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May 22, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

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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"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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"Where did this trope come from?" It smells religious to me: Satan has a divine power to lead people astray, such that no mortal can rescue them. Y'know, /Index Librorum Prohibitorum/ and all that. Gotta keep my soul pure so it'll fetch a higher price on eBay.

I remember a time when I just had to find out what this "social Darwinism" thing was, because if so many people of strong political views were insisting it was stupid, there almost had to be a tiny grain of sense in it, perhaps even wisdom. I was quite disappointed when I finally dug up its definition.

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The left by ignoring what SAT Tests reveals and stigmatizing anybody that makes too much of it cedes it to the race supremacists. Where it could be used as a tool to better address the issues. Frustrating.

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So I just turned 50, and spent my entire childhood in Manhattan, on the unfashionable part of the Upper East Side (the opening credits of The Prisoner Of Second Avenue go by the street I lived on, between 2nd and 3rd Avenues). “I was there”, but I also wasn’t, because while punk bands were being formed in The Bowery, I was playing stickball across from the two room apartment I lived in with my Mom, and my mental association with The Bowery was the bank that Joe DiMaggio shilled for on TV.

I haven’t lived in NYC as an adult, yet I have an immense pride for the version of it that I grew up in, from 1971 to 1988. I was incredibly fortunate to have a Mom that was brilliant and opinionated and unafraid, who could not so much guide me as nudge me to see parts of the culture that I wouldn’t have even known existed otherwise.

And yet, as Freddie says, the shit ordinary people put up with was fucked up. I didn’t see a lot personally, but watching interviews from the Ken Burns documentary about the Central Park Five brought something back to me, especially the one person saying how “you had your routine, your way of getting to work and back home, and you thought your way was how you’d get by without getting mugged”. It’s hard to not conclude that the undesirability of New York gave space for a lot of savvy people to create in ways that I love and cherish, and speak with a voice from my home, but now I also factor in the countless people back then who got beat up or worse every day: did it have to be that way?

I still miss it, though.

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What is gawd's name is the lead picture with the truck accident in the snow and some kind of red sticky stuff splattered all over?

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