The narrative on the right is that if you graduate high school, get a job and defer having children (until age 25 for example) that you can escape poverty. That should be a bar low enough for almost everyone to clear.
I always placed it in the category of "And this is why we can't have nice things". Part of living in a free society is that people have the freedom to screw up/make terrible choices.
You don’t think there is a correlation causation issue with that theory?
If someone has poor impulse control and a low to non-existent ability to defer gratification, checking the high school box doesn’t suddenly make them a good employee.
I think it's more like if somebody has poor impulse control and no ability to defer gratification that they are incapable of graduating high school.
The point is that everything lies on a spectrum. To get to the point where you drop out of high school, have kids before 20 and are unemployed--that's a clear minority of the population. There are a bunch of people who are crappy workers but who still manage to hold down a job and escape poverty. Like the ones who took ten minutes to get me my order after screwing it up at the drive through window the other day.
I have a lot of endangered-bird-themed material I've been workshopping at the nightclubs so I was excited, but I had to pivot pretty quick once it became clear we were talking about the human animal.
"Why do they call it a California Condor? Is this a bird that has a huge mortgage and can't drive? And is it a Northern California Condor or a Southern California Condor? Is it just flying around up there trying to pitch me on a startup or a movie script?"
Don’t bother joining the Southern California Condor association. It’s just a bunch of sqwawking about property taxes and the noise from the nest nextdoor.
"Have you ever noticed that a Speckle Chested Piculet flies like this? But meanwhile, a Red Fronted Macaw flies... like this? Do you think they ever go out in public together? They're flying around and some Antioquia Brushfinches see them. You know the Piculet is looking at them like 'I'm not with him!' Hahaha, oh, you know it's true."
Me too, but more in terms of questioning the celebration of shutting down Germany’s last nuclear power plant and having to resort to firing coal plants back up.
Was gonna write same. I'm familiar with the terms "behaviorist" and "determinist", but must have missed the lexical update where "environmentalist" started meaning other things besides Wow You Didn't Sort The Recycle and chaining oneself to trees scheduled for a haircut. Though I guess there was a conspicuously missing term for "favours Nurture over Nature", and environmentalist isn't the worst possible term, even if it was already in use.
I can't help but wonder about a counterfactual world where Charles Murray had been a somewhat better writer, or had a more farsighted editor. "The Bell Curve" was the poison pill for a lot of people in my generation who kneejerk reject the premise of <s>eugenics</s> genetic influences (and sometimes statistical distributions writ large...), the specific links of IQ and race. All roads lead to Nazi Damascus, apparently. Which is a sad state of affairs, since as Freddie points out, no one is confused about the polygenic determinants of height, eye or hair colour, etc. But since the entire field is cordoned off as a sort of progressive Superfund site, it becomes impossible to think coherently about. That's the environment that produces pure-hairshirt-environmentalists.
Then there's other stuff like epigenetics, which doesn't fall neatly into either camp, and as a result I think tends to get subpar media coverage. There's definitely certain competing Narratives at play, neither of which much like to acknowledge science that isn't easily weaponized. So neither Pure camp gives a clearsighted approach, and just taking a Solomonic golden mean still leaves out important facets. Humans are complicated, man.
“Solomonic”? Like… killing babies? Sounds like EUGENICS.
I think it’s hard to talk about this stuff, not least because eugenics is a real and persistent human practice. I’m not even talking about Nazis; as I understand it, lots of ancient cultures were pretty comfortable culling crippled or deformed infants. Of course, we don’t do that now. At some point we decided that everyone was God’s child, “all men are created equal,” cripples and all, and that has persisted even into our modern secular thinking — every human is entitled to live whatever kind of life they can.
Still… the eugenic drive IS persistent. The Atlantic reports that the abortion rate for fetuses that test positive for Down’s Syndrome is around 95 percent in Denmark, and also pretty high in the rest of Western Europe. (For that matter in many countries there are suspiciously more boys being born than girls, which suggests sex-selective, rather than disability-selective, eugenics at play.)
But it seems like the impulse has to stop somewhere. After all, fully half of us are below average on any given axis of measurement. And if you could eliminate that half… well, then there’s a new average, and now half the remaining population is below THAT threshold. Surely at some point you want to stop, before you’re Hugo Drax aboard his space station with his tiny master race coterie. Nobody wants to be that guy. Plus at some point you worry about inbreeding and loss of adaptive vigor.
Anyway… hopefully our humanistic values remain strong even if we find that much of life is just biological destiny. After all — is life less sweet if you can’t run a four minute mile or solve differential equations? (Though it probably will have to be less sweet if you have a genetic predisposition to diabetes.)
Here’s hoping people heed the call of Freddie (perhaps the Charles Murray of his generation!) and take all this new information as a reason to be generous, rather than cruel. (Or, to put it another way, here’s hoping the genetic predisposition to be cruel it’s not spread across too much of the population.)
"Over a long enough timeframe, conditions on social media ensure that pretty much all subcultures devolve into sneering comedy clubs." DeBoer's First Law.
By turning everything into a series of hot takes and snarky one-liners for the attention-challenged, the internet may well be the death of us all.
I still haven't figured out how much of what You say, KT, is for effect and how much is unfortunate. No matter. I don't come around here often for it to matter.
TY for Your reply. I'm vaguely aware of what an accelerationist is. And I agree there's a pretty good chance that accelerationists will lead us to a different and, more likely, bigger degree of miserable.
ICBW, but I wonder if pessimism of the acceleration kind doesn't DEaccelarate conversations. (If that's even a word.) TY again..
Remember when we thought that the Internet would usher in an age of highly-informed citizens, all connecting in a way that facilitated business, art and culture? Instead, it's brought us Tik Tok, memes, and yet another avenue for pornography.
I don't know if it's being naive so much as people forgot the lesson of the double-edged sword. Comes into play more often than one would suspect, IMO.
It's fun to declare how much the internet sucks but about 80% of Americans aren't on Twitter and of the ones who are 90% rarely if ever post. There's a lot of sweeping generalizations being made from the tiny percentage of (mostly unread) journalists and academics who are jerking themselves off on Twitter everyday while the rest of the world spins around perfectly fine.
"By turning everything into a series of hot takes and snarky one-liners for the attention-challenged, the internet may well be the death of us all."
I don't think that's a fair conclusion on a premise based around the handful of likeminded journalists, academics, and activists Freddie follows on Twitter.
It is worth remembering that twitter only has 200 million people and bots, and even facebook counts only two billion users. The majority of humanity does not exist to a significant extent on social media, and they are the ones best equipped to create the future. Not the losers who are addicted to the endless dopamine drip of doing unpaid labor for figures like Zuck or whoever ends up owning twitter.
Its not the end all be all but its not nothing either. 257M people voted in 2020 so one can imagine that the conversations online between Twitter and Facebook as well as the audiences of all the leading political influencers can sway elections. It also can lead to grass roots movements like happened with the Arab Spring. Or the Trucker protest. Or whatever you want to call Jan 6. Its not just noise. If it was just noise it wouldn't be so monitored and manipulated.
The thing is, there's Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/TikTok, endless porn and celebrity stuff, but also there's a big chunk of high-school education available for free from Khan Academy and college education available for free from MIT/OCW and other universities, tutorials on almost any technical subject on Youtube, podcasts that are basically like sitting in on a journal club with a friend who knows the field explaining the terms (try out TWIV or Probable Causation for examples), etc. For that matter, there are wonderful Substacks (Razib's and Freddie's are both good examples) that won't waste your time.
People who want to learn things have amazing resources to do that at their fingertips. People who want to piss away their time dunking on the outgroup or whacking off to goat porn or whatever also have amazing resources to do that. It's not one or the other--some folks right now are going through an online class on orbital dynamics or the philosophy of Nietsche, others are yelling at other idiots on Twitter.
These days I find the internet so much more entertaining than TV. To you point on my tabs right now I'm 20 minutes into an interview with 76ers former coach Brett Brown, 20 minutes into a Podcast with Rogan and Duncan Trussel because that tandem cracks me up, I got Alito's opinion on Roe. vs Wade up as I intend to read it eventually. Charlie Chaplin's the great dictator speech ready to go. Bad Faith podcast which I hope will give me a basic breakdown of how the left would handle inflation. and others I'm too embarrassed to share. :)
This has gone back and forth for a long while and, as far as I'm aware (which isn't great), in most cases (if not virtually all-a them) it comes down to a combination of factors.
I don't know how they determine these things, or whether they're accurate or not, but I remember there was a study that intelligence was 40% genetics. I'm always open to views which contradict this, but it would take a lot to convince that environment had *no* effect. But, then, I haven't studied the previous article on "Education Doesn't Work 2.0". I'm having trouble with the concept. The Michaela and Success Academy schools of strict instruction working being an example.
But "blank state" environmental theory. That's just plain preposterous. I give it exactly *zero* probability of being true.
Success Charter Academies have a sky-high attrition rate and don't backfill. It's a classic hidden selection effect masquerading as an educational effect.
It’s not attrition — it’s just that those students have already achieved SUCCESS and don’t need school anymore! (It’s like achieving nirvana and disappearing from the material realm.)
Funny - from the title, I thought the piece was about Greens, tree-huggers, etc.- and kept waiting for the education "analogy" to end :). But all good questions! (My favorite is how it's OBVIOUS to these people that athletic ability varies dramatically, but for some reason the comparison is taboo.)
"'A one liner and an ahooga horn produce a more desirable response than saying 'hmm I don't know the answer to that' on the internet, studies show." --American Scientist magazine
"The entire charter school ideology, which empowers plutocrats to defund public schools and attack teachers and their unions, depends entirely on the idea that students all have exactly equal inherent ability and that any suggestion otherwise is a way to dodge accountability." No, Mr. de Boer. This is grossly dishonest. There are vast numbers of incredibly hardworking charter school teachers and founders who are working to improve education for poor youngsters. None of them think that everyone is equal in potential, but they share a belief, many of them, that a lot of potential is terribly and cruelly wasted, and it is. Many children have terrible public schools and no other options because their parents both work and there are no charters. They're stuck, and it's a nightmare. I know because I have met them. You're just wrong about this.
Isn't this the kind of elite speak that isn't persuasive to the masses? Normal everyday people aren't looking at the methodology. They know people, they're neighbors, they have kids in schools. I'm not saying you're wrong, but "that's bad methodology" doesn't mean much to Joe Dadwithkidsinpublicschool.
There's tons of data out there on this. Schools that perform WAY below grade level for decades with no real change. Then charter schools come in take those same kids and make huge improvements.
It's not that charters are always good, or public schools are always bad. It that schools like everything else need competition to perform. Bad public schools and/or bad charter schools should be shut down.
We should have full school choice where the dollars follow the kids.
And no I don't hate teachers. My grand parents were both teachers, and my wife used to teach as well. I also served on the local school board. But it's horrific that we have allowed millions of kids to stay in failing public schools for decades.
I met them while working in charter schools. I led a charter school reform and wrote a training manual for a chain of charter schools. I trained dozens of teachers in charter schools. I also worked my ass off for eighty hours a week in charter schools. I practically killed myself doing it. Most of my staff worked incredibly hard, too, and for ridiculously low money which was all we could afford. When we received kids from the local public schools, about 80% of them had reading deficiencies. These deficiencies were almost all gone two years after starting at our school.
It is true that the academic results at charters are quite mixed. Some are objective failures and should be shut down. This is also true of government-run "public" schools. Charter school status is absolutely no guarantee of competence. Teaching skills are hard to impart, and charters are full of people who have high aspirations but not much experience or knowledge of effective teaching. That's also true of government-run schools.
What charters can do is create a hell of a lot more diversity of teaching approaches, and out of that something that works well has a good chance of spreading because it does work well and parents pass the word.
Just as important is that charters offer students a way out of public school chaos. Some public schools are violent hellholes where nothing can be taught even by well-intentioned teachers because the disorder is so extreme. Charters that have reasonable order and safety offer a way out of such conditions even when they don't teach any better than the local mess.
You criticize my "methodology." I don't have a methodology but I do have direct knowledge and experience. Since you do care about methodology, you must surely know that your own offers no justification for the sweeping generalization that first got my goat.
Agree. The public schools are not the best option for evert student. Public school
performance goes up when they face pressure from charters. Not every student is equal in ability, but all public ISDs do not provide equally for all students. By that I mean the average student can easily get lost.
I also wonder what would be different if we found that events in infancy had butterfly-effect-like impacts on development. Like let's say there really is no genetic component, but having some stimulus as an infant can really determine what a person is like. Since those events are pretty random, policy prescriptions would be essentially the same as if it was genetic, surely – like if someone becomes shy because they were in a room with people and got frightened when they were 6 months old, that's effectively the same as having a genetic predisposition to shyness.
Not saying that's how it works at all, but just as a thought experiment, early infant nurture could be functionally indistinguishable for inborn nature for the purposes of policy.
And, conversely, genes might well become highly malleable in the near future — e.g., the recent use of gene editing to change a patient’s cholesterol levels. Let the bioethical conundra begin!
But that argument is recursive: if you give two children these identical frightening experiences, one might be crippingly shy and the other might not. Is that outcome because of their genetics, or because child A had a similar experience a month prior and this just cemented it as traumatic, while child B played with blocks?
As Heydocbrown said in the top comment here, separating cause and effect and isolating them and controlling them are nigh-impossible. In fact I'd say they're completely impossible, minus some kind of bounded Emile experiment.
This is why, in this layperson's opinion, the meat is found not in the study of individuals but the study of population groups, groups deflined by biological haplogroup. Even then it's not a slam dunk to say "aha! Shared trait! Genetic!" But it's a starting point, particularly when you can contrast the expression of shared traits in one environment to a different environment - for example, the behavior of ethnic Swedes in Sweden versus those in Minnesota. Once again, though, such contrasts can raise more questions than they answer: how do you separate environmental causes at all, other than by guesswork?
the proper starting point on claims of human genetic determinism is skepticism.
I am professional agricultural researcher. So I can answer many of these questions in a general sense from lived experience of design and analyzing experiments. It is much harder to be confident about how they apply to humans for three reasons.
First, humanity is a young species, so its genetic diversity is very low. Two wild varieties (called “landraces” in the uhh… historic… technical vernacular) of corn have 99% of the same genes. A human has 99% of the same genes as a chimpanzee and >99.9% of the same genes as a very different human of the same genetic sex.
Second, best practice experimental practices for determining genetic vs environmental components of a trait (e.g. intelligence, or how tall corn is) are completely unethical for humans - replicated controlled trials. You would go to jail for them.
Third, humans are smart & social animals, which makes them engines for experimental confounders and provides a non-genetic reason for a trait to be heritable between generations.
This all makes determining what is intrinsic vs extrinstic for a human fiendishly hard.
To your specific questions:
Brain structure to function - if you figure this one out, you get a Nobel prize.
Animal cognition affected by genome - 100% true and proven in livestock.
Intrinsic dispositions, fraternal twins - maybe? but what if we're really sensitive to random stimuli in the womb? Or what if in a different environment very different than our current human society, the genetic intrinsics would express differently. Confounders.
How come school experiments don't work? - as you can't do well-controlled experiments on humans, why would you expect these experiments to tell you anything causally?
So the total environmentalists are wrong, but the genetic determinists (especially the really truly racist set) are taking data from weak experiments to make strong claims.
The genetic determinist claims out there are the sort that are hard to prove on crops and livestock, where we can use experimental techniques like replication and controlling the entire lifecycle of the experimental subject from birth. And even for corn, strong causal claims are hard to make.
Can you explain what the below means. How can a trait be heritable on a non-genetic basis?
"Third, humans are smart & social animals, which makes them engines for experimental confounders and provides a non-genetic reason for a trait to be heritable between generations."
By genetic determinism, do you mean the belief that our genes are primarily responsible (as in great than 50%) for our behavior, intelligence, looks, personality traits, etc.?
Are you saying that scientists who are genetic determinists (based on the definition above) are racist?
I think I take issue with the word "heritable" which I've always viewed as relating to traits v. preferences, like the Bulls example. I wish this discussion came with a dictionary.
The heritable part is your interest in following any sport team (the trait of tribalism). The environmental part is the particular team you choose to follow?
I’m not Doc Brown, but I’m pretty sure they’re just saying that because humans have culture, and pass behaviors on from one generation to the next, “heritable” does not equal “genetic.” For example, speaking a certain language is highly heritable (in that most children speak the same language as their parents), but it’s not genetically determined.
*for this message, I'm using the words Asian & English to indicate people who grew up in exclusively Asian/English language only homes.
There's an interesting find in linguistics. I don't know if there are studies on this. But its something Vietnamese friends taught me. The Vietnamese language has sounds which cannot be heard by people who grew up in English homes.
Likewise, some people who grew up in Asian homes cannot differentiate between the English L & R sounds. Ask an Asian person to say 'plyers.' My observation of this was with Korean co-workers in the 80s.
I'm curious if simply being in an environment where a tonal language was spoken a lot (but not learning it itself) makes a difference. I, sadly, only speak English but was constantly around my grandparents, who mostly speak Cantonese.
I knew a guy once who had learned Arabic as a child and then forgotten it when he moved to America. When he took an Arabic class later in the Army, he could read fluently (which is challenging — Arabic has a tough alphabet for English speakers!) but had no idea what any of the words meant.
Why do I use the term? Because when you do genetics vs environmental analysis you get a factor called "heritability," where 0 is "no association with genetics" and 1 "total association with genetics." This is what "heritable" means in a technical sense. In the case of Freddie's example, you would get a heritability>0 for sports fandom. i.e. correlation is not causation.
No, I am saying in the sense of your definition that racists are often genetic determinists with motivated reasoning.
"First, humanity is a young species, so its genetic diversity is very low. Two wild varieties (called “landraces” in the uhh… historic… technical vernacular) of corn have 99% of the same genes. A human has 99% of the same genes as a chimpanzee and >99.9% of the same genes as a very different human of the same genetic sex."
i think we should stop doing the 99.9% thing. it's an artifact of decades old research. we know the average human has 5 million snps. most are not functional. but there's plenty of variance to work with. dogs are far younger as a lineage than humans and directed strong selection has allowed for a lot of phenotypic diversity
"Second, best practice experimental practices for determining genetic vs environmental components of a trait (e.g. intelligence, or how tall corn is) are completely unethical for humans - replicated controlled trials. You would go to jail for them."
this critique pretty much invalidates all behavior science fwiw on the microeconomic/individual level. the level of stringency applied to behavior genetics is never applied to sociology. why?
I thought that the 99.(% genetic human/chimp similarity thingee was a comparison of mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely from the mother and doesn't undergo meiosis, which means that it is therefore less prone to change over time?
In other words, you can send a chimp to school, but it still won't get into Stanford, any more than you can teach a cat to speak Latin.
no. it's from protein level comparisons i think but has been kind of validated by whole genome sequencing...but the last generation has taught us that genomes vary a lot in size, have lots of random nonfunctional variation, blah blah. not sure what the stat tells us.
we know humans can vary in quantitative traits. height is clearly heritable and it doesn't have some of the methodological issues of behavior, but it's architecture is polygenic. so we probably have the variance. but if you need rfts etc you aren't getting them outside of north korea
i think the point about developmental 'noise' is a big one. a lot of 'environment' is just random stuff including biology that's not heritable we don't understand. this is what model organisms tell us. unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily help the classic 'environmentalist' side, because this is not environment you can control
I would 100 percent be on board for applying much greater stringency to sociology, economics, psychology, nutrition, medicine…. People don’t have to run RCTs or have perfect methodology to do interesting science, but we could probably stand to be a lot more humble about what “we know” or “studies show.”
I am not a fan of sociology research either. Replication crisis design issues and confusing correlation for causation is endemic there as well.
This is the right comparison though, because the methods used are literally the ones designed for breeding experiments, but without the critical component of a method for causality determination.
The dog point is interesting. My quick google suggests they're more diverse, which makes sense given that they were bred intentionally, and reach sexual majority in less than a year. I wonder if they've sampled the genetic diversity of wolves through interbreeding as well.
Stronger claims need stronger evidence, and genetic diversity is a relevant prior to analysis of an experiment on genetic inheritance, especially in the absence of a method to determine causality.
yeah but if you are a plant guy you work with isogenic lines, right? very few human lineages are so depauperate of variance.
re: dogs, 'village dogs' are similar to humans. but speciality breeds are new and mostly derived from recent european lineages. there has been some wolf admixture (and jackel too). but that's ancient, not really recent (mostly).
"Stronger claims need stronger evidence, and genetic diversity is a relevant prior to analysis of an experiment on genetic inheritance, especially in the absence of a method to determine causality."
the strongest method are family-based. they require big sample sizes but they're getting there
eg look at thousands of sibling pairs who are 1 stdev different in IQ and look at the consistent btwn sibling differences in genes. if they are enriched for brain dev genes that's 'curious' isn't it?
Yes. The point is that these sibling studies, unlike other polygenic score studies, are genuine randomized trials. They use the random assortment of different genes from the two parents, which makes them free of all the usual confounders. In fact, the usual environmental confounders just add noise, obscuring the signal but not creating systematic false signals. For most psychological traits the sibling heritability coefficient is unsurprisingly somewhat smaller than the population coefficient but usually not dramatically so.
I think a lot of people aren't apprised of the resources available for researchers who are linking genetic composition to behavioral traits. In particular, it's not common knowledge that polygenic scores are constructed over huge datasets, allowing experts to reliably draw-out correlations.
Kathryn Paige Harden's book The Genetic Lottery is particularly instructive in this regard. And she brings up the point that we can recognize differences in individual abilities without relying on group mean comparisons (ecological correlation fallacy) for policy. The social problem is conquering the tendency to use these differences to construct hierarchies.
"A human has 99% of the same genes as a chimpanzee and >99.9% of the same genes as a very different human of the same genetic sex"
I don't mean this to be combative, but I don't understand the significance of this statistic.
1) Surely some of the cognitive differences between humans and CHIMPANZEES are genetic, right, notwithstanding that we share 99% of the same genes? Is the point that 99% of shared genes is the right number for genetics to be a component of cognitive differences, but 99.9% is so much that it's unlikely that genetics contribute to cognitive differences? How do we determine that?
2) Doesn't that argument work for everything? If humans share 99% of genes with chimps and 99.9% with other humans, why doesn't that mean that differences in height or eye color or hair or what have you should be assumed not to be genetic?
Again, I suspect there's something I'm missing in my comprehension, so I appreciate your patience.
If just 0.9% of our genome is the difference between a chimp and Albert Einstein, now I'm even more certain that really tiny changes can have outsized effects.
Humor me for a second. I have no background in biology and little to no understanding of the human genome. I have avid-reader-level familiarity with lots of psychometric studies quantifying lifetime variance of IQs, which generally demonstrate that (i) IQs do vary over lifetimes, but rarely by significant amounts (e.g., almost no one moves from 50th percentile to 80th percentile, but moves from, say, 50th to 55th are not at all uncommon); (ii) IQs are strongly correlated with biological parent IQs, less so with non-biological parents and (iii) decline somewhat unpredictably past prime age (seemingly as part of the aging process). Given radical environmental changes that many, many people experience over lifetimes, how is this not persuasive evidence of a strong genetic (and heritable) influence on IQ with an acknowledgment of statistically significant, but comparably modest, environmental/developmental "other" factor. Or are you defining genetic determinists so rigidly as to be incompatible with the fact of sibling variance and modest lifetime variance?
Somewhere else in the comments someone raises the possibility of environmental factors being powerful, but only during a small window in childhood, especially infancy/toddlerhood. So by the time kids reach the age where we are testing people, mostly their range of possibility is already fixed.
And, in fact, it seems likely this is true for at least some things. Lead exposure is thought to be much more damaging to fetuses and very small children than to older children, teens, or adults. My guess is this is also true of, for example, the behavioral effects of abuse/neglect — being abused in early childhood could have a vastly more powerful influence on outcomes than, for example, if you suddenly acquired an abusive step-parent at 16 or 17.
While not disagreeable, I feel like this is burying the lede on the real question a bit.
Having experienced some small-scale childhood neglect (alcoholic parent and a case of abandonment), I’m very cognizant of how this treatment affected very specific behavioral qualities of mine - but can say very little, if anything at all, about how it relates to any genetic predispositions I have that seem to inform my behavior as well (for example: a natural inquisitiveness, the first trait I can consciously remember possessing, has influenced my desire to be cognizant of how my upbringing has also influenced my behavioral personality).
While the influence is there, it’s bearing on my personality is both combined with (and tangential to) my base inclinations, and furthermore, is beholden to (but not determinant of) what I decide to do with said information within my cognizant autonomy.
It baffles me that while it is exceedingly difficult and necessary to scientifically prove certain aspects of behavioral psychology (as pointed out in this post), why some people don’t just generally accept that it will always be a combination of nature and nurture that influences a person’s traits. It doesn’t even say what someone is willing or capable of doing with those conditions.
For sure. I was trying to answer the specific question of how a powerful environmental effect could be compatible with overall lifetime stability of traits, especially after puberty.
But obviously our genes are the substrate against which the environment acts. No amount of lead in the environment is going to turn a human child into a Springer spaniel, for example.
also, one last comment re: variation. there's a lot of publications now focusing on the ubiquity of soft selection on standing variation in humans. the fact that there's a lot of standing variation in the first place should update your prior on whether we (modern humans) have the genetic variance for a lot of these quantitative traits that come back with nontrivial heritabilities (as i said before, height is relatively noncontroversial with lots of bone morphogenesis genes discovered associated with variance, and it's clearly very polygenic and quantitative across all human populations).
"Brain structure to function - if you figure this one out, you get a Nobel prize."
That's not entirely true, right? I think scientists thought that fMRI was going to solve this problem, and its likely that fMRI studies are not as useful as we think. But there are some things that can be said at a gross level. And there are any number of other methods that allow us triangulate the function of specific areas when paired the fMRI studies, such as working with stroke patients and transcranial magnetic stimulation. For example, everyone knows that visual processing is in the back of the brain, that quantities are represented in the interparietal sulcus, Broca's area is critical to speech, and the amygdala is critical to experiencing fear. Even when there are exceptions to the rule, we understand the reasons for it; for example, a person was injured at a very young age and the plasticity of the brain was able to work without the missing brain center, but this person may have a more difficult time learning to speak (or whatever it is depending on the injury location), and past a certain age, plasticity greatly decreases.
100% people are working on the function-structure mapping. But Freddie is interested in education and education is a much more complex process. If I destroy your visual cortex, sure I can't teach you with a video... but that's not going to get you answers to questions relevant to the racial educational outcome gap
This paper is fun for where neuroscience actually is.
Maybe another way to think about it is that we have OK progress in function, but there isn't as much progress with variation in function. Does a stronger fMRI signal, number of neurons recruited, neuron density, or longer period of neuron development have anything to do with ability? I think there are studies that answer some of these questions, but its a much thornier issue.
Iain McGilchrist has largely answered the brain structure to function mystery, but his book is so long and well-cited that most cannot be bothered to engage with it.
His "Master and Emissary" is only 500 pages, and 100 of that is notes and stuff. That's nowhere near his magnum opus. Need to reread both-a them, as there's a lot to take in there.
Wouldn't womb stimuli affect both twins roughly equally? If not, wouldn't the cause of that different effect of the environment be non-environmental by definition?
There is one experiment that is truly a randomized trial and that is considered ethical. That is for two parents to have more than one child. The siblings inherit randomly different genes from the two parental sets. Although many environmental effects will affect the siblings' traits, any variation that is systematically correlated with genes is a true causal signal because there are no backdoor paths from environment to the random shuffling of those genes. Sibling polygenic score data show clear signals for many traits.
I used to do stand-up, and the open-mic comparison is nearly perfect. The only difference is that even open mics are to some extent curated; if a comedian is completely unfunny, they either won't get a slot, or won't get one until WAY late, when everyone has gone home. Twitter, however, is equal opportunity, and comedy is not an art form in which you want that kind of equality.
Often it's more like a Westwood coffee house open mic, where everyone puts their name into a bowl and the first 20 names pulled get 3 minutes of mic time. Except that there is no bowl and everyone gets up on stage at the same time and they are almost all equally unprepared. And, as you say, you really don't want that kind of equality.
Many people have difficulty separating hard truth from morality. The "is-ought" distinction, I've heard it called. Genetic differences in cognitive abilities raise serious questions for the egalitarianism at the core of modern American/Western ideology. What if the black-white achievement gap is impossible to solve (because of genetics)? What if women will never achieve parity in STEM fields with men (because of genetics)? In the minds of many, it is literally evil to believe these things to be true, so they work backwards from the morally correct conclusion to arrive at blank slate-ism.
Agree 100%. I believe men and women are fundamentally different and there will never be 100% parity in outcomes, not unless we socially engineer them and this would require totalitarian methods. I remember the James Damore controversy (same with Lawrence Summers brouhaha) and thinking of course they're both right. Women are different and want different things.
What we should do is not actively discriminate against women who show the same skills and potential as men. If some fields end up male-dominated, it's not because of sexism or the patriarchy. It's funny - no one complains about elementary and middle school teachers being overwhelmingly female. I believe the paucity of men in lower school teaching is detrimental for children (especially boys) but imagine if I went to my school board and demanded equity.
I'm not even sure the totalitarian methods would work all that well, any more than you can train a tabby cat to herd sheep or teach a squirrel to catch mice.
Even if they do what they are trained for, they aren't very good at it.
I actually agree with you but that wouldn't stop the blank statists from trying. Failure would demonstrate only that the right methods weren't tried. New methods would be needed. Look at Sweden for example. The paradox of increasing sex equality leading back to sex differentiated outcomes. People cannot fathom or accept that women want and prioritize different things than men do.
I don't think the STEM split is a matter of innate ability but rather preference.
Small sample size anecdata: I was part of a program in Grade 8 where they tested high-achieving math students and sent a few of us to skip a grade; 3 out of 4 of us were girls (and one of them remains of my best friends). Said best friend and myself both work in advocacy, even though we probably could've been engineers if we wanted to. The other girl is doing some soft envirosci stuff, judging from her LinkedIn. The boy went on to do a finance degree and runs a startup.
Even though I spent a lot of time on the internet in my youth and participated in web design competitions in high school, when I was contemplating various career options, compsci seemed like a distinctly unappealing option. A lot of stereotypes of the field being filled with basement-dwelling Mark Zuckerberg types.
I'm not sure I believe men and women have the same innate ability in math. Even if we did have the same exact innate ability statistically, women have different traits that result in different preferences and those preferences are driven in large part by biology.
I don't deny that preferences exist. Sometimes they are biological, sometimes environmental. I think so long as we can strive to neutralize environmental influences on career choices as much as possible, I'm not mad about any biological ones that reveal themselves.
But from my personal experience -- taking every high school math and science course available and then doing a Bachelor's of Science -- there was a pretty equal gender distribution in my classes and in the people competing for top spots. I also did a program in first year geared towards keener life science students, and checked an end-of-year photo we took to make sure I wasn't misremembering, and indeed -- there were 5 boys versus 20 girls in our class. So I'm dubious that there's actually a capacity difference!
The way I look at the black-white test score gap is the way I look at the asian-white gap. I don't believe Asians are smarter than me, it's environmental. As for women, was it Charles Murray's research that shows when women live in richer societies they tend to chose paths that are rewarding in non financial ways? I also believe what used to used to be taught in community college--that differences within groups are greater than differences between them.
Murray pointed out there is a racial IQ gap but teasing out the genetic component to that gap is not possible given the current state of the science.
The guy that I know that has done the most work with gender occupational preference is Richard Lippa at Cal State Fullerton. In a nutshell he posits that women in developing economies enter fields like tech or engineering because the primary motivation for anybody in a developing economy is to survive and earn money. In developed economies where that is not as high of a priority differences in occupational preference by gender are more easily expressed and the number of women working in tech/engineering/the hard sciences plummets.
Murray is the elephant in the room though, isn't he? The introduction most people have to this topic is _The Bell Curve_ and its attendant controversies.
The real tragedy there is that Murray never claimed that you can pin down racial differences in IQ to genetics. In fact he explicitly pointed out in the book that you can't because the science just isn't there. His real argument is that regardless of the explanation some people have a lower potential in terms of IQ and that IQ is correlated with lifetime earnings. What are the implications for that at a societal level?
Well, that's what Murray would have you believe his real argument is. And it would be nice to believe him, because it would give us an interesting topic worth discussing. A topic pretty close to the one at the heart of The Cult of Smart, actually.
But frankly, if you look at Murray's career as a whole, it's hard to avoid noticing that he's just a bigot. His arguments are fake; he arrived at his conclusions long before thinking of them. He'll happily use garbage data from pseudo-Nazis to justify claiming what he wants to claim.
The racial implications of the The Bell Curve are not merely a minor element that has become prominent by unfortunate happenstance; they're a big part of the reason for the book's existence.
1. Murray wrote that there is a persistent and very real racial IQ gap across races.
2. Murray wrote that it's not possible to determine if there is a genetic component to that IQ gap.
Which of those two is false? The first is easily the most incendiary claim from _The Bell Curve_ and it should be largely uncontroversial because it's true.
although the paragraph below is not the main point of this piece, it deserves attention because of its accurate diagnosis: "Decades of pop culture convinced people that being an adult means competing in a never-ending game of trading “ironic one-liners” at each other, while ego convinced them that they’re actually good at it. Everyone thinks that they’re funny and everyone wants to be a Bill Murray figure, the guy sitting at the back of the class impressing everyone with his zingers." The corollary to this realization is that sitting around watching cable news or following podcasts or just floating in the swirl of Twitter has everyone think that they have broad yet incisive knowledge of world affairs, which leads to more ironic jabs and a ceaseless litany of complaints and demands devoid of action
Unfortunately too many people are following a faulty logic that says: We know that outcomes are 100% the result of genetics and environment. We can't prove that genes have any influence (0%). So environment must be the remainder (100%).
When really we should be equally sceptical about both causes (genetics 0%, environment 0%, TBD 100%).
"The entire charter school ideology, which empowers plutocrats to defund public schools and attack teachers and their unions, depends entirely on the idea that students all have exactly equal inherent ability and that any suggestion otherwise is a way to dodge accountability."
There may be a branch of charter school supporters that believe that all students are equal and charter schools demonstrate what is wrong with regular public school teachers and administrators, but I'm not sure I would even consider that a substantial minority opinion. Anecdotally, quite a lot of charter school proponents believe the benefits of charter schools are either (i) matching students with appropriate schools (sometimes ones with particular emphasis on some topic like music or arts that might keep kids engaged when they lack other interests) and (ii) a focus on instilling discipline and work habits that benefit some of the lowest achieving students precisely because that is where there is the biggest bang for the buck with those students.
The truths found in the questions bother those with strong ideological positions. The answers would be disruptive to the "official narrative".
A wise society would take the reality of differences and help people maximize their abilities. It would also limit the exploitation of others. Fraud and corruption would be severely prosecuted.
And the entire equity system would be thrown out. Not everyone has artistic talent. If everyone was limited to my talent level, there would be no art. Not everyone can be good at chess. Not everyone can become a world-class athlete. Not everyone can become a doctor.
We would recognize that some who are capable in one area are idiots in another. Just because one person is verbally capable does not mean they are mathematically capable.
"Just because one person is verbally capable does not mean they are mathematically capable."
True to an extent. But I believe one of the strongest predictors on how you are going to do on one half of the SAT is how you do on the other half. Not identical of course. But if you are getting an 800 on one section you aren't likely to get super low on the other.
Lots of verbally smart people who suck at math and vice versa. Before 1994, the SAT was a valid IQ test. Math SAT scores were highly correlated with G, general intelligence.
This relates highly to problem solving, engineering, etc.
Verbal ability is about expression. Lots of people with good verbal ability can't understand how things work, but they can discuss their theories to the end of time.
If someone gets in the 99th percentile in verbal SAT, they will sound very smart. If someone gets 99% in the math SAT, they will likely do well in advanced physics.
I had a friend years ago get a humanities BA with a physics minor. He went to law school and did well. During law school he decided he wanted to turn the minor into a second bachelor's degree in physics to aid in getting a job in patent law. It added a year to his law school.
He said those advanced physics classes were impossible. He barely got Cs. But he wrote the papers for his groups, because the classmates were not good writers. Law school was a breeze for him compared to upper division physics.
People with high verbal IQ tend to underestimate what a high math IQ really is.
When I took the SAT, granted when Atlantis was still a continent, the math portion only made up about 15% of the total score. :o. When I was bullied by my friends into taking Engineering Calc 101 Freshman year,, I scored a D- on the final. A clueless idiot, I took 102, and I had a B+, thAnks to TA Shi Ping Han (from China) who kept correcting what he said was incorrect scoring on my exams - I had the only Math professor at the university of Wisconsin who allowed his TA’s to change grading. The further on in math, the more intuitive it becomes. After years of crap grades in high school, and a horrible start at the U, I might have been convinced to change my major if the Cambodia Riots hadn't come along…
The same is true on the right. If people are born with low ability and end up poor as a result that doesn’t fit the narrative either.
The narrative on the right is that if you graduate high school, get a job and defer having children (until age 25 for example) that you can escape poverty. That should be a bar low enough for almost everyone to clear.
The target of policy is populations, not individuals, for understandable reasons.
I always placed it in the category of "And this is why we can't have nice things". Part of living in a free society is that people have the freedom to screw up/make terrible choices.
You don’t think there is a correlation causation issue with that theory?
If someone has poor impulse control and a low to non-existent ability to defer gratification, checking the high school box doesn’t suddenly make them a good employee.
I think it's more like if somebody has poor impulse control and no ability to defer gratification that they are incapable of graduating high school.
The point is that everything lies on a spectrum. To get to the point where you drop out of high school, have kids before 20 and are unemployed--that's a clear minority of the population. There are a bunch of people who are crappy workers but who still manage to hold down a job and escape poverty. Like the ones who took ten minutes to get me my order after screwing it up at the drive through window the other day.
“ To get to the point where you drop out of high school, have kids before 20 and are unemployed--that's a clear minority of the population. ”
Yes, the poor are a small minority of the population.
The question is could it be even smaller if enough people just tried to follow those three guidelines.
The best argument I've got for a highly progressive income tax is that the initial distribution of talent was unfair.
I thought this was going to be a post about being a pure environmentalist in the sense of, like, eco-terrorism, and I was very excited.
But this is cool, too! Very thoughtful questions!
Just, you know… when you’re geared up for “I will kill a mf’er for the spotted owl”… different headspace.
I also expected that. I thought this was going to be an article against de-growth or something
I have a lot of endangered-bird-themed material I've been workshopping at the nightclubs so I was excited, but I had to pivot pretty quick once it became clear we were talking about the human animal.
"What's the deal with the spotted owl? Can't a dermatologist check out those spots?"
Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Why did the panda cross the road?
Because it was paved right through their native habitat!
"Why do they call it a California Condor? Is this a bird that has a huge mortgage and can't drive? And is it a Northern California Condor or a Southern California Condor? Is it just flying around up there trying to pitch me on a startup or a movie script?"
Don’t quit your day job
Oh, but my day job sucks.
Don’t bother joining the Southern California Condor association. It’s just a bunch of sqwawking about property taxes and the noise from the nest nextdoor.
"Have you ever noticed that a Speckle Chested Piculet flies like this? But meanwhile, a Red Fronted Macaw flies... like this? Do you think they ever go out in public together? They're flying around and some Antioquia Brushfinches see them. You know the Piculet is looking at them like 'I'm not with him!' Hahaha, oh, you know it's true."
This is your best one yet. It’s funny cuz it’s true!
Me too but Glad it was this instead
Me too, but more in terms of questioning the celebration of shutting down Germany’s last nuclear power plant and having to resort to firing coal plants back up.
Complete agree. Coal kills.
Yeah, but when environmentalists have a chance to really stick it to the environment, they gotta take it!
Wait, what?
Me too, especially in light of what is going on in Sri Lanka. I'd love a post on this topic.
Was gonna write same. I'm familiar with the terms "behaviorist" and "determinist", but must have missed the lexical update where "environmentalist" started meaning other things besides Wow You Didn't Sort The Recycle and chaining oneself to trees scheduled for a haircut. Though I guess there was a conspicuously missing term for "favours Nurture over Nature", and environmentalist isn't the worst possible term, even if it was already in use.
I can't help but wonder about a counterfactual world where Charles Murray had been a somewhat better writer, or had a more farsighted editor. "The Bell Curve" was the poison pill for a lot of people in my generation who kneejerk reject the premise of <s>eugenics</s> genetic influences (and sometimes statistical distributions writ large...), the specific links of IQ and race. All roads lead to Nazi Damascus, apparently. Which is a sad state of affairs, since as Freddie points out, no one is confused about the polygenic determinants of height, eye or hair colour, etc. But since the entire field is cordoned off as a sort of progressive Superfund site, it becomes impossible to think coherently about. That's the environment that produces pure-hairshirt-environmentalists.
Then there's other stuff like epigenetics, which doesn't fall neatly into either camp, and as a result I think tends to get subpar media coverage. There's definitely certain competing Narratives at play, neither of which much like to acknowledge science that isn't easily weaponized. So neither Pure camp gives a clearsighted approach, and just taking a Solomonic golden mean still leaves out important facets. Humans are complicated, man.
Also: acid critics condone base behaviour.
“Solomonic”? Like… killing babies? Sounds like EUGENICS.
I think it’s hard to talk about this stuff, not least because eugenics is a real and persistent human practice. I’m not even talking about Nazis; as I understand it, lots of ancient cultures were pretty comfortable culling crippled or deformed infants. Of course, we don’t do that now. At some point we decided that everyone was God’s child, “all men are created equal,” cripples and all, and that has persisted even into our modern secular thinking — every human is entitled to live whatever kind of life they can.
Still… the eugenic drive IS persistent. The Atlantic reports that the abortion rate for fetuses that test positive for Down’s Syndrome is around 95 percent in Denmark, and also pretty high in the rest of Western Europe. (For that matter in many countries there are suspiciously more boys being born than girls, which suggests sex-selective, rather than disability-selective, eugenics at play.)
But it seems like the impulse has to stop somewhere. After all, fully half of us are below average on any given axis of measurement. And if you could eliminate that half… well, then there’s a new average, and now half the remaining population is below THAT threshold. Surely at some point you want to stop, before you’re Hugo Drax aboard his space station with his tiny master race coterie. Nobody wants to be that guy. Plus at some point you worry about inbreeding and loss of adaptive vigor.
Anyway… hopefully our humanistic values remain strong even if we find that much of life is just biological destiny. After all — is life less sweet if you can’t run a four minute mile or solve differential equations? (Though it probably will have to be less sweet if you have a genetic predisposition to diabetes.)
Here’s hoping people heed the call of Freddie (perhaps the Charles Murray of his generation!) and take all this new information as a reason to be generous, rather than cruel. (Or, to put it another way, here’s hoping the genetic predisposition to be cruel it’s not spread across too much of the population.)
"Over a long enough timeframe, conditions on social media ensure that pretty much all subcultures devolve into sneering comedy clubs." DeBoer's First Law.
By turning everything into a series of hot takes and snarky one-liners for the attention-challenged, the internet may well be the death of us all.
I still haven't figured out how much of what You say, KT, is for effect and how much is unfortunate. No matter. I don't come around here often for it to matter.
TY for Your reply. I'm vaguely aware of what an accelerationist is. And I agree there's a pretty good chance that accelerationists will lead us to a different and, more likely, bigger degree of miserable.
ICBW, but I wonder if pessimism of the acceleration kind doesn't DEaccelarate conversations. (If that's even a word.) TY again..
Remember when we thought that the Internet would usher in an age of highly-informed citizens, all connecting in a way that facilitated business, art and culture? Instead, it's brought us Tik Tok, memes, and yet another avenue for pornography.
In hindsight, it's hard to believe we could be so naive.
Good point.
I don't know if it's being naive so much as people forgot the lesson of the double-edged sword. Comes into play more often than one would suspect, IMO.
'sneering' is such the perfect word tehre. He's too good at finding them. Its not fair.
It's fun to declare how much the internet sucks but about 80% of Americans aren't on Twitter and of the ones who are 90% rarely if ever post. There's a lot of sweeping generalizations being made from the tiny percentage of (mostly unread) journalists and academics who are jerking themselves off on Twitter everyday while the rest of the world spins around perfectly fine.
You appear to be arguing with a point that I didn't make.
"By turning everything into a series of hot takes and snarky one-liners for the attention-challenged, the internet may well be the death of us all."
I don't think that's a fair conclusion on a premise based around the handful of likeminded journalists, academics, and activists Freddie follows on Twitter.
I don't know about you, but I don't always follow the like-minded and I don't know who Freddie follows.
This in turn seems to be something other than your original point.
It is worth remembering that twitter only has 200 million people and bots, and even facebook counts only two billion users. The majority of humanity does not exist to a significant extent on social media, and they are the ones best equipped to create the future. Not the losers who are addicted to the endless dopamine drip of doing unpaid labor for figures like Zuck or whoever ends up owning twitter.
Most people aren't on the internet, period. Hell, not so long ago, some 40% of the world's population had never made or received a phone call.
That said, I doubt that the people who have no internet are best equipped to create the future.
Its not the end all be all but its not nothing either. 257M people voted in 2020 so one can imagine that the conversations online between Twitter and Facebook as well as the audiences of all the leading political influencers can sway elections. It also can lead to grass roots movements like happened with the Arab Spring. Or the Trucker protest. Or whatever you want to call Jan 6. Its not just noise. If it was just noise it wouldn't be so monitored and manipulated.
The thing is, there's Twitter/Facebook/Reddit/TikTok, endless porn and celebrity stuff, but also there's a big chunk of high-school education available for free from Khan Academy and college education available for free from MIT/OCW and other universities, tutorials on almost any technical subject on Youtube, podcasts that are basically like sitting in on a journal club with a friend who knows the field explaining the terms (try out TWIV or Probable Causation for examples), etc. For that matter, there are wonderful Substacks (Razib's and Freddie's are both good examples) that won't waste your time.
People who want to learn things have amazing resources to do that at their fingertips. People who want to piss away their time dunking on the outgroup or whacking off to goat porn or whatever also have amazing resources to do that. It's not one or the other--some folks right now are going through an online class on orbital dynamics or the philosophy of Nietsche, others are yelling at other idiots on Twitter.
These days I find the internet so much more entertaining than TV. To you point on my tabs right now I'm 20 minutes into an interview with 76ers former coach Brett Brown, 20 minutes into a Podcast with Rogan and Duncan Trussel because that tandem cracks me up, I got Alito's opinion on Roe. vs Wade up as I intend to read it eventually. Charlie Chaplin's the great dictator speech ready to go. Bad Faith podcast which I hope will give me a basic breakdown of how the left would handle inflation. and others I'm too embarrassed to share. :)
Liked for perhaps the first Rights to Ricky Sanchez reference in FdB comments history.
oh man...I forgot to 'say the name'
The fifth most visited website on the planet is a damn encyclopedia. That's pretty cool.
Yeah, but, just speaking from my personal experience, at least half those visits are so I can fight with people online. 😆
Thank You, Sir. Cogent discussion, per usual.
This has gone back and forth for a long while and, as far as I'm aware (which isn't great), in most cases (if not virtually all-a them) it comes down to a combination of factors.
I don't know how they determine these things, or whether they're accurate or not, but I remember there was a study that intelligence was 40% genetics. I'm always open to views which contradict this, but it would take a lot to convince that environment had *no* effect. But, then, I haven't studied the previous article on "Education Doesn't Work 2.0". I'm having trouble with the concept. The Michaela and Success Academy schools of strict instruction working being an example.
But "blank state" environmental theory. That's just plain preposterous. I give it exactly *zero* probability of being true.
TY again.
Success Charter Academies have a sky-high attrition rate and don't backfill. It's a classic hidden selection effect masquerading as an educational effect.
It’s not attrition — it’s just that those students have already achieved SUCCESS and don’t need school anymore! (It’s like achieving nirvana and disappearing from the material realm.)
Thank You.
Funny - from the title, I thought the piece was about Greens, tree-huggers, etc.- and kept waiting for the education "analogy" to end :). But all good questions! (My favorite is how it's OBVIOUS to these people that athletic ability varies dramatically, but for some reason the comparison is taboo.)
"'A one liner and an ahooga horn produce a more desirable response than saying 'hmm I don't know the answer to that' on the internet, studies show." --American Scientist magazine
Yeah — probably studies funded by the KOCH BROTHERS. Ahooga!
"The entire charter school ideology, which empowers plutocrats to defund public schools and attack teachers and their unions, depends entirely on the idea that students all have exactly equal inherent ability and that any suggestion otherwise is a way to dodge accountability." No, Mr. de Boer. This is grossly dishonest. There are vast numbers of incredibly hardworking charter school teachers and founders who are working to improve education for poor youngsters. None of them think that everyone is equal in potential, but they share a belief, many of them, that a lot of potential is terribly and cruelly wasted, and it is. Many children have terrible public schools and no other options because their parents both work and there are no charters. They're stuck, and it's a nightmare. I know because I have met them. You're just wrong about this.
"I know because I've met them" is some rigorous methodology
Isn't this the kind of elite speak that isn't persuasive to the masses? Normal everyday people aren't looking at the methodology. They know people, they're neighbors, they have kids in schools. I'm not saying you're wrong, but "that's bad methodology" doesn't mean much to Joe Dadwithkidsinpublicschool.
I mean, horses for courses - we can make knowledge better or worse, and we have a vocabulary about separating one from the other
There's tons of data out there on this. Schools that perform WAY below grade level for decades with no real change. Then charter schools come in take those same kids and make huge improvements.
It's not that charters are always good, or public schools are always bad. It that schools like everything else need competition to perform. Bad public schools and/or bad charter schools should be shut down.
We should have full school choice where the dollars follow the kids.
And no I don't hate teachers. My grand parents were both teachers, and my wife used to teach as well. I also served on the local school board. But it's horrific that we have allowed millions of kids to stay in failing public schools for decades.
I met them while working in charter schools. I led a charter school reform and wrote a training manual for a chain of charter schools. I trained dozens of teachers in charter schools. I also worked my ass off for eighty hours a week in charter schools. I practically killed myself doing it. Most of my staff worked incredibly hard, too, and for ridiculously low money which was all we could afford. When we received kids from the local public schools, about 80% of them had reading deficiencies. These deficiencies were almost all gone two years after starting at our school.
It is true that the academic results at charters are quite mixed. Some are objective failures and should be shut down. This is also true of government-run "public" schools. Charter school status is absolutely no guarantee of competence. Teaching skills are hard to impart, and charters are full of people who have high aspirations but not much experience or knowledge of effective teaching. That's also true of government-run schools.
What charters can do is create a hell of a lot more diversity of teaching approaches, and out of that something that works well has a good chance of spreading because it does work well and parents pass the word.
Just as important is that charters offer students a way out of public school chaos. Some public schools are violent hellholes where nothing can be taught even by well-intentioned teachers because the disorder is so extreme. Charters that have reasonable order and safety offer a way out of such conditions even when they don't teach any better than the local mess.
You criticize my "methodology." I don't have a methodology but I do have direct knowledge and experience. Since you do care about methodology, you must surely know that your own offers no justification for the sweeping generalization that first got my goat.
“ , and it is.”
You wish this were true. We all do. The sad fact is that it isn’t.
Agree. The public schools are not the best option for evert student. Public school
performance goes up when they face pressure from charters. Not every student is equal in ability, but all public ISDs do not provide equally for all students. By that I mean the average student can easily get lost.
I also wonder what would be different if we found that events in infancy had butterfly-effect-like impacts on development. Like let's say there really is no genetic component, but having some stimulus as an infant can really determine what a person is like. Since those events are pretty random, policy prescriptions would be essentially the same as if it was genetic, surely – like if someone becomes shy because they were in a room with people and got frightened when they were 6 months old, that's effectively the same as having a genetic predisposition to shyness.
Not saying that's how it works at all, but just as a thought experiment, early infant nurture could be functionally indistinguishable for inborn nature for the purposes of policy.
Yes - environmental does not imply malleable
And, conversely, genes might well become highly malleable in the near future — e.g., the recent use of gene editing to change a patient’s cholesterol levels. Let the bioethical conundra begin!
I think the bioethical debate will end up as
1. Everyone opposes it in the abstract
2. In specific cases everyone will want to use it
“But I have a GOOD reason!”
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.274.5294.1926
But that argument is recursive: if you give two children these identical frightening experiences, one might be crippingly shy and the other might not. Is that outcome because of their genetics, or because child A had a similar experience a month prior and this just cemented it as traumatic, while child B played with blocks?
As Heydocbrown said in the top comment here, separating cause and effect and isolating them and controlling them are nigh-impossible. In fact I'd say they're completely impossible, minus some kind of bounded Emile experiment.
This is why, in this layperson's opinion, the meat is found not in the study of individuals but the study of population groups, groups deflined by biological haplogroup. Even then it's not a slam dunk to say "aha! Shared trait! Genetic!" But it's a starting point, particularly when you can contrast the expression of shared traits in one environment to a different environment - for example, the behavior of ethnic Swedes in Sweden versus those in Minnesota. Once again, though, such contrasts can raise more questions than they answer: how do you separate environmental causes at all, other than by guesswork?
the proper starting point on claims of human genetic determinism is skepticism.
I am professional agricultural researcher. So I can answer many of these questions in a general sense from lived experience of design and analyzing experiments. It is much harder to be confident about how they apply to humans for three reasons.
First, humanity is a young species, so its genetic diversity is very low. Two wild varieties (called “landraces” in the uhh… historic… technical vernacular) of corn have 99% of the same genes. A human has 99% of the same genes as a chimpanzee and >99.9% of the same genes as a very different human of the same genetic sex.
Second, best practice experimental practices for determining genetic vs environmental components of a trait (e.g. intelligence, or how tall corn is) are completely unethical for humans - replicated controlled trials. You would go to jail for them.
Third, humans are smart & social animals, which makes them engines for experimental confounders and provides a non-genetic reason for a trait to be heritable between generations.
This all makes determining what is intrinsic vs extrinstic for a human fiendishly hard.
To your specific questions:
Brain structure to function - if you figure this one out, you get a Nobel prize.
Animal cognition affected by genome - 100% true and proven in livestock.
Intrinsic dispositions, fraternal twins - maybe? but what if we're really sensitive to random stimuli in the womb? Or what if in a different environment very different than our current human society, the genetic intrinsics would express differently. Confounders.
How come school experiments don't work? - as you can't do well-controlled experiments on humans, why would you expect these experiments to tell you anything causally?
So the total environmentalists are wrong, but the genetic determinists (especially the really truly racist set) are taking data from weak experiments to make strong claims.
The genetic determinist claims out there are the sort that are hard to prove on crops and livestock, where we can use experimental techniques like replication and controlling the entire lifecycle of the experimental subject from birth. And even for corn, strong causal claims are hard to make.
This is a really great answer — thanks for taking the time to write it out.
Can you explain what the below means. How can a trait be heritable on a non-genetic basis?
"Third, humans are smart & social animals, which makes them engines for experimental confounders and provides a non-genetic reason for a trait to be heritable between generations."
By genetic determinism, do you mean the belief that our genes are primarily responsible (as in great than 50%) for our behavior, intelligence, looks, personality traits, etc.?
Are you saying that scientists who are genetic determinists (based on the definition above) are racist?
"How can a trait be heritable on a non-genetic basis?"
My dad was a Chicago Bulls fan, and so am I. He passed out down to me, but I highly doubt he did so through the genome.
I think I take issue with the word "heritable" which I've always viewed as relating to traits v. preferences, like the Bulls example. I wish this discussion came with a dictionary.
The heritable part is your interest in following any sport team (the trait of tribalism). The environmental part is the particular team you choose to follow?
I’m not Doc Brown, but I’m pretty sure they’re just saying that because humans have culture, and pass behaviors on from one generation to the next, “heritable” does not equal “genetic.” For example, speaking a certain language is highly heritable (in that most children speak the same language as their parents), but it’s not genetically determined.
Yes, these are 'cultural' behaviors or traits.
*for this message, I'm using the words Asian & English to indicate people who grew up in exclusively Asian/English language only homes.
There's an interesting find in linguistics. I don't know if there are studies on this. But its something Vietnamese friends taught me. The Vietnamese language has sounds which cannot be heard by people who grew up in English homes.
Likewise, some people who grew up in Asian homes cannot differentiate between the English L & R sounds. Ask an Asian person to say 'plyers.' My observation of this was with Korean co-workers in the 80s.
Yes. Goes in the other direction, too — it’s hard to learn tonal languages as an adult if you grew up speaking a non-tonal language.
I'm curious if simply being in an environment where a tonal language was spoken a lot (but not learning it itself) makes a difference. I, sadly, only speak English but was constantly around my grandparents, who mostly speak Cantonese.
I knew a guy once who had learned Arabic as a child and then forgotten it when he moved to America. When he took an Arabic class later in the Army, he could read fluently (which is challenging — Arabic has a tough alphabet for English speakers!) but had no idea what any of the words meant.
Brains can be very weird.
Heritable: yes like Freddie says.
Why do I use the term? Because when you do genetics vs environmental analysis you get a factor called "heritability," where 0 is "no association with genetics" and 1 "total association with genetics." This is what "heritable" means in a technical sense. In the case of Freddie's example, you would get a heritability>0 for sports fandom. i.e. correlation is not causation.
No, I am saying in the sense of your definition that racists are often genetic determinists with motivated reasoning.
"First, humanity is a young species, so its genetic diversity is very low. Two wild varieties (called “landraces” in the uhh… historic… technical vernacular) of corn have 99% of the same genes. A human has 99% of the same genes as a chimpanzee and >99.9% of the same genes as a very different human of the same genetic sex."
i think we should stop doing the 99.9% thing. it's an artifact of decades old research. we know the average human has 5 million snps. most are not functional. but there's plenty of variance to work with. dogs are far younger as a lineage than humans and directed strong selection has allowed for a lot of phenotypic diversity
"Second, best practice experimental practices for determining genetic vs environmental components of a trait (e.g. intelligence, or how tall corn is) are completely unethical for humans - replicated controlled trials. You would go to jail for them."
this critique pretty much invalidates all behavior science fwiw on the microeconomic/individual level. the level of stringency applied to behavior genetics is never applied to sociology. why?
I thought that the 99.(% genetic human/chimp similarity thingee was a comparison of mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited solely from the mother and doesn't undergo meiosis, which means that it is therefore less prone to change over time?
In other words, you can send a chimp to school, but it still won't get into Stanford, any more than you can teach a cat to speak Latin.
no. it's from protein level comparisons i think but has been kind of validated by whole genome sequencing...but the last generation has taught us that genomes vary a lot in size, have lots of random nonfunctional variation, blah blah. not sure what the stat tells us.
we know humans can vary in quantitative traits. height is clearly heritable and it doesn't have some of the methodological issues of behavior, but it's architecture is polygenic. so we probably have the variance. but if you need rfts etc you aren't getting them outside of north korea
Great to see you commenting on here. Huge fan of your writing!!!
i think the point about developmental 'noise' is a big one. a lot of 'environment' is just random stuff including biology that's not heritable we don't understand. this is what model organisms tell us. unfortunately, that doesn't necessarily help the classic 'environmentalist' side, because this is not environment you can control
I would 100 percent be on board for applying much greater stringency to sociology, economics, psychology, nutrition, medicine…. People don’t have to run RCTs or have perfect methodology to do interesting science, but we could probably stand to be a lot more humble about what “we know” or “studies show.”
Just fix this one thing!
Requiring preregistration of the study?
I am not a fan of sociology research either. Replication crisis design issues and confusing correlation for causation is endemic there as well.
This is the right comparison though, because the methods used are literally the ones designed for breeding experiments, but without the critical component of a method for causality determination.
The dog point is interesting. My quick google suggests they're more diverse, which makes sense given that they were bred intentionally, and reach sexual majority in less than a year. I wonder if they've sampled the genetic diversity of wolves through interbreeding as well.
Stronger claims need stronger evidence, and genetic diversity is a relevant prior to analysis of an experiment on genetic inheritance, especially in the absence of a method to determine causality.
yeah but if you are a plant guy you work with isogenic lines, right? very few human lineages are so depauperate of variance.
re: dogs, 'village dogs' are similar to humans. but speciality breeds are new and mostly derived from recent european lineages. there has been some wolf admixture (and jackel too). but that's ancient, not really recent (mostly).
Fair point on the dogs.
On isogenic lines, I don't agree with the point. You can do really good systematic work on variances with them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_association_mapping
ok understood.
"Stronger claims need stronger evidence, and genetic diversity is a relevant prior to analysis of an experiment on genetic inheritance, especially in the absence of a method to determine causality."
the strongest method are family-based. they require big sample sizes but they're getting there
eg look at thousands of sibling pairs who are 1 stdev different in IQ and look at the consistent btwn sibling differences in genes. if they are enriched for brain dev genes that's 'curious' isn't it?
Yes, that'd be interesting.
Yes. The point is that these sibling studies, unlike other polygenic score studies, are genuine randomized trials. They use the random assortment of different genes from the two parents, which makes them free of all the usual confounders. In fact, the usual environmental confounders just add noise, obscuring the signal but not creating systematic false signals. For most psychological traits the sibling heritability coefficient is unsurprisingly somewhat smaller than the population coefficient but usually not dramatically so.
I think a lot of people aren't apprised of the resources available for researchers who are linking genetic composition to behavioral traits. In particular, it's not common knowledge that polygenic scores are constructed over huge datasets, allowing experts to reliably draw-out correlations.
Kathryn Paige Harden's book The Genetic Lottery is particularly instructive in this regard. And she brings up the point that we can recognize differences in individual abilities without relying on group mean comparisons (ecological correlation fallacy) for policy. The social problem is conquering the tendency to use these differences to construct hierarchies.
IMHO, social science is an oxymoron. Just because One can quantify something? Not buying it.
"A human has 99% of the same genes as a chimpanzee and >99.9% of the same genes as a very different human of the same genetic sex"
I don't mean this to be combative, but I don't understand the significance of this statistic.
1) Surely some of the cognitive differences between humans and CHIMPANZEES are genetic, right, notwithstanding that we share 99% of the same genes? Is the point that 99% of shared genes is the right number for genetics to be a component of cognitive differences, but 99.9% is so much that it's unlikely that genetics contribute to cognitive differences? How do we determine that?
2) Doesn't that argument work for everything? If humans share 99% of genes with chimps and 99.9% with other humans, why doesn't that mean that differences in height or eye color or hair or what have you should be assumed not to be genetic?
Again, I suspect there's something I'm missing in my comprehension, so I appreciate your patience.
If just 0.9% of our genome is the difference between a chimp and Albert Einstein, now I'm even more certain that really tiny changes can have outsized effects.
Humor me for a second. I have no background in biology and little to no understanding of the human genome. I have avid-reader-level familiarity with lots of psychometric studies quantifying lifetime variance of IQs, which generally demonstrate that (i) IQs do vary over lifetimes, but rarely by significant amounts (e.g., almost no one moves from 50th percentile to 80th percentile, but moves from, say, 50th to 55th are not at all uncommon); (ii) IQs are strongly correlated with biological parent IQs, less so with non-biological parents and (iii) decline somewhat unpredictably past prime age (seemingly as part of the aging process). Given radical environmental changes that many, many people experience over lifetimes, how is this not persuasive evidence of a strong genetic (and heritable) influence on IQ with an acknowledgment of statistically significant, but comparably modest, environmental/developmental "other" factor. Or are you defining genetic determinists so rigidly as to be incompatible with the fact of sibling variance and modest lifetime variance?
Somewhere else in the comments someone raises the possibility of environmental factors being powerful, but only during a small window in childhood, especially infancy/toddlerhood. So by the time kids reach the age where we are testing people, mostly their range of possibility is already fixed.
And, in fact, it seems likely this is true for at least some things. Lead exposure is thought to be much more damaging to fetuses and very small children than to older children, teens, or adults. My guess is this is also true of, for example, the behavioral effects of abuse/neglect — being abused in early childhood could have a vastly more powerful influence on outcomes than, for example, if you suddenly acquired an abusive step-parent at 16 or 17.
While not disagreeable, I feel like this is burying the lede on the real question a bit.
Having experienced some small-scale childhood neglect (alcoholic parent and a case of abandonment), I’m very cognizant of how this treatment affected very specific behavioral qualities of mine - but can say very little, if anything at all, about how it relates to any genetic predispositions I have that seem to inform my behavior as well (for example: a natural inquisitiveness, the first trait I can consciously remember possessing, has influenced my desire to be cognizant of how my upbringing has also influenced my behavioral personality).
While the influence is there, it’s bearing on my personality is both combined with (and tangential to) my base inclinations, and furthermore, is beholden to (but not determinant of) what I decide to do with said information within my cognizant autonomy.
It baffles me that while it is exceedingly difficult and necessary to scientifically prove certain aspects of behavioral psychology (as pointed out in this post), why some people don’t just generally accept that it will always be a combination of nature and nurture that influences a person’s traits. It doesn’t even say what someone is willing or capable of doing with those conditions.
For sure. I was trying to answer the specific question of how a powerful environmental effect could be compatible with overall lifetime stability of traits, especially after puberty.
But obviously our genes are the substrate against which the environment acts. No amount of lead in the environment is going to turn a human child into a Springer spaniel, for example.
Oh sure, gotcha!
also, one last comment re: variation. there's a lot of publications now focusing on the ubiquity of soft selection on standing variation in humans. the fact that there's a lot of standing variation in the first place should update your prior on whether we (modern humans) have the genetic variance for a lot of these quantitative traits that come back with nontrivial heritabilities (as i said before, height is relatively noncontroversial with lots of bone morphogenesis genes discovered associated with variance, and it's clearly very polygenic and quantitative across all human populations).
"Brain structure to function - if you figure this one out, you get a Nobel prize."
That's not entirely true, right? I think scientists thought that fMRI was going to solve this problem, and its likely that fMRI studies are not as useful as we think. But there are some things that can be said at a gross level. And there are any number of other methods that allow us triangulate the function of specific areas when paired the fMRI studies, such as working with stroke patients and transcranial magnetic stimulation. For example, everyone knows that visual processing is in the back of the brain, that quantities are represented in the interparietal sulcus, Broca's area is critical to speech, and the amygdala is critical to experiencing fear. Even when there are exceptions to the rule, we understand the reasons for it; for example, a person was injured at a very young age and the plasticity of the brain was able to work without the missing brain center, but this person may have a more difficult time learning to speak (or whatever it is depending on the injury location), and past a certain age, plasticity greatly decreases.
100% people are working on the function-structure mapping. But Freddie is interested in education and education is a much more complex process. If I destroy your visual cortex, sure I can't teach you with a video... but that's not going to get you answers to questions relevant to the racial educational outcome gap
This paper is fun for where neuroscience actually is.
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268
Lots of smart people are moving the field forward steadily
Maybe another way to think about it is that we have OK progress in function, but there isn't as much progress with variation in function. Does a stronger fMRI signal, number of neurons recruited, neuron density, or longer period of neuron development have anything to do with ability? I think there are studies that answer some of these questions, but its a much thornier issue.
Anyway, neuroscience is cool
Iain McGilchrist has largely answered the brain structure to function mystery, but his book is so long and well-cited that most cannot be bothered to engage with it.
I just looked him up and he's a psychiatrist?
I'll wait for the neuroscientists to agree.
He did a lotta neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins, so there is that.
His "Master and Emissary" is only 500 pages, and 100 of that is notes and stuff. That's nowhere near his magnum opus. Need to reread both-a them, as there's a lot to take in there.
Wouldn't womb stimuli affect both twins roughly equally? If not, wouldn't the cause of that different effect of the environment be non-environmental by definition?
the 'environment' in a lot of these models is everything that's not linear genetic effects. so the definition goes the other way
There is one experiment that is truly a randomized trial and that is considered ethical. That is for two parents to have more than one child. The siblings inherit randomly different genes from the two parental sets. Although many environmental effects will affect the siblings' traits, any variation that is systematically correlated with genes is a true causal signal because there are no backdoor paths from environment to the random shuffling of those genes. Sibling polygenic score data show clear signals for many traits.
I used to do stand-up, and the open-mic comparison is nearly perfect. The only difference is that even open mics are to some extent curated; if a comedian is completely unfunny, they either won't get a slot, or won't get one until WAY late, when everyone has gone home. Twitter, however, is equal opportunity, and comedy is not an art form in which you want that kind of equality.
It's open-mic night, but everyone has their own personal mic and no one can leave the club. :)
What you describe is indistinguishable from hell.
I shall start depositing more dead mice on the doorstep of the local church from now on.
Often it's more like a Westwood coffee house open mic, where everyone puts their name into a bowl and the first 20 names pulled get 3 minutes of mic time. Except that there is no bowl and everyone gets up on stage at the same time and they are almost all equally unprepared. And, as you say, you really don't want that kind of equality.
Many people have difficulty separating hard truth from morality. The "is-ought" distinction, I've heard it called. Genetic differences in cognitive abilities raise serious questions for the egalitarianism at the core of modern American/Western ideology. What if the black-white achievement gap is impossible to solve (because of genetics)? What if women will never achieve parity in STEM fields with men (because of genetics)? In the minds of many, it is literally evil to believe these things to be true, so they work backwards from the morally correct conclusion to arrive at blank slate-ism.
Agree 100%. I believe men and women are fundamentally different and there will never be 100% parity in outcomes, not unless we socially engineer them and this would require totalitarian methods. I remember the James Damore controversy (same with Lawrence Summers brouhaha) and thinking of course they're both right. Women are different and want different things.
What we should do is not actively discriminate against women who show the same skills and potential as men. If some fields end up male-dominated, it's not because of sexism or the patriarchy. It's funny - no one complains about elementary and middle school teachers being overwhelmingly female. I believe the paucity of men in lower school teaching is detrimental for children (especially boys) but imagine if I went to my school board and demanded equity.
I'm not even sure the totalitarian methods would work all that well, any more than you can train a tabby cat to herd sheep or teach a squirrel to catch mice.
Even if they do what they are trained for, they aren't very good at it.
I actually agree with you but that wouldn't stop the blank statists from trying. Failure would demonstrate only that the right methods weren't tried. New methods would be needed. Look at Sweden for example. The paradox of increasing sex equality leading back to sex differentiated outcomes. People cannot fathom or accept that women want and prioritize different things than men do.
I don't think the STEM split is a matter of innate ability but rather preference.
Small sample size anecdata: I was part of a program in Grade 8 where they tested high-achieving math students and sent a few of us to skip a grade; 3 out of 4 of us were girls (and one of them remains of my best friends). Said best friend and myself both work in advocacy, even though we probably could've been engineers if we wanted to. The other girl is doing some soft envirosci stuff, judging from her LinkedIn. The boy went on to do a finance degree and runs a startup.
If you look at the breakdowns -- women have basically achieved parity in math (47%) and life & physical science (45%) occupations, but are much more underrepresented in computer workers (25%) and engineers (15%). https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/women-making-gains-in-stem-occupations-but-still-underrepresented.html
Even though I spent a lot of time on the internet in my youth and participated in web design competitions in high school, when I was contemplating various career options, compsci seemed like a distinctly unappealing option. A lot of stereotypes of the field being filled with basement-dwelling Mark Zuckerberg types.
I'm not sure I believe men and women have the same innate ability in math. Even if we did have the same exact innate ability statistically, women have different traits that result in different preferences and those preferences are driven in large part by biology.
I don't deny that preferences exist. Sometimes they are biological, sometimes environmental. I think so long as we can strive to neutralize environmental influences on career choices as much as possible, I'm not mad about any biological ones that reveal themselves.
But from my personal experience -- taking every high school math and science course available and then doing a Bachelor's of Science -- there was a pretty equal gender distribution in my classes and in the people competing for top spots. I also did a program in first year geared towards keener life science students, and checked an end-of-year photo we took to make sure I wasn't misremembering, and indeed -- there were 5 boys versus 20 girls in our class. So I'm dubious that there's actually a capacity difference!
Countries where women have the most choices show them going into soft fields where they can spend more time with their families.
Men wish they could do this, too, but a man who tries that is a layabout and gets divorced, assuming he even gets married in the first place.
. . . I wonder if gay men can pull this off?
The way I look at the black-white test score gap is the way I look at the asian-white gap. I don't believe Asians are smarter than me, it's environmental. As for women, was it Charles Murray's research that shows when women live in richer societies they tend to chose paths that are rewarding in non financial ways? I also believe what used to used to be taught in community college--that differences within groups are greater than differences between them.
Murray pointed out there is a racial IQ gap but teasing out the genetic component to that gap is not possible given the current state of the science.
The guy that I know that has done the most work with gender occupational preference is Richard Lippa at Cal State Fullerton. In a nutshell he posits that women in developing economies enter fields like tech or engineering because the primary motivation for anybody in a developing economy is to survive and earn money. In developed economies where that is not as high of a priority differences in occupational preference by gender are more easily expressed and the number of women working in tech/engineering/the hard sciences plummets.
Freddie did a great job of skating through his entire essay without once mentioning race and I don’t blame him.
Murray is the elephant in the room though, isn't he? The introduction most people have to this topic is _The Bell Curve_ and its attendant controversies.
The real tragedy there is that Murray never claimed that you can pin down racial differences in IQ to genetics. In fact he explicitly pointed out in the book that you can't because the science just isn't there. His real argument is that regardless of the explanation some people have a lower potential in terms of IQ and that IQ is correlated with lifetime earnings. What are the implications for that at a societal level?
Well, that's what Murray would have you believe his real argument is. And it would be nice to believe him, because it would give us an interesting topic worth discussing. A topic pretty close to the one at the heart of The Cult of Smart, actually.
But frankly, if you look at Murray's career as a whole, it's hard to avoid noticing that he's just a bigot. His arguments are fake; he arrived at his conclusions long before thinking of them. He'll happily use garbage data from pseudo-Nazis to justify claiming what he wants to claim.
The racial implications of the The Bell Curve are not merely a minor element that has become prominent by unfortunate happenstance; they're a big part of the reason for the book's existence.
1. Murray wrote that there is a persistent and very real racial IQ gap across races.
2. Murray wrote that it's not possible to determine if there is a genetic component to that IQ gap.
Which of those two is false? The first is easily the most incendiary claim from _The Bell Curve_ and it should be largely uncontroversial because it's true.
although the paragraph below is not the main point of this piece, it deserves attention because of its accurate diagnosis: "Decades of pop culture convinced people that being an adult means competing in a never-ending game of trading “ironic one-liners” at each other, while ego convinced them that they’re actually good at it. Everyone thinks that they’re funny and everyone wants to be a Bill Murray figure, the guy sitting at the back of the class impressing everyone with his zingers." The corollary to this realization is that sitting around watching cable news or following podcasts or just floating in the swirl of Twitter has everyone think that they have broad yet incisive knowledge of world affairs, which leads to more ironic jabs and a ceaseless litany of complaints and demands devoid of action
the earnest response a lot is "it's complicated" and "interaction effects"
but some do genuinely defend leon kaminesque zero heritability when push comes to shove
Unfortunately too many people are following a faulty logic that says: We know that outcomes are 100% the result of genetics and environment. We can't prove that genes have any influence (0%). So environment must be the remainder (100%).
When really we should be equally sceptical about both causes (genetics 0%, environment 0%, TBD 100%).
I'm assuming you mean basic determination and drive here?
For decades my null hypothesis is that it's 50% nature and 50% nurture and this has served me well.
"The entire charter school ideology, which empowers plutocrats to defund public schools and attack teachers and their unions, depends entirely on the idea that students all have exactly equal inherent ability and that any suggestion otherwise is a way to dodge accountability."
There may be a branch of charter school supporters that believe that all students are equal and charter schools demonstrate what is wrong with regular public school teachers and administrators, but I'm not sure I would even consider that a substantial minority opinion. Anecdotally, quite a lot of charter school proponents believe the benefits of charter schools are either (i) matching students with appropriate schools (sometimes ones with particular emphasis on some topic like music or arts that might keep kids engaged when they lack other interests) and (ii) a focus on instilling discipline and work habits that benefit some of the lowest achieving students precisely because that is where there is the biggest bang for the buck with those students.
The truths found in the questions bother those with strong ideological positions. The answers would be disruptive to the "official narrative".
A wise society would take the reality of differences and help people maximize their abilities. It would also limit the exploitation of others. Fraud and corruption would be severely prosecuted.
And the entire equity system would be thrown out. Not everyone has artistic talent. If everyone was limited to my talent level, there would be no art. Not everyone can be good at chess. Not everyone can become a world-class athlete. Not everyone can become a doctor.
We would recognize that some who are capable in one area are idiots in another. Just because one person is verbally capable does not mean they are mathematically capable.
We are wasting resources in pursuit of a fantasy.
Need to reinstitute the use of the term 'Idiot Savant'. Banned for not being PC. I'm surprised they still call it Midget Racing.
"Just because one person is verbally capable does not mean they are mathematically capable."
True to an extent. But I believe one of the strongest predictors on how you are going to do on one half of the SAT is how you do on the other half. Not identical of course. But if you are getting an 800 on one section you aren't likely to get super low on the other.
Lots of verbally smart people who suck at math and vice versa. Before 1994, the SAT was a valid IQ test. Math SAT scores were highly correlated with G, general intelligence.
This relates highly to problem solving, engineering, etc.
Verbal ability is about expression. Lots of people with good verbal ability can't understand how things work, but they can discuss their theories to the end of time.
If someone gets in the 99th percentile in verbal SAT, they will sound very smart. If someone gets 99% in the math SAT, they will likely do well in advanced physics.
I had a friend years ago get a humanities BA with a physics minor. He went to law school and did well. During law school he decided he wanted to turn the minor into a second bachelor's degree in physics to aid in getting a job in patent law. It added a year to his law school.
He said those advanced physics classes were impossible. He barely got Cs. But he wrote the papers for his groups, because the classmates were not good writers. Law school was a breeze for him compared to upper division physics.
People with high verbal IQ tend to underestimate what a high math IQ really is.
When I took the SAT, granted when Atlantis was still a continent, the math portion only made up about 15% of the total score. :o. When I was bullied by my friends into taking Engineering Calc 101 Freshman year,, I scored a D- on the final. A clueless idiot, I took 102, and I had a B+, thAnks to TA Shi Ping Han (from China) who kept correcting what he said was incorrect scoring on my exams - I had the only Math professor at the university of Wisconsin who allowed his TA’s to change grading. The further on in math, the more intuitive it becomes. After years of crap grades in high school, and a horrible start at the U, I might have been convinced to change my major if the Cambodia Riots hadn't come along…