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Elana's avatar

You probably already know that Matthew Yglesias had a post on slow boring regarding the SAT yesterday. He linked to your post and cited one of the studies you linked to. But there was a comment posted by one of the subscribers that I thought would interest you. The commenter is one of the few right-of-center commenters on Slow Boring and here’s what he had to say about your book:

“Freddie DeBoer's book and the heritability of intelligence (as measured by SAT & academic achievement) are the primary reasons I changed my mind and now support welfare policies and a progressive tax code. I was raised in a household that valued hard work, and implicitly equated success in any field of endeavor to the level of dedication and effort put forth. I am grateful for the work ethic that upbringing instilled in me. I still think personal responsibility, effort, courtesy and risk-taking are important differentiators in levels of success and those things should be rewarded.

The research into the heritability of intelligence, though, is rock solid. It makes us uncomfortable when stratified by race, but that doesn't invalidate the data. And once I internalized the conclusion that a part (even a large part) of one's success in our meritocratic society is inherited, I finally recognized that those who earn less money are also victims of those same phenomena. Though we can and should argue over how much of one's earnings are deserved due to self-controlled actions versus the luck of birth (parents, the society created by our forefathers, etc), the redistribution of some portion of those earnings from the lucky to the unlucky is now something I strongly support.

The level of redistribution, and mitigating the moral hazard of that redistribution, is where I wish our political arguments would take place. The centrality of Kendi-style, identity-based arguments in today's political discourse is frustrating to me.”

So maybe your book was not the pop-seller you were hoping for (though time will tell. I could see your book getting a steady, slow following and becoming more popular than you see now). But you genuinely changed someone’s mind. We know how rare that is these days. And that will have a ripple effect. And knowing your ultimate goal of compassionate redistribution of wealth, I call that success.

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Always Adblock's avatar

"The idea that we’re all so vulnerable to bad ideas, endlessly moldable clay that can become one of the fallen if the wrong idea briefly flits across our brain, is so bizarre and pernicious. Where did this trope come from?"

That's not what it is. At least not in this case. The reason for cancelation and censorship isn't that the ideas are bad. It's that they are in a lot of cases completely reasonable and that it's the liberal consensus that's wrong, and that if you expose people to them they might believe their lying eyes.

Was the possibility - not the guarantee, the possibility - of a lab leak of COVID a "bad idea"? No, it was a very, very reasonable one, hence the screaming denunciation and banning of anyone who mentioned it for the better part of 18 months.

Nobody gets canceled for saying that high crime is caused by the fact that the moon is made of green cheese, even though it's a worse idea that most any competing theory.

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