> 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.
your own writing may help some of us to know what DS do. My field (used to be library science) now teaches DS--that is where I work--an iSchool-- and I do not know what to say to the DS people who teach Python and R but I'm still teaching book history so they ignore me and I am not in same orbit as them. I seriously doubt when I move on if book history will be taught.
Yeah that’s virtuous bullshit. She could say “this is a real world example of elementary data science” but no. Gotta take it to the next level. Set up a recruiting table for NASA in Ulta.
Yes, it was late and I didn't but when I have to stop and look up things KK seems to take for granted I know I need a glossary. I think he should do a glossary on the home page for his substack.
The pure Twitterspeak (or whatever you want to call it) on display there is irritating enough on its own. Also: "If they can keep acting like hanging out in garages is 'computers' we get to have this."
I may be out of touch, but are they really acting like that? It seems like the boys "doing computers" are actually, y'know, doing computers, because they have access to them. It's not 1977.
Oh jeez--are we back to this again? I'm old enough to remember the same kind of condescension about how the average housewife had a harder job than anybody because she had to be somehow a professional chef, a tailor, a janitor, a purchasing agent, yada yada. As if the average 1960's dinner menu was the same as what was served in a fancy restaurant, and navigating a department store was the same as fufilling a government purchasing spec.
Yes! Or when people add up household tasks and conclude that the salary should be $100k (after all, they’re “at work” 24/7). We can appreciate domestic work, and argue for financial support, without patronizing women.
Been both a project manager and a house spouse. No comparison. Unless you have an army of kids, running the average American household doesn't take that much time. The house job is way better because nobody is hassling you about "deliverables" and weekly status updates.
Having been a house-husband, and a product development engineer ... I never had to negotiate for stove time, nor bargain for butter in my own kitchen. But I regularly had to fight for tester time, disk space, and specific material when I was a product engineer.
I bet nobody told you that you had to get your kids dressed in clean clothes in 30 minutes, even though every scrap of clothing in the house had to be washed and dried and that would take an hour at minimum even if you crammed everything together in one load and sacrificed quality. And if you pointed out this very basic fact you were told you are not a team player.
The thing about the house spouse job, is that there's more house spouse jobs around than there are people who are actually good at the skills it needs.
In the working world, people who won't make good project managers can be writers or programmers or bus drivers instead.
The really unfortunate thing is where two suck-ass project managers marry *each* *other* ...
I mean, running one’s own life is the biggest project management job there is, but we all have to do it! I don’t feel like being condescended to about the monetary value of being a mom makes me feel “valid”. Life is hard and running a household and being a parent is hard. Yes it would cost a lot of money to hire out all the things a house spouse does, but it would cost a lot of money to hire someone to be my personal assistant, housekeeper, chef, chauffeur, etc and it doesn’t mean running my own life is the same as being a CEO.
I think the point people are trying to make with the money (inflated as it is), is that it's not "everyone" doing it: it is women doing housework and related tasks like elder care, and historically that's been utterly ignored as a task that generates value.
Not everything has to have direct economic value to be highly important, often more important than work that generates a dollar value. I’d rather be able to acknowledge that than try to jam everything into the capitalistic mode of equating worth with dollars and cents.
This is why I am a huge fan of the expanded child tax credit. I'd take it a step further and provide social security credits for people who take time out of paid employment to do unpaid care for others--kids, parents, extended family. We see the sacrifices that families make to care for each other--people will abandon careers or quit jobs to care for babies or elders. Why not build on that preference and give stipends and social security credits for family caregiving and then see what the demand is for daycare, pre-K and institutionalized elder care? My hunch is that the "daycare crisis" would not be there and that wages would go UP for people in the paid workforce.
This kind of arrangement got a bad rap in the '60's because the people burdened with child and elder care didn't get to choose it. Because of their sex they were not included in the workforce and it was just expected they'd do all this for free so that men could get on with whatever. Capital has been exploiting the relative abundance of labor that was unleashed in the '70's by luring women into the workforce and then when that pool of cheap labor was tapped out, undermining immigration laws to create another pool of powerless labor. Now the "solution" is daycare and universal pre-K so that everybody has to be on the treadmill. It would be a lot easier and more humane to just make it economically possible to care for your own parents and children and still live decently.
Running one's own life is NOT project management! You are in charge of your own life. There are no external milestones you have to meet on penalty of losing your livelihood. If we are going to beat this wrong analogy to death, your life isn't a fucking project. At the very least it is a program.
When I was a young girl who was more interested in math than, uh, beauty rituals, this kind of messaging definitely did not make me feel good about myself.
You know what else kind of makes me sad here is the missed opportunity. The post could have used an interest in skin care (that I'm sure is shared by some men as well) to convey a mathematical concept that would actually be useful to people in their hobby and spark something other than a sense of smugness in the intended audience. Like I couldn't tell you what she had in mind about the data science embedded in skin care but, you know, show that! Instead of a demonstration of the benefits of formalization and quantification we get apparent disdain for those things.
Skincare culture is so fucked up, if only because of all the additonal useless plastic shit that culture releases into the environment. The mental health issues it causes are even worse.
As a grown man who has had terrible skin since he was a teen, used Acne meds and all kinds of soaps, etc, and now has a wife who has great skin—despite having barely any "skincare routine" worth mentioning beyond "occasionally moisturize and use non-harsh soap"— I would point out this also overlaps with Freddie's point in that a significant factor in the efficacy of skincare is genetic.
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.
Most "moral superiority" of the wealthy is BS, but there's something about morality and poor folk that is seldom discussed quantitatively. Mistakes. The difference between 1 in 10, 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, and 1 in 10,000 (days where a clear mistake was made) - those differences are huge.
"Morality" is a way of minimizing mistakes.
"Immoral" behavior more often leads to bad outcomes.
Capitalism and measuring profit also reduces system mistakes far more reliably, and usually sooner, than any other system.
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?
That idea that smart kids can "uplift" their lower achieving peers has always pissed me off. Since when is it the responsibility of a kid to teach their friends? Isn't that what parents and teachers are supposed to do? Stop foisting your responsibilities off on kids! Even if a kid is bright, they may not have great social skills or be good at explaining things.
Yes, that’s true - but if a child finishes class work in 15 minutes that it takes peers 30 minutes to do, is the best use of the excess time helping classmates on stuff the kid has already just done?
I don't know. What do you think? Having been on both sides of that transaction--the kid who took forever to do math, but the kid who whipped through her spelling words in 10 minutes, my thought would be to give the fast kid something else to do that would engage them. I'm not sure it is a good idea to expect them to help their classmates. Kids may be able to do the work but their reasoning process might be idiosyncratic. Kids can also be jerks and and those who finish fast and then help the teacher can be ostracized for being suck ups.
I don't know about "expect" if that means "make." But I think "let" and "encourage" would be nice. I would personally prefer a culture where education was seen as a cooperative, we-all-want-to know-the-thing effort, rather than a competition. As for idiosyncratic -- fine and good. There is often more than one approach, and even knowing only this is mind-expanding.
Agree. There was a big focus on "project based" learning when my kids were students--the teacher would break the class into small groups of 3-4 kids and have them work together on problem sets. There was NO guidance as to how to work in groups, so the pattern was one or two kids did the work and the others sat around. Again-nothing wrong with peer tutoring and I think it has much to recommend it, but peer tutoring isn't the same as just assigning work and trusting the kids to figure out group dynamics. They are kids and kids, even adolescents, are still figuring out group dynamics and where they fit in.
"I would personally prefer a culture where education was seen as a cooperative, we-all-want-to know-the-thing effort, rather than a competition."
I realize I'm late to this. But first no, that's not how you want the smart kids to spend their time, in no small part because smart kids aren't teachers and it's a waste of their time and possibly hurtful to the lower ability kid.
Case by case basis, depending on the subject and the kid. Understanding something to the point of being able to explain it to someone else is very often not the same as what the kid has already just done. In seeing why someone else didn't get it, it sometimes makes you approach something in a different way that requires more reflection.
You're right. I'm talking about one of the arguments for eliminating honors or gifted/talented classes, which is that if the smartest kids are in the mainstream classes, their presence will somehow "elevate" the achievement of the entire group. It's never entirely clear what that means, but I suspect it means "raise the average test score for this group of kids so that the school doesn't look bad." Some educators will argue that a kid who is good at say, algebra, can help other kids with their work and that is a good thing. Yes it is, and if a school wants to encourage peer tutoring then create a time and space for it. Don't make the kids sit around in class fiddling with their phones while the teacher works with the students who are struggling. That is just asking for the bright kids to check out and hate school.
Oh screw that, agreed. It's also asking for the slower kids to shut down and not raise a hand, because they don't want to be the one slowing the parade down. This argument is often presented as though it justifies itself, without any specific, what-actually-happens-in-detail evidence.
Which folks? Are you saying the kids who finish fast go around and teach according to their understanding? Because that is why I am suspicious of the "each one teach one" idea. Just because some 14 year old thinks they have figured out quadratic equations doesn't mean they can effectively teach another 14 year old. Which is why I said kids often have "idiosyncratic" ways of understanding/learning concepts.
I went to a big public h.s. school in the MW. There were 15 classes and we were placed in homerooms by testing ability--6-1, 6-2...6-15.
I was a 6-2. The 6-1s were almost all boys who went into engineering fields. We 6-2s were a mix of girls and boys. Once in H.S 6-11 through 6-15s went to auto and shop classes. The 6-15 s were mostly boys. Can you believe that was once done? BTW, most of the kids in the high numbers went into military or trades or small business and ..at least so far as I remember from the one reunion I went to ...most were fine. Looking back this was draconian...you were in college prep or you weren't...but I do remember the fellows in auto classes had cars and were among the most sought after dates. This kind of school would be a great study but I am sure this is done no where now. I don't remember anxiety of who was in which class..the school body was kind of proud of the high ranking class who won debates against other schools...if there was any envy it was, as you would expect, about sports prowess.
We had a similar system, but I think they were craftier about the labels. I remember being with a bunch of kids that more or less were interested in the same things I was interested in, and there were whole groups of kids that seemed to spend all of their time over in the "business center" or in the shop complex. I think tracking got a bad rap because not all schools had the resources to provide business centers or auto shops, and so the 6.15's got dumped into a classroom and were ignored by a teacher that the principal was unable to get rid of.
a few years later I learned they did a reverse sort of thing so the 2 ends were higher academically 6-7 and 6-8 were the non-college bound. As if the students didn't figure it out. But later they used the term "gifted" and I think that was a labelling that created perceptions of not being gifted--esp.in a family where some are designated "gifted" and some not so. There were also programs that had students assigned to work as part of their HS program. We have had alternatives to what we have now.
I think Europeans are generally heading into their trades or profession at the age of 18 unless they take time off, so I assume high school has to start being tracked like that if you're going to have 17 year olds making the decisions to pursue medicine or law school.
In my UK high school we were tracked for most things, including Maths, English and languages, and I vividly remember that in the second form they simply took the entire bottom track of the Latin classes and sent them off to do Drama and social sciences instead. I was so pissed. I was in track 3 out of 4, if only I'd realised I needed to make my work that much crappier...
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?
Thank you, we know a bit about lot or where to find it. And I can access databases for anyone who needs them. BTW--a librarian won Jeopardy last night and he's not the first.
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.
When I go round to the club and get routed by a gaggle of sixth-graders, little do they realize that, with each of their piercing "Checkmate"s, they are feeding my pathological need for humiliation.
Does he still play it for fun? It's depressing to me when I see people quit doing something entirely because they rose to a level where they suddenly weren't better than everyone else there. Unless they were ONLY doing it for the gold stars to begin with.
Music is another one of those areas. Especially jazz. People who have good ears naturally will always be out of reach of those who must labor with ear training over the years. But unless you really study jazz, and play with others, you will never know just how much this natural talent helps. I loved it, and man did I try harder at it than anything, but then some kid comes in and just crushes the chord changes by ear. I knew I didn't have "it."10,000 hours wasn't gonna make a difference at that level. Next life time God, please? I still play, but I need my day job.
This is also the case for me. I'm naturally really good at music theory and that got me to a point in playing jazz, but when you start to try to outline fast moving, chromatic progressions, I think you need the ears. Also for memorizing tons of tunes.
I got a scholarship to study music in undergrad, was accepted to a couple of pretty good music programs, and started out studying cello performance. And I realized within a couple of semesters, just like the kid playing chess, that there was something in the other cellists I did not have. I loved it, I enjoyed and still enjoy the study of music, and if I practiced 8 hours a day for ten years I would not still not have that thing.
On the flipside, my brother decided in high school he wanted to learn drums. Our folks got him a beginner’s drum set and paid for a few months of lessons. After a year or so he declared he’d learned all he needed to from the teacher and quit, and within half a year of that he was a regular at improv jam sessions in local blues clubs. Later on he taught himself piano completely by ear, y’know, just for funsies. I got the music scholarship but he was always the greater talent.
On a serious, ahem, note, understanding this phenomenon was incredibly meaningful for me. I believe that knowing your limitations around a field you are good at is extremely difficult. To know the difference between 1/1000 vs 1/10,000 is extremely hard for humans. It took thousands of hours of playing and studying just to realize I am just a 1 in 100 musician, which means I wow my friends but embarrass my talented band mates. How the heck did the bass player sing three part harmony with the singer and pianist almost effortlessly, playfully? They have something in their brain I don't. They played music, I kind of worked music. Sigh.
I am incredibly interested if anyone has links to how to differentiate exceptional talent. I think the action for excellence happens at the tails, weird things happen there. I would like to learn more how those tails pattern.
Absolutely! Same in classical music. And everyone accepts it. Why is a visiting violinist paid $10-20K for a single concert while the members of the violin section don't make that in a month? Because she/he is who they are... and they are not. And so it goes. No hard feelings.
"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.
Deconstruction, perhaps? If the goal is to figure out what we're actually talking--in health, for example, do we define health as "being free of disease and injury", as "being able to run a mile and lift 60 pounds", as "being thin and attractive"? All of these are arguably being used as an underlying definition of health in one sector or another, but which definition is being used isn't always apparent.
Or possibly bureaucratization, if we're talking laws. It's easy to tell if a child can read one-on-one, but the government cannot feasibly sit down with every child one-on-one and see if they can read. So they have to select some endpoint to test, which involves figuring out what we want when we say "every child must be able to read".
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’m taking an A&P course right now and the first chapter was about study and learning techniques. Helpful. With a little section about growth mindset. Sort of helpful, but pretty defeating if you’re doing your best and using the techniques and still struggling, right? Because that makes the struggle your fault, a *personality* deficiency rather than a limitation imposed by the combo of your interest/intellectual predisposition/ability.
Go back to that 1975 paper above on “Role Of Expectations And Attributions” and look more closely at the proposed intervention to help these poor fixed mindset students:
Twelve extremely helpless children were identified [and tested on how many math problems they could solve in a certain amount of time]…the criterion number was set one above the number he was generally able to complete within the time limit. On these trials, he was stopped one or two problems short of criterion, his performance was compared to the criterion number required, and experimenter verbally attributed the failure to insufficient effort.
So basically, you take the most vulnerable people, set them tasks you know they’ll fail at, then lecture them about how they only failed because of insufficient effort.
Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying “YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU’RE JUST NOT TRYING NOT TO BE STAMPED ON HARD ENOUGH”.
“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.)
Your second question reminds me of this imagined letter from a State Compensation Board in a hypothetical perfectly egalitarian society in Elizabeth Anderson's "What Is The Point of Equality".
To the disabled: Your defective native endowments or current disabilities, alas, make your life less worth living than the lives of normal people. To compensate for this misfortune, we, the able ones, will give you extra resources, enough to make the worth of living your life good enough that at least one person out there thinks it is comparable to someone else's life.
To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don't value what little you have to offer in the system of production. Your talents are too meager to command much market value. Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we'll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities.
To the ugly and socially awkward: How sad that you are so repulsive to people around you that no one wants to be your friend or lifetime companion. We won't make it up to you by being your friend or your marriage partner-we have our own freedom of association to exercise-but you can console yourself in your miserable loneliness by consuming these material goods that we, the beautiful and charming ones, will provide. And who knows? Maybe you won't be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
"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.)"
I don't understand how the discovery of penicillin relates to the artists mentioned? Why is it a choice? Does he think if Fleming never discovered penicillin it would have taken decades for somone to have made a similar discovery?
And here's the full quote. I think his point is that we might say we value other things, but being smart is always the real numero uno. (I'm not sure hunter-gatherers or many warrior cultures would agree -- being an excellent spear-fisher might well be prized above verbal/mathematical prowess, and they might have little interest in "driving civilization forward" -- but it is hard to deny, with hindsight, that antibiotics are nice to have.)
---------------------------
Finally, some advocates of “honesty” about race and IQ have argued that we must acknowledge that black people have lower IQs but must also “progress” toward an ability to celebrate individuals for a range of talents beyond intelligence. I consider those making this argument sincere — and quixotic.
“Smarts,” as they drive civilization forward, will always occupy a privileged place in our evaluation of human beings. The Duke Ellingtons and the Michael Jordans will be our kings, but the Albert Einsteins and the Stephen Hawkings will be our gods. As a linguist, I am aware of no human language in which the word for “smart” does not refer to, well, smarts. No society in the world applies that word as well to those who are good at spearing fish, playing the flute, or making themselves well liked. Much of the reason we step around the issue of race and IQ is that intelligence, shimmering in all of its viscerally resonant glory, is something whose value we do not really question.
The popularity of Howard Gardner’s schema of “multiple intelligences,” including the musical, social, and kinesthetic, only illuminates our genuine sentiments toward IQ. This extension of the concept of what it is to be intelligent handily distracts us from a guilty but primal elevation of the particular kind of intelligence Gardner classifies as “logical-mathematical” — i.e., what all of us deep down think of as “real” intelligence. In real life we will continue to casually designate some people as smart, with the implication that this is an unquestionably superlative attribute, on the basis of math, science, and scholastic performance rather than that of shooting hoops, playing the saxophone, or being popular.
This will not change. Given a choice between history’s having produced Beethoven — or Ray Charles, or Hamilton — and its having produced penicillin, all would choose the latter. That is, neither black Americans nor educated America will ever accept the idea that black people must cherish themselves as something other than smart.
"And here's the full quote. I think his point is that we might say we value other things, but being smart is always the real numero uno. (I'm not sure hunter-gatherers or many warrior cultures would agree -- being an excellent spear-fisher might well be prized above verbal/mathematical prowess, and they might have little interest in "driving civilization forward" -- but it is hard to deny, with hindsight, that antibiotics are nice to have.)"
Thanks for that. In any sort of physically demanding or apocalyptic scenario the relative worth of "smart may change."
As an aside.
"Under this analysis, there may be a heritable part of IQ that differs between the races, but, first, it is small, and second and more important, environmental factors override its effects. This is the main takeaway from a recent article in Vox by the IQ researchers Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard Nisbett."
Interestingly I just listened to Kathryn Paige Harden on the Capitalisn't podcast and she agreed with the economists that the heritable effect of IQ is massive. She said that economists and other social scientists understand that whereas lay people don't. In fact one of the economists on the show, Luigi Zingales, said these polymorphisms were probably more predictive of intelligence than a FICO score was of someone repaying a mortgage.
"No society in the world applies that word as well to those who are good at...making themselves well liked."
In Chinese culture those who are good at cultivating status due to social skill are routinely called smart. I'm sure there are other cultures where the same is true.
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.
I think a lot of anti-meritocrats succeeded within it, like Thomas Frank, and it gives them more credibility. Some of us otoh might be accused of sour grapes.
Yeah, I think so? Hence the guilt component that's infested everything, the quasi-religious exhortations to "sit with your discomfort", and the swerves into things like systemic racism/patriarchy which don't undercut the idea of meritocracy, but rather attack our particular implementation of it.
Its probably both though, right? Sort of gets back to whether we have any agency in determining our own lives.
Compared to most people, I probably am very lucky to have a lot of talent, but if I control for that factor, I still think I out competed some people that were similar to me in talent. We probably notice what happens immediately around us more readily.
Life is unfair. " Just World cuts deep. " - the demand that life be "just" = fair can only lead to unjust policies which create injustices against some people, without compensating for the unfairness of life.
Low IQ; Bad Health; Unattractive; Short (for men); tiny breasts (women); bad voice or good.
There is no genetic justice - and no real way to get it.
Letting the rich & powerful get more genetically superior kids will soon be a thing, and we should be against it.
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...
I feel like it's also a bit of meaningless hype that tech companies spread to further convince people of the inevitability of tech / software's dominance over as much as possible.
Good point, it does fit with the fantasy a lot of tech people have that everything eventually will be virtual and they'll be their own Hiro Protagonist.
It's more trying to increase the top of the funnel so we can actually get enough people to hire. There are like 300k more programming jobs in the US than programmers so there are in theory sociality beneficial jobs that aren't getting done because we don't have enough folks. All the venture money sloshing around things like crypto puts that to a bit of a lie, but it's really, really, really hard to get good engineers right now at any price.
If we're talking societal benefit then most of those jobs would be better off going unfilled. These days Google is shit, twitter is shit, LinkedIn is shit, the list goes on and on and on...if a software company is well-known then it's probably run by shitlords.
This is a view that is, as I understand it, controversial among computer science educators, but after trying to tutor students for CS101 I'm pretty sure coders are born, not taught. Just that way of thinking, of breaking down problems and the logic involved, seems to be very difficult for a lot of people to get into. I'm not sure it's based on intelligence, or at least I know a lot of otherwise-intelligent people who struggled with for loops.
The industry expecting everyone to be a savant who codes all day and goes home to code some more doesn't help, of course.
Is it silly to think that as we run up against a ceiling on the # of people with the aptitude--while at the same time AI gets better and better--we'll see "coding" become something that's automated and/or seriously dumbed down?
Parts of coding will be done by AI. I've been playing around with Github's Co-pilot, and it's surprisingly good at writing certain types of code for me. If I am able to clearly tell it what to do, then it can often produce what I want, without bugs, and in a fraction of a second. I expect this trend to continue and accelerate. I eagerly await all this.
The problem is that only an experienced software engineer can tell it what to do. An average person using co-pilot will produce garbage. I don't think this will change anytime soon. In fact, I think this task is pretty much the last thing that will be automated.
Exactly, it's probably going to be a long time until AI can understand enough of businesspeople's vaguely stated requirements to give them what they want.
I am an extreme skeptic of "AI" and think its touted potential is mostly fraudulent, but I think I am very weird in this respect. I think the qualifiers you mention here, that it will be good for certain types of code, and that you still need an engineer to tell it what to do, are very key. You also still need an engineer to maintain it as requirements change and demands get more complex. I feel like it will just make more problems in other places, and only appear to be helping.
All that said, I have never tried Github's Co-pilot! Now I want to give it a go ...
It’s a lot of fun at the very least. Especially if you’re doing tedious boiler plate stuff: make api call -> parse and validate fields-> sort and filter results. It handles that stuff beautifully and I am very happy to let it do so when I can.
It's been repeated so often that it's a cliché, but "Coding is easy. Architecture is hard."
And it's not just coders or technical jobs. I think the consensus is pretty much that AI will be very useful in the next couple of decades as a tool utilized by people rather than as a people replacement.
> the problem is that only an experienced software engineer can tell it what to do
This is why I've always been dismissive of the "AI is coming for software jobs" predictions. At some point, someone has to tell the AI what to do. But telling the computer what to do is exactly what all software is.
Effectively, this AI is just a compiler that loosely defines a new programming language, and then translates it into java/c/whatever. At best, this new language can allow one to be more productive, but it will not erase the core difficulty, which is to unambiguously specify what the computer needs to do.
Arguably the dumbed down part has already happened / continues to happen in the evolution of code. Some grumpy older coders go as far as to call Python "pseudo code" because it has a lot of nuts and bolt type stuff hidden under the hood that you would have had to manage yourself in older languages.
I have also some experience with a Dell software product called Boomi that takes code-like logic and abstracts it further into little drag and drop flow charts that anybody that can make with a little training, which is kind of interesting. It tries to bring the power of code to people who don't write code, but in order to be any good at it you should probably already be thinking like a coder anyway, so it doesn't exactly fulfill its promise. And really the tool is only good for small tasks. As soon as you get more complex, it's not ideal.
This reminds me of the drag-and-drop coding “bricks” Lego used for programming the first generation of Mindstorms. Of course, one of the first things my software engineer dad did when my brother and I got our first Mindstorms set was find a more robust language (that was actually a language) others had created.
Many have argued that programming has already been significantly dumbed down. Much of the programming in 2022 is substantially different than that done in 1960 with much more user friendly languages and tooling. To some extent this started early in the development of software engineering as a profession, notably the 1959 development of the COBOL programming language. It was hailed as a non-technical language for generic business people so that they could encode business rules in computer systems without the need of any technical skills.
Yet as the language and tooling improves we don’t find the candidates changing much. Instead the expectation of software engineers grows. What previously would be done by a team of engineers with a diverse set of technical strengths is now accomplished with a single engineer. That single engineer will leverage modern programming language, open source libraries, and Software-as-a-Service vendors to abstract away all of the deep technical challenges. If anything, we may have accomplished the aim of COBOL with people applying technology without requisite technical depths, yet we still call them software engineers and pay them exorbitant salaries.
As a software engineer, I absolutely expect the expectations of the role to grow and change drastically over the next decade. Yet I’m no longer optimistic that requisite aptitude will be significantly lowered. With the proliferation of cloud computing and SAAS over the last decade, companies have already had the opportunity to keep the role expectation the same, which would allow them to hire lower tier employees.
I will say that tech companies already go to extreme ends to offload any software engineering work that could be handled by someone else or automated. There are a lot of people working tech jobs that while they are not software engineering, they certainly require interacting with technology systems. That will certainly continue as the tech improves, chiefly AI.
Coding has been getting automated and dumbed down by higher level languages and fancier compilers from the very beginning. So far the result has always been demand for more ambitious software and more of 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.
I work in K-12 and I do think this is a socialization issue. Boys who are bad at school are seen as lovable losers, especially if they're athletes. Girls who are bad at school are seen as unlovable, even if they're athletes. It's terrible and stupid. I also think there is pretty good evidence that boys will participate in class even if they actually have no idea what's going on, while girls will sit silently and suffer. It's why I try to never have kids raise their hands for answers, and instead have them talk things out with each other first, listen in on the conversations, and then call on people who have the right answer.
I think this is a common perspective but it doesn’t really bear out in practice. Girls have outperformed boys in school for many years now on the whole. Boys are more likely to be suspended and less likely to attend college. Anecdotally, I have a boy and a girl and it seems that some of my children’s teachers hold a barely disguised contempt for boys.
Girls are often more willing to please authority figures, and although they might not get suspended as often, I think girls are reprimanded and policed more often which is to say that they experience more social sanctioning against their flaws. While boys may receive punishments, its more focused on their actions rather than inherent character, and its a bit more up to them how to interpret that socially.
This is my point. Lovable losers get suspended all the time and don't go to college, but many teachers are actually willing to blame the system for this. "He would have just worked in a factory in my day." Girls who are not good at school are treated as serious social pariahs, particularly black girls. This is where you get the welfare queens stereotype, etc. More girls going to college doesn't necessarily mean that the system treats girls well, it just means the system puts a lot of pressure on their "inherent character," as Gnoment says, and that's a lot more effective to force change than to suspend them.
One of the biggest problems I don't see written about in majority Black schools is the lack of male teachers for young Blacks, especially boys. Also true in Whites, but a present "father" reduces the problem of too few male teachers.
I think suspensions is a canard. It's much more of a slow leak and hiding in plain sight situation. It's a school climate thing where it's 'normal' for girls to be anxious list keepers and people pleasers, and boys to be aloof.
That's not it. It's the increased emphasis on many many small assignments all due with predictable schedules (dot the Is cross the Ts) plus being graded on soft skills (meaning you need to adopt a feminine affect to do well) plus a lot of misandry. I think maybe my teachers saw it as "compensating" but they very frequently said girls are smarter than boys and if you were struggling as a man you were not treated with respect but if you struggled as a girl it was assumed to be a result of sexism.
As a Primary school teacher (grades 1,2 and 3) I have a wild hypothesis that this is based in a sort of opposite gender positive affect. I've never met more than 1 other Male primary school teacher so small sample size is small but we both tended to have slightly more positive feelings for girls than the women we work with.
Like year in and year out I'll talk to their next year teacher and the boy with ad hd who made me feel nothing but spite by the end of the year she's like he can't help it, and the girls who were like a little chatty and catty they can't stand it.
Thank you thank you. I had a foster kid, a boy, and I was in the position of course of helping him with his homework and believe me, there were some fundamental things he just did not get, but he could take apart a bike and put it back together at 11 yo. He did not grow up in a "bike household," and now he's an auto mechanic and FINE. The idea that he should have been shunted into college or "helped" more with his homework is insulting to him, and drives me nuts.
My son was pretty smart, but uninterested in academics.
He emancipated at 16, went to live with his mom, joined the Marines, excelled at reconnaissance, hand to hand combat, and electronics.
He also saved 21 of his boat crew when a storm came up while they were doing shore landings. But he never submitted to authority.
My story is/was very parallel.I accept genetics at the trait level. I also think the USA selected strongly for some traits in black slaves that are of great adaptive value when enslaved, but not so much when freed.
Eugenics! You talkin' eugenics, ain't cha? -- I don't think our society is ready to have open, honest talk about genetic selection effects of slavery. Nor about the inequality in sizes of the average erect male penis by race (Black, White, Hispanic, or Asian).
The genetic effect of Native American's anti-slavery is much clearer - frequent tribal extinction, and huge 'national' reduction in survivors. When losers "fight to the death", they're dead.
I love your point about foster kids. I'd just add that you can see the exact same thing, though maybe a little less dramatically, among biological siblings.
My two siblings and I all had the same parents, roughly the same childhood experiences ( with differences for age and birth order) and VERY similar early education -- we were all homeschooled by my mom all the way through elementary school, then we all went to the same high school. I'm the middle brother.
All three of us are above-average in general intellectual capability, and we all did reasonably well in high school and went to college. But in academic skill, it's obvious -- and we all agree -- that I'm a whole lot better at at it than either of them. I always have been, ever since we were young kids. Each of them beats me at certain things -- my older sibling is better at math than I am, and I think my younger sibling has a much better memory than I do -- but generally speaking, I'm the smart one. School was always easy for me (they both had setbacks in college), I have a Master's degree and I work in an intellectual job, and I get paid significantly more than either of them (though there are qualifiers to all of those: my Master's is in an easy field; my job is arguably glorified data entry; and I could probably make more money in the private sector if I really cared about maximizing my earnings but I prefer to maximize my leisure).
I love my sibs, and they love me. They are very smart, talented, and cool. But we're not equal in academic talent, and we never have been. And we all know it.
My wife could say the exact same thing about her sisters. She's the oldest of three, and her middle-sister is almost exactly like me -- an outlier in an already-above-average family set. It's super duper obvious that academic talent isn't evenly distributed in either of our families.
Well, no, eugenics is a political program aimed at applying artificial selection to an entire population. One can fall for someone in part because they have a trait and have children with them without thereby trying to have children with that trait. And one can intentionally try to have children with a certain trait without thereby intending to participate in a political project to make that trait more common.
Call it a political project if you wish, but it's still eu-genics.
Hitler misused it, but it's still valid, especially with the rise of genetic analysis, and selective abortion.
"During the aftermath of World War II, eugenics became stigmatized such that many individuals who had once hailed it as a science now spoke disparagingly of it as a failed pseudoscience. Eugenics was dropped from organization and publication names. In 1954 Britain’s Annals of Eugenics was renamed Annals of Human Genetics. In 1972 the American Eugenics Society adopted the less-offensive name Society for the Study of Social Biology. Its publication, once popularly known as the Eugenics Quarterly, had already been renamed Social Biology in 1969."
What I don't like is the profiling that goes along with that kind of thing, so we would have to all discuss the capacity for genetic variation, which is shown when full siblings come up with completely different interests and skills.
A bit of background: My parents were born in early 1970s rural China. The acceptance rate for high school students into bachelor degrees when they graduated from high school was about 20%. The percentage of students enrolled in high school then were at most 25% across the board, maybe even 15%. Both of them got engineering degrees. (The statistics is discounting the city-countryside disparity in higher education, which I don't know how to account for. From my mother's experience, 2 out of 40 in her village made it to high school, only she managed to go further)
I guess they are of above average intelligience.
My mother's parents were not particularly intellectual, but non of their generation in the village are. It is hard to be intellectual when you are pushed to be a farmer or fishermen, with almost all other options closed off. A feat that I always found amazing is that my maternal grandmother and her mother taught themselves how to read using a Chinese Bible after being introduced to Christianity in their 40s and 60s. I'm not sure many could have done that, I probably couldn't. Yet on the whole they never concerned themselves with education. Learn to read, learn a skill, go work was never discussed because that was what everyone else in the village and the nearby township does. My mother did not, she begged my grandma to go to high school, which persuaded my grandfather and made in further. My aunt had no such aptitude.
On my father's side, my paternal great grandmother was renowned in the nearby villages for being extremely good at calculating. Her husband was apparently also smart. All of her children are smart. I do not know much of my great aunt, but from my grandfather's account she like their mother was quick in thinking. Lack of concern for female education definitely hampered her, though it does not fit the narrrative of opressing females while males get the priviledge. All of them were poor, and were at the boundary of what was considered poor peasant and middle peasant. My grandfather worried himself sick in high school (comparable difficulty of acceptance during his time as my parents getting degrees, maybe a little less hard? unsure of this one) of family finances, and according to him it was a substantial cause of why he did not make it to university. His younger brother, my second great uncle, faced the same situation the next yeat, and promised to his parents that he would take the gaokao, and no matter pass or fail, he would not attend university. He passed and my grandfather buried his dreams of going to university to support his younger brother, as the family could barely afford to send one child. This was definitely less probable than getting a phd now. My younger great uncle was also above average in intelligience, but less so. Both my uncle and my father made it to university.
For my parents, it's obvious my father is smarter than my mother. They were of comparable social background, but he was 9 points short out of at least 700 total of making it to the best science/ engineering college in China, Qinghua. It was considered below his normal score range. My mother attended the local city university.
Due to many reasons, including but not limited to my father not getting a company apartment built by his state owned enterprise as the factory manager was corrupt enough to try embezzle the plot of land, but not competent enough to actually do it, he went to Singapore in search of greener pastures in 2000. He was not there to see my birth, and was absent for a large part of my life, even up till now due to work, and I wish it could have been otherwise. My mother joined him here a year after I was born, in 2002. I was bought to Singapore in 2005, and there begins my kindergarten journey of not knowing English for two years while my parents assumed just because kids I interact with speak English, I would have learnt naturally. I didn't, especially for spelling.
This they discovered at the start of primary school, pointing to the word"four" in a shopping center lift, and upon finding out I had no idea whatsoever what it means, promptly left the shopping mall to engage in mixed gender martial arts with me.
So at age 7 ( actually six and 2 months), I was illiterate in English, and barely spoke it. They enrolled me in morning tuition for about two - three months, drastically improving my English ability. This is what I always wondered reading Freddie's essays on intelligience and academic acheivement, whether I fall into the special cases. Part of it is uncertainty if my grades would have improved so much later if I didn't go for the tuition lessons. Maybe I was so much behind in the language of instruction for all subjects except mother tongue that I would have never caught up, no matter what my g factor was. Who knows. By the end of primary one I was in the top 3 in my class of twenty something, end of primary two I was the very best in a class of randomly sorted people.
Sorting based on results came in primary three, and even in the best class out of 8 I never dropped under the top 20% percentile. In the middle of the year there was a Gifred education programme, the first round of which selects for the top 10% of students, and the second round for the top 1%. I made it past the first round but not the second round. Years later, when researching IQ, I've found it was pretty much a Stanford Binet test, and I didn't make it. In my defense, at that point of time my thoughts are still almost exclusively in Chinese, I have limited cultural knowledge of English (i still dont see the point of scrambled words questions), my reasoning skills are still undeveloped (if chilli is to hot as blank is to cold types questions screwed me over), and I never had any practice for the test while many people had. Sour grapes, I know, but if a batch of 320+ only had one guy that passed (if i remember correctly 5-8 made it pass the first round)
Primary four I switched to a better ranked school, and topped the year in science, math and chinese. That was also the year i started seriously fighting with my parents. Two to four days out of a week, we would get into shouting matches which inevitably spiraled into physical violence on both sides ( serious question, is this what is considered abnormal behaviour that have detrimental effects on academics?)
The next fews years are too painful and guilt ridden for me so I would skip. I took a 6 months break in the last year of my secondary school and did not study anything yet still managed to enter the relatively more academic high school route. For context the Singaporean A levels are supposed to be harder than the British A levels and many people study hours per day from the start. I pulled up my socks and did my homework, getting over 80 percentile for most subjects, topping history. TBH I would rather spend my free time reading ,crafting worlds in my head and playing 4x games. Heck, I was playing civ 6 until 3 am of the day of my a levels exams, and go top in class and top 40 out of 750+ in school. To this day, I still do not get why people think it is hard.
Even I find this over elaboration of my results to be narcisstic, but please excuse a unvoluntary military conscript's attempt to trace his life as he languishes with people whose pinnacle in career acheivement is knowing how to do mail merge. Also since most of my personnel satisfaction derive from knowing things, grades really are the most quantifiable data out there.
Apologies for sloppy writing, I was falling asleep as I near the end and my brain rotted over for two years under conscription.
PS.Any tips to get back into the state of schooling?
I enjoyed hearing your story, and I wish you well as you finish out your conscription!
I'm afraid I know nothing about higher education in Singapore or any of the rest of Asia, so I don't have any real advice for you, except perhaps I'd suggest that you focus on finding a job or a program that gives you the opportunity to pursue whatever forms of intellectual exercise you most enjoy, and not worry so much about either prestige or wealth.
Yes, I'd say that all four of my grandparents were pretty smart. On my mom's side, her father was a dentist and her mother was a hospital nurse, both with great educations. On my dad's side, his parents were less prestigious and successful in formal academic training, but both of them had obvious artistic gifts and extremely quick verbal wit.
Terrific question on boys, I see this in my own 20 year old son and a lot of his peers and it's virtually ignored by public education. It's a massive problem, as evidenced by overdoses and gun violence among boys age 16-24.
It's the increased emphasis on many many small assignments all due with predictable schedules (dot the Is cross the Ts) plus being graded on soft skills (meaning you need to adopt a feminine affect to do well) plus a lot of misandry. I think maybe my teachers saw it as "compensating" but they very frequently said girls are smarter than boys and if you were struggling as a man you were not treated with respect but if you struggled as a girl it was assumed to be a result of sexism.
Fascinating & insightful. I think this is an understated benefit of following Freddie, that despite people like myself lowering the comment-bar, there's quite a few providing thoughtful insight. Cheers!
Once again, apologies for being late to this convo, but the whole notion of "boys aren't succeeding in high school" is utter bullshit.
Most pink collar occupations are relatively new and thus got shunted into the degree system. Most blue collar jobs don't go through college but rather trade school or the apprentice system. Translated: a plumber doesn't go to college and makes twice as much as the secretary who does, so who gives a shit?
More girls take the SAT than do boys. As predicted, girls get slightly higher in reading, boys get higher in math. Boys have a higher combined score, and more boys than girls meet "benchmarks". Translated: more well-behaved low ability girls play the game and have grades good enough to bother taking the SAT, but the boys who take it are slightly better ability pool. Translated again: a lot of the girls going to college shouldn't.
Right now we have more colleges than kids. Liberal arts schools are desperate for boys, who would rather not (and who can blame them?). But there's no lack of achievement in boys driving this, high schools aren't letting boys down.
I certainly think it's true that a whole lotta people are going to college who shouldn't, and who shouldn't feel like they need to, but I'm not sure you're right about there being a highly gendered dichotomy to it.
Do you have some data to back that first point up? How many of those non-college boys are getting those plumber jobs, and how many are either getting crap jobs or dropping out of labor force participation?
I would think the relevant data points would be basic high school graduation rates compared between girls and boys, with no regard for whether they attend college or not; and income comparisons between men and women of the same age regardless of education, drawn as a year-by-year curve as they get older (the expectation being, I would think, that girls who attend college would get a slower start on wage levels at the beginning than boys who get good trade jobs right out of high school, but then the girls will catch up over time if their degrees are worth it).
Also, if your theory is correct, we'd expect to see lower percentage rates of retention in college for girls than for boys. Is that what we see?
"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.
I think there's hope: social intelligence seems to be far more trainable and mutable by life experiences than g is.
I experienced this during my years in Wuhan. Many Americans operate under the illusion that our society is a meritocracy. Chinese people do not believe in such nonsense. As a result, they focus overwhelmingly on social skills when it comes to raising their children. This focus extends to their entire educational system and their outlook on life in general. Their resulting superior mental health outcomes and rapid progression as a society speak for themselves.
A lot of the economy is schmoozing and connections, yes. But as I mentioned above it's a big, diverse economy and there are at least pockets of it where what matters is what you can do rather than who you know. How else do you explain the rise of the coder? Even in the popular imagination, as evidenced by countless movies, books, etc., he is a geeky loser with no social graces. I would say that a lot of the time that comes pretty close to reality. If the ability to schmooze was the sole determinant of success then there's no way that could happen.
It's not the sole determinant, it's just way more important than any other determinant. Coders making above average salaries is not due to meritocracy. It's due to their specific proficiency being able to make money for rich people who are almost entirely scumbags.
Again, I think it depends on the industry. Plus merit does come into play. When an industry like tech takes off it elevates everybody working in it. But when general demand is high that also exponentially increases the demand for talent, especially for something like coding where a good coder can be an order of magnitude more productive than a mediocre one.
I think agreeableness is probably a part of it but that the whole concept is inherently impossible to represent with a number or even a single term due to its nature.
It depends. Thankfully it's an enormous economy and quite diverse, so I and all of my geeky friends are able to thrive despite our lack of social graces.
That's good! I am inherently mistrustful of such claims, however, because Americans tend to ignorantly believe that success/thriving/etc == making lots of money and that's just laughable. Success can only be defined on an individual basis and involves multitudes of factors.
Once you get past a certain threshold the effects of a large salary on mental well being start to drop off. Falling below that threshold though is no fun whatsoever.
I would say the main benefit is simply not having to worry about financial matters. It's the absence of stress rather than something that actively gives you happiness.
I tend to agree but I see it as more of a window: people who make less than roughly $75k/yr in America (depending on the area) have to deal with scarcity driving down their quality of life. People who make more than (very roughly) $300k/yr have to deal with all the vile shit that comes with having too many alienation tokens. This effect is why the vast majority of billionaires become rabid, subhuman scum over time.
I appreciate that you mention coding at the end, which can be one of the most defeating intellectual activities. It has a special way of blackholing all the energy you put into it.
I write code for my day job, but I was never a great math / science student growing up. In my opinion, most people who code professionally are relatively mediocre at it (myself included). You can get better at it if you have tons and tons of time (and maybe a good teacher). An infinite fund of Captain Ahab-style rage against the stupid machines also helps. But the people who are truly good at it are very very rare, and even professional coders look askance at them.
And anyway this all fits with your point of view about intellectual ability. I thought this piece was a memorable synthesis of your ideas on this topic.
I knew a bunch of CS majors in college because I played a lot of frisbee, and they were so good at coding, like, immediately. I took an intro to CS class and asked one of them for help and he kept saying, well, I don't read Anna Karenina for fun like you do, so it's o.k. to be bad at this. I mostly just felt humiliated, since I knew my career path would be either academia or teaching high school in the Midwest (I chose the latter) and his would be google and living on the West Coast.
The humiliation is where the Captain Ahab style rage comes in, and then you fight for years! Also I am in maybe a minority in my opinion that most CS classes are terrible, and most CS teachers more than terrible. Courses are designed for the people who will already be good at it.
My CS teacher wasn't the worst teacher I had in college, but he was in the bottom quartile for sure. Arrogant, self-righteous, and deliberately opaque. There were other professors who were actively cruel, and he wasn't quite there, but close.
I think this can be zoomed out beyond CS: Many higher education classes are pedagogically mediocre-to-terrible. Somewhat ironically, this is often particularly true at more selective research universities, where many professors are there to research first, teach second.
Separately, CS does often seem to be similar to many engineering and hard science disciplines, where early classes are often used to filter for students who have the preferred combination of motivation and pre-existing knowledge/skills/ability.
Not equality of outcomes. But a floor. A floor of material outcomes.
Amen.
> 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
The author is a data scientist, so she knows perfectly well what they do. Which makes it even more annoying.
Trying to promote my own blog post (the actually existing AI and machine learning one) But then it sounded snarky so I deleted it and made a new reply
your own writing may help some of us to know what DS do. My field (used to be library science) now teaches DS--that is where I work--an iSchool-- and I do not know what to say to the DS people who teach Python and R but I'm still teaching book history so they ignore me and I am not in same orbit as them. I seriously doubt when I move on if book history will be taught.
Yup, and schools will produce thousands of students who know how to copy/paste code but who have none of the actual skills that data scientists need.
Yeah that’s virtuous bullshit. She could say “this is a real world example of elementary data science” but no. Gotta take it to the next level. Set up a recruiting table for NASA in Ulta.
It's really. bad. lab. work.
I have a recent post explaining some of the stuff that data scientists actually do (the machine learning and AI one)
I read it and will have to re-read it because it is formidable.
If it's hard to read, that's my fault!
No it’s Kathleen’s fault for not applying herself.
Yes, it was late and I didn't but when I have to stop and look up things KK seems to take for granted I know I need a glossary. I think he should do a glossary on the home page for his substack.
Let me know what's hard to understand in the comments. I want my posts to be useful
o no, it may be I have no context--I have not followed programming for years.
Hahahahahahaha this is honestly so fucking sexist. The soft bigotry of low expectations indeed.
The pure Twitterspeak (or whatever you want to call it) on display there is irritating enough on its own. Also: "If they can keep acting like hanging out in garages is 'computers' we get to have this."
I may be out of touch, but are they really acting like that? It seems like the boys "doing computers" are actually, y'know, doing computers, because they have access to them. It's not 1977.
Been fixing cars since 1957.
They're computers on wheels now.
Getting more so. e.g. Tesla.
Oh jeez--are we back to this again? I'm old enough to remember the same kind of condescension about how the average housewife had a harder job than anybody because she had to be somehow a professional chef, a tailor, a janitor, a purchasing agent, yada yada. As if the average 1960's dinner menu was the same as what was served in a fancy restaurant, and navigating a department store was the same as fufilling a government purchasing spec.
Yes! Or when people add up household tasks and conclude that the salary should be $100k (after all, they’re “at work” 24/7). We can appreciate domestic work, and argue for financial support, without patronizing women.
IDK. I feel like running a household is a pretty serious project management job.
Been both a project manager and a house spouse. No comparison. Unless you have an army of kids, running the average American household doesn't take that much time. The house job is way better because nobody is hassling you about "deliverables" and weekly status updates.
You must be rare, though. In my experience, 80% of project managers don't offer much value. A really good is SUPER helpful though
I was a terrible project manager--it was a job that consisted of all of the things I hate doing and I am bad at. Which proves your point.
To be truly good at this job takes enormous amount of hours and dedication, far more than dev, marketing, etc. It's why I hesitate going back.
Me too.
I'm glad that it works well for you. Maybe I'm just a mess of a person.
Deliverables, like a kid eating? I don't need a boss to feel the pain when I haven't met a deliverable on time.
Having been a house-husband, and a product development engineer ... I never had to negotiate for stove time, nor bargain for butter in my own kitchen. But I regularly had to fight for tester time, disk space, and specific material when I was a product engineer.
Yes, you are right. Running a household is easy.
I bet nobody told you that you had to get your kids dressed in clean clothes in 30 minutes, even though every scrap of clothing in the house had to be washed and dried and that would take an hour at minimum even if you crammed everything together in one load and sacrificed quality. And if you pointed out this very basic fact you were told you are not a team player.
The thing about the house spouse job, is that there's more house spouse jobs around than there are people who are actually good at the skills it needs.
In the working world, people who won't make good project managers can be writers or programmers or bus drivers instead.
The really unfortunate thing is where two suck-ass project managers marry *each* *other* ...
I mean, running one’s own life is the biggest project management job there is, but we all have to do it! I don’t feel like being condescended to about the monetary value of being a mom makes me feel “valid”. Life is hard and running a household and being a parent is hard. Yes it would cost a lot of money to hire out all the things a house spouse does, but it would cost a lot of money to hire someone to be my personal assistant, housekeeper, chef, chauffeur, etc and it doesn’t mean running my own life is the same as being a CEO.
I think the point people are trying to make with the money (inflated as it is), is that it's not "everyone" doing it: it is women doing housework and related tasks like elder care, and historically that's been utterly ignored as a task that generates value.
Not everything has to have direct economic value to be highly important, often more important than work that generates a dollar value. I’d rather be able to acknowledge that than try to jam everything into the capitalistic mode of equating worth with dollars and cents.
This is why I am a huge fan of the expanded child tax credit. I'd take it a step further and provide social security credits for people who take time out of paid employment to do unpaid care for others--kids, parents, extended family. We see the sacrifices that families make to care for each other--people will abandon careers or quit jobs to care for babies or elders. Why not build on that preference and give stipends and social security credits for family caregiving and then see what the demand is for daycare, pre-K and institutionalized elder care? My hunch is that the "daycare crisis" would not be there and that wages would go UP for people in the paid workforce.
This kind of arrangement got a bad rap in the '60's because the people burdened with child and elder care didn't get to choose it. Because of their sex they were not included in the workforce and it was just expected they'd do all this for free so that men could get on with whatever. Capital has been exploiting the relative abundance of labor that was unleashed in the '70's by luring women into the workforce and then when that pool of cheap labor was tapped out, undermining immigration laws to create another pool of powerless labor. Now the "solution" is daycare and universal pre-K so that everybody has to be on the treadmill. It would be a lot easier and more humane to just make it economically possible to care for your own parents and children and still live decently.
Running one's own life is NOT project management! You are in charge of your own life. There are no external milestones you have to meet on penalty of losing your livelihood. If we are going to beat this wrong analogy to death, your life isn't a fucking project. At the very least it is a program.
Obligatory Bill Burr link: https://youtu.be/BESx4mO7XX8
I am a female data scientist who has never been able to figure out skincare.
Do you own a bar of soap? Then you're good to go.
When I was a young girl who was more interested in math than, uh, beauty rituals, this kind of messaging definitely did not make me feel good about myself.
You know what else kind of makes me sad here is the missed opportunity. The post could have used an interest in skin care (that I'm sure is shared by some men as well) to convey a mathematical concept that would actually be useful to people in their hobby and spark something other than a sense of smugness in the intended audience. Like I couldn't tell you what she had in mind about the data science embedded in skin care but, you know, show that! Instead of a demonstration of the benefits of formalization and quantification we get apparent disdain for those things.
“Real women have skincare routines” is the new feminism.
Totally. She could have used skin care to encourage interest in science and data. Instead she’s like, ⭐️~you already have a PhD!!!⭐️
Now I feel like someone should totally get out there and craft that post.
Sadly, I suck at skin care. I only know how to do programming...
Skincare culture is so fucked up, if only because of all the additonal useless plastic shit that culture releases into the environment. The mental health issues it causes are even worse.
I hadn't seen that. What a ridiculous, ridiculous statement.
As a grown man who has had terrible skin since he was a teen, used Acne meds and all kinds of soaps, etc, and now has a wife who has great skin—despite having barely any "skincare routine" worth mentioning beyond "occasionally moisturize and use non-harsh soap"— I would point out this also overlaps with Freddie's point in that a significant factor in the efficacy of skincare is genetic.
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.
Most "moral superiority" of the wealthy is BS, but there's something about morality and poor folk that is seldom discussed quantitatively. Mistakes. The difference between 1 in 10, 1 in 100, 1 in 1000, and 1 in 10,000 (days where a clear mistake was made) - those differences are huge.
"Morality" is a way of minimizing mistakes.
"Immoral" behavior more often leads to bad outcomes.
Capitalism and measuring profit also reduces system mistakes far more reliably, and usually sooner, than any other system.
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?
That idea that smart kids can "uplift" their lower achieving peers has always pissed me off. Since when is it the responsibility of a kid to teach their friends? Isn't that what parents and teachers are supposed to do? Stop foisting your responsibilities off on kids! Even if a kid is bright, they may not have great social skills or be good at explaining things.
Having to teach/explain something is a very effective way to learn it better. But you're probably talking about something else.
Yes, that’s true - but if a child finishes class work in 15 minutes that it takes peers 30 minutes to do, is the best use of the excess time helping classmates on stuff the kid has already just done?
I don't know. What do you think? Having been on both sides of that transaction--the kid who took forever to do math, but the kid who whipped through her spelling words in 10 minutes, my thought would be to give the fast kid something else to do that would engage them. I'm not sure it is a good idea to expect them to help their classmates. Kids may be able to do the work but their reasoning process might be idiosyncratic. Kids can also be jerks and and those who finish fast and then help the teacher can be ostracized for being suck ups.
I don't know about "expect" if that means "make." But I think "let" and "encourage" would be nice. I would personally prefer a culture where education was seen as a cooperative, we-all-want-to know-the-thing effort, rather than a competition. As for idiosyncratic -- fine and good. There is often more than one approach, and even knowing only this is mind-expanding.
Agree. There was a big focus on "project based" learning when my kids were students--the teacher would break the class into small groups of 3-4 kids and have them work together on problem sets. There was NO guidance as to how to work in groups, so the pattern was one or two kids did the work and the others sat around. Again-nothing wrong with peer tutoring and I think it has much to recommend it, but peer tutoring isn't the same as just assigning work and trusting the kids to figure out group dynamics. They are kids and kids, even adolescents, are still figuring out group dynamics and where they fit in.
"I would personally prefer a culture where education was seen as a cooperative, we-all-want-to know-the-thing effort, rather than a competition."
I realize I'm late to this. But first no, that's not how you want the smart kids to spend their time, in no small part because smart kids aren't teachers and it's a waste of their time and possibly hurtful to the lower ability kid.
Plus, don't forget the pony. Gotta have a pony.
Case by case basis, depending on the subject and the kid. Understanding something to the point of being able to explain it to someone else is very often not the same as what the kid has already just done. In seeing why someone else didn't get it, it sometimes makes you approach something in a different way that requires more reflection.
You're right. I'm talking about one of the arguments for eliminating honors or gifted/talented classes, which is that if the smartest kids are in the mainstream classes, their presence will somehow "elevate" the achievement of the entire group. It's never entirely clear what that means, but I suspect it means "raise the average test score for this group of kids so that the school doesn't look bad." Some educators will argue that a kid who is good at say, algebra, can help other kids with their work and that is a good thing. Yes it is, and if a school wants to encourage peer tutoring then create a time and space for it. Don't make the kids sit around in class fiddling with their phones while the teacher works with the students who are struggling. That is just asking for the bright kids to check out and hate school.
Oh screw that, agreed. It's also asking for the slower kids to shut down and not raise a hand, because they don't want to be the one slowing the parade down. This argument is often presented as though it justifies itself, without any specific, what-actually-happens-in-detail evidence.
No, it's not. It's an effective way for some folks to learn it better, and those folks go around demanding that everyone fit into their strong suit.
Which folks? Are you saying the kids who finish fast go around and teach according to their understanding? Because that is why I am suspicious of the "each one teach one" idea. Just because some 14 year old thinks they have figured out quadratic equations doesn't mean they can effectively teach another 14 year old. Which is why I said kids often have "idiosyncratic" ways of understanding/learning concepts.
I went to a big public h.s. school in the MW. There were 15 classes and we were placed in homerooms by testing ability--6-1, 6-2...6-15.
I was a 6-2. The 6-1s were almost all boys who went into engineering fields. We 6-2s were a mix of girls and boys. Once in H.S 6-11 through 6-15s went to auto and shop classes. The 6-15 s were mostly boys. Can you believe that was once done? BTW, most of the kids in the high numbers went into military or trades or small business and ..at least so far as I remember from the one reunion I went to ...most were fine. Looking back this was draconian...you were in college prep or you weren't...but I do remember the fellows in auto classes had cars and were among the most sought after dates. This kind of school would be a great study but I am sure this is done no where now. I don't remember anxiety of who was in which class..the school body was kind of proud of the high ranking class who won debates against other schools...if there was any envy it was, as you would expect, about sports prowess.
We had a similar system, but I think they were craftier about the labels. I remember being with a bunch of kids that more or less were interested in the same things I was interested in, and there were whole groups of kids that seemed to spend all of their time over in the "business center" or in the shop complex. I think tracking got a bad rap because not all schools had the resources to provide business centers or auto shops, and so the 6.15's got dumped into a classroom and were ignored by a teacher that the principal was unable to get rid of.
a few years later I learned they did a reverse sort of thing so the 2 ends were higher academically 6-7 and 6-8 were the non-college bound. As if the students didn't figure it out. But later they used the term "gifted" and I think that was a labelling that created perceptions of not being gifted--esp.in a family where some are designated "gifted" and some not so. There were also programs that had students assigned to work as part of their HS program. We have had alternatives to what we have now.
I think Europeans are generally heading into their trades or profession at the age of 18 unless they take time off, so I assume high school has to start being tracked like that if you're going to have 17 year olds making the decisions to pursue medicine or law school.
In my UK high school we were tracked for most things, including Maths, English and languages, and I vividly remember that in the second form they simply took the entire bottom track of the Latin classes and sent them off to do Drama and social sciences instead. I was so pissed. I was in track 3 out of 4, if only I'd realised I needed to make my work that much crappier...
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?
Thank you, we know a bit about lot or where to find it. And I can access databases for anyone who needs them. BTW--a librarian won Jeopardy last night and he's not the first.
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.
Yeah, but what really is "good at chess?" Isn't me losing in 10 turns just a different "way of playing?"
Yes :)
When I go round to the club and get routed by a gaggle of sixth-graders, little do they realize that, with each of their piercing "Checkmate"s, they are feeding my pathological need for humiliation.
Does he still play it for fun? It's depressing to me when I see people quit doing something entirely because they rose to a level where they suddenly weren't better than everyone else there. Unless they were ONLY doing it for the gold stars to begin with.
Yes, he does! :)
Music is another one of those areas. Especially jazz. People who have good ears naturally will always be out of reach of those who must labor with ear training over the years. But unless you really study jazz, and play with others, you will never know just how much this natural talent helps. I loved it, and man did I try harder at it than anything, but then some kid comes in and just crushes the chord changes by ear. I knew I didn't have "it."10,000 hours wasn't gonna make a difference at that level. Next life time God, please? I still play, but I need my day job.
This is also the case for me. I'm naturally really good at music theory and that got me to a point in playing jazz, but when you start to try to outline fast moving, chromatic progressions, I think you need the ears. Also for memorizing tons of tunes.
I got a scholarship to study music in undergrad, was accepted to a couple of pretty good music programs, and started out studying cello performance. And I realized within a couple of semesters, just like the kid playing chess, that there was something in the other cellists I did not have. I loved it, I enjoyed and still enjoy the study of music, and if I practiced 8 hours a day for ten years I would not still not have that thing.
On the flipside, my brother decided in high school he wanted to learn drums. Our folks got him a beginner’s drum set and paid for a few months of lessons. After a year or so he declared he’d learned all he needed to from the teacher and quit, and within half a year of that he was a regular at improv jam sessions in local blues clubs. Later on he taught himself piano completely by ear, y’know, just for funsies. I got the music scholarship but he was always the greater talent.
On a serious, ahem, note, understanding this phenomenon was incredibly meaningful for me. I believe that knowing your limitations around a field you are good at is extremely difficult. To know the difference between 1/1000 vs 1/10,000 is extremely hard for humans. It took thousands of hours of playing and studying just to realize I am just a 1 in 100 musician, which means I wow my friends but embarrass my talented band mates. How the heck did the bass player sing three part harmony with the singer and pianist almost effortlessly, playfully? They have something in their brain I don't. They played music, I kind of worked music. Sigh.
I am incredibly interested if anyone has links to how to differentiate exceptional talent. I think the action for excellence happens at the tails, weird things happen there. I would like to learn more how those tails pattern.
“They played music, I kind of worked music.” Yes! That’s exactly it!
Absolutely! Same in classical music. And everyone accepts it. Why is a visiting violinist paid $10-20K for a single concert while the members of the violin section don't make that in a month? Because she/he is who they are... and they are not. And so it goes. No hard feelings.
"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.
Deconstruction, perhaps? If the goal is to figure out what we're actually talking--in health, for example, do we define health as "being free of disease and injury", as "being able to run a mile and lift 60 pounds", as "being thin and attractive"? All of these are arguably being used as an underlying definition of health in one sector or another, but which definition is being used isn't always apparent.
Or possibly bureaucratization, if we're talking laws. It's easy to tell if a child can read one-on-one, but the government cannot feasibly sit down with every child one-on-one and see if they can read. So they have to select some endpoint to test, which involves figuring out what we want when we say "every child must be able to read".
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’m taking an A&P course right now and the first chapter was about study and learning techniques. Helpful. With a little section about growth mindset. Sort of helpful, but pretty defeating if you’re doing your best and using the techniques and still struggling, right? Because that makes the struggle your fault, a *personality* deficiency rather than a limitation imposed by the combo of your interest/intellectual predisposition/ability.
Scott Alexander describes just this in his take on growth mindset: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/08/no-clarity-around-growth-mindset-yet/.
Go back to that 1975 paper above on “Role Of Expectations And Attributions” and look more closely at the proposed intervention to help these poor fixed mindset students:
Twelve extremely helpless children were identified [and tested on how many math problems they could solve in a certain amount of time]…the criterion number was set one above the number he was generally able to complete within the time limit. On these trials, he was stopped one or two problems short of criterion, his performance was compared to the criterion number required, and experimenter verbally attributed the failure to insufficient effort.
So basically, you take the most vulnerable people, set them tasks you know they’ll fail at, then lecture them about how they only failed because of insufficient effort.
Imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, saying “YOUR PROBLEM IS THAT YOU’RE JUST NOT TRYING NOT TO BE STAMPED ON HARD ENOUGH”.
“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.)
Your second question reminds me of this imagined letter from a State Compensation Board in a hypothetical perfectly egalitarian society in Elizabeth Anderson's "What Is The Point of Equality".
To the disabled: Your defective native endowments or current disabilities, alas, make your life less worth living than the lives of normal people. To compensate for this misfortune, we, the able ones, will give you extra resources, enough to make the worth of living your life good enough that at least one person out there thinks it is comparable to someone else's life.
To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don't value what little you have to offer in the system of production. Your talents are too meager to command much market value. Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we'll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities.
To the ugly and socially awkward: How sad that you are so repulsive to people around you that no one wants to be your friend or lifetime companion. We won't make it up to you by being your friend or your marriage partner-we have our own freedom of association to exercise-but you can console yourself in your miserable loneliness by consuming these material goods that we, the beautiful and charming ones, will provide. And who knows? Maybe you won't be such a loser in love once potential dates see how rich you are.
For number 2: gladiator arena for ugly-ass jerkwad idiots, probably.
But enough about the NHL.
Lol that’s harsh. Quite a few of those guys are hot, haircuts notwithstanding.
"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.)"
I don't understand how the discovery of penicillin relates to the artists mentioned? Why is it a choice? Does he think if Fleming never discovered penicillin it would have taken decades for somone to have made a similar discovery?
I knew I should have included more context. (It's always tricky trying to figure how much of something to quote.) Here's the link to the full essay:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/07/race-iq-debate-serves-no-purpose/
And here's the full quote. I think his point is that we might say we value other things, but being smart is always the real numero uno. (I'm not sure hunter-gatherers or many warrior cultures would agree -- being an excellent spear-fisher might well be prized above verbal/mathematical prowess, and they might have little interest in "driving civilization forward" -- but it is hard to deny, with hindsight, that antibiotics are nice to have.)
---------------------------
Finally, some advocates of “honesty” about race and IQ have argued that we must acknowledge that black people have lower IQs but must also “progress” toward an ability to celebrate individuals for a range of talents beyond intelligence. I consider those making this argument sincere — and quixotic.
“Smarts,” as they drive civilization forward, will always occupy a privileged place in our evaluation of human beings. The Duke Ellingtons and the Michael Jordans will be our kings, but the Albert Einsteins and the Stephen Hawkings will be our gods. As a linguist, I am aware of no human language in which the word for “smart” does not refer to, well, smarts. No society in the world applies that word as well to those who are good at spearing fish, playing the flute, or making themselves well liked. Much of the reason we step around the issue of race and IQ is that intelligence, shimmering in all of its viscerally resonant glory, is something whose value we do not really question.
The popularity of Howard Gardner’s schema of “multiple intelligences,” including the musical, social, and kinesthetic, only illuminates our genuine sentiments toward IQ. This extension of the concept of what it is to be intelligent handily distracts us from a guilty but primal elevation of the particular kind of intelligence Gardner classifies as “logical-mathematical” — i.e., what all of us deep down think of as “real” intelligence. In real life we will continue to casually designate some people as smart, with the implication that this is an unquestionably superlative attribute, on the basis of math, science, and scholastic performance rather than that of shooting hoops, playing the saxophone, or being popular.
This will not change. Given a choice between history’s having produced Beethoven — or Ray Charles, or Hamilton — and its having produced penicillin, all would choose the latter. That is, neither black Americans nor educated America will ever accept the idea that black people must cherish themselves as something other than smart.
"And here's the full quote. I think his point is that we might say we value other things, but being smart is always the real numero uno. (I'm not sure hunter-gatherers or many warrior cultures would agree -- being an excellent spear-fisher might well be prized above verbal/mathematical prowess, and they might have little interest in "driving civilization forward" -- but it is hard to deny, with hindsight, that antibiotics are nice to have.)"
Thanks for that. In any sort of physically demanding or apocalyptic scenario the relative worth of "smart may change."
As an aside.
"Under this analysis, there may be a heritable part of IQ that differs between the races, but, first, it is small, and second and more important, environmental factors override its effects. This is the main takeaway from a recent article in Vox by the IQ researchers Eric Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard Nisbett."
Interestingly I just listened to Kathryn Paige Harden on the Capitalisn't podcast and she agreed with the economists that the heritable effect of IQ is massive. She said that economists and other social scientists understand that whereas lay people don't. In fact one of the economists on the show, Luigi Zingales, said these polymorphisms were probably more predictive of intelligence than a FICO score was of someone repaying a mortgage.
"No society in the world applies that word as well to those who are good at...making themselves well liked."
In Chinese culture those who are good at cultivating status due to social skill are routinely called smart. I'm sure there are other cultures where the same is true.
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.
The are anti-meritocracy... after having succeeded within it
I think a lot of anti-meritocrats succeeded within it, like Thomas Frank, and it gives them more credibility. Some of us otoh might be accused of sour grapes.
Yeah, I think so? Hence the guilt component that's infested everything, the quasi-religious exhortations to "sit with your discomfort", and the swerves into things like systemic racism/patriarchy which don't undercut the idea of meritocracy, but rather attack our particular implementation of it.
America has no true meritocracy, so this is impossible.
Its probably both though, right? Sort of gets back to whether we have any agency in determining our own lives.
Compared to most people, I probably am very lucky to have a lot of talent, but if I control for that factor, I still think I out competed some people that were similar to me in talent. We probably notice what happens immediately around us more readily.
Life is unfair. " Just World cuts deep. " - the demand that life be "just" = fair can only lead to unjust policies which create injustices against some people, without compensating for the unfairness of life.
Low IQ; Bad Health; Unattractive; Short (for men); tiny breasts (women); bad voice or good.
There is no genetic justice - and no real way to get it.
Letting the rich & powerful get more genetically superior kids will soon be a thing, and we should be against it.
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...
I think tech companies are heavily invested in the idea that everyone should learn to code as a way of driving down programmers' salaries.
I feel like it's also a bit of meaningless hype that tech companies spread to further convince people of the inevitability of tech / software's dominance over as much as possible.
Good point, it does fit with the fantasy a lot of tech people have that everything eventually will be virtual and they'll be their own Hiro Protagonist.
It's more trying to increase the top of the funnel so we can actually get enough people to hire. There are like 300k more programming jobs in the US than programmers so there are in theory sociality beneficial jobs that aren't getting done because we don't have enough folks. All the venture money sloshing around things like crypto puts that to a bit of a lie, but it's really, really, really hard to get good engineers right now at any price.
If we're talking societal benefit then most of those jobs would be better off going unfilled. These days Google is shit, twitter is shit, LinkedIn is shit, the list goes on and on and on...if a software company is well-known then it's probably run by shitlords.
Not all programming jobs are for big tech companies. In fact most of them aren't. They don't pay as well but are, in most cases, better for society.
I think differently. Sometimes coding means moving some smaller data sorting task from your head to the computer.
I spent 21 years in product development mostly with my feet on my desk—thinking about to make the computer do my job—which meant coding.
Very much relate to what you're saying!
This is a view that is, as I understand it, controversial among computer science educators, but after trying to tutor students for CS101 I'm pretty sure coders are born, not taught. Just that way of thinking, of breaking down problems and the logic involved, seems to be very difficult for a lot of people to get into. I'm not sure it's based on intelligence, or at least I know a lot of otherwise-intelligent people who struggled with for loops.
The industry expecting everyone to be a savant who codes all day and goes home to code some more doesn't help, of course.
Is it silly to think that as we run up against a ceiling on the # of people with the aptitude--while at the same time AI gets better and better--we'll see "coding" become something that's automated and/or seriously dumbed down?
Parts of coding will be done by AI. I've been playing around with Github's Co-pilot, and it's surprisingly good at writing certain types of code for me. If I am able to clearly tell it what to do, then it can often produce what I want, without bugs, and in a fraction of a second. I expect this trend to continue and accelerate. I eagerly await all this.
The problem is that only an experienced software engineer can tell it what to do. An average person using co-pilot will produce garbage. I don't think this will change anytime soon. In fact, I think this task is pretty much the last thing that will be automated.
Exactly, it's probably going to be a long time until AI can understand enough of businesspeople's vaguely stated requirements to give them what they want.
I am an extreme skeptic of "AI" and think its touted potential is mostly fraudulent, but I think I am very weird in this respect. I think the qualifiers you mention here, that it will be good for certain types of code, and that you still need an engineer to tell it what to do, are very key. You also still need an engineer to maintain it as requirements change and demands get more complex. I feel like it will just make more problems in other places, and only appear to be helping.
All that said, I have never tried Github's Co-pilot! Now I want to give it a go ...
It’s a lot of fun at the very least. Especially if you’re doing tedious boiler plate stuff: make api call -> parse and validate fields-> sort and filter results. It handles that stuff beautifully and I am very happy to let it do so when I can.
It's been repeated so often that it's a cliché, but "Coding is easy. Architecture is hard."
And it's not just coders or technical jobs. I think the consensus is pretty much that AI will be very useful in the next couple of decades as a tool utilized by people rather than as a people replacement.
> the problem is that only an experienced software engineer can tell it what to do
This is why I've always been dismissive of the "AI is coming for software jobs" predictions. At some point, someone has to tell the AI what to do. But telling the computer what to do is exactly what all software is.
Effectively, this AI is just a compiler that loosely defines a new programming language, and then translates it into java/c/whatever. At best, this new language can allow one to be more productive, but it will not erase the core difficulty, which is to unambiguously specify what the computer needs to do.
The specification *is* the software.
Arguably the dumbed down part has already happened / continues to happen in the evolution of code. Some grumpy older coders go as far as to call Python "pseudo code" because it has a lot of nuts and bolt type stuff hidden under the hood that you would have had to manage yourself in older languages.
I have also some experience with a Dell software product called Boomi that takes code-like logic and abstracts it further into little drag and drop flow charts that anybody that can make with a little training, which is kind of interesting. It tries to bring the power of code to people who don't write code, but in order to be any good at it you should probably already be thinking like a coder anyway, so it doesn't exactly fulfill its promise. And really the tool is only good for small tasks. As soon as you get more complex, it's not ideal.
This reminds me of the drag-and-drop coding “bricks” Lego used for programming the first generation of Mindstorms. Of course, one of the first things my software engineer dad did when my brother and I got our first Mindstorms set was find a more robust language (that was actually a language) others had created.
Many have argued that programming has already been significantly dumbed down. Much of the programming in 2022 is substantially different than that done in 1960 with much more user friendly languages and tooling. To some extent this started early in the development of software engineering as a profession, notably the 1959 development of the COBOL programming language. It was hailed as a non-technical language for generic business people so that they could encode business rules in computer systems without the need of any technical skills.
Yet as the language and tooling improves we don’t find the candidates changing much. Instead the expectation of software engineers grows. What previously would be done by a team of engineers with a diverse set of technical strengths is now accomplished with a single engineer. That single engineer will leverage modern programming language, open source libraries, and Software-as-a-Service vendors to abstract away all of the deep technical challenges. If anything, we may have accomplished the aim of COBOL with people applying technology without requisite technical depths, yet we still call them software engineers and pay them exorbitant salaries.
As a software engineer, I absolutely expect the expectations of the role to grow and change drastically over the next decade. Yet I’m no longer optimistic that requisite aptitude will be significantly lowered. With the proliferation of cloud computing and SAAS over the last decade, companies have already had the opportunity to keep the role expectation the same, which would allow them to hire lower tier employees.
I will say that tech companies already go to extreme ends to offload any software engineering work that could be handled by someone else or automated. There are a lot of people working tech jobs that while they are not software engineering, they certainly require interacting with technology systems. That will certainly continue as the tech improves, chiefly AI.
Coding has been getting automated and dumbed down by higher level languages and fancier compilers from the very beginning. So far the result has always been demand for more ambitious software and more of 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.
I work in K-12 and I do think this is a socialization issue. Boys who are bad at school are seen as lovable losers, especially if they're athletes. Girls who are bad at school are seen as unlovable, even if they're athletes. It's terrible and stupid. I also think there is pretty good evidence that boys will participate in class even if they actually have no idea what's going on, while girls will sit silently and suffer. It's why I try to never have kids raise their hands for answers, and instead have them talk things out with each other first, listen in on the conversations, and then call on people who have the right answer.
I think this is a common perspective but it doesn’t really bear out in practice. Girls have outperformed boys in school for many years now on the whole. Boys are more likely to be suspended and less likely to attend college. Anecdotally, I have a boy and a girl and it seems that some of my children’s teachers hold a barely disguised contempt for boys.
It could be both.
Girls are often more willing to please authority figures, and although they might not get suspended as often, I think girls are reprimanded and policed more often which is to say that they experience more social sanctioning against their flaws. While boys may receive punishments, its more focused on their actions rather than inherent character, and its a bit more up to them how to interpret that socially.
This is my point. Lovable losers get suspended all the time and don't go to college, but many teachers are actually willing to blame the system for this. "He would have just worked in a factory in my day." Girls who are not good at school are treated as serious social pariahs, particularly black girls. This is where you get the welfare queens stereotype, etc. More girls going to college doesn't necessarily mean that the system treats girls well, it just means the system puts a lot of pressure on their "inherent character," as Gnoment says, and that's a lot more effective to force change than to suspend them.
And men are less agreeable as a trait, and respond better to more physical than social pressure.
Before you react, think about the many ways USA education and child raising is different from other societies. Think about suits and neckties...
After 12 or so, boys should be taught by men.
Flat statement. See "Initiation rites"
One of the biggest problems I don't see written about in majority Black schools is the lack of male teachers for young Blacks, especially boys. Also true in Whites, but a present "father" reduces the problem of too few male teachers.
Good point. Kids without dads go bad. Generally.
Again, late to this, but sorry: You don't see it written about? It's written about so much I parodied it: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2017/02/28/oh-woe-no-teachers-of-color/
Also, there's not a shortage of male teachers in high school, but they're mostly white. Most black male teachers are in elementary school.
I think suspensions is a canard. It's much more of a slow leak and hiding in plain sight situation. It's a school climate thing where it's 'normal' for girls to be anxious list keepers and people pleasers, and boys to be aloof.
That's not it. It's the increased emphasis on many many small assignments all due with predictable schedules (dot the Is cross the Ts) plus being graded on soft skills (meaning you need to adopt a feminine affect to do well) plus a lot of misandry. I think maybe my teachers saw it as "compensating" but they very frequently said girls are smarter than boys and if you were struggling as a man you were not treated with respect but if you struggled as a girl it was assumed to be a result of sexism.
As a Primary school teacher (grades 1,2 and 3) I have a wild hypothesis that this is based in a sort of opposite gender positive affect. I've never met more than 1 other Male primary school teacher so small sample size is small but we both tended to have slightly more positive feelings for girls than the women we work with.
Like year in and year out I'll talk to their next year teacher and the boy with ad hd who made me feel nothing but spite by the end of the year she's like he can't help it, and the girls who were like a little chatty and catty they can't stand it.
Thank you thank you. I had a foster kid, a boy, and I was in the position of course of helping him with his homework and believe me, there were some fundamental things he just did not get, but he could take apart a bike and put it back together at 11 yo. He did not grow up in a "bike household," and now he's an auto mechanic and FINE. The idea that he should have been shunted into college or "helped" more with his homework is insulting to him, and drives me nuts.
Yes.
My son was pretty smart, but uninterested in academics.
He emancipated at 16, went to live with his mom, joined the Marines, excelled at reconnaissance, hand to hand combat, and electronics.
He also saved 21 of his boat crew when a storm came up while they were doing shore landings. But he never submitted to authority.
My story is/was very parallel.I accept genetics at the trait level. I also think the USA selected strongly for some traits in black slaves that are of great adaptive value when enslaved, but not so much when freed.
I'd love a discussion of which traits they are...
Eugenics! You talkin' eugenics, ain't cha? -- I don't think our society is ready to have open, honest talk about genetic selection effects of slavery. Nor about the inequality in sizes of the average erect male penis by race (Black, White, Hispanic, or Asian).
The genetic effect of Native American's anti-slavery is much clearer - frequent tribal extinction, and huge 'national' reduction in survivors. When losers "fight to the death", they're dead.
There are studies of penis size? Not actually concerned about that.
I am interested in the genetic/trait effects of slavery.
I love your point about foster kids. I'd just add that you can see the exact same thing, though maybe a little less dramatically, among biological siblings.
My two siblings and I all had the same parents, roughly the same childhood experiences ( with differences for age and birth order) and VERY similar early education -- we were all homeschooled by my mom all the way through elementary school, then we all went to the same high school. I'm the middle brother.
All three of us are above-average in general intellectual capability, and we all did reasonably well in high school and went to college. But in academic skill, it's obvious -- and we all agree -- that I'm a whole lot better at at it than either of them. I always have been, ever since we were young kids. Each of them beats me at certain things -- my older sibling is better at math than I am, and I think my younger sibling has a much better memory than I do -- but generally speaking, I'm the smart one. School was always easy for me (they both had setbacks in college), I have a Master's degree and I work in an intellectual job, and I get paid significantly more than either of them (though there are qualifiers to all of those: my Master's is in an easy field; my job is arguably glorified data entry; and I could probably make more money in the private sector if I really cared about maximizing my earnings but I prefer to maximize my leisure).
I love my sibs, and they love me. They are very smart, talented, and cool. But we're not equal in academic talent, and we never have been. And we all know it.
My wife could say the exact same thing about her sisters. She's the oldest of three, and her middle-sister is almost exactly like me -- an outlier in an already-above-average family set. It's super duper obvious that academic talent isn't evenly distributed in either of our families.
Absolutely! I love when it shows up in full siblings, because everyone knows beyond a doubt that some stuff is just inborn and built-in.
It's also obvious that you engaged in eugenics in your choice of mate.
(That's merely a neutral observation. I'm trying to normalize the concept.)
Well, no, eugenics is a political program aimed at applying artificial selection to an entire population. One can fall for someone in part because they have a trait and have children with them without thereby trying to have children with that trait. And one can intentionally try to have children with a certain trait without thereby intending to participate in a political project to make that trait more common.
Call it a political project if you wish, but it's still eu-genics.
Hitler misused it, but it's still valid, especially with the rise of genetic analysis, and selective abortion.
"During the aftermath of World War II, eugenics became stigmatized such that many individuals who had once hailed it as a science now spoke disparagingly of it as a failed pseudoscience. Eugenics was dropped from organization and publication names. In 1954 Britain’s Annals of Eugenics was renamed Annals of Human Genetics. In 1972 the American Eugenics Society adopted the less-offensive name Society for the Study of Social Biology. Its publication, once popularly known as the Eugenics Quarterly, had already been renamed Social Biology in 1969."
--Britannica--
What I don't like is the profiling that goes along with that kind of thing, so we would have to all discuss the capacity for genetic variation, which is shown when full siblings come up with completely different interests and skills.
A bit of background: My parents were born in early 1970s rural China. The acceptance rate for high school students into bachelor degrees when they graduated from high school was about 20%. The percentage of students enrolled in high school then were at most 25% across the board, maybe even 15%. Both of them got engineering degrees. (The statistics is discounting the city-countryside disparity in higher education, which I don't know how to account for. From my mother's experience, 2 out of 40 in her village made it to high school, only she managed to go further)
I guess they are of above average intelligience.
My mother's parents were not particularly intellectual, but non of their generation in the village are. It is hard to be intellectual when you are pushed to be a farmer or fishermen, with almost all other options closed off. A feat that I always found amazing is that my maternal grandmother and her mother taught themselves how to read using a Chinese Bible after being introduced to Christianity in their 40s and 60s. I'm not sure many could have done that, I probably couldn't. Yet on the whole they never concerned themselves with education. Learn to read, learn a skill, go work was never discussed because that was what everyone else in the village and the nearby township does. My mother did not, she begged my grandma to go to high school, which persuaded my grandfather and made in further. My aunt had no such aptitude.
On my father's side, my paternal great grandmother was renowned in the nearby villages for being extremely good at calculating. Her husband was apparently also smart. All of her children are smart. I do not know much of my great aunt, but from my grandfather's account she like their mother was quick in thinking. Lack of concern for female education definitely hampered her, though it does not fit the narrrative of opressing females while males get the priviledge. All of them were poor, and were at the boundary of what was considered poor peasant and middle peasant. My grandfather worried himself sick in high school (comparable difficulty of acceptance during his time as my parents getting degrees, maybe a little less hard? unsure of this one) of family finances, and according to him it was a substantial cause of why he did not make it to university. His younger brother, my second great uncle, faced the same situation the next yeat, and promised to his parents that he would take the gaokao, and no matter pass or fail, he would not attend university. He passed and my grandfather buried his dreams of going to university to support his younger brother, as the family could barely afford to send one child. This was definitely less probable than getting a phd now. My younger great uncle was also above average in intelligience, but less so. Both my uncle and my father made it to university.
For my parents, it's obvious my father is smarter than my mother. They were of comparable social background, but he was 9 points short out of at least 700 total of making it to the best science/ engineering college in China, Qinghua. It was considered below his normal score range. My mother attended the local city university.
Due to many reasons, including but not limited to my father not getting a company apartment built by his state owned enterprise as the factory manager was corrupt enough to try embezzle the plot of land, but not competent enough to actually do it, he went to Singapore in search of greener pastures in 2000. He was not there to see my birth, and was absent for a large part of my life, even up till now due to work, and I wish it could have been otherwise. My mother joined him here a year after I was born, in 2002. I was bought to Singapore in 2005, and there begins my kindergarten journey of not knowing English for two years while my parents assumed just because kids I interact with speak English, I would have learnt naturally. I didn't, especially for spelling.
This they discovered at the start of primary school, pointing to the word"four" in a shopping center lift, and upon finding out I had no idea whatsoever what it means, promptly left the shopping mall to engage in mixed gender martial arts with me.
So at age 7 ( actually six and 2 months), I was illiterate in English, and barely spoke it. They enrolled me in morning tuition for about two - three months, drastically improving my English ability. This is what I always wondered reading Freddie's essays on intelligience and academic acheivement, whether I fall into the special cases. Part of it is uncertainty if my grades would have improved so much later if I didn't go for the tuition lessons. Maybe I was so much behind in the language of instruction for all subjects except mother tongue that I would have never caught up, no matter what my g factor was. Who knows. By the end of primary one I was in the top 3 in my class of twenty something, end of primary two I was the very best in a class of randomly sorted people.
Sorting based on results came in primary three, and even in the best class out of 8 I never dropped under the top 20% percentile. In the middle of the year there was a Gifred education programme, the first round of which selects for the top 10% of students, and the second round for the top 1%. I made it past the first round but not the second round. Years later, when researching IQ, I've found it was pretty much a Stanford Binet test, and I didn't make it. In my defense, at that point of time my thoughts are still almost exclusively in Chinese, I have limited cultural knowledge of English (i still dont see the point of scrambled words questions), my reasoning skills are still undeveloped (if chilli is to hot as blank is to cold types questions screwed me over), and I never had any practice for the test while many people had. Sour grapes, I know, but if a batch of 320+ only had one guy that passed (if i remember correctly 5-8 made it pass the first round)
Primary four I switched to a better ranked school, and topped the year in science, math and chinese. That was also the year i started seriously fighting with my parents. Two to four days out of a week, we would get into shouting matches which inevitably spiraled into physical violence on both sides ( serious question, is this what is considered abnormal behaviour that have detrimental effects on academics?)
The next fews years are too painful and guilt ridden for me so I would skip. I took a 6 months break in the last year of my secondary school and did not study anything yet still managed to enter the relatively more academic high school route. For context the Singaporean A levels are supposed to be harder than the British A levels and many people study hours per day from the start. I pulled up my socks and did my homework, getting over 80 percentile for most subjects, topping history. TBH I would rather spend my free time reading ,crafting worlds in my head and playing 4x games. Heck, I was playing civ 6 until 3 am of the day of my a levels exams, and go top in class and top 40 out of 750+ in school. To this day, I still do not get why people think it is hard.
Even I find this over elaboration of my results to be narcisstic, but please excuse a unvoluntary military conscript's attempt to trace his life as he languishes with people whose pinnacle in career acheivement is knowing how to do mail merge. Also since most of my personnel satisfaction derive from knowing things, grades really are the most quantifiable data out there.
Apologies for sloppy writing, I was falling asleep as I near the end and my brain rotted over for two years under conscription.
PS.Any tips to get back into the state of schooling?
Are your grandparents also smart/
I enjoyed hearing your story, and I wish you well as you finish out your conscription!
I'm afraid I know nothing about higher education in Singapore or any of the rest of Asia, so I don't have any real advice for you, except perhaps I'd suggest that you focus on finding a job or a program that gives you the opportunity to pursue whatever forms of intellectual exercise you most enjoy, and not worry so much about either prestige or wealth.
Yes, I'd say that all four of my grandparents were pretty smart. On my mom's side, her father was a dentist and her mother was a hospital nurse, both with great educations. On my dad's side, his parents were less prestigious and successful in formal academic training, but both of them had obvious artistic gifts and extremely quick verbal wit.
Terrific question on boys, I see this in my own 20 year old son and a lot of his peers and it's virtually ignored by public education. It's a massive problem, as evidenced by overdoses and gun violence among boys age 16-24.
It's the increased emphasis on many many small assignments all due with predictable schedules (dot the Is cross the Ts) plus being graded on soft skills (meaning you need to adopt a feminine affect to do well) plus a lot of misandry. I think maybe my teachers saw it as "compensating" but they very frequently said girls are smarter than boys and if you were struggling as a man you were not treated with respect but if you struggled as a girl it was assumed to be a result of sexism.
Fascinating & insightful. I think this is an understated benefit of following Freddie, that despite people like myself lowering the comment-bar, there's quite a few providing thoughtful insight. Cheers!
Once again, apologies for being late to this convo, but the whole notion of "boys aren't succeeding in high school" is utter bullshit.
Most pink collar occupations are relatively new and thus got shunted into the degree system. Most blue collar jobs don't go through college but rather trade school or the apprentice system. Translated: a plumber doesn't go to college and makes twice as much as the secretary who does, so who gives a shit?
More girls take the SAT than do boys. As predicted, girls get slightly higher in reading, boys get higher in math. Boys have a higher combined score, and more boys than girls meet "benchmarks". Translated: more well-behaved low ability girls play the game and have grades good enough to bother taking the SAT, but the boys who take it are slightly better ability pool. Translated again: a lot of the girls going to college shouldn't.
Right now we have more colleges than kids. Liberal arts schools are desperate for boys, who would rather not (and who can blame them?). But there's no lack of achievement in boys driving this, high schools aren't letting boys down.
I certainly think it's true that a whole lotta people are going to college who shouldn't, and who shouldn't feel like they need to, but I'm not sure you're right about there being a highly gendered dichotomy to it.
Do you have some data to back that first point up? How many of those non-college boys are getting those plumber jobs, and how many are either getting crap jobs or dropping out of labor force participation?
I would think the relevant data points would be basic high school graduation rates compared between girls and boys, with no regard for whether they attend college or not; and income comparisons between men and women of the same age regardless of education, drawn as a year-by-year curve as they get older (the expectation being, I would think, that girls who attend college would get a slower start on wage levels at the beginning than boys who get good trade jobs right out of high school, but then the girls will catch up over time if their degrees are worth it).
Also, if your theory is correct, we'd expect to see lower percentage rates of retention in college for girls than for boys. Is that what we see?
"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.
Is social intelligence a subset of 'g', general intelligence, or something else entirely? I wonder.
I think there's hope: social intelligence seems to be far more trainable and mutable by life experiences than g is.
I experienced this during my years in Wuhan. Many Americans operate under the illusion that our society is a meritocracy. Chinese people do not believe in such nonsense. As a result, they focus overwhelmingly on social skills when it comes to raising their children. This focus extends to their entire educational system and their outlook on life in general. Their resulting superior mental health outcomes and rapid progression as a society speak for themselves.
A lot of the economy is schmoozing and connections, yes. But as I mentioned above it's a big, diverse economy and there are at least pockets of it where what matters is what you can do rather than who you know. How else do you explain the rise of the coder? Even in the popular imagination, as evidenced by countless movies, books, etc., he is a geeky loser with no social graces. I would say that a lot of the time that comes pretty close to reality. If the ability to schmooze was the sole determinant of success then there's no way that could happen.
It's not the sole determinant, it's just way more important than any other determinant. Coders making above average salaries is not due to meritocracy. It's due to their specific proficiency being able to make money for rich people who are almost entirely scumbags.
Again, I think it depends on the industry. Plus merit does come into play. When an industry like tech takes off it elevates everybody working in it. But when general demand is high that also exponentially increases the demand for talent, especially for something like coding where a good coder can be an order of magnitude more productive than a mediocre one.
It sounds, to me, like "agreeableness" in the Big Five.
I think agreeableness is probably a part of it but that the whole concept is inherently impossible to represent with a number or even a single term due to its nature.
It depends. Thankfully it's an enormous economy and quite diverse, so I and all of my geeky friends are able to thrive despite our lack of social graces.
That's good! I am inherently mistrustful of such claims, however, because Americans tend to ignorantly believe that success/thriving/etc == making lots of money and that's just laughable. Success can only be defined on an individual basis and involves multitudes of factors.
Once you get past a certain threshold the effects of a large salary on mental well being start to drop off. Falling below that threshold though is no fun whatsoever.
I would say the main benefit is simply not having to worry about financial matters. It's the absence of stress rather than something that actively gives you happiness.
I tend to agree but I see it as more of a window: people who make less than roughly $75k/yr in America (depending on the area) have to deal with scarcity driving down their quality of life. People who make more than (very roughly) $300k/yr have to deal with all the vile shit that comes with having too many alienation tokens. This effect is why the vast majority of billionaires become rabid, subhuman scum over time.
I appreciate that you mention coding at the end, which can be one of the most defeating intellectual activities. It has a special way of blackholing all the energy you put into it.
I write code for my day job, but I was never a great math / science student growing up. In my opinion, most people who code professionally are relatively mediocre at it (myself included). You can get better at it if you have tons and tons of time (and maybe a good teacher). An infinite fund of Captain Ahab-style rage against the stupid machines also helps. But the people who are truly good at it are very very rare, and even professional coders look askance at them.
And anyway this all fits with your point of view about intellectual ability. I thought this piece was a memorable synthesis of your ideas on this topic.
I knew a bunch of CS majors in college because I played a lot of frisbee, and they were so good at coding, like, immediately. I took an intro to CS class and asked one of them for help and he kept saying, well, I don't read Anna Karenina for fun like you do, so it's o.k. to be bad at this. I mostly just felt humiliated, since I knew my career path would be either academia or teaching high school in the Midwest (I chose the latter) and his would be google and living on the West Coast.
The humiliation is where the Captain Ahab style rage comes in, and then you fight for years! Also I am in maybe a minority in my opinion that most CS classes are terrible, and most CS teachers more than terrible. Courses are designed for the people who will already be good at it.
My CS teacher wasn't the worst teacher I had in college, but he was in the bottom quartile for sure. Arrogant, self-righteous, and deliberately opaque. There were other professors who were actively cruel, and he wasn't quite there, but close.
I think this can be zoomed out beyond CS: Many higher education classes are pedagogically mediocre-to-terrible. Somewhat ironically, this is often particularly true at more selective research universities, where many professors are there to research first, teach second.
Separately, CS does often seem to be similar to many engineering and hard science disciplines, where early classes are often used to filter for students who have the preferred combination of motivation and pre-existing knowledge/skills/ability.