> why on earth would I pretend that an aerospace engineer’s talents are as easy to come by or acquire as that of a skilled barista?
Thank you for helping me to articulate why this viral tweet (21k likes) has been irritating the shit out of me:
"If you have a robust skincare routine you have demonstrated aptitude in many core skills of data science. I will not be taking criticism of this idea. Girls who have developed personalized skincare routines know more about multivariate causal inference than many engineers."
I want young girls to feel good about themselves. But we don't need to tell them that shopping at Sephora means they're data scientists.
Failure to admit that there are stark differences in abilities, whether from intrinsic and extrinsic sources, leads to the corrosive belief that the poor are poor because of some moral failing and the wealthy are wealthy because of some moral superiority.
One question is how you prevent kids who are “tracked” according to ability from being forgotten about if they’re the lower achievers. I think that’s what people are really concerned about when they quibble with this idea.
Another is when does being in a lower performing setting impact the outcomes of a kid with more potential? There’s been talk about the better performing kids “uplifting” average or poor classrooms - how many better performing kids does that take and when do their outcomes get impacted?
I came to this substack after reading _The Cult of Smart_ (which-I think I heard you & Joe Rogan discuss) so I have that background. Your book really helps people to understand that range of abilities and different abilities are ok. I know intelligence is a minefield. Librarians spent a lot of time on books for adult new readers trying to engage non-readers. Some will never do like to read and are more visual or oral. But getting away from intelligence...why is it ok for some people to be sports super stars and others not? Or musical and others not?
Yes. A very quick story. I have a nephew, now 30, who is VERY smart, a good student, now a software engineer at Google, etc. When he was 12 or so he started playing chess, and became serious about it: books, problems, and then a tutor, an old Russian master, that he would visit every week. After a few months of this, he came to the tutor's house one day, and there was a 7-year old girl there. "Play her," he said. My nephew felt a bit weird, but he sat down across from her, and in a few minutes she crushed him. Then she did it again. And again. That day he realized that even though he loved the game, and would continue to enjoy it, she *had* something that he did not have, and that was the end of his chess "career." So, yes, of course.
"that is, that not only are there no inherent predispositions towards being good or bad at school, no one even becomes better or worse, no one is smarter than another. There are no measurable differences in what we know or can do intellectually. "
Is there a term for this? I see so much pseudo-intellectual output that involves little more than obscuring things that we actually know. What REALLY is intelligence? What REALLY is being able to read? What REALLY is health? It subtract rather than adds to our knowledge of the world. I fucking hate it.
I think conservatives would probably call this "post-modernism," but I don't think that's it.
I think part of the cause of the mystification about intelligence among, say, academics (who are by and large in its upper echelons) comes from a conviction that such mystification is somehow liberating for those who would not usually be successful. Two examples.
1. In philosophy, one explanation for the preponderance of men is that philosophers think of one another and care about genius. The big names are (thought to be) supremely intelligent and this more or less innate capacity is taken to explain their success. The idea is that women, who are, let's supposed, generally socialized not to think of themselves in such grandiose terms, take it that they are not geniuses, so cannot succeed in philosophy, and self-select out. Removing this pernicious myth is thus floated as one way of correcting the imbalance between the sexes.
2. More broadly in pedagogy, teachers are told they have to instill a "growth mindset:" students must believe, if they struggle with a task or a subject matter, that they are capable of growing and succeeding if only they put their mind to it. A belief that they simply aren't smart enough, no matter how they try, is taken to inhibit this necessary effort, and so a teacher should be a constant cheerleader, framing every obstacle a student faces as conquerable if they put their mind to it.
Both of these denials of the importance or even the existence of intelligence are made with the best of the intentions. They may even, for all I know, attain their desired ends, at least to some degree. They both, however, deny reality: the big names really were, by and large, actually geniuses, and sometimes you just will never be good at something no matter how you try. Assuming, then, that there is a problem of people giving up to soon, it would seem better, at least more honest, rather than peddling the noble lie that intelligence has no part in success, to instead try to uncover and cure the (irrational) lack of self-confidence that leads to people surrendering before the battle is lost.
I do think that wealth/power has the ability to create the *impression* of intelligence, and that at least some attacks on the concept of intelligence are actually attempting to attack the upper-middle-class-smart-person-complex. There are certain cash-grab graduate programs available to anyone with money to convert into an Ivy League degree. There are white-collar jobs that really do consist of dicking around on a spreadsheet all day. I don't think that an aerospace engineer's talents are as easy to come by as a barista's, but I do think there are a lot of people who think they're Smarter than a barista because they had the grades and extracurriculars to go to a Good School or they have an emails job instead of a service job or they bought a terminal degree in a relatively non-rigorous field. I totally get the impulse to attack those people and the idea that certain signifiers are equivalent to intelligence. That said, the correct response is not that there's no such thing as intelligence or that all skill sets are created equal.
“If the concern is saying that there are attributes and abilities in life that matter that are not academic or connected to intelligence, and that they should be taken seriously and rewarded, the news is good, as this is perhaps the core argument of my book.”
Two questions (to which I do not, myself, have answers):
1) What’s the best argument for this, in your view? I ask because this reminded me of John McWhorter saying (in the context of the racial IQ gap debate): “Given a choice between history’s having produced Beethoven — or Ray Charles, or Hamilton — and its having produced penicillin, all would choose the latter.” I don’t know that I agree — or, at least, if our self-worth depends on being the person who invents penicillin, most of us will be very disappointed. But would be curious to hear your view in a nutshell. (I am still working my way through the book, I swear.)
2) Assume there are many socially valuable traits — musical and artistic and athletic ability, a la Gardner, but also loyalty and a strong work ethic and civic duty and sense of humor and so on. Still… if each of these can be plotted on a scale, are there people who fall at the far left of every scale — who are poor at all facets of being human? Lumpenproletariat or what have you? People who are neither skilled nor moral nor pleasant? If so, what do we do with them? Does every person have some value beyond the sum of their utility functions for other humans, and if so, from what does it derive? (I would accept religious or quasi-religious answers. I would also accept a Rawlsian argument that we treat each person AS IF they had value, because none of us knows before he is born which kind of person he will be. But, again, curious what your framework is.)
Funny sad how AI is still so mediocre at writing program code (so far); but it keeps code-writers well-paid. Python is easier than C or FORTRAN.
"But why on earth would I pretend that an aerospace engineer’s talents are as easy to come by or acquire as that of a skilled barista? I want to fight for equality in full view of reality, please."
I think you mean "economic equality" and, sort of pragmatically, "less economic inequality".
My wife, after finishing 6 yr Med school (in Slovakia 30 years ago, after the 89 velvet revolution) found out that senior janitors in hospitals make as much, a few even more, than starting doctors. This has been changing but there's a huge doctor salary difference between central Europe and Western Europe & the US. Many doctors & nurses leave for higher pay elsewhere.
What do you think the salary differences should be? (how to get there is quite different question)
I think of low IQ folk, like Forrest Gump, and "how much should he make" for being a dishwasher, or janitor, or gardener, or trash collector or...
What about a similar guy who is lazy? Or more reckless, willing to make more mistakes? Or one who becomes an addict: drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling. Crime? (Is the thrill of stealing something one gets addicted to?)
Wait, "Not everybody who is poor is low-IQ and/or lazy, careless, or irresponsible" ... yeah yeah. That deflection is why there is so little talk about how society should be encouraging such people to live - subsiding desirable actions and punishing the illegal ones, with reality punishing the legal but life-negative ones.
Similarly "Not everybody who does poor at school is low-IQ" -- so there's too little talk about what is a "good school" for the low-IQ students.
You say: "What the left pushes for is equality of human value," but CRT clearly teaches that whites have less value, and most anti-Trump voter news articles (by elites!) exude contempt for such humans. You may want "the left" to push for equality, but that's not the left today.
That actual left, today, is also against Free Speech - so it's very illiberal.
It's simple: it undercuts meritocracy, which much of the left has taken on-board, consciously or not. People don't like being told they're successful for reasons outside of their control/effort, and they really don't like being told they are excluded from success due to flukes of heritage. Just World cuts deep. The successful in society are highly invested in believing that their success is legitimate, and the unsuccessful are often conned into believing their failure is their own fault.
If you really want to have fun, dig into health privilege or beauty privilege. People really really really don't like that, say, an unattractive woman is more likely to be judged guilty by a jury than an attractive woman. In my experience they'll do everything possible to reject that such a thing is possible.
You only touched on it briefly, but the expectations surrounding coding are insane. I've been doing it professionally for 20 years, have a degree from a great university and have worked at very good companies. Only in the past few years have I started to feel like I'm actually good at it.
The fact that a smart grad student struggles with it should tell us that maybe not all kids are going to pick up on it. But nope, lets treat it like math and torture 90% of students with it...
My mom was a teacher and a great one but she always seemed to believe, in a flower child kind of way, that we could all be doctors or engineers if we wanted to. I think I mostly believed her until my husband and I adopted our children. Want some back up for the power of genetics? Ask an adoptive parent. Both of our kids were adopted as infants. One is social-butterfly artist that everyone likes but couldn’t make change to save her life. The other one scores in the top percentiles on everything academic and has the social skills of a lovable brick wall. I think our emphasis on education and our financial ability to give them opportunities has definitely enhanced their lives, but we have had zero to do with their skill sets.
Along the same lines, not sure if I’ve missed it but would love to read your thoughts on gender differences in education and the decreasing numbers of boys succeeding in high schools and choosing to attend college. Touring colleges with our daughter this has become really evident.
"No one knows what smart is, it’s some sort of ineffable quality we can’t pin down."
This is closest to the truth in our current society. IQ is an accurate measure for certain arbitrary tendencies, but social intelligence is far more important right now. Nobody can possibly even come close to putting a number on it, however. It is far more valuable in all ways to an individual to be "smart" socially than it is for that individual to be "smart" academically.
I think this is the central flaw rationalists have: their defining feature is that they generally lack social intelligence, so they cling ever more closely to IQ and are much the worse off for it.
> why on earth would I pretend that an aerospace engineer’s talents are as easy to come by or acquire as that of a skilled barista?
Thank you for helping me to articulate why this viral tweet (21k likes) has been irritating the shit out of me:
"If you have a robust skincare routine you have demonstrated aptitude in many core skills of data science. I will not be taking criticism of this idea. Girls who have developed personalized skincare routines know more about multivariate causal inference than many engineers."
I want young girls to feel good about themselves. But we don't need to tell them that shopping at Sephora means they're data scientists.
Source: https://twitter.com/grimalkina/status/1484585594059583488
This is an object lesson on how stupid intellectuals are, forklift drivers know this and yet we are for bidden to speak about it.
Failure to admit that there are stark differences in abilities, whether from intrinsic and extrinsic sources, leads to the corrosive belief that the poor are poor because of some moral failing and the wealthy are wealthy because of some moral superiority.
Doesn’t seem particularly controversial to me.
One question is how you prevent kids who are “tracked” according to ability from being forgotten about if they’re the lower achievers. I think that’s what people are really concerned about when they quibble with this idea.
Another is when does being in a lower performing setting impact the outcomes of a kid with more potential? There’s been talk about the better performing kids “uplifting” average or poor classrooms - how many better performing kids does that take and when do their outcomes get impacted?
I came to this substack after reading _The Cult of Smart_ (which-I think I heard you & Joe Rogan discuss) so I have that background. Your book really helps people to understand that range of abilities and different abilities are ok. I know intelligence is a minefield. Librarians spent a lot of time on books for adult new readers trying to engage non-readers. Some will never do like to read and are more visual or oral. But getting away from intelligence...why is it ok for some people to be sports super stars and others not? Or musical and others not?
Yes. A very quick story. I have a nephew, now 30, who is VERY smart, a good student, now a software engineer at Google, etc. When he was 12 or so he started playing chess, and became serious about it: books, problems, and then a tutor, an old Russian master, that he would visit every week. After a few months of this, he came to the tutor's house one day, and there was a 7-year old girl there. "Play her," he said. My nephew felt a bit weird, but he sat down across from her, and in a few minutes she crushed him. Then she did it again. And again. That day he realized that even though he loved the game, and would continue to enjoy it, she *had* something that he did not have, and that was the end of his chess "career." So, yes, of course.
"that is, that not only are there no inherent predispositions towards being good or bad at school, no one even becomes better or worse, no one is smarter than another. There are no measurable differences in what we know or can do intellectually. "
Is there a term for this? I see so much pseudo-intellectual output that involves little more than obscuring things that we actually know. What REALLY is intelligence? What REALLY is being able to read? What REALLY is health? It subtract rather than adds to our knowledge of the world. I fucking hate it.
I think conservatives would probably call this "post-modernism," but I don't think that's it.
I think part of the cause of the mystification about intelligence among, say, academics (who are by and large in its upper echelons) comes from a conviction that such mystification is somehow liberating for those who would not usually be successful. Two examples.
1. In philosophy, one explanation for the preponderance of men is that philosophers think of one another and care about genius. The big names are (thought to be) supremely intelligent and this more or less innate capacity is taken to explain their success. The idea is that women, who are, let's supposed, generally socialized not to think of themselves in such grandiose terms, take it that they are not geniuses, so cannot succeed in philosophy, and self-select out. Removing this pernicious myth is thus floated as one way of correcting the imbalance between the sexes.
2. More broadly in pedagogy, teachers are told they have to instill a "growth mindset:" students must believe, if they struggle with a task or a subject matter, that they are capable of growing and succeeding if only they put their mind to it. A belief that they simply aren't smart enough, no matter how they try, is taken to inhibit this necessary effort, and so a teacher should be a constant cheerleader, framing every obstacle a student faces as conquerable if they put their mind to it.
Both of these denials of the importance or even the existence of intelligence are made with the best of the intentions. They may even, for all I know, attain their desired ends, at least to some degree. They both, however, deny reality: the big names really were, by and large, actually geniuses, and sometimes you just will never be good at something no matter how you try. Assuming, then, that there is a problem of people giving up to soon, it would seem better, at least more honest, rather than peddling the noble lie that intelligence has no part in success, to instead try to uncover and cure the (irrational) lack of self-confidence that leads to people surrendering before the battle is lost.
I totally agree with this post.
I do think that wealth/power has the ability to create the *impression* of intelligence, and that at least some attacks on the concept of intelligence are actually attempting to attack the upper-middle-class-smart-person-complex. There are certain cash-grab graduate programs available to anyone with money to convert into an Ivy League degree. There are white-collar jobs that really do consist of dicking around on a spreadsheet all day. I don't think that an aerospace engineer's talents are as easy to come by as a barista's, but I do think there are a lot of people who think they're Smarter than a barista because they had the grades and extracurriculars to go to a Good School or they have an emails job instead of a service job or they bought a terminal degree in a relatively non-rigorous field. I totally get the impulse to attack those people and the idea that certain signifiers are equivalent to intelligence. That said, the correct response is not that there's no such thing as intelligence or that all skill sets are created equal.
“If the concern is saying that there are attributes and abilities in life that matter that are not academic or connected to intelligence, and that they should be taken seriously and rewarded, the news is good, as this is perhaps the core argument of my book.”
Two questions (to which I do not, myself, have answers):
1) What’s the best argument for this, in your view? I ask because this reminded me of John McWhorter saying (in the context of the racial IQ gap debate): “Given a choice between history’s having produced Beethoven — or Ray Charles, or Hamilton — and its having produced penicillin, all would choose the latter.” I don’t know that I agree — or, at least, if our self-worth depends on being the person who invents penicillin, most of us will be very disappointed. But would be curious to hear your view in a nutshell. (I am still working my way through the book, I swear.)
2) Assume there are many socially valuable traits — musical and artistic and athletic ability, a la Gardner, but also loyalty and a strong work ethic and civic duty and sense of humor and so on. Still… if each of these can be plotted on a scale, are there people who fall at the far left of every scale — who are poor at all facets of being human? Lumpenproletariat or what have you? People who are neither skilled nor moral nor pleasant? If so, what do we do with them? Does every person have some value beyond the sum of their utility functions for other humans, and if so, from what does it derive? (I would accept religious or quasi-religious answers. I would also accept a Rawlsian argument that we treat each person AS IF they had value, because none of us knows before he is born which kind of person he will be. But, again, curious what your framework is.)
Funny sad how AI is still so mediocre at writing program code (so far); but it keeps code-writers well-paid. Python is easier than C or FORTRAN.
"But why on earth would I pretend that an aerospace engineer’s talents are as easy to come by or acquire as that of a skilled barista? I want to fight for equality in full view of reality, please."
I think you mean "economic equality" and, sort of pragmatically, "less economic inequality".
My wife, after finishing 6 yr Med school (in Slovakia 30 years ago, after the 89 velvet revolution) found out that senior janitors in hospitals make as much, a few even more, than starting doctors. This has been changing but there's a huge doctor salary difference between central Europe and Western Europe & the US. Many doctors & nurses leave for higher pay elsewhere.
What do you think the salary differences should be? (how to get there is quite different question)
I think of low IQ folk, like Forrest Gump, and "how much should he make" for being a dishwasher, or janitor, or gardener, or trash collector or...
What about a similar guy who is lazy? Or more reckless, willing to make more mistakes? Or one who becomes an addict: drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling. Crime? (Is the thrill of stealing something one gets addicted to?)
Wait, "Not everybody who is poor is low-IQ and/or lazy, careless, or irresponsible" ... yeah yeah. That deflection is why there is so little talk about how society should be encouraging such people to live - subsiding desirable actions and punishing the illegal ones, with reality punishing the legal but life-negative ones.
Similarly "Not everybody who does poor at school is low-IQ" -- so there's too little talk about what is a "good school" for the low-IQ students.
You say: "What the left pushes for is equality of human value," but CRT clearly teaches that whites have less value, and most anti-Trump voter news articles (by elites!) exude contempt for such humans. You may want "the left" to push for equality, but that's not the left today.
That actual left, today, is also against Free Speech - so it's very illiberal.
It's simple: it undercuts meritocracy, which much of the left has taken on-board, consciously or not. People don't like being told they're successful for reasons outside of their control/effort, and they really don't like being told they are excluded from success due to flukes of heritage. Just World cuts deep. The successful in society are highly invested in believing that their success is legitimate, and the unsuccessful are often conned into believing their failure is their own fault.
If you really want to have fun, dig into health privilege or beauty privilege. People really really really don't like that, say, an unattractive woman is more likely to be judged guilty by a jury than an attractive woman. In my experience they'll do everything possible to reject that such a thing is possible.
You only touched on it briefly, but the expectations surrounding coding are insane. I've been doing it professionally for 20 years, have a degree from a great university and have worked at very good companies. Only in the past few years have I started to feel like I'm actually good at it.
The fact that a smart grad student struggles with it should tell us that maybe not all kids are going to pick up on it. But nope, lets treat it like math and torture 90% of students with it...
My mom was a teacher and a great one but she always seemed to believe, in a flower child kind of way, that we could all be doctors or engineers if we wanted to. I think I mostly believed her until my husband and I adopted our children. Want some back up for the power of genetics? Ask an adoptive parent. Both of our kids were adopted as infants. One is social-butterfly artist that everyone likes but couldn’t make change to save her life. The other one scores in the top percentiles on everything academic and has the social skills of a lovable brick wall. I think our emphasis on education and our financial ability to give them opportunities has definitely enhanced their lives, but we have had zero to do with their skill sets.
Along the same lines, not sure if I’ve missed it but would love to read your thoughts on gender differences in education and the decreasing numbers of boys succeeding in high schools and choosing to attend college. Touring colleges with our daughter this has become really evident.
"No one knows what smart is, it’s some sort of ineffable quality we can’t pin down."
This is closest to the truth in our current society. IQ is an accurate measure for certain arbitrary tendencies, but social intelligence is far more important right now. Nobody can possibly even come close to putting a number on it, however. It is far more valuable in all ways to an individual to be "smart" socially than it is for that individual to be "smart" academically.
I think this is the central flaw rationalists have: their defining feature is that they generally lack social intelligence, so they cling ever more closely to IQ and are much the worse off for it.