or not) instead of some bullshit the so-called experts made up to bamboozle them.
It's so funny watching people scramble to avoid admitting that genetics has a huge impact on humans and their potentialities.
Granted, as a species, we are the closest to blank-slate out of any species ("niche-switching is our niche"), but reality doesn't go away just 'cause we don't like it.
A good deal of the folks enmeshed in various delusions related to their belief that reality is socially constructed, I've found, are folks that have little concrete experience with reality. Academic types, those who've exclusively worked in knowledge-production or in offices. Rock climbers and farmers are very much not prone to these delusions, for a couple of examples.
Try to convince a dog breeder that dopey English Mastiffs are just an environmental change away from gaining the intelligence of the German Short-Haired Pointer, which can practically solve Sudokus.
What about the anecdotes of millions of people who self-profess that despite very much effort, they just can't wrap their head around some advanced math concepts? That doesn't count as evidence?
If you were arguing that math comes easier for some people than others, sure that's strong evidence. If you're arguing that they are literally incapable, and no set of curcumstances would allow them to learn - that is a very different claim and needs very different evidence.
I don't know how to weigh these anecdotes, but I think that's suggestive that the methods of teaching might be relevant even to people who struggle with math for decades.
But I would speculate that of the set of people who bombed the class, they could fall into a number of buckets. E.g., one bucket is people who were mentally capable of learning the concepts, but were to lazy to put in the effort (then we can quibble about whether inherent laziness puts people into the "not capable" bucket). Another bucket is people for whom alternative learning environments might have brought them to understanding and a passing grade. Another bucket is people who just lacked the preliminary background and with a couple years of effort could be made to pass the class as it exists. And finally, another bucket is people who are genuinely incapable, regardless of environment, of understanding the concepts.
This shouldn't be surprising. I have tried to deeply understand quantum mechanics, and while I can parrot some of the most well-known and more simple concepts, I truly believe that I lack the capability of grasping the very core, deep insights in an intuitive way. I might pass undergraduate level classes in the topic, but I am fairly certain I couldn't achieve a PhD. I'm not the dumbest bulb in the shed, but I can see that there are people much, much brighter than I, and it is obvious that their ability to understand more advanced and deep concepts is greater than mine; This leads to the observation that of the set of understandable knowledge in the universe, some of it is available to some people but not available to me, no matter how hard I try. (I take solace in Feynman's quote, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.")
Then look at every human capability and its distribution across the universe of humans, and it's pretty clear that we all can't do everything, every one person has some cutoff beyond which they aren't capable of understanding in any given topic. For some people (and hey, maybe it's a really small slice of the population), that cutoff is somewhere before Calc II.
And we both admittedly don't know the size of the bucket of people who cannot, given a lifetime of 80 years continuous study and tutoring, understand a topic.
But in my teaching experience, it's dwarfed by the group of people who doesn't care about the topic and bombs because they don't put in the effort.
Students need to focus on the basics and no where is this more true than in mathematics. Too many students muddle through middle and high school mathematics without gaining mastery or with multiple gaps in their knowledge. By the time they get to calculus they're simply unprepared to put all their previous knowledge to use. "Calc 101" is the first time that many students are required to apply theorems and then use algebra, trigonometry and arithmetic to arrive at results to problems. If there's any weaknesses in their fundamentals it's going to make the problems intractable (and, yes, they are for many students).
It's better to track students and only advance them to the next level in math when they've demonstrated mastery of previous topics. That would mean, of course, that a good fraction of students would never "reach" calculus (or even algebra)-- but that's OK if it means they have enough numeracy to balance a ledger or learn avoid blowing money on the lotto. At least their time would not be wasted on trying to do "Business Calculus" in college.
Then you evaluate and attempt to improve techniques as is done every year.
First, there are clearly a large number of people out there who have no business trying to pass algebra 101. Even if they theoretically could with sufficient effort and tutoring, it is not worth their time, nor is it going to lead to that much that is beneficial.
Second, teaching is already hard. Teaching math also requires an understanding of math that is rare. Hence finding people who are good math teachers is hard. Finding people who are good math teachers and willing to do it for a math teachers salary is even harder. If it were trivial to improve our teachers we would off course do it. But it is not at all trivial.
I think this matters less in a liberal arts college, but especially if you are going to ask students to build on their algebra 101 with other courses. If passing algebra 101 took a lot of effort, chances are that the other courses are going to take the same amount of effort, if not more.
I can definitely say that there are many people for whom it is a struggle - even those on college courses.
But a hundred years ago we could easily have the same conversation about simply reading and writing - they (the poor, women, or "lower class" ) luke not be taught to read. But it turns out that if you start young enough, and put enough effort in, 99% of everyone can learn
So, perhaps society is not putting enough effort in, or asking enough effort from, our kids for them all to learn calculus.
As the Agile Manifesto says, the work delivered represents the effort input so far. If society wants all children to learn calculus, we need to pay that price.
Edit: I think that we do need a new conversation about education. We have My father left full time education at 14, at 18 most of my peers left school and only 25% of us went to college. Today it's 50% it the total spend has not gone up in line.
I honestly don't know what kind of world the "universal education" advocates of the 1870s were imagining - but I am damn sure it was not people doing college courses on their iPhones, but it is the world they ushered in.
We need to double down on what worked for the 20th Century (and avoid the, y'know wars and genocide and stuff).
Education will lay at the heart of that.
But there is a reason 2nd graders dont do book reviews of classic literature. Even though they can absolutely read the complex words out loud on autopilot any day of the week.
Edit: Actually, I think your premise is wrong. Children don't read words they don't understand "like muscle memory". The differences in meaning between, idk, betrothed, engaged, wedded and living in sin are superficial but they carry with them implications of social value, history and more. Children are supposed to read books and pick up context and understand meaning as they go along. We don't expect a 10 year old to grok calculus any more than we expect them to grok social/sexual arrangements. But we have different standards for 19 year olds - in the case of sexual arrangements it's obvious why. Perhaps less so for calculus.
Reading and comprehension levels are hard to guage for this reason - at a certain point the words are placeholders for political positions. And it's hard to tell if someone does not understand the word or disagrees with the politics. Please see every election for past ten years for reference
I would be surprised that a psychiatrist would find it a useful term - in the same way that any doctor would not look at the paralympics and see only one illness / disability but dozens of conditions.
I am fairly certain there are Rain Man like people who can do algebra or calculus but would for most people sit under the term "disabled".
Perhaps it might be good for you to ask, "the people I see who can do algebra also can act in certain other ways, socially and mathematically. How much am I looking for people who can do maths, people who can do maths like I do, and people like me who can do maths"
Edit: yes I suspect I sit to the left of you, but the important takeaway here is not that some people are more "intelligent" than others (I agree for whatever definition we choose) but that raising the education level of all in society massively benefits us all. Oh and ranking peoples value in society based on intelligence is not a good idea. It's only just above ranking on physical disability, or your parents aristocratic connections.
I gave no indications that people ought to be ranked in terms of value to society based on intelligence or any other criteria.
Their argument was purely an philosophical one, stating that a well informed society operates better, makes better decisions, ect. And a well educated person can make better decisions for themselves and have a higher quality of life.
The reason that universal education caught on was because large businesses realised that could have more efficient factories if they didn't have to teach everyone to read. Thus college and university because the place where the 'universal education' dream could be realised. Where every person could go and receive an education that would afford them a higher quality of life and allow them to better engage with the world.
Then, factories became more specialised and 90% of universities became slaves to some "industry"
Many universities "computer science" programs are hardly that. Rather they've turned into a coding bootcamp with slightly more math.
There is a thing called functional illiteracy [1], where people can write and read but mostly only their name and some very basic things like grocery lists. They also cannot comprehend texts even if they can read most words. It's more or less equivalent to being able to add numbers, maybe multiply numbers 1-10 but very far from algebra.
No first world country can claim a 99% literacy rate unless you count in these people, which would stretch things quite a bit.
The richest kids at my highschool were also the smartest. There were one or two rich kids who didn't make honor society. There were also only a 5-6 smart kids who were middle/lower-class. Graduating class of ~500 in 1985, about 50 honor society (top 10%).
It's known that intelligence can be significantly negatively affected by environmental factors like malnutrition (both of child and mother during pregnancy), childhood disease, pollution and injury, and there is some evidence (also mentioned in the article we're discussing) that a century or two ago the average person was significantly dumber than now, presumably because of those factors - especially to the poor and women, which often experienced more severe childhood malnutrition than their male siblings.
So it would seem plausible that a hundred years ago a nontrivial percentage of people actually were too dumb to succeed in literacy and perhaps the fix for that wasn't just starting young enough and putting effort in, but rather that we started getting much fewer kids with severe environmental damage to their intelligence.
Doesn't this contribute to lower the reputation of the universities?
I mean, I did sociology in a small university in northern Spain and there was debate between the stats and methodology professors and pretty much everyone else about this.
In the end I'm grateful to my stats and methodology professors, because having to work very hard is the only thing that actually gave me something useful to go and fight with the world.
Many of my peers had to go to other unis because they couldn't pass there, so in the end they get a pass like me, the same in the eyes of employers, but they know it's bullshiting, and I know too.
IDK, It seems to me that there's a lot of lazyness in social sciences, and this kind of hard attitude to it is not only good for the students, but needed in the field.
IDK in the US, but this professors got a lot of heat for their stances on what a university is about, but they stood their ground, even when they've got hit by political bullshit, denied money for research, etc.
There's another thing (again, IDK if it's the same in the US), but why don't you see it in CS or Engineering faculties? I mean, I remember in my uni the students of this faculties had maybe a couple of professors that where ok to lower the bar a bit, but most of them just assumed that you gotta learn what you gotta learn. And many of them where pretty hostile to students, 180º stance from what I see in Stanford Moocs for example.
The way to make sure your students all pass is to do your job, those students need a teacher that cares and not one that 'needs a job', and preferably one that does not start off with the self-reinforcing viewpoint that a good fraction of them are too dumb to learn the material on offer.
Seriously, consider changing jobs to something with less of a negative effect on people's lives.
I've been on the receiving end of this attitude and it harmed me quite a bit, later on, with better teachers some of the damage got fixed but I most certainly would have traded two of my math teachers that 'needed a job' for some of the (much) better ones. Thanks to Fred Pach and one Mr. Groot I'm not a total loss at math and it ended up not being my skills but those of the teachers that were deficient.
It appears you are letting your past personal experiences distort your judgments about me. It’s ok. I understand this. It’s natural but it makes it hard to have a discussion about whether or not it’s the case that everyone can learn algebra.
You made a statement that the way to pass everyone is to do my job. Clearly you have not taught much in a classroom with a wide variety of students. Consider the possibility that you simply don’t know anything about the craft of teaching other than your very limited experience of being a student and that as such you should be wary of making negative conclusions about me.
I actually do because I read all of your comments in this thread.
You’ve obviously not taught much in the classroom. Why is it so obvious? Consider the possibility that your thinking on this issue is clouded by your past.
When I mention that I just mostly pass my students now they understand that grades are an administrative aspect to the job and know that this is detached from my desire to get as many students as possible to learn as much as possible. People with extensive experience don’t harp on my statements about grading. At most they’ll claim they don’t lower their standards but they don’t make any wild conclusions about me like you did.
But you, you’ve made wholly unjustified conclusions about me and that says you don’t know the nuances involved. You don’t immediately understand that one can think not everyone can learn a topic and still be passionate about learning.
Are the best Universities good because they have the best teaching, or are they just selecting the best people, who would be successfull no matter what?
The universities are penalised in rankings when a student fails to pass, but they are not penalised if they are so selective that the student never got a chance to study in the first place. This breeds an elitist system that does not let students rise to the challenge. Thats also one of the reasons why european universities do worse in rabking than UK ones - it's common there to start with a huge class, but only small part will co plete the course. In UK its harder to get in, but vast majorty seems to pass.
If universities worked like a normal business does, you'd expect that the best universities would grow, expand, and eventually there would an Oxford in every major city, with oxford teaching methods. But that's not how it works. But people still keep trying to appply 'free market theory' to education, when it obviously works very differently.
Lastly there is perpetual conflict between research and teaching - many professors want to do research and don't like teaching, many post graduate teaching assistants are folks that, no matter how briliant, were afraid of the job market, etc.
Of course there are genetic influences and not everybody can be an Einstein or rocket scientist. But below that level there is a lot possible that has nothing to do with genetics. Most things are more influenced by motivation than the ability. And on that the real cause does not matter.
If the people would spend only a fraction of the energy, they waste with questioning if something is genetic or not, in the development of skills by learning - they would improve beyond the proclaimed "genetic" level.
Reduce media consume. Reduce politics. Almost the whole discussion is toxic. The right proclaims everything is genetic but on the other side punish people not having the "good genetics".
By the time you’re in college, it’s already over. It’s why good daycare / preschool / school for everyone matters, otherwise you’re just missing out on a lot of potential talent.
Isn't the whole point that you can't simply look at the gene of a person and know what his mind is capable of except for genetic defects and even then it's hard to estimate.
Your belief should probably be considered heretical, even among your conservative colleagues, because your colleagues should recognize how deficiencies in one area can be made up for in other areas, sometimes (but not always) at a higher efficiency cost.
Where genetic gifts are lacking, determination and perseverance can almost always make up the difference, especially at a basic algebra/calculus level.
I have been trying to get better at chess lately. I grew up playing it so I'm already fairly proficient, and I've been putting a decent amount of free time into studying openings and playing puzzles. Yesterday, I played my friend who hasn't played in literally years and never really played seriously anyway, and he beat me handily 3/3 games. I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master, no matter how much time I put in, because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.
Life circumstance stratification, certainly, and you will get no disagreement from me that some people don't have the time or energy necessary to devote to something as not-immediately-useful as calculus, but from an intellect perspective, no.
Everyone who is not experiencing some kind of mental illness has the intellectual capacity to learn calculus, though I will capitulate it is fortunate for me and this statement that we do classify a low enough IQ as a mental illness!
Are you seriously suggesting trying to raise multiple children while simultaneously learning calculus is approximately as hard as living alone and trying to learn calculus?
Honestly, I think you're trying to find a neat solution where none exists. You haven't stumbled on anything here, you're more likely ignoring the real-life circumstances your students find themselves in, and your colleagues are not.
To suggest it? No. To be taken seriously though?
I could be living in a ditch down by the river, or I could be the leading researcher into how people learn calculus and it wouldn't make a difference with regard to my argument (though, practically speaking if I were the lead researcher on how people learn calculus, I'd be more likely to back my argument up with objective research, and that would strengthen my argument).
> (of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.
Nothing about a reputation or using it to discredit them.
For example, I'm not a calculus teacher, therefore I couldn't possibly form a valid argument about how teaching works. That would be an ad hominem, because it focuses on who I am (not a teacher), rather than what I've said (the teacher I was replying to hasn't eliminated any variables at all before drawing their conclusion). (It's also nonsensical, considering how many other things people teach, and how small a percentage of all teachers calculus teaching ends up being, and how unrelated-to-the-science-of-education calculus is).
It's actually funny, because the example you've given isn't an ad hominem, since you have evidence to support the idea that I can't cook (the burnt toast). You're equating an absence of information about me with specific data, which is different.
People have to make judgments with imperfect knowledge. It’s reasonable to discount the unsubstantiated opinions of someone with no experience with the topic at hand.
It should at least be interesting to you that it was obvious from your comments that you don’t have experience teaching mathematics in the classroom. Why was that so obvious to those of us with that experience? The previous question is rhetorical.
What is interesting to me is the fact that you retreated to this ad hominem the moment you were challenged, because it tells me you don't have any real explanation for how you eliminated other possible causes for your students sometimes performing poorly.
You'd prefer to live in a world where your experience has meaning than to live in a world where your experience is not valuable when faced with this question, which is completely human of you, but ultimately not useful in this discussion, due to its anecdotal and un-rigorously collected nature.
I can't stop you from throwing this New Yorker article, and the other works of Dr. Harden, in the face of your colleagues, but I can hopefully dissuade others from making the same logical mistakes you're making. I believe I've succeeded at that, by clearly highlighting the carelessness of what you've said here.
Ultimately, what I find most fascinating is, in real time, you've demonstrated how right Dr. Turkheimer ultimately is and how dangerous this research can be when put in the hands of folks who don't understand its delicacy or even the basic facts surrounding these arguments.
I'm grateful for your engagement with me, it's been helpful to work through this with someone like you, but I'll commit to the thing you tried and failed to do; I'm no longer going to reply to your comments in this thread. You're clearly (and I mean clearly) wrapped up in a need to think of some of your students as too dumb to learn calculus, and there's literally nothing I or anyone else here can say that would convince you otherwise, and at this point I've done my part in preventing others from thinking that your insight is useful or helpful in this conversation.
Have a great rest of your evening!
Here’s an example:
… I must be a calculus teacher in order to challenge your assertion that IQ is the primary source of the problems your students have with learning in your classrooms..
No one has said any of these things and no one has implied any of these things. I never said or implied that IQ is the primary source of anything. No one believes that you must be a teacher of calculus to be right. What people have wondered is if you are a teacher because some of your statements seem to the the type of statements only a non teacher would make.
Given the immense complexity involved with learning, there's essentially no way for you to describe the situation with enough detail for anyone to be able to make an informed judgement. It's extremely common for bad players to describe themselves as 'proficient', spending a 'decent amount of time' can mean anything, studying openings and playing puzzles is likely the wrong way to practice, the skill level of your friend is impossible to ascertain, etc.
The way you actually get better at anything is by:
1. Dedicating enough time to it, consistently (~20h per week or so maybe if you want any sort of quick results). The incredibly common trap here is that people think that spending time on a game equals getting better at it. There's no way to improve without spending a certain amount of time playing, but spending time playing does not make you better on its own.
2. Doing whatever it is you want to get good at (doing anything else does not count - if you want to learn how to play regular chess, play regular chess; puzzles or anything else does not count).
3. Reviewing your games to find mistakes you've made - this part is crucial, if you can't see any mistakes you made, you cannot improve. If that's the case, get someone better than you to review your game(s).
4. Playing while trying to work on addressing one mistake at a time, until you don't make it anymore.
Chess is actually really easy to improve in - fast, trivially repeatable games, chess engines, lots of learning resources, objective rating system.
> I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by 'chess master', but for example getting into the top 10% of players is pretty easy. You are indeed incredibly unlikely to be one of the best, because for that you will have to dedicate your entire life to playing chess. But unless you literally want to be one of the best (top 1%+ of players), genetics will not limit you. You may take more time to get to any given level than someone gifted with more working memory or whatnot, but it's still doable.
> because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.
Because of humans' limited memory and processing power, we play games not by exhaustively analyzing but via building simplified models and heuristics so I don't see why you'd need to 'keep the board in your head'.
I don't think the onus is on me to prove you wrong, so much as the onus is on you to prove that your experience is scientifically rigorous and representative of more than just your personal experience.
And to be clear, I don't doubt that many people "can't" learn calculus in the same way I "can't" run a marathon; we don't have the desire, discipline, and free time necessary to do the work required. This does not speak in any way towards our capacities to do so, only our desire.
So I suspect the vast majority of your students didn't have the sufficient desire to learn a lot more than they were incapable, and I think it's a critical distinction, because you can change people's motivations, but you cannot change their capacity.
As stated in my original comment I’m quite liberal. In education we talk a lot about social conditions and their effects on education. It’s why teachers’ unions strongly support universal healthcare, school lunch programs, etc.
After 20 years on the job I’ve come to the conclusion that some can’t learn it. This isn’t controversial in some sense since we know retarded people can’t learn algebra. So what level of capability is necessary to learn it? I don’t know but I suspect it’s well above being mentally retarded.
I could be completely wrong but given your lack of experience in the topic my experience ought to at least make you pause a bit. In another comment you wrote about me:
… you're more likely ignoring the real-life circumstances your students find themselves in, and your colleagues are not.
Talk about making an assertion with no evidence! At least I waited 20 years before stating my absurd assertion.
Also not for nothing, but "retarded" hasn't been a medical term for some time now, with institutions such as the AMA and SSA both replacing the term with "intellectual disability". The only remaining reasons you'd use it are either because you are thus uninformed, or you're signaling something...
I’ll read whatever response you have but won’t comment further. I wish you well. Keep up the good fight!
I think you, and everyone who thinks like you, need to take a very hard look at what you've done to eliminate the environmental factors related to your viewpoint that some people aren't smart enough to learn something, because its extremely easy to trick yourself into thinking someone is incapable when in reality other factors abound.
As the article explains, if society refused to educate/feed/raise/nourish red-headed children, there would be a genetic correlation between red-headedness and intelligence.
How absolutely confident are you that you've accounted for every explanation besides the genetic one in determining why some people can't learn algebra?
My university would conditionally admit students who had a math score below a certain threshold on their ACT, I think it was 19 or something. Anyway, as part of their admittance criteria, they had to attend an after class lab for an additional hour an a half for a total of three hours per week dedicated to learning pre-algrebra. There were four modules where they would do some reading, work through some example problems through interactive software, and then have some homework to work through that was almost identical to the examples. Students would try and try and try and try to learn the material, and they would take days to work through the problems on their own (often with my guidance, giving pointers on how to think about the problems) to finish the module so they could take the quiz and pass the module. Near the end of the semester many students made appreciable progress, but for others the inability to retain and apply what they've spent so much time on results in tears, especially because they don't know if this requirement will keep them from being able to graduate.
Given infinite time, could these guys all have figured out pre-algrebra enough to pass? Maybe. But the amount of time it takes them to learn math concepts that are very easy for us means that it's entirely impractical to expect them to ever achieve proficiency in advanced mathematics.
This just does not look like a universally effective way of teaching to me, irrespective of the topic. It's hardly any wonder that some people fell through the cracks if they were unfamiliar with the subject in the first place. What about leveraging stuff that's actually been tried and tested, like the Khan Academy videos and their automated interactive, school-like environment?
Your VO2max, max heart rate, and other factors appear to be significantly determined by genetics, and will absolutely contribute to your capacity to run a marathon. If it takes you a year of hard training, but it takes me a few practice runs a few weeks before, it's not fair to say we required the same amount of desire, discipline, or free time to succeed. I would instead say we had a very different capacity to run a marathon.
Are you saying that similar things could not possibly be true for learning math? Or really anything else that humans do?
All healthy people can learn calculus and run marathons, with varying degrees of success and effort, due to genetics and environmental factors.
I also don't think "healthy" and (presumably) "not healthy" are useful categorizations. There are many people in that fuzzy in between area between "healthy" and "not healthy", for both physical and mental health.
Is it really worth so vigorously arguing the semantics of "some people are incapable of learning algebra" and "it requires an impractically large amount of effort for some people to learn algebra"?"
You can overcome difficulty, you cannot overcome (by definition) impossibility.
What you keep ignoring in what I'm saying however, is that I do think certain things are impossible for some people. I will never play in the NBA, for example, but that's a far cry from being "very good" at basketball.
Learning calculus and completing a marathon are not the point at which "healthy" (and yes, it's fuzzy, but precision is impossible on this topic) people are sometimes unable to do things. Winning a marathon and getting a Ph.D. in mathematics, I would acquiesce to your argument.
In other words, I think anyone can dabble in anything, but you do need an alignment of genetic and environmental circumstances to be in the top 1% of something. I could be argued into top 10%, but below that, it appears the data supports almost anyone being able to do almost anything, or at least well beyond whatever artificial lines we might draw to discourage people from achieving.
To turn it around: Do you have any evidence that your "anecdotal evidence" doesn't simply reflect your teaching skills?
This is a strawman. They never said 'gifted', they just said that some people have it and some don't.
> deficiencies in one area can be made up for in other areas
Not what we're talking about. GP is probably great at things that aren't chess. That doesn't mean they're good at chess.
> Where genetic gifts are lacking, determination and perseverance can almost always make up the difference
Determination and perseverance aren't (at least partially) genetic gifts?
Honestly I think 'genetics' are a bit of a red herring here anyway because the real underlying assertion being challenged is that all humans have equal potential in all things (which anyone who has ever taught any mildly difficult topic will know is trivially disprovable). The precise mechanism whereby innate human potential differs isn't important if you can't even agree that it differs.
In general, you'll find that "leftists" believe that psychometrics is bogus in terms of science. Instead, it masquerades as science in order to fool the public into believing that biased public policy is neutral. There's no denial that some folks have brain damage, developmental disabilities, etc. but a denial that standardized tests are an appropriate proxy for genuine medical diagnoses.
Community colleges should present themselves as a public benefit. We shouldn't ask that everybody pass any class, simply that everybody has the opportunity to attend/audit any class. It is unfortunately true that the typical university administration is clueless and money-grubbing, preferring graduation rates to other metrics.
I further suspect but didn’t state this that if one doesn’t have exposure to algebra growing up then it is extremely difficult to learn as an adult. Children are easier to brain wash and in low level Mathematics we do a great deal of brain washing.
* IQ causes income
* Income causes IQ
* Some unknown thing causes both income and IQ
* The correlation is spurious; IQ and income are unrelated
Evidence strongly suggests that the third bullet point is true; socioeconomic class causes both income and IQ. Richer people living in nicer neighborhoods both have better opportunities for income, and also better opportunities for education; education causes IQ. This is why redlining is brought up so often as a root cause of so many of the disparities in quality of life; redlining deepened socioeconomic divides.
Adoption studies might also be informative.
In some schools around the Bay Area, we have half the students on the fastest track, and about half the math faculty as calculus teachers. An immodest minority of students complete Calculus BC early and go on to the local college to continue their math education for their remaining years in HS. And these aren't even the top 50 schools in the nation.
The gains become clear depending on the degree to which you know what you want, and especially if you're thinking about graduate programs.
1. Calculus in some sense is somewhat disorganized, and it sucks that it's a gateway to more math in the US. By finishing Calculus early you can move on to the math you wanted to learn, such as Linear Algebra.
2. University students may have to spend about a year learning Calculus. That's a long time, and to some people they'd rather spend their money better by learning something else or graduating early.
3. If you're thinking about graduate studies in something technical such as Econ or Stats, then you'll probably want at least Analysis. The problem is that in the grand scheme of things, even Analysis does not leave you very prepared to do things, it just makes you prepared to learn more, so you may want to get ahead of this problem.
Because 95% of the time high school work doesn't transfer to the college level even if you do semesters at De Anza. You're back to scratch unless you go to flagship in-state, and even then you can only transfer up to a certain amount (at my undergrad it was up to Calc 2 - several people I know took Calc 3 in the same institution in high school but had to take it again).
Even if a college didn't want to transfer the credits for Calc 3, I'm surprised that they wouldn't allow you to skip the course. Also, for your friends, if they took a class at the same institution... doesn't that mean they got a repeat? Strange.
I also wouldn't generalize these things to people who occupy university posts, as they probably had interesting trajectories.
yes
> as they probably had interesting trajectories.
Not every physics professor went to a top school and published groundbreaking research.
I do want to emphasize that taking Calc 3 again is one class out of dozens you need to graduate.
In my country, highschool last three years. The first year, i was living in the dorms with some of my classmates. One, let's call him M, was fairly dissipated and, while everyone would rather play and discuss than study, and had shitty grades in everything but biology. Math was his weakest, with grade ranging from E- to D+ (i try to convert grades here, my grades wer in the A range and the average was B-), and English/spanish were not a lot better.
At the time, at the end of the first year, we had to choose specialities and which kind of diploma we could do. the "general" kind, with to specialities, economics/humanities or science, or the "technological" one, with three (electric, mechanic, civil). He realized at the end of the year that the only thing he wanted to do was biology, but as this subject was only available in the science speciality, he was fucked. Impossible to get to the "general"branch with his grade. He struck a deal with the school administration: 4 hour a week added to his curriculum, one hour every night after eating and before going in our dorms to make sure he worked. The year, in math, did not start well. He had a F/F- as his first grade (the average was D+, top of the class was B), but our professor was exceptionnal. we had 3 math illiterate in our class, and while the notation was pretty harsh on them, he took time to help everyone understand with interesting examples, stories and exercises. He even took hours of his own time for supplementary lessons. Our class relation was special too, we were only 20, and spent a lot of time together, even after college. Last time i talked to M he was doing a Master in marine biology, and aimed for a doctorate
End of the 3rd year, we have to get the national test. Our class ended up with an average grade of A-, M had a B+ and wasn't the lowest scorer in math (of our class). Miles ahead of the nationnal average (C+/B- that year). It was a public technological highscool in a rural area. The other close HS was one dedicated to farming. Culturally, we did not start at an advantage compared to the average kid of our country, i'd say we were at a disadvantage. But great teachers and small, but close class can help you emancipate from some of your determinations.
* What percentage of your students hate math?
* How do you differentiate between someone who doesn't get it because it's beyond their mental skill level versus someone who doesn't get it because they'd rather be doing literally anything else?
* When you say "mentally disabled", what exactly does that mean in the context of a spectrum of ability levels across the species?
* There are a lot of reasons people might fail your class. What are they? What's the percentage breakdown?
* What are the dangers of thinking that not all people can learn math? What are the dangers of not thinking that?
Here are some more thoughts to ponder:
Children are easier to brain wash than adults and teaching basic math involves a great deal of brain washing. To what extent is it the case that a person with no exposure to algebraic concepts growing up is at a disadvantage to learning algebra as an adult? There is a theory that if one doesn’t learn a language in childhood then it is impossible for them to learn one as an adult. Is something similar applicable to Mathematics?
Though I don't know of any studies about algebra in particular, kids show greater neuroplasticity in general than adults. So learning anything as an adult tends to be more difficult.
But I live with an American who reasonably fluent in Norwegian after 2 years of study in their 30s. It's certainly not impossible.
I have no doubt that math, like virtually everything, is more difficult for adults to pick up from scratch.
My conclusion is that some people simply can’t learn algebra. Be it genetic, environmental, lack of intellectual fortitude, lack of “intelligence”, or any combination thereof it is simply the case that some people can’t learn algebra.
However that feels really different from saying a not insignificant portion of the population, inherently cannot.
Considering that a small percentage of careers require more than basic algebra/geometry/statistics, it's not hard to see that math has a "why should I learn this?" problem more than a "am I able to learn this?" problem.
I don't think the issue is necessarily that they're incapable, it's more that they don't have the necessary background intuition or knowledge. At least in the state i taught in, this is not surprising as elementary school teachers often dread math and fail their standardized teaching test math portion several times sometimes. It's the blind leading the blind.
I've also noticed it in reading, when they have teachers who aren't readers themselves trying to teach it to them.
Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence. I mean, all I know of you is this comment, so I could easily be missing a lot more context about this argument you've had, but it sounds like you have an axe to grind, not a carefully-considered conclusion.
But you can't base any argument on that when research into alternative (or complementary), genetics-based explanations is being stiffled. Or well you can, but that's just society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer.
When you stiffle research directions for political reasons, you're doing politics, not science, and the arguments based on lack of stiffled research don't hold any more water than arguments based on no research.
Unfortunately, in practice science often turns out to be almost as much of a vehicle for confirming answers one already has in mind, rather than open-ended investigation.
Look closely enough and there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors. Other than maybe some people jumping to the conclusion that one has an axe to grind with minorities when one attempts to explain certain things with genetics. Which is just as much an arbitrary social taboo as the preceding taboos that constitute what we today call bigotry. (For the record, I'm a staunch opponent of all forms of violence and oppression.)
For me it makes exactly zero difference. Even if free will does exist in some essential sense, I do not believe that people generally choose what opinions to espouse. They simply acquire them through mimesis of their social environment. If that makes me a nihilist and a coward, then so be it.
Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality. I dream of a world where the concept of free will is considered just as poor taste as racial slurs. I think that, perhaps paradoxically, it will be a much more free and just world.
How is this any different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion"?
Which is exactly what you said, except that you chose to ignore that connotations conduct meaning, when you asked your rhetorical question. This is not e-prime, it is a plain old adverb answering the question "how?" like adverbs normally do.
> How is this any different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion"?
> It's not arbitrary. "Other causative factors" is boundless.
These are distinctly different lines on inquiry. One is an inquiry to in the illusory nature of separateness, the other is an inquire in to the boundless nature of causative factors.
When we don’t even understand ourselves what hope is there we will understand other people? It’s definitely an ongoing process anyway.
My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.
Genetics is obviously not the same as everything else in existence; I'm not sure that even makes sense as a statement. You seem to have somehow derived that I am arguing against the concept of distinctions at all. I'm not sure if language would be feasible without distinctions.
I don't disagree with any of what you just said, but I fail to see what point you are trying to make or what you are arguing against. Without the (linguistic) act of making distinctions, everything is indeed one and the same, but that's... kind of pointless?
EDIT: Sibling poster also seems to fail to make the distinction whether (a) we're comparing genetics to other causative factors, or (b) we are comparing my statement about genetics to your "all is one" interpretation of it.
In case it's still unclear, (a) and (b) are two completely separate things and I'm not sure how this conversation got to the point of conflating them. It just serves to reinforce my belief that the ambiguity of our language's syntactic structures makes it inordinately difficult to reason about many things in everyday language. Or maybe I'm just a bad communicator. "Me bad", "you bad" that's supremely easy to express lol
EDIT2: Correction, TheSpiceIsLife does actually get it.
The confusion is in the difference between proximal and ultimate causes, the rest of the discussion is over the ultimate cause of certain phenotypic features being down to genetics, some other mechanism or not significant at all. You've then said "all these different things are just proximate causes and [because free will doesn't exist] the ultimate cause is the laws of physics" to which people have unsurprisingly gone "what the hell does that have to do with anything?" because, well, it doesn't.
The fact that the ultimate cause of me taking a dump is "the laws of physics" doesn't mean the proximal cause wasn't me 'deciding' to go to the loo, and the fact that you can always say "the laws of physics" (or some higher power) is the cause doesn't make talking about higher level causes any less useful.
I don't believe in free will but its such a good trick that you act as though it were true almost 100% of the time, and talking about my 'decisions' as causes is useful the same as talking about 'genetic' and 'environmental' is useful. We talk about the causes of the Big Bang usefully despite time only coming into existence when the Big Bang happened :)
I like this idea of a "deterministic" language. In fact it reminds me of Nonviolent Communication, and is probably a good tactic for discussions that might otherwise devolve into personal attacks.
To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid. Think of it as the number of distinct ideas you can hold in your head at once, sort of like trying to hold a phone number in your head when you've just heard it for the first time.
The general consensus in psych is that this number for the average person is in the single digits and is relatively static in adulthood till a decline in old age. It's been my observation that people with really incredibly small working memory cannot do algebra. The amount of numbers/ideas held in their head is too large, and multiple students in this group described the experience of attempting an algebra problem as feeling like sand constantly slipping through their fingers.
Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.
I have. Some people are dumb.
You try teaching these people (anecdotally they're less than 1% of the population, with no obvious markers, so you have to actually find one first) and then come back and tell me how it's like "getting algebra to run on someone with less working memory". If I wanted to continue that analogy, I might say that the task is like getting algebra to run on someone whose brain has a power supply that randomly shorts out and spends half its time browned out.
Because some people out there are just not easy to teach.
A week of playing Kerbal Space programm gave me better understanding of orbits than years studying calculus, physics, general and special relativity.
It has poor applicability in everyday life - we learn all the biology of a cell but kid's don't know the difference between aspirin and ibuprophene.
Interestingly, testing myself with the Wechsler reverse-digit-span test, I found very large improvements in working memory from taking 20-minute afternoon naps and from modafinil. I'm not claiming everyone is alike, of course, but working memory is definitely not as fixed as height and eye color.
Specifically with regard to mental math, I find I can do a lot more when I'm lying in bed in a dark room than when I'm in an uncomfortable chair in a noisy cafe with people talking to me. Or, for that matter, classroom.
> Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.
I tried marijuana once and found the opposite effect: when I was high, by the time I got to the end of saying a sentence, I couldn't remember how it had begun. But people report that I seemed like I was conversing normally; if they didn't know me, they wouldn't have realized anything was off. I wonder if these folks were experiencing something similar all their lives?
Sure. My ability to do anything also drops to near zero if I don't sleep enough. Yet I have not found unlimited increases in capability if sleep more and more...
> modafinil
Yeah, drugs are a quite different beast. Doping happens when individual athlete realizes they have hit the limits what their "natural" biology can do and yet still are not going to win the competition.
If you are functioning at the optimal point - stimulants will only make your performance worse.
You are likely sleep deprived, for whatever reason. That's all.
But I did make paper sort of my working memory and when doing algebra I felt that I was just the very resource limited CPU that executed the instructions from paper-memory.
Algebra always made me feel like I was doing some mindfull exercise where I had to empty my mind, follow the paper script and hope I didn't mess anything while switching from row to row of calculations.
Even today, as a programmer, I struggle to remember class or function names, I just empty my mind and am really good at searching stuff in code.
> There is also evidence of domain-specific cognitive deficits that contribute to specific learning-related disabilities. For example, phonological processing difficulties have been found in children with poor reading performance, whether or not they also exhibited problems with ADHD symptoms or math, but not in children with deficits in ADHD symptoms or math only. Similarly, both with and without a reading deficit, children with ADHD symptoms exhibit significantly impaired object naming and behavioral inhibition, and math-disabled groups demonstrate visuospatial and numerical processing deficits, while those with only reading problems sometimes do not.
There's significant co-morbidity between learning disorders and ADHD, and despite dyscalculia being as common as dyslexia (~3-7% of the population) it's a lot less well-known, isn't as frequently diagnosed and there are fewer tools to help people with it. It would be very possible to have both ADHA and dyscalculia, given you used symptoms listed for both that are almost word-for-word identical with those in the paper...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7079676/
(paragraph 3 of the main discussion)
My problem was that oftentimes I would screw up calculations for a math problem and only get 7/10 score on it (the reasoning was mostly right, but the answer was not).
I can get around this by brute forcing the numbers into the formulas on paper and going through each step slowly but surely, even steps that people can do mentally. I just need significantly more time than my peers to finish.
Taking stimulants and increasing my dopamine levels across my synapses alleviates much of the working memory deficits I outlined.
I wonder how many of these students that struggle were just undiagnosed ADHD and not deficient in an low IQ mental handicap sense.
I've got ADHD that was undiagnosed until a decade after finishing my degree, and maths was my favourite - and best - subject all the way from age 4 through to doing solutions to Einstein's equations involving 10+ A4 pages (both sides) of tensor mechanics for my final year project. My results across that time showed the more maths in a subject the better I did, the more writing it had the worse I did.
Doing maths is like reading is for me - an external cognitive structure that I can follow to make my own brain calm down while in that process. While I don't do much maths nowadays, I literally read whenever I'm not actively doing something else - I read a page or two of my book in-between clicking reply to your comment and starting typing this reply.
Maths involves a lot of "muscle memory" once you get past the initial hump. But it's often poorly taught at an early age to the level of inducing near-phobic levels of discomfort with it which to me seems strange. But I don't think there's any extra issue with having ADHD and maths
ADHD is very comorbid with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia - around 20–60% of people with ADHD also have one or more learning difficulties. Dyscalculia affects as many people as dyslexia, but dyslexia is far more well-known and more likely to get diagnosed and helped with. There's a nice summary box of typical symptoms of dyscalculia in this paper:
Wait, are there mainstream schools of thought where working memory isn't considered valid? I'm a layman but I suffer from ADHD, and very much notice that my working memory fluctuates with my attention span (from lack of sleep/stress/etc).
Google's of no help to me, but I remember a story of some educators, looking at some kids who didnt go to school but worked selling concessions, but in turn, were actually quite good at math. They couldn't answer math questions when written out on a worksheet, but they could do the exact same questions when presented in the form of a complex order. (Double digit multiplication and summation isn't the same as algebra, but being able to do that implies a large working memory, which is claimed is the barrier to learning algebra.)
You sequenced the genomes of your students and correlated their performance against their genes?
I haven’t performed any genetics tests but brain composition is partly determined by genetics so genetics might play role, right?
I got the feeling as a kid that a lot of my classmates would just give up. I mean they're sitting there acting like they're concentrating on math, but they aren't. In other classes intermittent attention is enough, you pick up social cues and repeated stories that you've heard, and poof you have a history essay. With math there's a need to have all the steps.
How do you control for that as a teacher observing the kids? How do you know whether a kid has actually tried to learn stuff at home?
I still remember my brother was baffled at how I got top grades in math when he never saw me studying. Of course I tended to do that when he wasn't around.
The only solution I ever found was not having more than 3 students at a time, not an option for most teachers; I spent most of my career working with 1-3 students as a result. With that few students you can carefully observe the mistakes students are making and ask individual questions about their mental state. Experience will eventually tell you to differentiate students not putting in effort from students who are so lost that they're just flailing and hoping something sticks.
With more students, my experience was that both my attention became too split to give students the kind of careful diagnosis to control for effort.
Previous education, upbringing, cultural values, etc are all separate effects that may influence your overall ability, but intelligence __definitely__ influences your ability.
Low intelligence + good education = poor overall ability
Presuming that there are only mentally disabled and normal people is the weird hypothesis. The baseline idea should be that it varies just like health and height. Affected by both genetics and outside factors such as malnutrition and injuries.
I have found with math, the way it's presented matters more than most subjects.
At that point people are trying to help you but saying things to you as if you are stupid, but you still don't understand. That really sucks, so people get afraid of math. Avoiding it, and nodding when asked "do you understand" when really they do not. This is hard to fix because you need to go back to the point they did not understand, but the fear and pain makes even teaching that a lot harder to fix as well.
My feeling is that most people should be able to understand algebra. However, I think that requires a very deliberate and personalized approach for some people. Certainly with collective classes, if you go at the speed of the slowest student there will be slow progress and a lot of people who are bored and mentally check-out.
If any approach is going to work for people who have real difficulties, it needs to be small-scale personal teaching, and it needs to come with trust. Someone needs to feel like they can keep saying "no I do not understand" without disapproval, disappointment, or frustration from the tutor.
I said absolutely nothing about what percent of people this is true for and absolutely nothing about why this is true. I brought it up in the context of the article because saying that not everyone can learn algebra is as taboo in education as the thought that genetics plays a role in poverty and success in life in psychology. My reason for thinking this is responses like yours.
There are clearly people who can’t learn algebra: intellectually disable people are such an example. I believe some level of “intelligence” is require to learn algebra.
How can you conclude from what I’ve written that I haven’t thought much about my belief? How can it appear I have an axe to grind from what I’ve written? You have formed an image of me that is wildly incorrect. Do you initially assume that everyone who thinks not everyone can learn algebra has an axe to grind?
They didn't seem to do this at all. It can simultaneously be true that there are some who, due to genetics, simply cannot complete a particular task, no matter how conducive an environment they are put in, while for others genetically do not have these hurdles but whose success is still dependent on their environment.
If anything, you are the one dismissing this possibility out of hand, and making leaps of logic.
I think most people agree that there are extremes. There probably exists a small number of people who literally cannot (just like how 1 in a million could probably teach themselves calculus at age 10, also exists). However it's a big jump to conclude that even a small percentage of the people at your college cannot in the literal sense - i.e. if their life depended on it, they had all the resources they could want, they had no other distractions.
You just gave the definition of "cannot". Those circumstances will never happen, they're pure hypotheticals. Sure, hypothetically I might be able to play competitive tennis against Nadal. Practically, though, that'll never happen, I cannot and will never be able to do that - pretending otherwise is just naive and purely theoretical discussion.
If the claim was merely that math comes easier to some than others - again it would be an uncontroversial claim and i would agree with it.
However, my reading of the original comment was that a good portion of the population literally are physically incapable under any circumstance, including the silly hypothetical circumstances i laid out, to learn algebra. I think that is false. It sounds like you do too. So i guess we're in agreement.
Not exactly. I read the original claim that they are "incapable to learn algebra even in very good/way above average (but still realistic) circumstances".
Still though, we could ask how many people in the entire human population could run under a 4 minute mile with any amount of training, time and resources? Obviously more than have done it, but how many? Certainly not remotely close to everyone.
Now, to be sure, some people and some books are better at teaching than others, but it typically has nothing to do with notation used, and everything to do with the order of introduction of concepts, level of detail of explanation (which can be both too high and too low), amount and quality of examples, etc. However, the core issue here is that some things are actually genuinely hard, and people of average intelligence simply cannot grasp them without expending ludicrous amounts of effort.
If you have some concrete suggestions about mathematical notation, ways it could be improved in more than superficial manner, I (and the rest of mathematical community) is very much open to hear them. Improvements in notation do happen regularly, and when they are valuable, they reach wide acceptance. For example, in the second half of 20th century, the notation of commutative diagrams have been invented, and it spread like a wildfire, because it genuinely facilitates understanding.
I think its pretty clear that momentum causes a lot of nomenclature pain. You can't just redesign entire fields of understanding every couple decades. For instance, what other fields use single greek characters to label concepts in a seemingly unpredictable arrangement? Often, local maxima are found because concepts are added in the context of the field as it already existed.
And its not just math. Most sciences have this problem. It is what it is but its silly to say we're in the best of all possible worlds just because math has been around a long time.
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Greek letters are typically used in opposition to Latin ones in order to distinguish what programmers can think of as “type” of concepts. For example, when doing geometry, you might want to designate angles with Greek letters, and points or line segments with Latin ones. This makes it much easier to mentally keep track of what name correspond to which object.
Yes, learning Greek letters for the first time is some amount of initial overhead (not much, as typically used ones are similar to Latin anyway, nobody starts with psi or xi). However, crucially, this overhead is paid once, and pales compared to the difficulty of learning the concepts being represented in the first place. It is never the case that replacing Greek letters with Latin makes students go “oh thank you, now I understand everything!”, instead, things are typically just as hard as before. However, replacing Latin with Greek might actually do that, by reducing the mental overhead through introduction of categories (types) of objects.
Sometimes notation elides 'obvious details'. The details are obvious to those that have already gone through the learning curve, which is easier if one is strongly connected to other working mathematicians than for outsiders. Mathematicians barely notice inadequate or unusual notation. Outsiders struggle and spend significant energy just deciphering the notation.
Anecdote 1: Sometimes notation is too terse: single letters. Granted, efficient for whiteboard scribbling. Would be really nice to standardize an appendix for notation. E[X] = <expr>. Hmmm, what could E be? By the fifth paper, somebody bothers to write 'expected value' in plain English and the mystery in unambiguously clarified. In a voice-based interaction this is a non-issue, not so for those that only have text to deal with. This compounds as a novice has to juggle a set of mysterious symbols with tens of elements.
Anecdote 2: Long long time ago (before ubiquitous email or http:// took off) a young student spent some time working through a handful of type theory academic papers that somehow trickled into his corner of the Universe. The type inference rule notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rule), which is rather straightforward in retrospect, ate up more time that he's willing to admit. Γ is just a set of judgments and Γ |- expr is just a notation for 'Γ includes the judgement expr'? Then why don't they use the standard expr ∈ Γ, this is confusing? Are there some examples? Is there some code that one could possibly run through a debugger? The questions remained unanswered, as there was noone he knew in the same linguistic sphere interested in the topic. And the papers themselves never detailed such obvious notation details.
PS. I agree that the bigger obstacle is the lack of proper big picture 'why do we even bother with these concepts / theorems'. At an extreme, there is (used to be?) a certain style of math books consisting exclusively of a dry litany of 'Definition 1.2.3', 'Theorem 3.2.4', 'Corollary 2.3.1'. Very rigorous and very difficult to ascertain what problems they were trying to solve.
I really cannot conceive how one can learn what the concept of “expected value” of a “random variable” means, without encountering E[X] notation. This is a technical concept having a technical meaning, and any place that actually defines this meaning will teach you this notation. If you see this notation for the first time in some academic paper, but haven’t ever read any probability textbook, it means that you almost never actually learned the concept, which is my entire point. You might have some intuitive understanding derived purely from the literal meaning of the words “expected value”, but without actually getting technical, this intuitive understanding is mostly superficial, and, as such, not very useful. You won’t be, for example, be able to answer such fundamentally important questions like “is expected value of sum of random variables a sum of expected values of each? Is expected value of product a product of expectations?”. You can’t know answers to these questions without having ever seen E[X] notation, and if you don’t know the answers, your problem is with the actual concept, not notation.
> PS. I agree that the bigger obstacle is the lack of proper big picture 'why do we even bother with these concepts / theorems'. At an extreme, there is (used to be?) a certain style of math books consisting exclusively of a dry litany of 'Definition 1.2.3', 'Theorem 3.2.4', 'Corollary 2.3.1'. Very rigorous and very difficult to ascertain what problems they were trying to solve.
I agree that it very much often is a problem. It’s not a problem of notation, though.
Sorry, but I didn't learn E[X] notation. I learned E{X} notation. Notations aren't even consistent across the lectures I have attended.
Because they are unable to change it. Just like with any thing evolved over a long time, like music notation, languages, even, to some extent, programming languages. Every change brings a lot of pushback, it's a monumental task to create a new one and even more so is getting any traction with it.
That doesn’t square well with the fact that notation keeps getting refined and improved. There is no pushback for genuine improvements. Biggest problem here is that there rarely are changes that clearly and meaningfully improve situation over status quo. I gave one example above, but overall, I am not going to take complaints about notation being obstacle to understanding seriously without concrete ways how to meaningfully improve it. You can of course keep complaining that it’s confusing, but without proposals for improvements, you’re actually complaining about the difficulty of substance, not the notation, and it says more about you than about notation.
Hard disagree. The most important thing I learned is that it is all made up on the spot to the point that the lecture material explicitly says that books have used 6 different forms of notation for the exact same concept. When you understand that you drop any pretense of "design" in the notation. That helps you abandon foolish ideas that it is "consistent" and that the only thing it is optimized for is the author. When you understand that then it's just a meaningless barrier to overcome but it also becomes easy to overcome precisely because it is that trivial. You just get used to it and e.g. learn the alphabets of the dozen languages (including klingon because the lecturer had to make that joke) from which the variable names where sourced from. Once you did the meaningless grind the barriers are gone.
> People who complain about notation usually actually have problem with the substance, and the complaints about notation is just a coping mechanism, to deny hurtful reality that one can’t understand something hard, blaming external factors instead.
No it is quite simple. You can't understand an easy or hard concept if you can't read it. I still remember how I understood nothing in the first semester. Then when I was preparing for the exam everything was extremely easy because the notation was understood by that point.
>If you have some concrete suggestions about mathematical notation, ways it could be improved in more than superficial manner, I (and the rest of mathematical community) is very much open to hear them.
As I already said that is meaningless because there is no universal notation. "The mathematical community" will adopt a fraction of proposals and further splinter into separate "factions".
Admittedly, that's from physics, so we can't really blame mathematicians for it.
"But that's trivial!" Not to students who aren't future HN readers.
You know, if you were trying to teach Chinese to 18-year-old English-speakers at community colleges with three hours a week of lecture, you might come to the conclusion that only a few rare geniuses had the ability to learn Chinese at all, and none would ever learn more than a few hundred words. But of course over 98% of people born and raised in China learn to speak Chinese fluently by the age of 5, and that's not because of genetics; it includes almost 98% of white people born and raised there too. There are several factors that I think of as key to this difference:
1. Plausibly there is a critical period for language acquisition, and if so, it very likely ends before age 18. Looking at an 18-year-old you can't tell whether their deficits in Chinese-speaking ability are due to genetics or environmental effects in the previous 18 years. There probably isn't an early-childhood critical period for calculus (I think you need formal operational reasoning for that) but maybe there are other things you need to develop early on for calculus to be easy for you when the time comes. Like, fluency in reading, for example.
2. Three hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for two years, is a total of 216 hours. Native language acquisition more typically involves over 20,000 hours of language exposure by age 5. Sometimes it's surprising how much more you can achieve when you apply literally over a hundred times more effort. Or, to look at it a different way, how little you will achieve when you're applying less than 1% of the effort necessary to get good results.
3. Schooling is a really terrible way to learn things. Extrinsic motivation displaces intrinsic motivation, massed practice displaces spaced practice because it gets better exam scores (especially if you know when midterms are coming up), the feedback necessary for improving is delayed by hours or days by the nature of homework grading, and the pacing is inevitably far too fast for some students and far too slow for others. It's well established that individual tutoring produces results two standard deviations better than ordinary classes (Bloom's two sigma problem). That's 30 IQ points. And Bloom wasn't even spacing out practice over decades the way you ought to; he was working within the semester structure of traditional schooling, extrinsic motivation and all.
Is there a possible human culture where 98% of everybody routinely learns to do symbolic integration? Or does human nature render that impossible? Maybe. (Hell, when I have an integral to do in my head, I myself invariably settle for just approximating it unless it's a fucking monomial. Maybe I should spend a few semesters doing them on the blackboard in front of a class, I bet that would help.) But the meat grinder of community college doesn't give us much evidence about that one way or the other, except to know that we don't live in that culture today. It doesn't help us at all with the question of what to attribute to environmental effects and what to attribute to genetics.
(One indication that such radical changes may be possible is the gradual transformation of literacy; hieroglyphics were the province of the priesthood and the quasi-priestly scribes, and even after the invention of alphabets, Charlemagne and Genghis Khan were illiterate. Can you imagine trying to teach a classroom full of 18-year-olds hieroglyphics in three hours a week, if they had no previous experience with reading and writing? Yet today literacy rates are over 95% in most countries, though countries with non-phonetic orthographies like Chinese and English lag a bit behind.)
My english teacher/class master till 8th grade insisted I follow a profession that doesn't involve math -- she even recommend me to be a radio host for a children program -- she thought highly of me, but she thought math was not my thing.
She was half right -- I have ADHD and even though my blood relatives are highly successful (doctors, lawyers, judges) NOBODY was good at math.
Anyway, my parents thought otherwise and promised to buy me a PC if I get admitted to a math/programming class in highschool and paid for math tutoring. My math skills completely turned around in a year and I ultimately loved math, especially calculus.
I don’t get to decide who has the ability to learn algebra. All I get to do in this regard is determine who knows enough to pass.
Another assumption is that the function is continuous. That's one I'm not sure about. I don't think there's a continuum between folks with mental disabilities and folks without. I think there's a discontinuity -- or perhaps overlapping spectrums on different dimensions -- but not a continuum. That's why many mental disabilities are the result of very concrete genetic variations. You can't have 80% of a generic variation. You either have it or you don't, which implies some sort of inherent discontinuity.
My guess would be algebraic ability is a normal distribution. But that's not a death sentence. People who might, because of genetics or more likely nurture/circumstance be unlikely to learn a lot in algebra, are not doomed to that fate. It just means it might require a lot more time and hard work for them and their teachers -- to the point where they might not find it feasible, and instead choose to do something else.
Not all people can read, it's obvious since the mentally disabled can't. Yet with proper education, all non-disabled people can be taught reading.
But that doesn't mean everyone can read, if you're illiterate by your 20s, you're gonna have a hard time catching up. Same for mathematics: most people reaching even high school are too mathematically illiterate to catch up[1]. Is genetics a factor: definitely, but it's among many others.
The reason why it's a partisan issue is the following: if I say genetics is a decisive factor, then I can say «it's natural, there's nothing we can do so we don't need to spend all that government money trying to help those people». The left-sided point of view goes as «There's nothing we can do about genetics, but we can change everything else. Then we need to find what are all the other factors, because those are the actionable ones». The conservative focus on genetics is mainly a justification for doing nothing.
> There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.
“intelligence” is conveniently pretty ill-defined, but I don't think I'm more intelligent than my doctor friends, yet they struggled a lot to grasp even the most basic concepts of algebra when I tried to help them during our studies. “Not everyone can learn all topic” but I have yet to find evidences that your ability to learn a random topic you're not interested into is correlated with the common acceptance of the word “intelligence”.
[1]: that doesn't mean it's impossible, just likely well beyond the amount of effort they can (or want to) afford.
This is the "As a mom"-argument applied to iq. When it comes to child-rearing mothers will not infrequently claim to know what works best in general because they have had children of their own. I mean an equally valid interpretation of your anecdata is that not all people can learn how to teach mathematics at community colleges.
My collection of anecdotes that not everyone can learn math works as an anecdote that not everyone can teach math.
It's worth noting however that we often consider these people "disabled" (or euphemistically "differently abled"). The point is that there's no genetic dial you can turn from "worse" to "better", it's more like a massive board of switches that feed into each other.
Why penalize people who are trying by failing them out of the simplest classes?
Rich idiots fail up, poor idiots end up homeless. No reason to penalize the poor who try when the entire game is arbitrary. This position tends to make certain groups bristle, especially those with a classist sense of "fairness".
That a well-informed position believes that not (almost) everyone who is attending a college can learn single-variable algebra is fairly depressing.
I don’t believe everyone has equal intellectual talent in all areas. My talent for math far exceeds my talent for physics. I’ve tried to learn physics but I just can’t. I have no intuition for it. There is variation amongst our brains and how the connections in our brains formed in childhood. In some people the wiring is such that learning a given topic is not feasible. Such is my belief.
I'm not disputing your superior experience on this topic (hence "well-informed position"); I'm just saying that it's fairly depressing.
I understand now what you meant by fairly depressing. Thank you for the clarification.
Like if I learn accounting, I know why I'm learning it; to learn how to create, audit, or read the financial statements of a business. If I learn math, it comes across more as "here are these arcane puzzles you need to solve." Like no one does double entry bookkeeping in the abstract; you learn the history, the methods, etc in the confines of an express purpose.
But trying to learn precalc as an adult (which i do get), what's striking is how little purpose or context there is to it. Why do I need to know how to factor imaginary numbers, or know the slope of something?
I think math when isolated is a big reason why its so hard to learn. They teach the toolset but people don't have the need to use the tools unless they go into a separate subject.
I truly don’t believe my people are genetically smarter because we have a truly awful abysmal track history in governing.
My guess as an immigrant who went to community college here and then to University here is that students just have too much choices/freedom. They are told they should strive to whatever they want. I and my friends grew up told you need to choose a major that will bring bread on the table, that should be the only priority.
But genetics doesn't matter, in that just because you have "bad" genetics doesn't mean you'll suck, whether it comes to weightlifting, intelligence, temperment, etc. Maybe you won't be in the top 0.0001%, but except for some very specific circumstances, you can defy the average. If you want to know if someone's bad at something, actually testing them is much more accurate than looking at their genetics.
If you look at the top 10 distance runners, they're all from Ethiopia and Kenya. But as you look further down the list into the top 100, you start to see Americans and others. Furthermore, the Americans' times are really close to the Ethiopians and Kenyans.
So, even if we know for a solid fact that some ethnic group is on average dumber than another, or more violent, it doesn't mean anything. Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages.
The great American distance runners have genetic talent - they didn’t just train harder than their middle school mates who were out of breath while the champions ran faster and longer than anyone else weeks after beginning training.
Who knows if it was only due to genes? And more importantly, there isn't a gene that's about running faster. (sure, some genes are helpful and might get you in front - not discounting the work the athlete goes through)
Getting to the podium is a mix of several characteristics: Some people might be more prone to muscle recovery/injury resistance. Another one has a better muscle fiber mix. Another one has different muscle attachment positions. And another one feels less pain.
Though yes your genetics probably will push you towards a sport. Take the 100m finalists and put them to train marathon (and vice versa) and they'll probably go to the back of the pack even with good training.
The point isn't that there is a "best" set of genes. The point is that there can be genetic advantages or disadvantages. Physical reality has an impact on experiential reality.
Where it gets dangerous is when people start using this as an argument for eugenics or an "ought" rather than "is" (i.e. constructing hierarchies out of physical attributes).
But the aim of all this genetic stuff is not saying "well, Kenyans can make better marathon runners if we stick them into a sports contest." It's usually a lot more pernicious than that, and involves intelligence. And ordering society in some manner around genetic expressions in a way a lot more dangerous than recognizing some people are better at public performance than others.
Nobody seems to be up in arms about it, why?
We also already do all sorts of soft eugenics in our own lives, from assortative mating to academic scores and schools one attends, social circles that one enters because of their achievements and so on. At some point it will become a lot more quantitive, to reduce the currently large factor of luck.
Societies that refuse to take advantage of optimizations this could bring will eventually lose out, for better or worse, this is entirely inevitable.
The progress of technology is not always progressive. There is a reason most of sci-fi reads downright dystopian.
Amusingly, it is literally what you are writing about. Certain variants of that gene confer exactly a) better recovery b) sports injury resistance c) fast twitch fiber synthesis.
Simply because we have not pinpointed something with laser precision, propagated the knowledge to every human with internet access and papered it up with indisputable evidence strong enough to pacify the eternally-online exception finders and fact checkers - does not mean such things do not exist.
You are your genes. just a tiny 2% difference - and you would end up a dolphin.
This is weirdly specific and I'm pretty sure my brain is going to remember this and bring it up on random occasions for the next ten years.
And there might be other genes. Someone missing this beneficial change might have other helpful mutations. As even the article points
> In addition, whilst Kenyan and Ethiopian endurance runners are highly successful (Wilber and Pitsiladis, 2012), the frequency of the XX genotype within this group is very low at 8% (Ethiopian) and 1% (Kenyan) (Yang et al., 2007) (XX is the endurance variation)
Or are you saying that Track programs should genetically test for this gene and drop whoever doesn't have it?
They don't have to. There is almost certainly a lot of self-selection going on. Anecdotally, I got one of those genetic kit tests done 10 years ago, and it included results on a "fast-twitch vs slow twitch muscle gene". I, who was a sprinter in high school who struggles immensely with long distance running, unsurprisingly have the gene for fast-twitch muscles. My wife, who has never participated in any kind of sport involving sprinting at any level but competes in long-distance races, unsurprisingly has the slow-twitch gene. Neither of us had any of these genetic tests available when we got involved in these activities. We just learned over time what we were naturally good at and what we struggled with. Does it mean that I can never run long-distance at the level my wife does, or that she could never have competed in sprinting? Maybe, but not necessarily. However if possible, it would take far, far more effort than sticking with the things we are good at.
Between people gravitating to what comes naturally, and other filters (like making or being cut from a track or XC team), a lot of the genetic filtering already occurs without actual testing.
Do you interpret “genetic talent” as “there is a single gene that explains everything about this skill”? I don’t.
Would you say it’s unreasonable to say cheetahs are faster than turtles due to genetics unless you can pinpoint the one gene that causes the running speed difference?
> Some people might be more prone to muscle recovery/injury resistance. Another one has a better muscle fiber mix. Another one has different muscle attachment positions. And another one feels less pain.
All genetic, so you’re agreeing with me then?
Almost every trait, even willpower itself, is influenced by genetics. But for most traits it's very difficult if not impossible to reliably determine what genes influence what. Most things aren't determined by one gene, they're influenced by many genes, as well as randomness and your environment.
A current topic would be representation within a given domain. Particularly since in most representation cases (high paying jobs, celebrities, top universities, etc), we're already looking at the tails of the distribution. There, small shifts can heavily affect the quantity of users in the right tail, especially for domains with stronger requirements (see your case with the runners).
Of course I won't try to discount potential cultural impact, but anyone trying to sell you a story of how it's all nature or all nurture is typically spouting bullshit.
Our own brain capacity for knowledge makes us concentrate on the top 100s. While the 100k top scientists do matter scientifically, they do not matter culturally.
Sure, but there is no social contention arising from racial differences in the world's fastest runners. What gets us in trouble are the the racial differences in high-prestige jobs. To really understand the impact of differences in distributions, you need to look at some numbers. The excerpt below comes from Douglas Murray's new book. I am not going to attempt to convince you that racial differences in IQ exist. But he makes a strong case that if such racial differences did exist, the impact on the distribution of high-prestige jobs would be absolutely enormous:
"...Why are there so few minorities in these high-prestige jobs? It's a numbers game in which the odds are against a Latin (he uses geographic indicators in place of the colloquial 'black' and 'white', and 'latin' in place of 'hispanic') achieving one of those positions are high and the odds against an African are prohibitive, even if we assume that there is no racism whatsoever among the employers for high-prestige jobs.
To illustrate, I'll use the cohort of young Americans ages 25-29, the age at which the potential candidates for such jobs are coming out of law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate STEM departments. In 2019, there were 23.2 million Americans in that age group. About 228,000 people in that age group can be expected to have IQs of 135 or over.
The racial distribution of Americans ages 25-29 in 2019 was more multiracial than among the older population. Only 54% were European while 20 percent were Latin, 15 percent were African, and 6 percent were Asian. But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool that contained about 2,800 Africans [~1%] and 9,500 Latins [~3%] compared to 50,700 Asians [*~22%*] and 160,000 Europeans [~70%]." [~3% being 'other']
So, while the marginal IQ differences between individuals do not matter not one whit, when considered at the population level, these differences can hardly be ignored.
This is one mistake, and the danger of using IQ as anything more than a trend indicator. Employers don't need 'people with an IQ over ${ARBITRARY_CUTOFF}'. They need 'people who can do X and Y'. And IQs over 100 quickly stop having significant predictive power for mental abilities other than IQ tests. Even exams which focus on pass/fail of an aptitude rather than excellence show little 'racial' variance in general.
The numbers in that paragraph also seem entirely fantastical to me. It basically claims not only that there are IQ differences between the "races", but that they are huge.
Finally, and most importantly, the whole set of observations is meaningless in the way it is used. Even granted that there are such huge differences in IQ between various "racial" groups, the social justice response won't change - we need to focus on eliminating the social and environmental causes at the root of these differences. Murray could claim that the differences are genetic, but I am very curious what is the scientific methodology by which he defines these groups - how much genetic testing did he do determine whether one particular person is 'European', 'African', 'Latin', or 'Asian'? What genes in particular was he looking for that make someone European? (For that matter, are Italians and Spanish people "European" or "Latin"?? Is Eva Longoria, whose family came from Spain to America with a royal land grant 400 years ago "European" or "Latin"?).
The scientific literature is very clear on this point--IQ is predictive of job performance. If you need people who can do X & Y, IQ is the best predictor[0] of whether a given individual will be able to do X & Y.
> And IQs over 100 quickly stop having significant predictive power for mental abilities other than IQ tests.
I would love to see a source for this claim.
> The numbers in that paragraph also seem entirely fantastical to me. It basically claims not only that there are IQ differences between the "races", but that they are huge.
The numbers in the paragraph are partly due to differences in IQ, and partly due to the nature of distributions. IIRC, Murray claims a mean IQ difference of ~15 points between 'Africans' and 'Asians'. Here's an image[0] of two distributions with an equivalent mean difference. Note how, the farther you get from the center, the greater the proportion of red:black. At 1 standard deviation, the ratio is 3:2, at 2sds, the ratio is 4:1!
> Even granted that there are such huge differences in IQ between various "racial" groups, the social justice response won't change - we need to focus on eliminating the social and environmental causes at the root of these differences.
The point of this conversation is that, if these differences are due to genetics, then no amount of 'eliminating causes' will address the root cause of these differences.
> Murray could claim that the differences are genetic, but I am very curious what is the scientific methodology by which he defines these groups - how much genetic testing did he do determine whether one particular person is 'European', 'African', 'Latin', or 'Asian'? What genes in particular was he looking for that make someone European? (For that matter, are Italians and Spanish people "European" or "Latin"?? Is Eva Longoria, whose family came from Spain to America with a royal land grant 400 years ago "European" or "Latin"?).
All the data he uses relies on self-reporting of race. Self-reporting is always how race is assigned. Self-reporting is how we know that certain minorities are 'underrepresented' in certain jobs--folks self-report their race when hired. It's the same way we know that there are differences in incomes and in educational achievement between races--self-reporting. You can doubt the veracity of self-reporting of race, but that doubt would have to apply to all data with a racial dimension. And, anyway, if race was some sort of fuzzy, meaningless construct (as you appear to be implying), then we would expect there to be little correlation between race and anything, let alone IQ. And yet the data show these differences (according to Murray).
Longoria would be 'Latin' (Hispanic). The whole race vs. ethnicity thing is weird, but he explains it well in the book.
[0]https://www.jstor.org/stable/20182140 [1]https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/shiftmean.jpeg
Sure, because race is entriely social construct. It's impossible to find a genetic link between the vague notion of 'black' and IQ, because people who are in the social category 'black' or 'latin' or 'european' have a wide variety of genotypes.
As such, the only possible conclusion from IQ studies is that IQ is a measurement of social and perhaps early childhood environments. So, improving conditions for marginalized groups will improve IQ and implicitly improve other success metrics (to the extent those are correlated with IQ).
Note - IQs below 100 are a different matter entirely, and they mostly represent known developmental disorders such as Kleinefelter, or severe malnutrition in early life (a preventable condition, but irreversible).
The Americans still almost certainly have very favourable genetics for distance running, they're just less favourable than the genetics of the Kenyan runners.
If you compared the American runners in the top 100 against the average American I would be very surprised if they had similar physical attributes (Lung capacity, muscle fibers, etc).
From following genetics research and researchers, I've seen plenty of that, and I don't see the relevance of your point here.
Nevertheless genetic differences can make a huge difference to individuals. Many factors we uncontroversially categorise as disabilities have a genetic basis.
In UK schools children categorised as on the Autism spectrum, or dyslexic receive additional support and consideration with regard to exam rules. I don't want to sideline into an argument about to what extent these specifically have a genetic basis, but broadly if we are going to agree that such factors are taken into account, it's flat out incoherent to then ignore or deny research into the origins, characteristics and influence of these factors.
That stuff is basically all interesting but largely meaningless because it’s so binary. It doesn’t matter if your part of a group that’s 10x as likely to be lactose intolerant, you are either lactose intolerant or your not. Sure the dairy industry might care, but the only impact on individuals is what they can bring to very large family gatherings.
Even where it is actually meaningful to an ethnic group, people rarely from a single ethnic group. A large chunk of African Americans are whiter genetically than their black.
But those that aren't cosmetic can matter a lot. For a noncontroversial example, sickle cell anemia. It absolutely makes sense to screen people of West African descent for sickle cell anemia.
(Between groups being entirely too muddled by confounding factors)
And the stridently progressive crowd (read: Twitter) rage-cruising right past the distinction, and using arguments against the former to dismiss the latter as anathema.
And then, as these things typically go, coming to their senses and being somewhat embarrassed by where they end up, but unwilling to concede their obviously righteous point and so making increasingly intellectually ridiculous justifications.
Other times, studies look at groups with much more proeminent socio-economic differences than genetic ones (countries, neighborhoods). Here the genetic factor is impossible to isolate from the other factors, making genetic claims dubious.
In my experience, it depends on the group. It seems conservatives are more likely to defend the idea of IQ differences among racial groups, but also more likely to reject the studies showing that liberals tend to have higher IQ's than conservatives[1].
Fundamentally, though, I'm not sure what the use of highlighting group differences is. I tend to skeptical of such studies (in my own experience datasets can be very misleading if sliced the wrong way), but if the studies about political alignment are true, then what? Should I start separating people based on what group they belong to? As the above poster said, when you're measuring an individuals aptitude then the group aptitude is basically meaningless.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/26/liberals.atheists.sex....
Also again, no. You generally don't make individual judgements based on group differences. You can make population-level decisions based on them or allocate funds more effectively or reach a deeper understanding on group differences with such research so socially outlawing it is counter-productive even if you personally won't use the results in your day to day life.
This may be true, and a perfectly fair point ... but it does not actually prove the argument wrong, it simply points out that groups are susceptible to motivated reasoning. ie, there are some measurable IQ differences among groups which may be related to genetics, and this point is not invalidated because different people supporting it or criticizing it are hypocrites.
Policies that discriminate based on genetics are bad, not because genetic differences aren't real, but because they're a) inaccurate, especially compared to measuring the differences themselves, and b) usually immoral, because having good genetics is luck and doesn't make you deserve a better life. Chomsky (see above comment) probably does a better job explaining this.
Of course, named disorder or not, genetics can be the cause/have a high impact.
E.g. is it bad for a primate to have bad bite strength? What if that disability enhances their thinking ability (by both allowing their brain to expand more since the muscles holding the jaw are weaker and by forcing them to use something other than their bite strength)?
While extreme cases are useful for illustration and thought experiments, they are quite distracting when the real issue is small variances in the top ranges of ability.
Which should make you rather skeptical of inferring just how innate IQ really is (assuming it's a valid concept).
The heritability correlations for obesity are only slightly weaker than IQ. Yet we know for a fact the logical complexity of losing weight is simple (doesn't mean it's easy). Anyone can and people do lose weight, even if statistically it may be rather unlikely.
It's completely plausible to me that intelligence can be simple but hard to increase too.
If it's not a statistical anomaly and the genes truly do contribute to obesity, the causation must be very indirect and situational.
Is it genetics? Is it gut microbiota? (E.g. genetics of other species?)
If you don't control for portion size comparing people who all have a burger and fries for dinner every night is basically useless, those meals could be hugely different in composition, portion size or how much is left over. Even if dinners are identical, snacking can be thousands of calories a day that you might never see happening. You've also missed what activity they do as well...
Two people who both "chug beer and eat greasy takeaways" whenever you see them out can be very different the rest of the time. If one stays slim and one doesn't it's far more likely to be that the former eats smaller portions overall, snacks less between foods and does more activity overall, before reaching for more exotic answers.
I know of one study only where the numbers can be trusted, and it was done on prisoners, where every single gram of food that passed their lips was accounted for. They were fed the same diets, but their weight gains varied a lot:
https://dm5migu4zj3pb.cloudfront.net/manuscripts/106000/1065...
The paper is about how the weight of fat cells changed at different subject weights, not how much subject weight changed for a fixed food size - the only mention of food portions is with respect to ensuring weight was maintained, gained and lost for the different stages. "After desired or maximum obtainable weight was reached" indicates they weren't using weight as the outcome here.
The only place you can see the weight gains is by looking at Table I and working it out yourself for each subject, and the relative gains are all very similar: 23.3%, 25.3%, 21.4%, 20.0% and 18.0%. I'm guessing they wanted them to put on 20-25% of their body weight to give consistent and measurable changes to the fat cells.
We have fat raccoons, that implies that genetics doesn't matter as much as we think we does.
Same with intelligence, how much is it genetics and how much is that the environment doesn't promote desired traits.
I understand that some have genetics that make it harder for them to keep off weight, either by metabolism, neural hunger stimuli or otherwise, but then we're still back to the fact that environmental changes made the biggest effect, not genetics. Why can't this be the case in your other examples too?
TL;DR: Yes, genetics matter. What's more relevant is, how much?
Due to epigenetics, environmentals actually shape genetics to a degree.
Someone in these discussions always brings up epigenetics at some point, its impact there far exceeding its impact on population genetics I would guess :) Nobody ever talks about genetic drift or gene flow however, probably because despite being actual things that affect population genetics talking about "nearly neutral drift in small populations" is really hard to wedge into an ideological shouting match dressed up as a scientific debate.
Your random guy on the street ain't going to be Newton, no matter how much he studies or loves math. Similarly, the man born with muscular dystrophy isn't going to be setting marathon records.
This is a simplification of course, but I hope it conveys the point.
These difference in distribution though start to appear when you do statistics. And often an extreme percentile is used as a measure of whether there is discrimination (top engineer at google, board member at an international company, olympians). And it only takes minor differences in distributions (mean, standard deviation) to have big differences on such extreme percentiles.
> Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages.
It's not clear it says anything about the difference in averages. Say someone is born in Syria with great genetic potential to be a distance runner, you might expect they are unlikely to "live up to that potential" because of all the obvious things that get in their way.
Is it not possible that individuals who are biologically very well suited for distance running in Kenya have a better chance of ending up as distance runners than they do in America, because Kenya specializes in distance running and America does not, and because America actually specializes in other comparable things that are more remunerative? Or perhaps that in Kenya, amateur athleticism is a relatively lucrative career compared to outside options whereas in America it is not.
Let me model this mathematically; say countries are homogeneous such that all persons born in the country j are characterized by a two parameter model that for the sake of argument we'll take to be normal: mean_j and sd_j. A draw from this distribution assigns natural talent theta_i to each person i. If they choose to train and run, we see theta_i, so the observed outcome is: y_i = D_i theta + (1 - D_i) 0. Thus training to run is a treatment (D_i); if you are treated you reveal your talent theta, if you are control, you don't run and no one knows. Then the characteristics of the population as a whole are characterized by mean, standard deviation, and n (population) and the observed distribution is just the distribution of y_i.
In all countries D_i = f_j(theta_i, p_j); p_j refers to the fraction of the country that runs; in a country where everyone runs, the function is constant 1. In a country where runners are a random sample f_j has no theta_i term. You could imagine other functions that are positively or negatively correlated with talent. An easily implementation of this would be to draw a bernoulli variable with p_j and some correlation rho_j with theta_i; you can do this with a copula or the analytic formula for biserial normal-bernoulli correlation, but let's say the detals of the function are irrelevant.
Finally, competition reveals max(y_i) for a country, and thus for the planet.
It is easy to find a world where the identity of the winning country j is the country that has the highest mean. It's also possible that the identity reflects mean-sd-n (e.g. all countries have the same average but some have more variation; or more births = more outliers). But it's also easy to assign viable p_j or f_j(theta_i) p_j such that the "wrong" country wins because of cultural factors.
It's true the model is a toy model (countries aren't homogeneous, talent may well not be normal, theta is not perfectly revealed and training has varying degrees of quality, individual race times have stochasticity), but even accepting the toy limitations wherein every cultural factor goes through f_j(theta_i) and p_j, it's clear we don't have a bead on mean_j.
So, like, what now?
But "doesn't say anything about the individual people" point is that, if you take any one person, no matter what their parents' genetics and environment say (barring extreme examples), they have a chance to become a great distance runner. A very slim chance, but a chance. Similarly, there are people born from poor families who show a suprising amount of intelligence.
There are several issues: winning reveals the maximum of the distribution, not the mean or sd. An observed pattern of one country winning might reflect different distributional means. It might reflect same means and different standard deviations. It might reflect that the number of observations is larger and thus the probability of an outlier at a certain number of sd above the mean is higher. But beyond that, there are also obvious non-genetic processes that even in a toy distribution can produce a winning country that has lower genetic capability. The entire enterprise of saying "Kenyans win running, so Kenyans are more genetically talented at running" is unsupported.
Or as my father once framed the argument: "It's because they've only recently come out of the jungle right" and when I yelled at him explained his reasoning with, "That's not racist, stands to reason they'd be better at physical things, we've evolved over millions of years to not need that sort of thing any more." at which point my mum told me not to call my dad a racist and to leave the dinner table, which I most certainly did.
It's amazing looking back how racist the 80s were when I was growing up. The framing has gone from outright racism that was "common knowledge" everyone accepted, and been dog-whistled into this seemingly academic debate about the effects of genetic differences between population groups, which is so far removed from the original that it's hard to tell who really is "just asking questions" and who wants to talk about "coming down from the jungle" without being labelled a racist.
On a more technical level, was your equation meant to be
y_i = D_i theta_i + (1 - D_i) 0
i.e. "theta" was supposed to be "theta_i"
That is not true. We've known that since the 80s. See https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/30/hungarian-education-ii...
If not everyone can be expected to learn and be proficient in everything due to genetics, then suddenly merit itself is also based strongly on luck, and now the belief that people with greater merit should have better lives no longer seems fair. Intelligence is now just another gift to the fortunate who are destined to have a better life. How can you feel good about using your considerable advantages to the detriment of others if your merit is the result of a jackpot paid out at birth?
Even if you believe that with enough time and perseverance you can overcome your lack of intelligence compared to another person, you have to ignore the fact that having to spend more time on something (but actually, everything) than everyone else will put you further and further and further behind everyone else in a way that compounds quickly.
Modern society is ostensibly structured this way: the smart will win. If intelligence becomes genetic, it can instead be said that "the lucky will win." And successful people desperately want that to not be the case, because they want to believe they deserve their considerable advantages. And they want to be guilt free about the miserable lives some people lead; it's their fault for being stupid, after all.
You could push these questions all the way to debating if you ever had any free will to begin with or if your whole life was the result of your environment. And ultimately does it even matter what the answers to these questions are? If rewarding people for being smarter drives the population to move towards the goal, then why not keep things like that?
I think you can put anyone in that environment and they would become elite in whatever you push them into if they stick with it. On the other hand when you look at people that have bad outcomes in life, they generally don't have any good role models or much parental presence in their lives, and that seems to be a much stronger factor than genetics in terms of finding success in this world.
To me, 'everyone' does not mean literally every person but rather the vast majority. Whether this number is 95% or 90% is going to be interpreted differently. I think nearly all of us can agree that as intelligence falls on a bell curve there will always be those unfortunate enough to not be able to do certain tasks. However the nature of the bell curve does mean that around 90% of people are above ~80 IQ.
I see intelligence mostly as your rate of learning. That means you're competing with people who will get better faster than you. The only way to beat that is to outwork them, but there are only so many hours in the day.
You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else.
I don't think it's unfair or morally wrong that an attractive person can be paid to model whereas I can not. Or a very tall person could be paid to play basketball while a short person who has more skill and practiced much longer and harder can not.
I think progessives care mostly about the economic consequences, not a judgement of someone as a person.
Also as I said, there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
If it's not, even the best funded policies with the best intentions can only get you so far, and inequality will remain. Not because of a conspiracy that is keeping some down while lifting others up, but because of nature.
I do believe that it would be good on all counts if they would accept genetics, because it would allow for asking much better questions, but I can see why they can't: they're heavily invested in the opposing position and few people are happy to just throw away an investment.
> there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
That's true, but maybe that's because they matter less? I.e. if inequality was primarily defined by height or beauty, they might have a harder time with it. Intelligence & related non-physical things are more important, I believe everybody intuitively accepts that.
And furthermore, looking into extremes, it's also perfectly clear that people are not actually against the idea that there is "unchangeable bad luck". A person with a severe genetic based mental disability (let's say downs syndrome) is clearly extremely unlikely to ever create much value or be paid much money and nobody has a problem with that (again I'm talking purely economically, not their value as a person or the love and happiness they bring to others).
I believe they matter less because they're not a great predictor for success. You have plenty of very attractive people working the checkout at the super market, but few very smart people. At the same time, the super successful people aren't considered beautiful by most people. The same is true for essentially all other physical attributes -- having great hearing won't teleport you into the top 10% of wealth. I don't think either idea should be taboo, obviously.
Fair point about people with severe genetic disadvantages. I guess most people broadly categorize them into a different group and measure their success relative to that group ("he's doing great, he can often manage his daily chores alone"), not compared to "normal" people. It's more of a achievement vs perceived potential, I think.
You can see whether or not they are smart, can you?
> At the same time, the super successful people aren't considered beautiful by most people. The same is true for essentially all other physical attributes -- having great hearing won't teleport you into the top 10% of wealth. I don't think either idea should be taboo, obviously.
This just all seems like complete handwaving to make observations fit the hypothesis.
What we do know for sure is that people are not at all hesitant about attributing to luck/genetics many things which affect a person's ability to contribute, create value, and earn money. Both physical and intellectual conditions, as well as circumstances of birth. So the burden of proof required to claim otherwise for specific cases has to be far higher than this.
It's hard to change you height, but your mind? Of course you can change that!
You can exercise and train your mind of course, as you can with your body. I don't see that as a plausible reason people believe this way. I think they are stuck in the anti-scientific, anti-intellectual dogma for reasons that are not rational.
It would be a real moral problem to have others judge the value that someone is able to contribute by strange factors like this -- some faceless "expert" decides the NBA player has to forfeit their income because they are over 7'2".
The real moral issue is popularizing the idea that it is unfair or the gains ill-gotten if people are successful, that their earnings are like loot that should have been "divvied up". It comes from and breeds jealously, resentment, division, hate, and crab mentality.
If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.
I also think there should be various safety nets so the poorest and least skilled people can have at least basic access to necessities and training if they would be otherwise unable to support themselves.
That's not really what I'm saying. The ways in which society hands out wealth and power today are not necessarily the ways in which it always has or always will. What specific traits lend one toward success are a bit subjective and take different forms at different times and places. So if right now, some individual cannot succeed as easily as another, those tables may very well turn at some point in the future.
To the degree that we justify whoever is being rewarded now, because they are smart/resilient/beautiful (by current standards) or whatever allows them to succeed, we must also acknowledge that under different circumstances it may very well be that we would be congratulating someone else for completely different justifying reasons. By the same token, if someone is not rewarded by society, we should resist the urge to justify their lack of success in terms of some intrinsic deficiency, when indeed they very well may have succeeded with the same traits in a different version of society. The arbitrary nature of how society chooses to reward individuals clashes with attempts to justify the status quo, which would much prefer to describe outcomes as an inevitable consequence of various conditions, like genetics, that can be used to explain why some are wealthy/powerful and others destitute.
It is this framing that I find to be morally suspect, because it tries to justify the current social hierarchy in absolute terms, when the reality is a bit more complex and subject to the prevailing whims of the times we live in.
> If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.
Agreed. I only want to acknowledge that these are but a few of the many ways society can choose to value its individual members. The genetics, or upbringing, or nutrition, or behaviors of those who have achieved success are not predictive of obtaining wealth or power in all versions of society, past and present, and so should not necessarily be treated as more important or superior in any universal way.
A leftist is not immune, and a professor is certainly not immune to this.
More so because there is no proof for that.
Individuals exhibit different levels of intelligence. Sure, life is unfair.
However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
What we observe could be explained by many other more convincing factors: early learning activity, more care to the child's education, logical and clear answers to the kid's questions about the world around him, help with the homework, etc. With proper early learning activity for the baby, and amazing teachers for the early teachings, the kid has a strong foundation. From there, compound returns.
Genes determine differences in intelligence between say a human and a dog or a human and a bird.
Genes also determine physical size, skin color and basically every difference in human attributes.
What black magic makes it so that these genes just happen to not at all influence intelligence among humans?
You can't see it but ideology is influencing your bias. You are unable to see how ludicrous it is to say intelligence isn't inherited when literally every single other thing is.
While they do not necessarily inherit intelligence, there is a non-zero likelihood that eg. intelligence is a gene-thing. This non-zero likelihood might be bigger than a primarily by moral standards led discussion might suggest us to be.
Do you have an alternative explanation for the results of twin studies on IQ then? It's also not just IQ, so many things very strongly correlate between identical twins.
> Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
Does natural selection only work on non-humans then?
Alternatively, it could be viewed as more of a reshuffling, where selection will still take place in the long run but with very different pressures.
The way I see it, none of us asked to be born, so if we really are trying to be 'fair', everyone should be granted a base level of material support regardless of their ability to contribute. I also think all of us would be much better off we collectively valued happiness more than material wealth. There is definitely a place for incentives, but when those come with the baggage of class warfare, past a certain point they become more destructive than constructive on aggregate.
Yes, this is why top schools are designed to segregate out stupid people - positive eugenics.
Yes, definitely. Ask anyone who breeds animals for a living. You can select for even more abstract traits like "willingness to train", obedience or fearlessness.
I don't see why that would be more convincing. As a hyperbole, if two completely different species (say a monkey and a primate) are exposed to the same learning environment, one would definitely end up fairing better than the other due to the differences in their brain. The twin studies just show that, given most other factors for twins are likely to be the same.
But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have.
The exact same argument was made back when we had slavery.
Now its just used to justify wage slavery and gross wealth inequality and policies which punish the poor.
(It also is grossly oversimplified and discounts reversion to the mean and that two dumb parents can absolutely have a smart kid -- along with the fact that a smart kid born in poverty is going have a much more difficult time getting their net worth up into tends of millions than someone who is just literally born with that much -- plus neglects the effects of e.g. malnutrition on childhood development)
The cognitive dissonance is real - it's an echo chamber in here about how self-driving is a pipe dream, and yet a much more difficult problem of determining ability driven by genes is easily swallowed.
Similarly, you can tell how much of intelligence is genetic for a given environment (and the "for a given environment" bit is forgotten by so many) by comparing clones (identical twins) to non-clones (non-identical twins).
Additionally, sometimes even if you don't understand about how anything happens you can still influence the result. E.g. you don't need to know anything about protein expression and brain development to breed more docile foxes. (Not that I would recommend trying breeding experiments on humans)
Doesn't genetic endowment imply the exact opposite. If the "people at the top" got there because of a factor over which they had no influence—what was once called a gift—how can they deserve their place? You might argue that they are the people who should be at the top because of their abilities, but that has nothing to do with whether they deserve it or not.
The next step in the line of reasoning is that their genetics have divine provenance. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_and_Wealth_Gospel
Essentially: I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because God wanted me to be, therefore God wants me to be rich. Conversely God wants poor people to be poor. If He didn't want that, then He would have made them smarter.
Them: You just need to believe that genetics matters!
Me: Okay, fine I do.
Them: Well, then you must agree with <probably something about meritocracy and billionaires and awarding wealth to the top 1%>
Me: Nope, I still want to tax billionaires out of existence and use that to support your "stupid poors" and your ideal of a ruling class and an underclass with unlimited market exploitation created by birthright of genetics is wrong (again, for the sake of argument, it still doesn't really work this way). "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs" and they need more. Economically, Elon Musk should be playing with nightmare-mode level taxation levels, all the "stupid poors" need the difficulty slider backed off for them -- instead we have that nearly reversed.
Whatever you call it (leftist/progressive/socialist) isn't founded at all on a rejection of genetics, attacking that gets you nowhere.
How to balance of equality of outcomes vs equal treatment.
How to enable individuals to develop their productive ability.
What quality of life we want to provide with charity to those with low economic productivity.
What tax policies achieve these goals and favors the kind economic growth that raises all boats.
In my opinion, I think all of the discussions about economic fairness and what people 'deserve' is just a side freakshow distracting from these real questions.
We can strive for a society where the environment produces the best outcomes, but some will always be better than others at any measurable task.
Saying that someone is better at something because they have better genes, better upbringing, better schooling, doesn't take away the fact that they are better.
The people with the best ability do deserve to be at the top.
The only question is what we can do as a society to enable individuals to develop ability to the greatest extent possible.
It's ironic. Because genetics are so vague and ambiguous unless it is about skin color. People attribute their success to themselves. So they automatically declare their genetics to be superior. The reason why it is so appealing to explain things with genetics is that genetics are permanent. If you are rich you will always be rich and the poor always poor. It then becomes a self fulfilling cycle because everyone falls for it and tries to keep people rich or poor with their genes as the justification. It's just a more scientific version of believing that god gave you your role. If genetics matter then genetics are just another form of luck where people want to read tea leaves.
The reason why people on the left defend against the notion that genetics are everything is because this is the thing fascists use to divide people and make them kill each other. So cool — genetics matter, just like education, nutrition, social situation, security of ones environment etc — but what do we do with this? Argue that some people do rightfully suffer because they chose to have been born into the wrong body? Try to weed out the bad genetics? Who will decide what is bad genetics? The aryan master race? People of color?
There are so many other levers we can pull I don't think we need to bring genetics into it from a political improvement perspective. When we think about healthcare that is a different topic.
If it's ok to do affirmative action based on race, it's also ok to do it based on other genes. I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is ok to discriminate based on known skin color (as long as it matches their notion of who should be discriminated against).
Did I say I wanted to cut funding to genetics? What I did was explaining a perspective which I don't share for the most part. What I said is that the idea of willfully designing the shape of a society based on some features of the body (blood, genes, shape of the skull, ...) stands in the tradition of horrible genocides. My grandfather was a Nazi, so this is not some abstract thing for me, but him explaining that e.g. people from the balkan region are "just thieves" because it is "in their blood" would be a thing that he would certainly also read out of genetics.
I am all for research of genetics for medical purposes, there lies great potential there. I think exploring links between sociology and genetics is also quite interesting.
What I am vehemently against is to divide people based on genetics and make policy based on that alone.
> I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is ok to discriminate based on known skin color (as long as it matches their notion of who should be discriminated against).
I guess american progressives think they need to do this to correct centuries of the pendulum leaning into the other direction. While I aknowledge the fact (centuries of opression against non-white people), I don't agree with the conclusions in extremo. Of course a majority white society has the duty to deal with it's racist heritage pay reparations to the ancestors of that violence and opression etc. If Germany pays reparation to victims of the Holocaust this isn't racism against Germans, it is the pure minimum any decent free society would do. Similarily the significant injustice that has been dealt to native americans or people of color has to be confronted in a serious and fair manner. Giving justice to that injustice can of course look from the outside as if they get a unfair advantage over us who had the luck not to have had such a history. That doesn't feel good, because one has to accept the injustices the own society and nation has done and it lessens our role in the story. But it is necessary.
Science is about learning things. How or whether those learnings should be applied is a question of politics. Blanket-censoring entire fields of research for political reasons is not the answer to anything.
You talk about how you don't want extreme race-based policy, but at the same time the only injustice you're contemplating on correcting is based on race. I don't hear any calls to pay reparations for any past injustices that were based on non-racial issues, not from you, not from "the left" in general.
Not claim that everything is due to a secret cabal of structural racism/sexism/hate on the poor? As long as you have that as your perfect explanation for the state of the world, you won't really make a difference, because you're attacking the wrong issue.
I believe it's much more dangerous to be willfully ignorant of science than what political movements might form because of science.
On the world level, yes. On a Western country level? No. Well, maybe in the US, in some parts, flammable drinking water probably doesn't help.
But if you look at Sweden or Germany, "it's the drinking water" doesn't work. To discount genetics is to close your eyes to reality -- not incredibly helpful when you're trying to understand something. And understanding helps if you want to change something, which progressives do.
> [Harden] told me, “As a parent, I try to keep in mind that differences between people are examples of runaway feedback loops of gene-by-environment interaction. People have some initial genetic predisposition to something, and that leads them to choose certain friends over other friends, and these initial exposures have a certain effect, and you like that effect and you choose it again, and then these feedback loops become self-reinforcing.”
Feedback loops sound about right, where some tiny minute preference leads to positive reinforcement, leads to more positive reinforcement, until you've got a full blown preference/predilection/talent for something (or the opposite).
The idea that genetics play zero role seems silly, but it also makes sense that society shapes the experience of someone with a given genetic combination in a way we can still control.
This (very long) article reinforces my belief that society is best off when it finds a place for everyone, and not when it idolizes one set of talents/skills, and acknowledges just how little genetics really matter to be "competent" at any given thing.
I very much look forward to reading the book this article is promoting.
What's weird, is that if you believe in equality , you 'd WANT to know the genetic determinants of anything, so you can truly equalize it with genetic engineering.
I don't remember the context any more, but it hella set the stage for my opinion on that field.
I wonder what we can do about it. Maybe science-anthro needs a re-branding?
In feudalism, being poor, is your fault. You are morally suspicious, of lower blood and any theory that fits will be used to justify this world order before itself. Thus why national-socialist attracted so many nobles. Thus why "differences" written in stone are so abhorrent to the left. Cause nothing should be written in stone, in a enlightened world.
Then, there are differences. But to my mind, the differences are quite universal. Cause those differences were shaped by the environment and the environment was for the last 10.000 - 200 years pretty universal for the species. We have neuro sub-types everywhere, adapted to the ebb and flow of resources and the rise and fall of overpopulation. Somebody optimized to survive a civil-war, might not be optimal for calculus, but might be better at improvisation than someone born into the calm waters of post-(civil-war/genocide) societies. We might even one day learn to suppress the epi-genetic stress triggers that make this wheel go round.
We can learn to detect those differences, and learn to work around those differences and it might even benefit us. Or we can shun the "other" - like we already shun those optimized for conflict - and watch the world go down the drain. Cooperation yields higher reward, so research away, but the endgoal should be here to stay.
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection is a good overview of how practical this is today, IME. TL;DR: Selection is barely worth it at reasonable valuations of IQ points, but will be massively worth it in the future due to improvements in models and the ongoing reduction in price of polygenetic screenings. I believe this was last updated in 2016, though.
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-editing for the babies of the "far future", or maybe 25 years from now.
If the genetic lottery has winners and losers, surely that’s pure gold to progressive politics! It’s official, scientific confirmation of the existence of oppressors and victims, along a multitude of axes. And the policy implications are so obvious: equity is achieved by giving extra help to the genetic losers. A whole class of hitherto-wishy-washy political activity suddenly gains scientific cover: the activity of quantifying exactly how much disadvantage each group suffers, and correspondingly how much assistance to render.
Why are progressive think tanks not totally on board with this already?!
Possibly because they'd have to completely rewrite their ideological framework. Right now, it's based on active influences (racism, sexism, discrimination against the poor), and with genetics playing a (larger) role, it would shift to more passive influences (fewer women are in tech because they don't care as much for tech as men, not because they're oppressed) that you can't change via revolution + labor camps.
Having scientific proof of differences does nothing. It's not the starting stats that progressives see as the thing that needs to be equalized, but the opportunities. Maybe the outcomes. It depends.
I’m not a progressive, but if over decades of pursuing liberal policies outcomes are not equalizing, it seems to make sense to try to figure out why and find something better to try.
Pure equality is not possible while people have parents.
The argument that your parents make you not equal is exactly what liberalism is trying to reject. Someone should not be treated differently based on their heritage (monarchies anyone?).
In fact, since you believe you can't be equal due to parentage, you probably agree with some of what progressives have to say. The current system isn't equal.
1. Genetics, upbringing and culture all matter
2. Diversity within an ethnic group is extremely large - often similar magnitude to diversity between ethnic groups
3. Therefore, to judge someone on their ethnic average will be inaccurate at best, offensive at worst
I think that this position has been misconstrued by pop-right / alt-right figures to create a false narrative in the culture wars.
Most scientific research into eugenics, "racial differences" and such is motivated by reactionary value systems. Most of it can also easily be classified as pseudoscience and is published in fringe journals (e.g. see Emil Kirkegaard's "research" and his "journals").
Since this topic is so overrun with reactionaries trying to scientifically justify their views, it's extremely risky for a serious journal to publish research into it and for institutions to fund this research in the first place. Because in all likelihood that reasonable accredited scientist prompting you about wanting to do the research is either personally pursuing such ideological goals or representing the interests of such a group.
In other words, because of all the incredibly unscientific "research" actual racists and eugenicists have done in this field before, it's extremely hard to do any work in this field without either risking being perceived as supporting their views (by opponents) or as validating their unscientific prior work (by supporters).
It's a bit like debating the Israel-Palestine conflict: if you criticize Israel for their actions in Palestine, you might have genuine human rights concerns or you might just do so as a proxy for anti-Semitism. If the people doing the latter wouldn't exist (and there wasn't such an obvious historical precedent for why they're scary) it wouldn't be such a hot button issue. Go ask a leftist how this usually plays out for them.
In reality IQ matters much less than people think. The top 5 rated chess player of all time (Hikaru Nakamura) has a ~105 IQ. People with an average IQ are capable of performing at the 0.1% level with the proper structured training and time.
In my experience IQ mostly impacts the rate at which you learn things. So it took you 2 years instead of 1.5 to master a certain skill -- so what? As a society we should put more emphasis on hard work and results, and less on inherant traits.
The fixation on intelligence is a reflection of a culture that don't recognize hard work and is ultimately lazy. We don't want to put in the grueling effort it takes to master, and hone a craft over decades. We would rather cash in on "genetic lottery" points for the rest of our lives.
You see people bragging about their university or SAT score from 30 years ago, but have accomplished nothing since then.
I have no moral objection with studying IQ among individuals and groups. But I think compared to other factors that influence human potential, it is the least interesting and least actionable. It also perpetuates the myth that it really matters on an indivual level.
And like I said, it's pretty hard to deny IQ is a proxy for learning rate (which is extremely beneficial practically). But it is not the deciding factor in human potential.
There are much more impactful and practically easy improve environmental factors like culture, school system, diet, parenting that are a much more fruitful place to focus our effort.
So for example, if you want to train someone to be a human calculator, really fast at crunching numbers, then you don't need intelligent people. That is what chess is like. But if you want people to build and understand huge complex systems all carefully interconnected like Math then you need intelligent people.
The rest is just where you place the line, and if you grant that, you are establishing the threshold for genocide.
Things would be a bit simpler if the argument wasn't 'never talk about any differences among people', but 'never place that line, because society is not constructed for the destruction of the least among it'.
It is NOT an inevitable requirement that society is constructed for the destruction of the least among it.
He doesn't say that genes (or early environment) is the only thing that matters either, and points at evolution in the IQ distribution over time, and takes the argument that if you were to put an "asian tigger mum" behind each children, you would most likely get an impact on scores.
For those interested, his debate with Coleman Hughes is interesting [1]. Coleman makes an good objection. He says that these studies on variations in IQ distributions may or may not be correct, but that we shouldn't publicise them because most people are incapable of thinking in term of distributions, and will treat an individual differently based on one of the metrics (mean, percentile, standard deviation) of whichever way you cut the population. I am conflicted on that. On one side I oppose the idea that you shouldn't look at the facts because the facts could be misused (the "chemistry is bad because Zyklon B" argument). On the other hand I have seen enough educated and smart enough people incapable of thinking in term of distribution to acknowledge that Coleman has a point.
I've been experimenting with some self-improvement techniques for nearly 10 years. I found them after a few years of personal crisis and a quest for understanding, as I was very confused at what was causing my inconsistent life success/happiness/satisfaction/health. I'd had plenty of cases where I'd done well in life (in school work, career, friendships, relationships, sport, physical health) and plenty of other cases where I'd done terribly. "Trying harder" didn't seem to improve things, and in many cases made things worse. It didn't make sense that it was all explained by hard-coded genetics, as, well, it made no sense that my patterns were selected for by evolution, and it was hard to understand how genetics had given me a brain that was quite good at things one week but terrible at the very same things the next. And it didn't seem like these tendencies mirrored either of my parents'. It sometimes did seem like sometimes it was one parents' tendencies competing/conflicting with the other's, but other times the patterns seemed completely unlike anyone in my family. Genetic determinism just made no sense as an explanation, even after multiple doctors/psychiatrists said some version of "that's just how you're wired".
Just by chance I ended up connecting with a practitioner who practiced a form of "subconscious emotional healing", and whilst I was skeptical I was exasperated and open to trying anything at that point. After starting these practices, I felt immediate relief to a lot of the anxiety and fear I was feeling, and over time, all aspects of my life have gradually improved.
A particularly significant example of how this work has been beneficial has been in my career, and particular instances where I needed to learn a skill or deal with a challenge, and was finding myself very stuck, but by undertaking the healing work I was able to let go of the fear/anxiety/resistance I was feeling, then I found I was easily able to learn the skill or work through the obstacle, and have ended up being able to increase my capabilities and progress my career much more effectively. I've also been able to have a much better time with friendships, relationships, and my physiological health.
Some notable experts on the topic, such as Gabor Maté, assert that deeply held emotions like trauma influence our genetic expression, a mechanism known as epigenetics [1]. Others heavily dispute the role of epigenetics or the possible effectiveness of "subconscious healing" in altering life outcomes. It all seems to be derided as nonsense among conventional biomedical professionals and devotees.
The thing is, I don't see any significant research either proving or disproving anything in this area, but I do see plenty of non-mainstream practitioners and individuals undertaking this kind of work and having really good outcomes. I’ve often thought of trying to gather data on my own progress, of physiological indicators and perhaps even IQ tests, but it’s hard to get any meaningful testing done when you’re just a guy who reckons he’s onto something.
But it seems like an important thing to study, because, unlike genetic determinism, it has the potential to substantially change life outcomes for people living today. When I think about the times in my life when I was struggling, particularly as a deeply confused/terrified school student wondering why I was making my teachers and parents happy one week and disappointing them the next, and realise how much of it was influenced by the subconscious emotions that it's taken until now to identify and resolve, my heart breaks for the many people still experiencing those kinds of feelings, but believing or being told that they can't hope for anything better due to society's embrace of genetic determinism.
If anyone reading this happens to be working in fields related to epigenetics or behaviour-change, or is connected with anyone who is, and wants to talk to someone who has spent 10 years undertaking emotional healing work with great success, please feel free to get in touch.
This.
IQ !== Success.
I used to go to college with two very bright people. I couldn't catch up with them. Because one of them was ridiculousely intelligent and the other was up there close.
20 years on, the first one is working at Mcdonald's. Yes, I couldn't believe it too. The second one is a teacher (not that this is a bad job), who told me he hates the job and how much he messed up his career.
For me it's persistence/perseverence >> IQ / Intelligence.
If you have someone who is average IQ but is willing to go through hell to achieve what they want, then I'd rather go for the average IQ girl/guy.
Another thing that doesn't get mentioned when discussing IQ and race is humility. If you have a high IQ and think you can do better than other people/race why not invest that gift and give back to this world. Why not be humble about it and help your fellow humans making this world a better place. Sitting there and claiming you are better than X and Y because your race is Z shows how weak you really are. Be humble about what you have and invest your time and effort in becoming better as a person, be a role model for your family, son, daughter, your community and your country.
Which is also horribly unfair, as that's done almost entirely to upbringing, genes, sleep and food. Only the last two can be changed by the individual.
Sure these patterns may be somewhat inherited, but quite possibly inherited in such a way that it can be altered with effective techniques, like those that I've been using.
I'm not claiming any proof, just arguing that proper research needs to be done into this.
I agree with you though that the headline, much of the article, and arguably some of Harden's presentation of her work is irresponsible.
Ofcourse genetics influence stuff, but so what? Does being less good at something means you are less human or less worthy? Does belonging to a population with certain traits an individual have those traits?
Humanity has gone through this road before, it turned out ugly, why do we need to actively persue a narrative that focuses on biological determinism given that it proved to be an extremely dangerous narrative? And yes, this is a narrative, even when we find scientific evidence for facts that support this narrative, the organization of these facts and acting on them is always mediated by narratives which fill in the gap about the things we don't really know which are not these very specific facts.
The framing of the title here is a nice example for this fallacy. What are progressives that the title is mentioning? Is it an actual organised thought, or just some tribal strawman? It's just a narrative, and narratives are very effective in creating reality, we should be careful about them and not consider them just a force of nature we can't and shouldn't control. Exactly like how we as individuals don't blindly accept a determinism about our actions and abilities. So we shouldn't accept it for us as a society.
what is different this time around to prevent someone with power from using some research results to advance discriminatory policies (even if the results are overblown, purposefully misinterpreted, etc.)?
ignoring the science isn't great, but using the science as a basis for creating policy is still a very scary idea
[1] https://www.britannica.com/science/three-parent-baby (nuclear transfer)
Smart and highly accomplished people, on the other hand, often try to deflect, dispute, water down and distract, once the topic of heritability of intelligence comes up.
To a part this is given by the fact that intelligence is a hard topic, but I wonder to which degree this semi-denial is psychological. Smart people might resent the possibility that part of their success could be traced back to random unearned biological privilege that cannot even be taxed and redistributed. "Just World fallacy" is an attractive one, especially in a society that verbally celebrates equality and equity.
If we're talking about personal decision making, dig in, help me improve myself, warn me what to look out for... But too many of these conversations are actually masking conversations about trying to charge more or outright deny opportunities to people who are deemed to have inferior genes.
Being egalitarian-minded, many progressives are inherently hostile to the idea that our personalities and behaviors may be hardwired on some level...except that they don't generally have trouble accepting it for, say, sexual preferences. So it's not even a consistent opposition.
To me, the idea that our behavior is a combination of both nature and nurture seems kind of obvious, and the idea that we should refrain from scientific inquiry here because people might use the knowledge improperly feels...wrong. Very wrong.
The idea of, "Science at all cost!" should, by now, be thoroughly debunked for a number of very clear reasons, some specifically in this area of genetics and psychology (is there an exception for Poe's Law when talking about genetic behavioral outcomes?).
We must be careful, and Dr. Harden does seem to understand that, which is good.
If there were only possible negatives, it might be more understandable, but of course that's not true. Learning more about how genetics affect behavior could, for example, lead to better treatments for behavioral disorders.
In my mind, there's a distinction between science-as-knowledge and science-as-practice. There are obviously many potentially unethical scientific practices, but I don't think gaining scientific knowledge can ever be wrong, in the sense of merely having the knowledge itself being wrong (of course, it's possible for it to have been gathered in an unethical way).
That's probably the only example that I can think of. Do you have any more?
The right has tons of examples: evolution, climate change, vaccines, etc.
Does the left have any except genetics?
Oh, I guess there's sex differences in personality/behavior/preferences, though arguably that's the same thing as genetic causes of personality.
Indeed nuclear power seems like an odd one to be opposed to. I think the idea is because we should be going forward with solar and wind?
The social commentary is a not what I had in mind because I don't consider it a hard science like virology, biology, etc.
Watch how the most vocal egalitarians just happen to send their kids to the most elitist private school they can possibly afford and collect the most credentials proving they are vastly more capable than the flyover rubes.
One thing you will notice is how if you do say IQ is genetic, certain people will call you racist. This strikes me as very similar to looking up rude words in the dictionary.
There are things you know and you know others know, but you never mention. Most of the time that's because there's no reason to mention it. There's no point talking about uncomfortable things just because you can. What's worrying is when something actually important but still can't be talked about.
Try to have a nuanced view on covid mitigation strategies and you'll feel the same way. Even on HN which encourages rationality.
There are lot of very polarized topics where it's pretty much impossible to have a rationale conversation. I have the feeling pretty much everybody choose what they want to believe and then build a rationalization to justify their views. Pretty depressing.
This matches my observations for the last half decade, but more so from progressives and left leaning people. Any deviance from "the narrative" results in instant ostracizing! Other political groups just make excuses to walk away for the time being, in my experience, which isn't inherently good either, but better than this.
There was a study on twitter that quantified this: left leaning people do not follow right leaning people, right leaning people follow left leaning people. One group has only a caricature of the other, while the other has a clearer picture of the opposition party's belief set.
I really hate the idea that people must be blocked if they didn't reach the same conclusions. It assumes that people are static, irredeemable deplorables even if they weren't exposed to the viewpoint by that point in their life. Harkening back to an old campaign point from the left also half a decade ago.
Then of course there is the assumption that I must therefore be "on the right", especially given the adjectives I used as well as being frustrated more with the left. Which is why the ostracizing occurs for questioning anything, nobody considers the possibility of an "ally" having introspection, or the possibility of evaluating the world outside of a false dichotomy? Super productive, everyone.
If you've ever tried to convince someone to disregard a deeply held religious belief, you know how much of an uphill battle it can be. And it can be downright impossible for the more zealous, especially if they believe they're constantly battling some sort of "other" (mostly theoretical Nazis).
It doesn't look like things will be getting better any time soon. In fact, with the increase of deplatforming and ideology-driven power mods on social media sites like Reddit, it seems like we're moving into a sort of digital dark age.
[1] https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/30years/Rushton-Jense...
Also, the keystone of progressive dogma is that there is VALUE in the wellbeing of all types of people, contrasting with conservative dogma that hierarchy is both inevitable and deeply moral: that there are and will always be underpeople, which must be kept in their place.
Progressive dogma is more akin to your basic Ratatouille trope: that the good idea, the new concept, the innovation can come from ANYWHERE. I think that's a defensible position, and it puts a completely different spin on the idea of not starving the underpeople to death or killing them outright.
That's a false dichotomy and really the core of my complaint. Instead of dogma, we should be striving towards facts based on empirical evidence. Science.
Further investigation (for instance, Shaun's video on 'The Bell Curve') reveals this evidence is faked.
Some of us have had our patience with this sort of thing eroded, over time. You cannot simply assert you have the evidence, you have the facts, any other interpretation is wrong, and therefore you automatically win. That ain't gonna fly, except among a subset of HN commenters and system-participants.
And their brigading only discourages the participation of those who still think all this is about exchange of ideas. In my experience 'we define the facts, the evidence, and use systemic means to stifle anybody who gets in the way' does not enhance the free exchange of ideas.
Shall this lead to a scientifically backed reason to stigmatize groups? Shall this lead to a blessed segregation of people?
Would this lead to a better co-existance of people or a worse one?
Unfortunately I don’t see much way out of this outside of exiting society (and perhaps life) permanently.
imagine that scientists find the genes that makes you predisposed to homosexuality. how long is it before a repressive regime starts testing its citizen and systematically killing anyone with it?
should the scientist have still released the study or is there some sort of ethical consideration?
But avoiding scientific inquiry puts one at a disadvantage, because the research WILL happen with or without you. And if it's without you, you won't have any say in how it's used, or how society restructures itself (because it will). Without your voice, we could end up with Gattaca or Brave New World. With your voice we could have something better.
But take note: The world WILL change. You can't stop it, but you can guide it.
Anyone have a source for this?
I am a scientist, I work on these things, and I am here to tell you that:
--Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited
--Your personality is largely determined by genetics and is pretty much settled in to what it will always be by ~30
--If you don't learn to count right by ~4 you never will
--There are, in fact, many people who could never learn calculus
--Sex differences in behavior are driven by genetics and the effects are large
The broad strokes here are not up for debate, and denying them makes you analogous to a flat-earther. The details will change.
There are huge portions of the educated populace who will go to great lengths to spin stories about how it ain't so. They do this because it is comfortable to believe given the normative ethics we were all programmed with as children. Trying really, really hard to believe manifest falsehoods has a lot of practical drawbacks, though. Like the constant, expensive performance of searching for just the right way of teaching calculus to people who will never learn it--public policy that hasn't a chance in hell of ever working.
If you've read this far, and you're feeling upset or angry or uncomfortable with the facts I've listed, I encourage you to reflect on which problems in the world are really important to you. Write them down. For each one ask, "Is continuing to believe in a broken model of how things actually are going to help me solve this problem? Or would I be better off facing an uncomfortable truth and doing what I can with it?"
Thank you for reading my rant, I'll be here all day :-D
Citation needed, especially given that there are enormous differences in intelligence between people who acquired speech and those who didn't.
Yes, it's the nature vs nurture argument all over again, but I think that regarding intelligence it's far from settled.
Edit: sorry, I asked that question in another thread...
> However, for intelligence, heritability increases linearly, from (approximately) 20% in infancy to 40% in adolescence, and to 60% in adulthood. Some evidence suggests that heritability might increase to as much as 80% in later adulthood but then decline to about 60% after age 80.
It does not corroborate the claim "Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited".
Variance in all traits is higher in childhood. The idea is that you grow into your mostly pre-determined self.
It just doesn't make sense given a more macroscopic view of things. If inheritance obviously controls the difference in intelligence between the human brain and the dog brain, or the cat brain, or the monkey brain, what black magic makes it so that among humans themselves inheritance controls very little of intelligence?
The 70% - 80% statistic seems like a ballpark estimate he pulled out of a anecdotal conclusion based off of a broad spectrum knowledge of the related scientific research. You likely aren't going to find a citation that proves this claim definitively. It does not mean that his point is incredulous nor does it mean that his point isn't part of common sense.
His point makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. The same sense as the fact that the covid vaccine protects against the virus even though for the longest time it was NEVER FDA approved (aka no strong citations). The conclusion was obvious despite not meeting the stringent verification of the FDA and many people were able to arrive at this conclusion without the science. Yet many people refused to believe the efficacy of the vaccine due to their political ideology.
I believe there's a similar biased attitude coming from the far left side of thinking. The unwillingness to see that the science and common sense points to an inescapable conclusion. There is no unseen magical force that makes all races, all genders and all peoples equal. There are differences, and the differences are biological and obvious.
Like literally genes control how ugly and how tall you are but not intelligence at all? By some crazy magic intelligence is the one thing that isn't at all influenced that much by genetics? Seriously, which viewpoint is more realistic here?
Seriously the same ultra left people who were calling out the anti-vacc people as stupid and unintelligent for refusing the vaccine are unable to see the exact same kind of ideological stupidity within themselves.
Give everyone perfect parenting, a great education and lots of nutritious food and some of them still won't be able to learn calculus.
It's about whether it's possible or not, not whether you actually do learn the thing.
Someone with an IQ of 120 may not ever learn calculus, but they probably have the ability to do so. You cannot say the same of someone with an IQ of 80.
The question is where and how does the 70-80% come? How is it meaningful and how is it measured?
I also think we can only accept that we're born different, but human. If we should aspire to anything, it should be to make life good for every individual, taking their capacities into account, not to give everyone an academic degree.
I agree with your sentiment in the second paragraph. Human gets a little fuzzy, though...I think you really mean to point at personhood. There are humans who definitely aren't people, like those born without brains. And with the computers our grandkids will install--oh my! I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
So there must be some poor environment A and good environment B, and some poor genes A and good genes B that a comparison must be made between to understand exactly what this percentage means and of course there must be a definition of intelligence and a way to measure it.
In your second paragraph, you've actually hit on one of the apologetic clichés that's popular now. People will say, "Yes, 70-80% of variance...GIVEN OUR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT". And they will act as if they've said something profound. Yes, that's true, and we don't know about the heritability of intelligence in environments that don't exist...but we can make really good guesses. Further, from a public policy perspective, we've got to work in the environment that we've got. And in that environment, the number is 70-80%.
The problem is that since there already is substantial variance in environment that different people experience today, but nevertheless the amount of variance explained by shared environment is very, very low, this means that if we want to increase intelligence using environmental interventions, you can’t designate some environment that some (eg. well off people) already experience, and get everyone into that environment, because it simply won’t work. If it did, it would already show in the amount of variance explained by environment.
Instead, what you need to do is to intervene by putting people in environments very few if any people today experience. This is the only approach that can work, as it can overcome the low amount of variance explained by environment. Suffice to say, nobody yet figured out what those unusual environments actually would be like, as you can’t simply copy whatever well off or genius people grow up like. If you do come up with something, it might end up being a hard sale too, given that this will be necessarily stranger than what people normally expect. But, if it works, you’ll improve the world massively and make history. Chances are against you though, as millions of people in the education industry worldwide have already tried almost anything you could come up with, and nothing really works.
That can't be researched (effectively). Policies affect the current situation, not the desired one.
Edit: Also, what do you call intelligence?
The debate here is about whether we should try to change the environment in such way that Group A and Group B would be more similar. We know that Group A in general has poorer environment however there's an argument that improving those conditions won't bring Group A to Group B level anyway since it's mostly genetical. Progressives want to change the environment, conservatives think it's a futile effort.
How would you determine in the following scenario whether levelling the playing field would cause the averages to be the same? Would 70-80% imply that, yes, it's likely and under what circumstances?
If the variance for a single person's measurement could be around 40p, then if genetics is causing 75% of it, then it would be responsible for 30p of that and environment 10p, then can we deduce that Group A given similar environment would actually be 5p higher in intelligence?
In this case while genetics describe 75% of the variance, environment is still enough to make naturally more gifted group less successful. So without knowing the other variables the 70-80% is still not meaningful.
Here is an overview paper by one of the leading researchers in the field (and one of the most distinguished researchers in psychology at large) Robert Plomin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/
Unlike the rest of psychology, psychometry as a field does not have any kind of replication problem: all major results have been replicated many, many times on many different data sets. You can go to Google Scholar and find probably hundreds of replications (keyword is “heritability of intelligence”). Here is for example one from Japan: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01067719 which finds heritability to be 50% among 12 year olds, here is one from Norway https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/On-the-quest... finding 70% among military recruits, you can go on and on.
> I also think we can only accept that we're born different, but human. If we should aspire to anything, it should be to make life good for every individual, taking their capacities into account, not to give everyone an academic degree.
Clearly, but if the society denies reality, the result is expansion of higher education among people who can’t benefit from it, bullshit degrees, student debt, and general misery.
>Using years of education rather than intelligence per se, the meta-analysis mentioned earlier with 125 000 individuals in a discovery sample yielded a GPS that accounted for 2 and 3% in two independent samples.16 More variance in intelligence is likely to be explained with GPS derived from larger samples, whole-genome sequencing and more novel strategies such as using networks of functionally linked genes.
Accounting for 2-3% of variance in intelligence through genetics is pretty weak support for genetics being an important contributor to variation in intelligence (however measured).
The denialism here lies with those who wish to believe that intelligence is largely genetically determined, rather than socially and environmentally determined.
What that means is that we can now point to concrete genes that contribute to intelligence, and assign them weights that tell us the significance of this contribution. This means that this 2-3% figure is not about reality of genetic contribution to intelligence on the ground, but rather about our explicit understanding thereof in 2014, when this article was originally published.
Since then, our polygenic scores have significantly improved: for example, Lee et al in 2018 constructed polygenic scores that describe 11-13% of variance, a significant improvement over 2-3% result Plomin cites. There are probably even better results now, as the progress in the area is quick.
Of course, 11-13% is still short of 80%+ that we already know is determined by genes, but our explicit understanding is slowly getting there. Importantly, as we get there, the goalposts of critics are constantly shifting: when we couldn’t point out to specific genes, the entire notion of heritability was attacked. Now that we can, the alleged problems are with spurious correlations resulting from population stratification etc. Alas, the science moves forward, despite fierce opposition.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3
> The denialism here lies with those who wish to believe that intelligence is largely genetically determined, rather than socially and environmentally determined.
I think your inability to distinguish between heritability and polygenic scores makes you thoroughly unqualified to make statements like that.
There are two questions here:
1) What genes contribute to human intelligence? Evidently there are some, as the structure of the brain humans are uniquely endowed with at birth is mostly determined genetically.
2) Do common variations in these genes contribute to common variations in human intelligence?
For 2) the answer is categorically "a few percent at most", even according to the sources you provide yourself. It's pointless denying this fact. Repeating that ~80% of variation in intelligence is genetic is displaying a limited understanding of inheritance.
To answer 1) it may be possible to identify those genes that contribute to intelligence by performing large scale genetic studies to identify the rare cases where a small signal is detected from one or several of these (a polygenic test, for example, as you are fond of).
Once these genes have been identified, one could then in theory investigate how they function, etc, in order to better understand the genetic basis of human intelligence, but it is unlikely to help understand the basis of the difference in intelligence between individuals.
They are not “measures” in the same sense measuring tape is a measure of length. They are like credit scores: they are useful to predict likelihood of defaulting on a loan, but they do not give you full understanding of the entire reality on the ground. With better constructed credit scores you can get better at predicting defaults, just like Lee et al got better at predicting educational attainment than the 2-3% figure Plomin quoted. No sane person would say that Experian credit scores give you complete understanding of given persons credit ability and their future credit behavior, and no sane person will tell you that polygenic scores of intelligence/educational attainment give you complete picture of a person’s intelligence or education. Do you understand it now?
If you’re still confused, try to think about this: if what Plomin meant, like you suggest, that genes only explain 2-3% of variance in educational attainment, how is it possible that only 4 years later, Lee et al exhibited PGS explaining 11-13% of variance? Have genes got 4 times stronger in 4 years?
> For 2) the answer is categorically "a few percent at most", even according to the sources you provide yourself.
No, it is not. I encourage you to put some effort into understanding what is being talked about here.
So, quite frankly, I don't care if you spend a lot of time thinking about it, it's irrelevant. The consensus is clear.
So please, I am begging you, tell me why I should believe you over everyone else.
So, to reiterate because I'm realizing that para wasn't so clear: guessing how smart you are based on your genetic code is something we're only just learning how to do. We're getting better at it though. Estimating how smart you are based on how smart your parents are is a totally different game that we've been playing for a century.
Why is this in quotes when it isn't a quote?
I'd like your definition of intelligence.
I haven't read the wiki article and so can't vouch for it
But you raise a very important point, and you're right: as far as I'm aware, latest evidence says that being malnourished as a child does significantly impact intelligence as it does height (stunting). Though I believe the last piece of work I read on it claimed the effect was smaller than previously believed. That was ~2 years ago.
For any given trait X, the question about how much it is "inherited/genetic" or "environmental" is a commonly used shorthand, even amongst professionals, but it can be subtly misleading. All traits are 100% inherited, and all traits are 100% environmental. What do I mean by this? How is the ability to speak Russian genetic? How is the colour of your hair environmental?
Well, put it this way: is the difference between a human child brought up in a Russian family and their pet dog who has lived with them for the same time genetic or environmental? And what is the difference between a pair of identical twins, one of whom bleached their hair with peroxide–genetic or environmental?
The above are of course exaggerations, but they're just obvious examples. The correct way of phrasing the question is this: given a population A, what percentage of the variability of trait X is inherited and what percentage is environmental? Given the population of mammals, is the ability to speak Russian mainly genetic? Yes. Given a pair of identical twins, is any difference in their hair colour environmental? Also yes.
So, to the question as to how much of a decline in intelligence can be accounted to malnourishment throughout life (and how much to other environmental factors, genetics, etc.) we need to specify what population we're talking about. I'd be willing to bet that:
1- the variability in intelligence due to malnourishment in the population of middle-to-upper class children is negligible,
2- the variability in intelligence due to malnourishment in the entire child population of a developed country is detectable,
3- ...and the variability in intelligence in the due to malnourishment in the worldwide child population is significantly higher.
In these Internet days, it is even easier to claim you are a scientist when you are anonymous online, and make all sort of claims.
>
>In these Internet days, it is even easier to claim you are a scientist when you are anonymous online, and make all sort of claims.
OK, but what about their comment do you disagree with or find in error?
http://ibg.colorado.edu/cdrom2016/franic/Moderation/Lit/Turk...
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97802038...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761348839...
(I should note that beyond an undergraduate degree in linguistics I have essentially no professional qualifications in anything related to neuroscience. Most of my understanding comes from having read some Sapolsky and Steinberg cover to cover a few times, with a limited deep dive into late adolescent risk calculation and risk-taking related to a homicide case I was on.)
Is my understanding mistaken? Why?
A way you could look at this would be to think as heritability here as the cap of your intelligence. No matter how hard you try, barring some sort of magical medical intervention, your maximal intelligence is limited by your genetics. However, that's the maximum. There are many ways to reduce IQ (lead a famous example here, nutrition another).
I think it's not an unreasonable hypothesis that those in lower socioeconomic brackets might increasingly encounter the damaging effects which might have an outsized effect on IQ. More factors than just heritability might create that effect you've mentioned.
To be honest, from what I've read in these comments: I doubt it. There's a lot of goal-post moving and deflection ("but what even is intelligence", "but what if we never taught people to speak", "but why should it even matter") that I believe Betteridge's law of headlines still holds.
The things I listed are "the sky is blue"-type claims to people who do evolution stuff.
Also a scientist here....
Intelligence, however measured, is largely inherited. However, that inheritance is not genetic, but social.
It's now been rigorously demonstrated that common variation in genetics has very little to do with intelligence as generally conceived.
Just for some examples of well-powered studies:
>A genome-wide polygenic score constructed from the GWA results accounted for 1.6% of the variance of intelligence in the normal range in an unselected sample of 3414 individuals, which is comparable to the variance explained by GWA studies of intelligence with substantially larger sample sizes.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29731509
>in 2016, a second meta-analytic GWAS analysis with a sample size of 294,000 identified 74 significant loci. This analysis produced a GPS, EA2, that predicted 3% of the variance in years of education [a proxy for intelligence] on average in independent samples.
(
I might need to expand on that a little:
I predict that "the genes responsible for intelligence" are not a thing. I think that genes tend to work together to make a living organism similar to how machine code instructions work together to make a program run.
So for example: I'm pretty sure that looking at the design of eg. a 6502 can't directly predict the existence of Mario:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/055624v2.full
If you can't easily predict what neurons will do based on their layout, what chance do you have to predict the exact outcome of the genes which specify that layout?
You're going to need more data than just the genes alone.
)
(Perhaps thinking of it in terms of "what bits you should change" is asking the wrong question, instead it might be handier to look for the sprite definition, or to look for the sprite plotting subroutine)
No gene works in a vacuum. Genes code for proteins that work together to perform diverse functions. Sure: in some situations you can indeed directly identify that a gene knock out or substitution might affect certain functions, but this is rather misleading!
Genetics is actually very much Turing complete and Genes might best be looked at as a kind of software (this might be considered an understatement).
For comparison: I'm sure we agree that a single machine code instruction by itself is meaningless. However, if you knock out or add a JSR (Jump to SubRoutine aka function call) at the right spot: sure you can claim that the JSR codes for a particular functionality. But: JSR is 3 bytes on a 6502, would you really believe someone who told you that 3 bytes is what it takes to "make Mario jump"?
In reality there's a lot more instructions behind it (with perhaps calls to further subroutines, and more subroutines past that). Genes are not quite 6502 code of course, if anything they're rather more sophisticated.
To look at some of your examples:
You mention eye color which is determined by quite a number of genes working together (eg. location, color select, pigment) .
Height is affected by ... almost everything all at once over a longer period of time (eating, sleeping, age, eating at a particular age, metabolic rate : which itself is fairly sophisticated... there's wall charts that span an entire room). This to the point where some people give up and say "height is actually mostly environmentally determined". (Of course in reality it's an interaction between Genes and environment)
Vulnerability and immunity to diseases is very interesting indeed, if you eg. look at the role of somatic hypermutation in acquired immunity.
And all of these would obviously not work without working cells with DNA transcription, metabolism, membranes, replication, etc. ;-)
In short: be a little bit careful with claims in newspapers that say people have found a "Gene for X".
Evidently, our genes determine our brain, and are what makes us more intelligent than other animals. But between individual humans, genetic variation contributes to only a few percent of variation.
The 70-80% is heritable and not via parenting. It is contingent on an environment that provides things like food and air, and the basic idea is that we control for the environment in some simplistic way via twin studies.
It is also shown by the so-called "Flynn effect" [0], which is a substantial rise in measured IQ by over 1 SD in numerous populations during the 20th Century alone. This is comparable to the mean difference in intelligence between individuals, and absolutely cannot be accounted for by changes to genetics.
There is also almost no difference between genetics of humans and chimpanzees. No difference, except in a few areas that happen to matter a lot.
As it turns out, 20 000 years is plenty enough for natural selection to make dramatic change in the genetic makeup of the population. For a most obvious example, look at the spread of lactase persistence mutation, which occurred and started spreading less than 20 000 years ago.
> It is also shown by the so-called "Flynn effect" [0], which is a substantial rise in measured IQ by over 1 SD in numerous populations during the 20th Century alone. This is comparable to the mean difference in intelligence between individuals, and absolutely cannot be accounted for by changes to genetics.
The Flynn gains are hollow, though. They are not on g factor, and it’s the g factor that’s responsible for the predictive validity of IQ.
Imagine a society where people use human foot length to measure distances. After a century or two, they observe that everything is getting shorter, a sort of anti-Hubble effect. Nobody noticed, however, that people have become taller on average, and so their feet became longer, so the actual change is only in the used metric, not the latent variable they are trying to measure. Flynn effect is like that.
This is independent of understanding how genes might affect intelligence.
I didn't know about the counting one and am not surprised by this. In a thread on another post I wrote that there is a lot of brain washing that occurs in the teaching of low level mathematics. It's easier to brain wash children in this sense than it is for adults.
e.g. there are essentially zero people with downs in Denmark because laws stipulate that you must genetically test the unborn.
Those few that make it through this eugenics program are the result of false negatives.
Universal screening had unintended eugenic consequences. That scientific fact isn’t controversial, what is controversial is to say whether it was good or bad.
Except for a very small lunatic fringe minority, progressives generally aren't saying genetics "don't matter", they're saying that they shouldn't. Someone might have a neurological learning disability for example but that doesn't mean you should disregard them but accommodate them to the fullest extent possible.
Sorry for the following tangent but I promise it's relevant:
There is a lot of "progressivism" in the media where "not saying color" is portrayed as a solution to racism but this has become so ubiquitous that even conservatives have started copying this line. That's because it doesn't actually address the underlying impact of racism, it just hides it and makes acknowledging its connection to "color" a social faux pas.
At this point progressives are the ones saying "race absolutely exists and is tied to someone's physical reality", where they disagree with race realists is the degree to which race is a useful concept outside addressing racism (where it is necessary because you can't talk about racial discrimination without acknowledging that people are being grouped into racial categories). Same with sexism, sex and gender differences. That something is a "social construct" doesn't mean it can't interact with physical realities -- "species" is a social construct but it's obvious almost any way you look at it that there is some kind of utility in grouping creatures into "hamster" or "human".
She mentions autism and deafness as examples for genetic differences but it's progressives who are the ones pushing the concept of "neurodiversity", i.e. accepting that there ARE differences between the way human minds work and that we should be more accepting of people whose minds work differently (e.g. some autistics being bad at reading social cues but intuitively engaging in systems thinking). Traditional mainstream liberalism again pushed the opposite approach, of treating disabled people not as disabled but "differently abled" (again, a viewpoint now often propagated by conservatives when celebrating individuals who "overcome" their disability, setting an expectation for others to do the same rather than ask for affordances), thus encouraging a view that ignores their need for accommodations and not engaging with the idea of what affordances are or aren't socially normalized and what is seen as a "burden" (because it only benefits a marginalized group) vs a "necessity" (because it benefits the dominant group).
A lot of this discourse was recently fueled by companies making accommodations because of COVID that they had previously dismissed as impossible and unreasonable when disabled or neurodivergent people asked for them.
So yes, it can absolutely be true simultaneously that genetics can have a massive impact on an individual while the effects are overshadowed by in-group variation. No two people are created equal, yet we should not use that as an excuse to disempower or elevate arbitrary groups but ensure they are given equally the affordances they need to participate in society and contribute what they can. And sadly where we've done so in the past we need to compensate for the generational harm they have been burdened with.
> Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes.
This is absolutely disgusting, to blatantly attack scientific inquiry this way. Shame on these reactionaries.
I am sure that if first order effects of genes is allowed, you get a never-ending stream of “tall people are diligent”, “blonde people are empathetic” and similar false results that are not only useless, but also might upset general public or sponsors.
> The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.
Most reasonable people know that human beings are the product of both nature and nurture. Your genes alone won’t make you successful, but they can help (or hurt) your progress in many ways.
The article touches on the actual nuance of the debate further down: The real debate seems to be about whether or not the genetic influence should be studied. Opponents argue that studying it could open the door to discrimination or, at the extremes, eugenics. The opponents would rather not look, under the idea that if we ignore it then nobody can use it against us. I don’t find that argument very compelling, and I kind of doubt it’s very common anyway. I think it gets attention because it’s a way to inject controversy into the subject, which is a way to get more clicks.
"I don't want to argue X but proceeds to argue X" is a common yet despicable rhetoric trick.
For example; are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist?
If they are and are functioning it means it can work. If they are not, maybe people have differing opinions of what socialism entails.
What usually is a "no true scotsman" argument is when someone only calls something socialist when it's not working, because if an implementation is working that would deflate the argument. See a few posts above.
Absolutely not. They are primarily market based with a relatively large welfare state. How is that even a question?
The socialists I am aware of are openly anti-capitalist, and want to focus on oppression above anything else, placing race and gender based oppression at the top of a hierarchy to be countered.
They are explicitly opposed to many aspects of the Scandinavian model which is largely market based, for example School Vouchers which are used in Sweden, would unthinkable to an American socialist.
That has been a disaster in Sweden. With increased segregation, corruption, and inflation in grades to please "customers".
Regardless, the point is that Scandinavian countries are not “socialist” in the way leftist Americans think of socialism.
Not true at all. Why are you making shit up?
They were introduced to "give choice". And marketed - by the right-wing government at that time btw - like small teacher-led "idea-based" companies or similar would be the primary result, rather than the large stock-market school corps that have been the natural result.
> Regardless, the point is that Scandinavian countries are not “socialist” in the way leftist Americans think of socialism.
Just because Scandinavia (Sweden in particular) too has suffered with a massive wave of neo-liberal privatizations the last 30 years or so doesn't mean that the former more "socialist" way was in any way shape or form worse than the corrupt mess that we have here now.
I don't disagree with you that most "socialists" want what is essentially a government modeled on the Nordic states. But its highly problematic for those people to delude themselves into thinking that is socialism. I think it boils down to a bunch of lemmings who essentially want social democracy who don't realize a fraction of their comrades genuinely want to abolish private property and install an authoritarian government. At the very least it makes one doubt how seriously their loud opinion should be taken when those opinions are completely internally inconsistent.
Some socialists, such as Marx, argue that the logical endpoint of socialism is communal ownership of the means of production at some point in the future when the average worker produces more than their need.
So the issue becomes that for socialist-structured companies to become effective and commonplace extensive government intervention is required. At that point the line between "worker" and "communal" means of production becomes pretty thin. Like a large amount of socialist theory, there is a lot of verbiage and effort devoted to theoretical concepts that, when the rubber meets the road, boil down to irrelevance.
This is not extensive government intervention, it boils down to a simple change in property ownership laws.
Also, loans are fully compatible with worker-owned companies, so you can still have capital transfer.
So I disagree very strongly that this "boils down to irrelevance".
Market socialism is a thing, and the form of socialism that most of the more thoughtful socialists prefer.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&type=comment&dateRange=a...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443445.
See also: the last 250 years of economic history.
"it has been balanced with more progressive policies."
That doesn't sound like unhindered capitalism.
It certainly seems like your assigning 100% of it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443079.
An example of culture mattering is Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
The problem is that these research studies tend to narrowly focus on trying to prove that white people are superior. Why? What is this the only question that interests such supposedly academic individuals? It's because, yes, they are Nazis. They can't figure out any questions worth asking that don't boil down to the same old race baiting.
Where did you get this impression?
Bare in mind that the studies you hear about are the ones that generated some controversy.
The scientific method simply put is "Truth has more validity then beliefs". Of course we don't have access to Truth so we use evidence as a proxy to Truth via interpretation.
Obviously interpretations may vary and even contradict, but that's a good thing and discussion should be encouraged, not censored, as we hopefully stirve towards consensus.
In the spirit of this I have no problem with holocaust deniers moon landing truthers etc insofar as the presentation and discussion of evidence is concerned.
I think that there should be strong public unacceptance of any kind of scientific discussions being shot down.
Science is about making a hypothesis and then verifying that hypothesis against observations. That's it.
One thing to note is that within science and therefore the universe as we know it, no hypothesis can be verified to be 100% true. In other words no statement about the universe can ever be proven true.
This occurs due to a number of things. First, all observations have statistical inaccuracies attached to them. Nothing is ever 100% accurate. Thus because observations aren't 100% accurate, observations can never be used to prove a statement with 100% accuracy as a consequence.
Second, the universe is unknown and thus at any point in time we can suddenly uncover and observe a completely new piece of evidence that totally invalidates all previous hypothesis.
I know what you're talking about in your post. But when you truly understand science you will see that the line between truth and belief is actually really blurry. Science has given us zero verified truths. It has only given us probabilities and likelihoods that we just assume (aka believe) to be true.
In fact the foundations of science function off axiomatic assumptions that logic is real and probability is real. These two aspects of reality can NEVER be verified as they are the tools we use to verify other things.
But it's true: If progressives get it into their collective heads that genetics are a huge factor in economic, social, and psychological outcomes, eugenics will be right there on the table (again). While conservatives might use this knowledge to stop welfare, progressives will be self-righteously sterilizing people (again). So, the danger is real.
In both cases, the complaint is missing the point: some subset of progressives and some subset of other religious extremists aren't even having the same conversation you are.