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Sep 8, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

The thing I've never been able to grok is why the left has such a hard time coming up with a template for thinking about this...when disability rights are sitting right there?

I mean seriously. I know there are are a lot of wacky ends it can go down in terms of repeated invention of new terms to replace older ones deemed offensive. And of course some people (both within the community and outside of it) insist they have no disability whatsoever. But for the most part we have arrived at a consensus that people who are hearing impaired, vision impaired, mobility impaired, etc. do have genuine issues getting around society as it is constructed - issues to some extent immutable, and often there from birth (though sometimes from trauma or disease as well). The onus is on society to make accommodations to become more inclusive of their abilities - to work for everyone. In recent years this has even been extended to mental illness and addiction, with an understanding that it's not the fault of the individual suffering, asking someone to "snap out of it" is not a valid policy solution, and that the affected individual will never be "normal" (recovering alcoholics can't be expected to be causal drinkers, depression will never truly be cured, and so on).

So why can't we in this realm accept that difference exists, and yet insist this does not mean that it consigns some to an inferior life? I think part of it how deeply the poisonous ideology of meritocracy has wheedled its way into the American "left." I remember once making a statement that on average, a doctor is indeed smarter than a janitor, which then caused the individual I was talking with to jump to all sorts of conclusions (that I thought doctors should be paid more than janitors, that I thought doctors were superior people, etc.) Lots of people on the "left" believe they are so committed to the principle of tearing down hierarchies that they will reject out of hand any fact which they believe gives the ruling class a fig leaf of legitimacy. Whereas I see it similarly to you - that given it's totally beyond our control whether we end up smart or dull, it bears about as much moral sense to reward the smart (or punish the dull) as it does to force a paralyzed man to crawl up courtroom steps using their arms for want of a ramp.

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You asked whether Quiggan is crazy. I want to take this opportunity to share some stories about a colleague from my philosophy department.

This colleague told me once that the discipline of chemistry is intrinsically white supremacist because it was started by white males. That when we teach the problem of evil to our intro students, we should say that it works against Christian theism but not against Islam, because saying it worked against Christian theism would force Christians to interrogate their privilege, but saying it worked against Islamic theism would marginalize the Muslim students. This colleague also told me that s/he thinks that everyone actually agrees with her/him about politics, they just refuse to admit it. I had another colleague who stopped her/himself because s/he said "trailblazing" and "pioneering", which were "colonialist" words. I know yet another colleague who thinks the word "jungle" is racist, at least when you use it in phrases like "it's a jungle out there".

I bring this up because these colleagues, who say these things, are very smart and successful, in many cases smarter and more successful than I am. But I don't understand how they can believe these things without having lost their minds. I'm being half-literal here. I have lost my ability to simulate these people. I don't know what's going on in their minds anymore, and it's kind of frightening, because I don't feel confident I can predict their behavior anymore.

Am I overreacting? Or is this just how people feel about me when I say that I think Jesus of Nazareth literally died and literally came back to life?

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Sep 9, 2021Liked by Freddie deBoer

Not really disputing your larger points about genes nor that NCLB was ultimately a failure on its own terms. But to clarify: The law did not require 100% of students to achieve at the same level. It required 100% of students to pass the same minimum *threshold* of achievement. It's the difference between saying "All students should get the same score on the test" and "All students should get at least 60% on the test." The NCLB thresholds were not high. The last hard threshold was about the equivalent of being on level for Grade 9. Is "High school graduates should able to read and do math" a statement profoundly at odds with what science tells us about the heterogeneity of inherited ability? Because that's really all NCLB said. The number of schools that closed because of persistent low test score achievement was incredibly small. And teacher merit pay systems like the one in DC primarily rely on observations of teacher practice. To the extent that test scores are used they focus on improvement, not absolute levels, precisely because common sense tells us that student abilities vary widely.

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I admit, I'm still very on the fence about this genetics-and-intelligence stuff -- I know enough to realize I need to actually sit myself down and read a lot more books before I can offer much of value. My first response was outright rejection, even a bit of moral revulsion, until I recalled the Osmium Parable:

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/belief-identity-bias-and-the-osmium-264

I realized my sense of morality was based on an assumption about the world that may or may not be true. That I needed to step back and say, "okay, what is the fundamental principle at work, that I am not afraid to apply fairly and consistently whether I'm right or wrong"?

There was an implicit link between my belief in the worth of a human and their intelligence; thus, suggesting that someone was less intelligent was suggesting they were worth less than their fellow human beings. Laid bare, it's obviously absurd, and I can reject it, but it went unspoken in my mind for a long time. And most of the knee-jerk rejection of the possibility is based on the same unexamined belief in others.

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Isn't the problem, very basically, that to admit to undeniable genetic *influence* puts limits on what can people be and that goes against the inspirational Hollywood movie version of ethics that informs much of what we think of as the American left?

Could it simply be that they've been brought up with so many stories of wise old characters telling young protagonists that "you can do anything that you dream" - in their classrooms, on the big screen, on hackneyed TV shows - that they've come to believe the most crass literal and unexamined version of it?

And being left... they think it is simply unjust if that same horrendously literalised version of it isn't extended to everyone?

It might be particularly strong if what is also at work here is another very American idea: all self-worth is derived from achievement (rather than people just being innately valuable and therefore worthy of being looked after *regardless of ability*). If you have also never examined that assumption as leftist, then I'd say this is a profoundly powerful cocktail for surprisingly strong science denial. At least it looks like that from the UK, where these ideas are not quite as strong.

Also... does genetics and IQ discussion has to be avoided purely by proximity to the uber-toxic race and IQ discussion? Seems like people sense that if you accept the first, you have to accept the basic logic of the other (i.e. there *could* be differences) and now have to deny it on more narrowly evidentiary grounds while you continue to hold onto a paradigm that conflates worth and achievement.

This last 18 months has made me think that a lot of people's beliefs really do just come down to what they would be ashamed of believing in the eyes of the rest of the tribe. I can imagine few more toxic debates for members of the contemporary US left than the Race/IQ one so its possibly best for them to avoid even the slightest of slippery-sloped ramps towards it - which genetics and intelligence is.

Of course... to me a dysfunctional education system doesn't seem like a great price to pay for the assuaging liberal guilt - but what do I know?

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I read the New Yorker piece yesterday and it gave me a kind of relief as a parent. I have a child who has a high IQ like his parents, but also suffers from gender dysphoria and treatment resistant depression. I think the former may well have resulted from too much time spent on social media at a critical developmental stage and so I have regrets about not enforcing limits more strictly at that time, but the latter is what really makes his life so incredibly difficult and I think it's likely that it is a result of his genome and not something that any amount of parenting can fix. There are things I can do to ease his distress, and we have not exhausted all treatments -- TMS is next on the list and if that doesn't work I hear the new ECT is really effective -- but there is some relief for me in not rehashing every parenting mistake I may have made looking for the cause of his suffering, because the suffering is profound and I would give anything, including my own life, to make it stop. And that powerful unconditional love is something that I think almost everyone should experience, being a parent is the most interesting and intense experience I have ever had, and I want it for my son but then the dark side of heritability creeps in and just for a minute I think that maybe he shouldn't have a biological child because it's unkind to pass on this pain. I can pretty easily push that aside but I just wondered how others feel about mental illness and the genetic lottery.

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Thanks for linking in my common core history, particularly the one linking adultery profiles to reform reactions.

For those who might not know:

NCLB is indeed the proximate cause of the last 20 years of craziness. If it hadn't been for the "100% proficiency" requirement baked into law, the federal government would have had no means by which to force states to adopt Common Core, teacher evaluations, and the "common" tests.

I'm less concerned about VAM, although of course Freddie is right about how bad they are and why, for reasons I wrote about here: https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/bush-obama-ed-reform-victory-over-value-add/

Namely, principals did not buy into value add, and so they basically juked the results, using the portion of their subjective evaluations to offset the downside of any "bad" score results. As a result, most evaluation distributions showed exactly the same results: 95% or more meets or exceeds, 5% or less doesn't meet. This outraged the reformers, who had long argued that principals needed more tools to fire bad teachers. So principals directly acting to offset value add was a facer. There was one exception. From my article:

"The study’s outlier was New Mexico, which forced principals to weight VAM as 50% of the overall evaluation score, courtesy of Hanna Skandera, a committed reform education secretary appointed by a popular Republican governor. As a result, over 1 in 4 teachers were rated unsatisfactory.

But! A 2015 court decision prevented any terminations based on the evaluation system, and the case got delayed until it was irrelevant. In 2017, Governor Martinez agreed to a compromise on the evaluation methodology, increasing permitted absences to six and dropping VAM from 50% to 35%. New Mexico also completed its shift from a purple to blue state, and in 2018 all the Democratic gubernatorial candidates promised they would end the evaluation system. The winner, Michelle Lujan, wasted no time. On January 3, 2019, a perky one-page announcement declared that VAM was ended, absences wouldn’t count on evaluations, and just for good measure she ended PARCC.

So the one state in which principals couldn’t juke the stats to keep teachers they didn’t want to fire, the courts stepped in, the Republican governor backed down, and the new Democrat governor rendered the whole fuss moot."

Some cities are doing their best to dump teachers (DC comes to mind) but I'm not even sure that 100,000 teachers live in fear of VAM reviews (and that's a reassuringly small number)."

One thing I find very troubling about blank slate thinking is that we do no research on best ways to teach kids with IQs of, say, 75-100. Our entire method of instruction, particularly at the high school level, is based on a history where only smart kids went to high school. So just because we haven't successfully taught advanced math to low IQ kids doesn't mean we couldn't do better. Or teaching content of any level in a way they are more likely to remember. There are also different ways in which low IQ manifests itself (I once wrote about two documented below 90 IQ kids I had, one of whom had excellent and quick grasp of math facts but couldn't abstract, the other had some ability to abstract but no math fact grasp.) We need to study that more, but it's just impossible to do. When people study interventions, they almost never group high ability vs low ability together.

I'd really like to see us do more on that, but it involves tracking or ability grouping, much less acknowledging lower IQs, none of which is politically feasible.

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I'm asking myself if there has *ever* been a technological breakthrough enabling human beings to increase their power over nature--including their own nature--which was morally controversial at first, and which was collectively rejected because people stuck to the belief that it was wrong.

I'm pretty sure this has never happened, at least not if the nature of the breakthrough is defined broadly enough. (The world rejected free availability of nuclear weapons, but not nuclear technology in general. There are limits on research in microbiology, but only for the kind of projects that risk unleashing a pandemic. Every banned use of technology I can think of involves consequences that are uncontroversially terrible.)

What always, always happens instead is a Nietzschean "revaluation of values", led by social elites but eventually trickling down to the rest of society. Instead of abandoning the technology, people abandon the moral principle that prohibited its use. Almost everyone has stopped believing that birth control is immoral, and once gene editing to increase an unborn child's IQ becomes a practical option for the wealthy, people will stop disapproving of that too.

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As a teacher, this makes me laugh. I have taught masses of kids to read -- kids who had struggled before that. I've seen test scores go up two grade levels in nine months -- and that was the smallest change in the group. I've seen a whole group of first-graders go from below average to above 90th percentile by the end of second grade. I have seen other people do it. And I've seen the excuses the system throws out when they park normal kids in "special ed" and make endless excuses for their neglect and incompetence.

You keep throwing out aggregates, Freddie. You mean well. But you are wrong. It is possible to massively increase results. We do not have to have huge groups of kids who can barely stumble through what is considered first grade reading after two years of bumbling stupidity. Reading is so badly taught, math is so badly taught, there is no rational sequence, teachers do not know how to maintain order, schools are an idiotic mess. Schools for black ghetto kids are typically in constant turmoil. This walking disaster is the creation of the state over many many decades. But as the Haitian proverb goes, fish don't see the water. Even fish with advanced degrees.

Go study what DISTAR did with kids in K-2 during Project Follow Through and how the system buried those results under a mountain of lies. Look at the IQ changes. Look at the performance changes.

No, the system almost certainly will not change. Yes, you're right about that. But it certainly won't get better if we close off all options except homeschooling or the local disaster area called a public school and say that all its victims should be written checks as they face a lifetime of illiteracy and innumeracy.

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The blank slate mindset is probably the only way you can live with yourself when everything you do for yourself and your family is premised on the fear of falling that lots of liberals have. The things you do to stave off that fear - the way you pick a partner, the way you raise your kids - don't make sense if you actually believe down to your bones in the Blank Slate. But if you don't examine what you actually believe down into your bones, just telling yourself that the blank slate is real probably drags you across the finish line.

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Thomas Frank talks about this a bit in "Listen Liberal." He doesn't touch the topic of genetics, but he does point out how neo-liberals (his word, not the Twitter bastardization) like Obama, the Clintons, Larry Summers, etc like to focus on education as the solution rather than old-school solutions like labor unions or economic redistribution. They do this because it a) justifies the power of their own class (I deserve my wealth cuz I went to Harvard), b) worked for them, and c) puts the policy preferences of their upper-middle class above working class people.

In short, denying genetics allows neo-liberals to advocate their favorite policy: education. If people actually differ genetically, they may have to settle for the icky labor union and New Deal stuff.

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I'm not sure why you seem to think that proving the existence of a genetic component to intelligence, ability, etc. somehow destroys meritocracy. It doesn't. If anything, it confirms it. The whole point of meritocracy is that people aren't equal and that those with the most ability should rise to the top. It may sometimes be presented in a distorted way that suggests that anyone who works hard will be successful, but I don't think that's an accurate or sensible interpretation.

This is a completely separate question from asking whether meritocracy is good. In practice, it tends to be somewhat illusory, since actual merit (however one might measure it) is never the only factor in someone's success.

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founding

I’ve seen a lot more denial about the bottom of the distribution than the top. It’s one thing to acknowledge that some kids are naturally smart, but few people are willing to talk about the limitations of kids who struggle despite interventions.

Those who say “maybe genes matter, but who cares” seem believe everyone could succeed with proper support. The existence of talented kids doesn’t threaten this vision. But if we get real about kids at the bottom, we have to acknowledge all sorts of uncomfortable truths about our current strategies.

I think that’s what people mean when they say “Well, genes matter a little, but….” They’re thinking about smart kids vs. average kids, and how the environment can shape outcomes for those who are capable of achieving. They won’t concede that kids at the bottom of the distribution face challenges that environment can’t fix.

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The idea that the brain is somehow immune to generic influence makes sense when you remember that many of these people also believe in a fundamental split between the brain/mind and the body - that’s how phrases like “girl brain” and “born in the wrong body” become part of accepted discussion. Also, anyone who’s a parent knows that kids are not blank slates - I’m a bookworm introvert mother to an artsy extrovert, and she’s been the way she is since infancy.

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All the down-sides that you enumerated plus the undue burden placed on children who just aren't great at doing school. No one is good at everything - few intellectuals make good quarterbacks, and some not gifted at learning school stuff are greatly gifted in other kinds of intelligence: spatial, physical (kinesthetic), people, whatever. Whether these other kinds of intelligence are also at least partly genetic I don't know. In any event, we need to stop fixating on the intelligence (and habits of mind, e.g., self-direction, motivation, ability to focus) required to do well in school. Let's just give everyone the chance to be most fully who they are and to excel at endeavors other than STEM.

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Western novels have not been around very long in the scheme of things. but out of the gate the issue of marrying the wrong person was a central theme. I could name many but __Jude the Obscure__ (Hardy, 1894) comes to mind. There are genetic issues (Arabella) but not named as such and education issues. As for blank slates-- Reagan's _A Nation at Risk_ was the grandfather of NCLB and look who was in on that (David P. Gardner).

Now I'm not sure why I mention Hardy, then Gardner but if the latter read the former maybe there would not have been a blank slate.

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