Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve.
Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true - assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research - even if it is true (a phrase he uses a lot).
Since not one of his arguments depends on Herrnstein's scientific claims being false, the issue of science denialism never comes up with Chomsky. He lets his opponents have everything they "ask" for empirically ("even if it is true") and refutes them on other grounds.
This must partly be because (ironically?) he's smarter than most people (including most other progressives) and therefore wasn't about to walk into the trap the left finds itself in 50 years later - a trap which must be tightening, if an article like the OP appears in the New Yorker of all places. But there must be more to it than this. I think the progressives who find themselves having to challenge this research as false (rather than inconsequential and insignificant, as Chomsky does), actually share many of the ideological and meritocratic assumptions that Chomsky writes about - for example the assumption that wealth and power must necessarily flow to those with higher IQ. They don't want to give up this assumption because they belong to the meritocracy themselves (or are part of the class that identifies that way). Because of this, they can't accept Chomsky's argument much more than the Herrnsteins can.
Great comment. As you say, denying the research outright is playing a similar tune to those who would abuse the research to support pre-existing notions about everyone's rightful places in society.
We should be extremely skeptical of any argument that serves solely to justify the positions those in power, which is a typical endpoint for too many discussions of genetics. Using science to validate the status quo and describe certain economic and social classes as superiors/inferiors is a cruel perversion, but outright denying the science is similarly dishonest and not very convincing either.
Genetics are powerful, but only a piece of the great puzzle underlying human traits and behaviors. Especially when considering life at the individual level, you can't easily make any declarative statements about someone's potential, or even clearly discern the total effect of genes on their most basic traits like height without also considering a host of other factors with similar weightings. Beyond the ambiguity surrounding how genes and environment conspire to produce our traits, as Chomsky argues, the traits that are rewarded with wealth and power are often arbitrary: they are certain traits that can be identified in those who already have wealth/power in a self-justification of the existing hierarchy.
So even if we take the science at face value, it is quite a stretch to say that the science supports the current stratification. The two are not casually linked.
Agreed, the trick is to keep policy at the individual level. Because assumptions or observations of group behavior cause problems on both the right and the left.
For instance, there is a strong progressive assumption that the male/female divide if it were truly fair would be 50/50 in all industries (or at least the ones they focus on, e.g. comp sci).
But you can't on the one hand make bold statements about expected outcomes and then remain blind to the science of group differences. These issues would be far simpler if solved by focusing purely on individual achievement.
Given we have a fixed amount of effort to apply to scrutinizing superficially reasonable but deeply poor arguments, we should focus on those that -- if false -- have the most deleterious effect on utility, broadly defined. If social equity is a component of the utility function, and I think for many it is, then power-preserving arguments would be such a target.
This could really be articulated in any way you choose, but no it doesn't follow that "we should be more skeptical of arguments that facially seem to support the powerful at the expense of the weak" is an irrational or wrong position.
Except that the argument Chomsky makes about the fact that this research would have no purpose in a society that treats people as individuals, ie not a racist society, is certainly valid, but the current progressivism is to do the opposite, ie to define people by their race/sex, and to count the number of people of each race or sex in organisations, and to call racism/sexism if it is not exactly the population distribution.
That’s the argument Murray makes in his latest book, i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.
> i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it.
This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South African ones for instance).
This (pretty long) videos[1] offers a quite thorough review of the sources used in the book, and clearly this book isn't an honest look on a controversial topic (writing an opinionated book isn't a problem in itself, but Murray himself claimed his book to be as neutral and factual as possible, which is clearly not the case).
Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about.
As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
> Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about.
Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.
> As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one.
> (of which only a small bit relates to race)
It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.
Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial, consistent with almost all scientific evidence and obvious.
“That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious. But just because there's a lot of variation in many traits among humans mean there's variation in all of them, in fact we all have the same organs with the same functions, the same number of chromosomes, the same metabolic pathway to produce energy from food, etc. There are as many things that don't have variations in humans as thing that do. Don't get me wrong, I do think there is a genetic impact on cognitive ability, but this argument is really poor one.
> Murray was as far as can be determined acting in good faith.
When almost all your citations in your discussion about the link between “races” and intelligence, are taken from at best biased studies (from South Africa, Rhodesia or Southern US under segregation) when it's not openly racist (Richard Lynn, which has 20+ citations in the book!).
If you want quick look at the quality of the sources used in this book, I highly recommend you to watch just the five minutes starting at 1'52'28[1], about the “single best study of Negroid intelligence”.
Also genetically aren't all the different distinct populations found around sub-Saharan Africa anyway, with everyone else in the world all sharing a single genetic group that has very little genetic variance within it?
> “That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious.
Is this obvious? I can't imagine what kinds of attributes you're talking about. I think if they were significant ones (courageousness, curiosity, etc) they would probably have really profound political effects you don't see in reality.
It is obvious that there are many attributes that varies (skin color, eye color, eye shape, hair thickness, hair color, nose shape, lactose tolerance, height distribution, breast size, etc.).
But, it doesn't mean that every attribute varies this way. That's exactly what I'm arguing against actually.
About psychological traits you mention, there's so much cultural influence I don't think genetics would have any visible impact even if it was a factor (I'd be surprised if genetics played zero role here, but I expect the genetic-induced variance to be much lower than the culturally-induced one).
Consider something like the role of courage in military tactics. If you had some populations who were simply less courageous than others, you'd have a different baseline for stuff like, does a phalanx work? Is a phalanx even necessary?
Even a minute difference in something like this would change the mechanics of the formation. So stuff like Alexander's globe-spanning conquests would suddenly become impossible as he hit a different population regime where his tactics don't work anymore, or the Mongols would hit some barrier where they would start losing all their battles because people weren't reacting the way they should, etc.
In reality, of course, empires like the Roman one absolutely depended on the fact that the same social systems and techniques worked just as well in modern day scotland as they worked in modern day Iraq - a legionnaire was a legionnaire, whether they came from egypt or wales, and they could and were moved around and interchanged.
That doesn't mean there cannot be genetic variations on those attributes though. No two legionnaires had exactly the same size[1] but that didn't prevent building legions acting as a unit…
In fact, the whole purpose of the phalanx as a combat organization is to remove the weight of individual actions: you don't need “courage” (whatever that means[2]) to stand in a phalanx, because you're clumped up with every soldiers, and you have nowhere to flee (and btw those soldiers are your neighbors and relatives, so fleeing would destroy all your social life back home, putting an enormous social pressure on soldiers).
There has been an extremely long and celebrated history of different nations and peoples employing different military tactics and being known for different sets of skills in battle.
But aside from that, it seems like everything you wrote is pure conjecture and even if some of it was true, that absolutely does not prove a point about there being no genetic component to intellectual diversity.
Sure - the basic concept of a multi-ethnic social organization presupposes that ethnicity doesn't affect how you react on social conditions. In the 19th century and early 20th century, it became fashionable to say that only nations of one ethnicity could ever function. There are, however, many centuries of empires functioning with a myriad of ethnic and cultural groups living under the same law and administrative structure, and it works fine, because people are basically the same everywhere. If they weren't, it wouldn't.
P 1. A policy is a set of procedures a state employs to get a desired reaction from a population.
P 2. An empire is a state that employs some policies across its entire territory.
P 3. Multi-ethnic empires with strong cohesion have existed.
So if you take 1, and 3, you see that for both to be true, people have to have very standardized reactions to policies across ethnic 'lines'. I state it with certainty because it's obvious.
> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes, is (or ought to be) completely non-controversial
It is.
None of the controversy over the book is about that orbital-level view.
If the sources are bad, how can you make any such statement about conclusions in the work? To state as fact what is and is not controversial regarding the Bell Curve, smells a bit like your Gas Light is possible not combusting properly.
> If the sources are bad, how can you make any such statement about conclusions in the work?
I’m not making any statement about the conclusions in the work.
I’m making a statement about the controversy around the work, from observing that controversy, including reading extensive material from people objecting at the time it first became controversial.
The controversy was never over the broad idea that different populations have different distributions of different attributes.
> The general argument of the Bell Curve, that people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes
It is by no means "the general argument" of the Bell Curve, and saying that pretty transparently shows that you have not read it. You are, of course, excused by the fact that the book has been the target of relentless smear campaign by media and many academics, which resulted in painting completely wrong image of what the book actually is about.
Bell Curve is almost entirely concerning the American society, and only in passing mentions issues and results from different parts of the world. The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ. Moreover, which will probably be shocking to people who only know Bell Curve through second hand accounts of people very loudly denouncing it, for the most part it explicitly restricts itself to results and data from the population of white Americans only, to show that these correlations are not a result of some sort of insidious ethnic or racial discrimination, as they also exist within white population. Only in last part of the book ethnic and racial disparities are mentioned, mostly to show that these are pretty much what you would expect if you assumed that correlations of intelligence and outcomes within population of white Americans are the same if you extend your analysis to population at large.
> The point of the book is largely that people within the same part of the world have widely varying outcomes, which, to a large degree, are explained by their IQ.
Except the data they use is not IQ (they are using AFQT Score because that's the available data) and they are artificially constructing an equivalent IQ. The original data doesn't even fit a bell curve (because there's no reason a given test should). For some reason, unjustified in the book, they assume that the AFQT score depends only from genetic factors and not from any kind of social determinism.
The fact that the book liberally jumps from AFQT score to IQ to “genetic factor” is an enormous issue which completely destroys the credibility of their work.
Also, in their book it is “to a large degree, explained by their IQ”, because they controlled for almost no social or environmental factors: only the “parental socioeconomic status” (also a made-up metric) is taken into account.
Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.
Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone (even if I don't see reasons to assume genetics has no impact on it either).
And btw, the study you quote explicitly rules out the conversion done in the book:
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
> Which means: for the people with a high enough AFQT score, IQ is correlated with AFQT score. This is indeed interesting, but generalizing to the rest of the population is a methodological mistake.
No, because everything else we know about IQ, especially the existence of positive manifold, strongly suggest that it will also correlate at lower IQs too. You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.
Alas, there have been other studies done, and it turns out that indeed, AFQT/ASVAB score and IQ correlation does in fact extend to areas on the left side of the distribution too, exactly as expected. To reiterate: this correlation exists across entire spectrum, not only among high IQ people. If anything, the correlation at high IQ is lower than expected, because of range restriction effect.
> Moreover, there is no reason to assume the AFQT score to depend only on genetic factors alone
Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
> no direct one-to-one correspondence AFQT percentile scores and IQ scores can be stated.
It can, though. The problem is that the population of military test takers is not representative of population at large. For one thing, its average intelligence will probably be higher, due to relative scarcity of mentally disabled people. However, if you know the parameters of IQ distribution among military test takers, you can easily convert AFQT/ASVAB to IQ.
> You can’t just say “the study on X has not included Y, therefore we should have absolutely no expectations about any sort of relationship between X and Y”. That’s not how science works.
Oh yes it is. Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud. Doing so in any hard-science topic would earn you an angry comment from your reviewers.
> Fortunately, nobody is claiming that, so you won’t have to put much effort to convince anyone otherwise.
Oh, and I guess Herrnstein and Murray didn't publish that book? Because they definitely do so in The Bell Curve: They are literally plotting AFQT and SES (their bogus “socioeconomic factors”) against social outcome and since AFQT has a higher correlation than SES, they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
And if you read my previous comment, you'd notice that the AFQT -> IQ is only a part of the issue in the Bell Curve, the bigger part being how they assume AFQT -> genetics because they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics. (The last steps being an ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve so it's not really a surprise…)
> Extrapolating outside of study sample is either a scientific rookie mistake or just plain fraud.
No, extrapolating outside of study sample is the entire point of doing science. Of what use science would be if we could not do that? Imagine, “no, you can’t say that this vaccine is effective, at best you can say that it was effective in the sample of subjects being included in that study, but you can’t extrapolate that outside the sample, that would be a rookie mistake”. This is, of course, absurd. We do science precisely so that we can make useful predictions in day to day life, outside of studies.
> they conclude that genetics must be the decisive factor!
I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
> they assume AFQT = IQ = g = genetics
I don’t think they do, and it is contradicted by what you wrote in this very comment, where you say they claim genetics is “decisive factor”. This clearly makes no sense under assumption of equality/identity of concepts — you wouldn’t say that A is a “decisive factor” in B, if A and B are the same thing.
> ideological stance, which Herrnstein have been defending for decades prior to the publication of the Bell Curve
Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
> No, extrapolating outside of study sample is the entire point of doing science. Of what use science would be if we could not do that? Imagine, “no, you can’t say that this vaccine is effective, at best you can say that it was effective in the sample of subjects being included in that study
It's not about not extrapolating to individual subjects outside of the test group, it's about not extrapolating to categories which aren't represented. That's why we don't conclude a vaccine is effective on all mammals after a trial on mouses! We experiment on humans, and we even try to get as much diversity as we can (age, gender, preexisting conditions etc.) so the result can be generalized to the entire population.
> I observe a goalpost being shifted, from “genetic factors alone” to them being decisive. I do not accept that. Please, tell me, where they, or anyone else claims that genetic factors alone determine outcomes.
The argument made in The Bell Curve is that genetics is the single most important factor. I wrote “alone” not because there is not other factors, but because according to the authors there is no other factors as important.
> Relationship between g and genetics is an empirical, not purely ideological issue. Hernstein has been saying that g is mostly determined by genes precisely because this is the current state of our scientific knowledge, and has been for decades.
It's not. At least not according to the usual definition of “scientific knowledge” which imply some degree of consensus: this research field is strongly divided on that question, with a clear ideological split. BTW, even the mere existence of g is questioned.
I wonder if a society that treats people as individuals is even possible?
To me that sounds like reasoning along the lines of the physics professors answer: "First, let's assume that all cows are spherical..."
Not always a useful assumption.
Generalizations are necessary for a human to function. Something like 90% of all daily activities are repetition and you would become psychotic if you tried to make a conscious effort to evaluate and re-evaluate everything all the time.
This goes for how we view people too, obviously. Especially those that we do not know.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't try, just trying to argue that it would be inhuman to expect us to succeed every time.
Except the stars are millions of light-years away from the moon. I don't think we are that far from a race neutral society, despite the last year of political slogans.
Treating everyone as an individual is exactly the opposite of “assume all cows are roughly spherical”. It means judge someone with the highest resolution information available. The fact that perfect information is not always available, doesn’t mean you can’t still have the maxim of making the best of the information you have / can acquire.
> But the claims of systematic racism or sexism when you don’t have matching representation everywhere can only be opposed if you get into this ugly discussion.
I agree. This is a major counterargument to this notion that this type of knowledge is not useful. Not even mentioning that it is freaking interesting and it will always spark curiosity in a lot of people.
So I know a lot of people mentioned in this New Yorker piece. Not well but I consider them colleagues. I have a lot to say about it on several levels.
On the one hand, I've had to deal firsthand with the phenomenon Paige-Harden is talking about, in hiring discussions and faculty meetings. It's infuriating and bizarre to see the level of denial that arises among people who ostensibly are extremely intelligent and well-educated. It reaches a point where my only conclusion has been that these individuals are completely out of touch in an ivory-tower sense, that they have no idea what happens in clinical settings, and the problems that arise in terms of phenomena that are obviously congenital disorders or near-disorders, even if they don't have a label per se.
On the other hand, I think the behavior genetics community is in a bit of denial itself, about the strengths of its models and reliability of its conclusions. The field has found itself in a no-mans land the last decade or so, in that the revolution promised by the genome area instead stripped the field of results: the findings of the twin era, when faced with molecular genetics, largely evaporated. This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication.
This all leads to a general sense within the BG community and without that the models and findings of behavior genetics are based on very big assumptions, assumptions that seem to fall apart when looked at through a microscope. They might have some validity in a broad brush sense — in the sense that yes, there are some sets of genes that collectively lead one to have higher functioning cognitive ability, and some that lead to impairments — but the tricky details most people wrestle with are mismodeled. Comparing one end of the bell curve to the other is doable; less doable is comparing adjoining areas of the curve. There's also the strange complexity of life, which is largely absent from these models. A common pattern is for some BG conclusion to be drawn in the literature, and then everyone has very clear, prima facie evidence — on the news, in everyday experience, and so forth — that clearly contradicts it. The BG community wrestles with it, comes up with some contorted explanation for why there's no contradiction, and then silence.
The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement. What it concerns itself with are characterizing with abstract descriptions — "additive genetic variance", or "polygenic risk" — people as if they are static objects. It's not oriented toward identifying something specific or manipulable, like a neurophysiological pathway that can be changed, or the products of specific genes. Even when research is oriented toward potential change, as in environmental interventions, genes are still treated as something fixed and unchanging, background that is to be covaried out because it's not something we should do anything about.
So, even though I think the left-leaning segments of academia definitely go overboard in how they approach behavior and genetics, there's some sympathetic groups who largely reject it for other reasons. They see the field as fuzzy and unreplicable in a levels-of-analysis sense, if not sample-to-sample sense, and are skeptical of the overall worldview implicitly being promoted.
I need to reread the Chomsky piece; it's dense and full of excellent points. But part of what it points to is the fundamental problem with seeing individuals in society in terms of reward or punishment for what they are, rather than in terms of the obligation of society at large toward improving other individuals.
The real crisis looming on the horizon isn't the failure of the left to appreciate behavior genetics. It's the failure of everyone to appreciate the implications of a civilization where we will soon be able to alter our genes at any stage of life, as well as the neurobehavioral structures that are downstream from them. Where does the moral obligation lie then? With the individual or society? What value is there then in abstract quantifications of variance due to the individual at birth, and variance that occurs later?
>This is alluded to in the article with polygenic risk scores, but those I suspect will face a similar crisis of replicability; although they predict outcomes, it's relatively weak when you get to behavior, and much weaker still upon replication.
Why would you say that? I think you implied you work in this field, so maybe you do know better than me. But from my perspective, you are incorrect. Not only a lot of SNP's are replicating, but we also have the definitive method to test causality, which is applying PGS intrafamily.
> The reason why I'm posting in response to your comment is that underlying all of this I think is a fundamental, often implied concern about BG research: that it is not oriented toward intervention, change, or improvement.
Ok, now I am definetely sure you don't work in the field. Wtf? Of course it is immensely valuable to know that cluster X of genes influences condition Y. Nowadays, drug discovery is a pretty messy process without any direction except trial and error. If we can previously know which genes are first implied in this condition, then we can reason what they are probably doing (using previous knowledge of them) and from there work in a possible solution.
Chomsky's basic argument is that we can build a society where social success doesn't depend on IQ. Or as he puts it:
"If... society can be organized more or less in accordance with the "socialist dictum," then nothing is left of Herrnstein's argument"
So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
The topic of the article, and therefore of my comment, is progressive takes on the issue. If you aren't a progressive, you don't agree with any of those. That's fine but trivial, it doesn't need pointing out. My point is that within the range of progressive arguments, Chomsky's is definitive because it doesn't involve the intellectual contortions that other progressive positions are increasingly depending on.
You can be a progressive without believing that we can organize society so that value creation is rewarded with nothing but "respect" and "intrinsic satisfaction". That's Chomsky's argument. It's false.
There's more to Chomsky's argument than that, and if you read it closely, he says "redistribution of income would
appear to be an equally obvious strategy", which is much closer to a mainstream progressive position.
The statement you are putting forwards assumes many things - that value is decided by solely by monetary values as decided by "the market", that a market that can calculate values perfectly is possible, that social rewards have no value, that socialism is incompatible with rewarding people materially for material product, etc..., which most people would say are false.
Socialism is a system where a clique of powerful people jail and abuse anyone who opposes their ways. Ostensibly it's for the good of society, but in reality it's just for the ruling class. Source: lived under socialism for 14 years. Also observe N.K.
Come to think of it, it's a woke utopia. Enforced equality, anti-meritocracy and cancellings making everyone live under constant fear.
Meh, none of that is socialism. Those things also happen in capitalist societies so I guess we could also say that those things are capitalism... it seems that to you there is no distinction between capitalism and socialism.
Also, your source is bad. It is like saying that you read something in a book... Which book?
Sorry about your experience, but here in America it's not much better. We imprison more people than anywhere else in the world, including the USSR at its height, in raw numbers and per capita terms as well. Our system is one built on a concept of punishment and retribution, rather than rehabilitation and forgiveness.
Here's a glimpse at how our ruling class views the role of prison in our society:
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." - John Ehrlichman
The other half of that of course is that prison is highly profitable in the United States, making the incentives to imprison people incredibly perverse. Housing people involuntarily is an industry in America, and people are working very diligently on optimizing and perfecting it to be as profitable as possible. This leads to insane situations where prisoners are being used to fight fires with little to no pay, which may sound like slavery to you, but... well. It is. The 13th Amendment which "abolished" slavery even carves out an if someone is convicted of a crime.
I'm sure you witnessed and were subjected to terrible things. I would be careful though of concluding the problem was with "socialism" rather than powerful people abusing their power to maintain and amass more power. That dynamic is pretty universal and happens under any system with psychopaths in charge. Whenever it happens under one "-ism" people from other "-isms" will use that to point out how flawed the opposing ideology is. But really, all the system determines is how hard of a time the psychopath-in-charge has pulling the levers of power. We just put a psychopath in charge of our Democracy here in America 4 years ago, and his term ended with him instigating an insurrection on the country's Capitol in an attempt to maintain power, bringing an end to 240+ years of peaceful power transitions. It can happen anywhere.
TLDR; the American ruling class will pretextually raid your home and throw you in prison if you opposed their agenda of invading foreign countries and segregating the population by race. Not only will they put you to work and not pay you anything, they will actually charge you for the privilege of imprisoning you (again, for pretextual reasons), making a profit off of your misery. I guess we can conclude this is Democracy?
He opposes it when it turns up. But for example, he was frightfully keen on Venezuela's "21st century socialism" until it predictably, and predictedly, became yet another authoritarian failure:
> Do you think they invented his quotes? There's usually room for a fruitful discussion if you want one.
No. But do I think that their "interpretation" is even close to charitable and that there's a even faintest chance that we'll get somewhere from that starting point? No, not a chance.
The author is of course the author of some "abolish the NHS book/report" as well. Do you honestly believe that this sort of such stuff is represented by anything other than monied interests?
"[W]hat’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela is that I can see how a better world is being created […] The transformations that Venezuela is making toward the creation of another socio-economic model could have a global impact."
That seems to prove my point, irrespective of whether the IEA is a right-wing thinktank (yes, it is).
> So, if you think socialism works, then yeah, you'll find this very persuasive. From my POV, though, it's a deluded fantasy which 100 years of disastrous policy catastrophes have disproved.
(not to bring up a no true scotsman-type argument) but maybe chomsky has a different understanding of what "socialist principles" mean compared to most contemporary people (and those who implemented those disastrous policies)?
The research definitely is significant - definitely politically, if not scientifically (which I'd argue it is, any research that helps find the truth / predict the future / create a better model of the world is scientifically significant).
We're currently in the middle of several highly emotional political debates, which would easily be resolved by having better/more scientific data, particularly into the correlation of IQ and interests with race & sex. Sure, genetics don't determine an individual's life, but they do influence population averages, so if genetics explain/predict sex & race differences in careers and education, we could hopefully resolve those debates.
Another example of this is the association between violence and (1) computer games, and (2) sex/testosterone. The first one, albeit "intuitive", was debunked using science/statistics, and the second one most people just assume as "obviously" true (and noone claims sexism!) (although AFAIK it's scientifically debatable).
Again, genetics don't determine an individual, but they do influence the population & sub-groups.
Clear evidence that one group differs from another doesn't provide any useful information for dealing with individuals.
Like make up a characteristic where women differ statistically from men, but have the difference be about 1/2 the standard deviation for either group. Lots of women will be closer to the average for men than the average for women, and vice versa, there's no useful generalization to make from the clear evidence.
And lo and behold, most human characteristics are similar to this pattern, with clear distinctions available between groups and of no value in making decisions about individuals, because of intragroup variation.
“ Clear evidence that one group differs from another doesn't provide any useful information for dealing with individuals “
This isn’t necessarily true.
For example, I know that two-year-olds are far more sensitive to missing naps then eight-year-olds are.
This changes how I structure time and environment around a two year old so that he is the statistically more likely to behave. If I don’t do that, I set them up for individual behavioral failures.
> Like make up a characteristic where women differ statistically from men, but have the difference be about 1/2 the standard deviation for either group.
> there's no useful generalization to make from the clear evidence.
It's quite painful then that people are obsessed with measuring group differences with the only possible explanation being bigotry. If people ignored identity groups and studied individuals, we might not be in such a political mess.
If outcomes between groups are different, investigation into underlying causes of differences in group outcomes is often useful- bigotry need not be a motivation.
What I see is that if a difference is indeed found, there can only be two reasons for it: Racism or sexism.
Computer science or video games are an example. The demographics allegedly show very prevalent sexism here that is allegedly responsible for said difference.
The self-reflection about how other fields have similar one-sided demographics with the opposite sex isn't interesting on the other hand. On the contrary, that realization is ignored, because it would endanger the sexism story. A look at the pipeline is also just ignored, even if demographics are one-side before discrimination even could occur.
I don't believe that some people believe their own conclusions though. The bad thing is that states and governments now try to correct something that is based on false assumptions. This is nothing else than totalitarian and absurd behavior.
>What I see is that if a difference is indeed found, there can only be two reasons for it: Racism or sexism.
This seems absurd to me. As an example, I figure that the reason that there are more male construction workers than female construction workers is not sexism- it's that men largely have more physical strength and a greater inclination or preference for highly physical and dangerous work than women.
Would you call this sexism? Why should it be the default assumption that men and women have equal preferences to self-select jobs exact equal proportion for each and every profession?
> Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true
The identification of differences between groups seem to be commonly conflated with the act of unfairly discriminating against a group with prejudice based on differences (perceived or real), which is kind of absurd when you think of some of the more superficial and obvious yet real differences. You clarify this very succinctly, but it is still abstract, and I find many people tend not to understand until given a more concrete example... this I find challenging to do without being prejudged as some kind of racist or sexist, so unfortunately I just don't bother any more, the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.
> the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects.
I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested or said what bothered them. (https://theundefeated.com/features/it-was-past-time-for-aunt...)
Broad, sweeping statements about groups of people have been used to discriminate all over the place. They've been used to justify not teaching certain kinds of people, or to justify myths that certain groups of people "should" always be a certain way because of the majority trendline.
The people that built these myths sometimes did so (or do so today) with pseudoscience. So, for some who have heard this kind of nonsense their whole lives (maybe it was used to discriminate against a parent), actually valid + careful scientific research can sound like the same old nonsense.
Incidents of people being offended in the past doesn't mean that people aren't more sensitive today than they are now. I think there is a strong argument made in "The Coddling of the American Mind" that overprotective helicopter parenting after the turn of the century, combined with the rise of online echo chambers that provide instant support for any personally held opinion have resulted in a society of individuals who are extremely sensitive and take offense much more easily.
His arguments regarding the social consequences arent as good as they could be, but the ideas he is refuting are so stupid that I cant tell if they are strawmen or just commonly held ideas. Chomskys writing is often convincing, but his perspective always seems so limited. The (in)significance of the research, intentionally vague regarding specific or general as a trick, and justified by fear of missuse in politics, perhaps. But it shows an emphasis on argument over substance, and a lack of perspective on technology.
Thank you, /blast/, for sharing this article. The US public discourse has become a thoroughly annoying, exhausting puppetry of shouting, wrestling straw-men.
Democracy needs education and clear discourse. Citizens in a democracy are to be treated fairly and as equals before the law. If we cannot even ensure these principles, democracy is in a decrepit state indeed.
I wonder what exactly remains as a political commitment to the people.
I don't think that a text judging biology, written by an (arguably smart) linguist dating 50 years back can be in any sense "definitive". Even in a moral and political one. Science evolves and real-world consequences follow.
Someone playing with electricity in 1800 was doing scientifically insignificant research. 100 years later, electricity was a major industrial force.
We are just entering the era when genetic manipulations of not just embryos, but adult organisms will be possible. One day, this technology will be used on humans as well. Even if the U.S. forbade such research, other countries likely won't. 20 or 30 years from now, progressives will have to find answers to technology that can tune various parameters of human beings, maybe including some cognitive abilities.
Having read and enjoyed the linked article, I noted that roughly the second half of Chomsky's argument is that the inquiry into race and IQ is fundamentally just boring -- "of quite limited scientific interest". He's saying "sure, you could be right, but who cares?"
This contrasts with the reactions in the article of scorn such as comparing researchers to "Holocaust deniers".
It struck me that of the two; Chomsky's reaction is the more devastating.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. This sort of battle comment leads to predictable, nasty discussion, and what we want here is curious conversation.
I'll lead with this - people should be treated with respect regardless of their race and regardless of their IQ. People should be given equal opportunity to succeed, regardless of any differences.
> Widely report that some races don't do as well as others on standardized tests, etc.
>Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
We have widely studied and reported on reasoning for why some races do worse on tests in america, and the answer is not inherent differences in race, and it has very reasonable scientific backing. The reason is racist policies that made it harder for some groups to succeed. This is a real thing in American history. It's the same underlying reasoning why many rich coastal enclaves in liberal areas also do better on standardized tests - better access to opportunity and support.
> 3. Blame racists, or even a whole race that does better as the cause of this.
Its pretty hard to ignore the american history of racism, from slavery to redlining to KKK to modern day voting laws. And its pretty easy to connect the dots to how those MASSIVE issues affect people in 2021.
The important point of all this really was the vast american history of racism, not comparing dogma or "propoganda" to what i think about treatment of others. Also, FWIW you're wrong. Progressives are not about giving more opportunity, they're just ensuring that opportunity is received by the people who historically did not have opportunity.
--- --- ---
America has a vast history of racism that is providing people with neither equal nor equitable opportunity.
That is the thing to remember.
America has a vast history of racism that is providing people with neither equal nor equitable opportunity.
Giving disproportionate advantage to minorities because minorities of the past several hundred years had disadvantage is not justice or even logical. It's just racism.
I don't ask for anything special despite my ancestors being treated like crap. My ancestors were discriminated against, yet now my children are seen as benefactors of a "history of racism" despite our ancestors being literally subject to that racism.
It's a farce, and a thinly veiled excuse for modern racism.
...and it's very telling that progressives have abandoned the notion of equality.
> assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot.
Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism.
Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these people mean, but don't say out loud for the fear of instant character assassination by being called out for racism is that they don't want brown people in their countries.
New Yorker bought into this, unfortunately. The author does not want to "help" racial minorities, she wants to label them dumb, an needing compassion, which in reality will lead to even more strong ostracism, and stigmatisation. Nobody have to be "scientifically established to be dumb, and biologically inferior." That's right out of 3rd reich's playbook.
Where there are differences among humans, I think they should be eligible and encouraged for scientific study. Science doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) care about feelings. I worry that we’ve created a society where “it’s taboo to study that” will blind us all on the path to true understanding.
If we discover facts that we internalize as uncomfortable along the way, it wasn’t the discovery that made those facts exist. Politics can take over after science reveals the facts, but (ideally) not before.
I find it extremely likely that, across all research, that we will find actionable information about what interventions are helpful (and which are not) and blinding ourselves to that in the interest of comfort is undesirable IMO. These could be nutritional, societal, economic, or other and these interventions could serve to lift billions of humans to a better condition.
> The idea that racism is wrong because we all have equal capabilities is preposterous to begin with, why, you might as well justify sexism in that way.
Nobody challenges that women are physically weaker then men. Trying to point to this, and scream out of loud as part of some fetish is preposterous, and trying to justify sexism.
Nobody denies that genetics exist. Waging a sneaky campaign to seep into scientific publications to legitimise racism, and attempting to "scientifically pronouncing somebody dumber than others" is preposterous, and is racism.
This vexation of finding scientific basis for somebody's inferiority is exactly what German, and American Nazis did in nineteen thirties, while hiding behind the fig leaf of "doing real science."
> Nobody challenges that women are physically weaker then men.
I have encountered multiple people in my personal life who are offended by the idea that women are physically weaker than men.
There is also plenty of evidence of this in the raging debate surrounding transgender (specifically male to female) individuals and their physical advantages competing against non-transgender women.
So yes, I would say there are many who challenge that notion.
> There is also plenty of evidence of this in the raging debate surrounding transgender (specifically male to female) individuals and their physical advantages competing against non-transgender women.
Yes, this is a huge issue in progressive ideology that is trying to take a local maxima of least-resistance arguments.
There are solid arguments why M2F individuals are not problematic in sports, but "there are no differences" is not one of them. Better ones include, the inherent differences are much smaller after hormonal changes most m2f people undergo, or that elite tier athletics are already self-selecting for the most genetically extreme people anyways, further reducing the difference.
I wonder how many people who throw accusations of "closet X" and "stealth Y" so easily are, in fact, themselves closet X and stealth Y and generalize about other people based on their own carefully hidden prejudices.
Reminds me of Conflict vs Mistake theory. Mistake theorists worry about whether an idea is true. Conflict theorists worry about whether an idea is useful their enemies.
Shifting the argument to "bad faith", "closet X", "stealth Y" is exactly that: It says nothing about whether something true, only that "it helps the bad guys."
Well, to be honest, claiming that people who say A do in fact mean B, is more of an attempt at mind reading of others than just another conviction.
This is frowned upon, because there is no bottom to this race downwards. Anyone can accuse anyone else of being a horrible, rotten human being who just puts up a tolerable facade.
> Anyone can accuse anyone else of being a horrible, rotten human being who just puts up a tolerable facade.
You say this as if human beings are entirely unfamiliar with the use of facades in everyday life (need I mention most women's familarity with "the nice guy"), more so in those domains where power and position are at stake.
No, I wanted to say that we should apply some threshold of evidence before making accusations like this, and we shouldn't apply them onto large groups of people.
These assumptions of sinister motives are unwarranted.
There are a small minority of people who find distortions of the truth aesthetically displeasing and finding things out pleasing, these people often become scientists. (I'm not one of them really, I get off on feelings of smug superiority I get by disagreeing with the "ignorant masses")
Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes.
The fact that this area is controversial suggests to me that it is worth exploration.
I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.
This belief of mine is considered heretical amongst leftist colleagues (I’m a liberal myself on almost every issue). As a college we act as if everyone can pass. Years of administration telling the math department that our passing rate is too low have led me to pretty much pass everyone who takes the final exam. Last semester 80% passed but only around 50% deserved to.
You're making a lot of leaps of logic here, which might be why your colleagues are disagreeing with you. You go from "not everyone can learn algebra or calculus" and "mental disabilities exist" to "therefore intelligence is a scale and controlled by genetics and unalterable," which doesn't really track.
Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence. I mean, all I know of you is this comment, so I could easily be missing a lot more context about this argument you've had, but it sounds like you have an axe to grind, not a carefully-considered conclusion.
I think the more people can learn algebra than OP implies, but as a former math educator my experience also indicates some people are genetically limited in mathematics. For reference, my specialty was working with very remedial students and only ever had a few students not make progress (~2%) but I do think that small percent was genuinely hopeless and I don't say that lightly. I have a pet theory as to why those students could not do algebra that that you might find convincing:
To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid. Think of it as the number of distinct ideas you can hold in your head at once, sort of like trying to hold a phone number in your head when you've just heard it for the first time.
The general consensus in psych is that this number for the average person is in the single digits and is relatively static in adulthood till a decline in old age. It's been my observation that people with really incredibly small working memory cannot do algebra. The amount of numbers/ideas held in their head is too large, and multiple students in this group described the experience of attempting an algebra problem as feeling like sand constantly slipping through their fingers.
Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.
My dad was a math and physics teacher and he had a very similar theory around the working memory. However he also thought that the problem for those students that had difficulties with math was that the working memory was often filled up with other stuff than the math that they were working on. It could be anything from difficulties to concentrate to problems with holding the pen correctly and therefore the working memory was overflowed.
This describes my experience with ADHD except your head is filled with impulsive thoughts (noise), so you struggle to string together a bunch of numbers in a logical forward progression through a formula, which also induces cognitive load when recalling the formula to your working memory when it is overwritten by the impulsive thoughts.
I can get around this by brute forcing the numbers into the formulas on paper and going through each step slowly but surely, even steps that people can do mentally. I just need significantly more time than my peers to finish.
Taking stimulants and increasing my dopamine levels across my synapses alleviates much of the working memory deficits I outlined.
I wonder how many of these students that struggle were just undiagnosed ADHD and not deficient in an low IQ mental handicap sense.
> I wonder how many of these students that struggle were just undiagnosed ADHD and not deficient in an low IQ mental handicap sense.
I've got ADHD that was undiagnosed until a decade after finishing my degree, and maths was my favourite - and best - subject all the way from age 4 through to doing solutions to Einstein's equations involving 10+ A4 pages (both sides) of tensor mechanics for my final year project. My results across that time showed the more maths in a subject the better I did, the more writing it had the worse I did.
Doing maths is like reading is for me - an external cognitive structure that I can follow to make my own brain calm down while in that process. While I don't do much maths nowadays, I literally read whenever I'm not actively doing something else - I read a page or two of my book in-between clicking reply to your comment and starting typing this reply.
Maths involves a lot of "muscle memory" once you get past the initial hump. But it's often poorly taught at an early age to the level of inducing near-phobic levels of discomfort with it which to me seems strange. But I don't think there's any extra issue with having ADHD and maths
ADHD is very comorbid with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia - around 20–60% of people with ADHD also have one or more learning difficulties. Dyscalculia affects as many people as dyslexia, but dyslexia is far more well-known and more likely to get diagnosed and helped with. There's a nice summary box of typical symptoms of dyscalculia in this paper:
> To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid. Think of it as the number of distinct ideas you can hold in your head at once, sort of like trying to hold a phone number in your head when you've just heard it for the first time.
Interestingly, testing myself with the Wechsler reverse-digit-span test, I found very large improvements in working memory from taking 20-minute afternoon naps and from modafinil. I'm not claiming everyone is alike, of course, but working memory is definitely not as fixed as height and eye color.
Specifically with regard to mental math, I find I can do a lot more when I'm lying in bed in a dark room than when I'm in an uncomfortable chair in a noisy cafe with people talking to me. Or, for that matter, classroom.
> Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.
I tried marijuana once and found the opposite effect: when I was high, by the time I got to the end of saying a sentence, I couldn't remember how it had begun. But people report that I seemed like I was conversing normally; if they didn't know me, they wouldn't have realized anything was off. I wonder if these folks were experiencing something similar all their lives?
> I found very large improvements in working memory from taking 20-minute afternoon naps
Sure. My ability to do anything also drops to near zero if I don't sleep enough. Yet I have not found unlimited increases in capability if sleep more and more...
> modafinil
Yeah, drugs are a quite different beast. Doping happens when individual athlete realizes they have hit the limits what their "natural" biology can do and yet still are not going to win the competition.
Yeah, the drawback of modafinil is that it seems to reduce my ability to recall things from long-term memory. Also, it makes it hard to switch tasks when it's necessary.
I don't think I'm suffering from sleep deprivation. Certainly it is true that if you take enough stimulants your performance will worsen! In fact, if you take enough stimulants you'll die and your performance will be zilch!
> To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid.
Wait, are there mainstream schools of thought where working memory isn't considered valid? I'm a layman but I suffer from ADHD, and very much notice that my working memory fluctuates with my attention span (from lack of sleep/stress/etc).
Google's of no help to me, but I remember a story of some educators, looking at some kids who didnt go to school but worked selling concessions, but in turn, were actually quite good at math. They couldn't answer math questions when written out on a worksheet, but they could do the exact same questions when presented in the form of a complex order. (Double digit multiplication and summation isn't the same as algebra, but being able to do that implies a large working memory, which is claimed is the barrier to learning algebra.)
I do have poor working memory and I did struggle with algebra, especially with copying wrong sign from row to row and things like that.
But I did make paper sort of my working memory and when doing algebra I felt that I was just the very resource limited CPU that executed the instructions from paper-memory.
Algebra always made me feel like I was doing some mindfull exercise where I had to empty my mind, follow the paper script and hope I didn't mess anything while switching from row to row of calculations.
Even today, as a programmer, I struggle to remember class or function names, I just empty my mind and am really good at searching stuff in code.
I read this paragraph in a paper on ADHD and learning disabilities literally after replying to a comment above yours...
> There is also evidence of domain-specific cognitive deficits that contribute to specific learning-related disabilities. For example, phonological processing difficulties have been found in children with poor reading performance, whether or not they also exhibited problems with ADHD symptoms or math, but not in children with deficits in ADHD symptoms or math only. Similarly, both with and without a reading deficit, children with ADHD symptoms exhibit significantly impaired object naming and behavioral inhibition, and math-disabled groups demonstrate visuospatial and numerical processing deficits, while those with only reading problems sometimes do not.
There's significant co-morbidity between learning disorders and ADHD, and despite dyscalculia being as common as dyslexia (~3-7% of the population) it's a lot less well-known, isn't as frequently diagnosed and there are fewer tools to help people with it. It would be very possible to have both ADHA and dyscalculia, given you used symptoms listed for both that are almost word-for-word identical with those in the paper...
I had no problem with reading or abstract thinking or grasping mathematical concepts.
My problem was that oftentimes I would screw up calculations for a math problem and only get 7/10 score on it (the reasoning was mostly right, but the answer was not).
Well, I’m certain cockroaches can’t learn calculus. Neither can apes or monkeys. Some humans can. Therefore I think that brain composition has something to do with learning calculus. There is variation in said brain composition amongst humans. It seems reasonable to think that the set of all people is not a subset of all things that can learn calculus.
I haven’t performed any genetics tests but brain composition is partly determined by genetics so genetics might play role, right?
I always wondered if the teachers understood how much effort people put in. Especially in something like math, where you can't just waffle.
I got the feeling as a kid that a lot of my classmates would just give up. I mean they're sitting there acting like they're concentrating on math, but they aren't. In other classes intermittent attention is enough, you pick up social cues and repeated stories that you've heard, and poof you have a history essay. With math there's a need to have all the steps.
How do you control for that as a teacher observing the kids? How do you know whether a kid has actually tried to learn stuff at home?
I still remember my brother was baffled at how I got top grades in math when he never saw me studying. Of course I tended to do that when he wasn't around.
> How do you control for that as a teacher observing the kids?
The only solution I ever found was not having more than 3 students at a time, not an option for most teachers; I spent most of my career working with 1-3 students as a result. With that few students you can carefully observe the mistakes students are making and ask individual questions about their mental state. Experience will eventually tell you to differentiate students not putting in effort from students who are so lost that they're just flailing and hoping something sticks.
With more students, my experience was that both my attention became too split to give students the kind of careful diagnosis to control for effort.
I didn’t imply anything about the number of people who can’t learn algebra other than that I think the number of such people exceeds the number of intellectually disabled people. I used the word intelligence and put this in quotes because intelligence is not really definable but the word does convey a sense of what I mean. One must have a certain level of cognitive ability to learn something. Where that level is for a given topic I can’t say.
You've offered some evidence as to why you believe some individuals are incapable of learning algebra, but you haven't offered an explanation as to why what you observed is necessarily the result of genetics, there could be dozens of additional factors at play here which are not being considered.
HN crowd doesn't think twice about people who try to run DOOM on a stack of pennies, but are ready to give up before trying to get algebra to run on someone with less working memory. It's weird how different the attitude is.
Have you ever been a teacher? Even a teaching assistant?
I have. Some people are dumb.
You try teaching these people (anecdotally they're less than 1% of the population, with no obvious markers, so you have to actually find one first) and then come back and tell me how it's like "getting algebra to run on someone with less working memory". If I wanted to continue that analogy, I might say that the task is like getting algebra to run on someone whose brain has a power supply that randomly shorts out and spends half its time browned out.
Because some people out there are just not easy to teach.
I'm not sure I understand your comment, this is exactly what I spent hundreds of hours of my life trying to do. Was I unclear that my entire educational career was being the person who got through to students that traditional education was giving up on?
I disagree - we have excellent tooling avaliable to cram and compile code into smallest CPUs, but our teaching methods are still the same as they were in 1800's
I think this reveals a lot of ignorance on the huge amounts of different teaching methodologies and techniques that have risen and fallen over the last 100 years.
How do you know what effect upbringing and cultural values has on math performance? You know because there's research for that.
But you can't base any argument on that when research into alternative (or complementary), genetics-based explanations is being stiffled. Or well you can, but that's just society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer.
When you stiffle research directions for political reasons, you're doing politics, not science, and the arguments based on lack of stiffled research don't hold any more water than arguments based on no research.
> society-scale version of googling for statements that you agree with instead of questions that they're supposed to answer
Unfortunately, in practice science often turns out to be almost as much of a vehicle for confirming answers one already has in mind, rather than open-ended investigation.
There were no leaps of logic made by me. I never indicated or said anything about genetics. I said that it’s clear some people can’t learn algebra and gave an extreme example of such a person by saying that an intellectually disabled person can’t learn algebra. I then said that I’m convinced that there is some level of “intelligence” required to learn algebra.
I said absolutely nothing about what percent of people this is true for and absolutely nothing about why this is true. I brought it up in the context of the article because saying that not everyone can learn algebra is as taboo in education as the thought that genetics plays a role in poverty and success in life in psychology. My reason for thinking this is responses like yours.
There are clearly people who can’t learn algebra: intellectually disable people are such an example. I believe some level of “intelligence” is require to learn algebra.
How can you conclude from what I’ve written that I haven’t thought much about my belief? How can it appear I have an axe to grind from what I’ve written? You have formed an image of me that is wildly incorrect. Do you initially assume that everyone who thinks not everyone can learn algebra has an axe to grind?
Other traits like height, health, beauty vary and are influenced by genetics. Intelligence varies between species, and is therefore, at least in part determined by genetics.
Presuming that there are only mentally disabled and normal people is the weird hypothesis. The baseline idea should be that it varies just like health and height. Affected by both genetics and outside factors such as malnutrition and injuries.
This is very nicely put. I wish I had thought of this phrasing when I posted my original comment. The point of my comment was to mention that there are heretical ideas that people won’t discuss in other areas of intellectual inquiry. That was the relation of my comment to the article.
"Nature vs nurture" in the hairless ape presupposes free will, which is a linguistic universal but a metaphysical unprovable.
Look closely enough and there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors. Other than maybe some people jumping to the conclusion that one has an axe to grind with minorities when one attempts to explain certain things with genetics. Which is just as much an arbitrary social taboo as the preceding taboos that constitute what we today call bigotry. (For the record, I'm a staunch opponent of all forms of violence and oppression.)
For me it makes exactly zero difference. Even if free will does exist in some essential sense, I do not believe that people generally choose what opinions to espouse. They simply acquire them through mimesis of their social environment. If that makes me a nihilist and a coward, then so be it.
Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality. I dream of a world where the concept of free will is considered just as poor taste as racial slurs. I think that, perhaps paradoxically, it will be a much more free and just world.
> Thought experiment: English Prime but also excluding any constructs expressing intentionality.
I like this idea of a "deterministic" language. In fact it reminds me of Nonviolent Communication, and is probably a good tactic for discussions that might otherwise devolve into personal attacks.
Saying "there is no essential difference between genetics and other causative factors" is arbitrarily different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion". That is, it differs in connotations and not in the essential content of the statement.
Which is exactly what you said, except that you chose to ignore that connotations conduct meaning, when you asked your rhetorical question. This is not e-prime, it is a plain old adverb answering the question "how?" like adverbs normally do.
No, I'm not. Can you be more precise in what you mean by "causative factors"? Without further context, and based on my understanding of the world, virtually anything internal or external to a person could cause them to be more or less skilled at something. It contains everything, and so seems that your statement could be interpreted that genetics and everything else in existence are one in the same.
You asked what was the difference between my statement (that genetics is not more special than other causes of being more or less skilled at something) and the statement that "all is one, separateness is an illusion". I answered that the difference between these two statements is arbitrary, which I still believe to be the case. Apologies if something else happened to you.
My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.
Genetics is obviously not the same as everything else in existence; I'm not sure that even makes sense as a statement. You seem to have somehow derived that I am arguing against the concept of distinctions at all. I'm not sure if language would be feasible without distinctions.
I don't disagree with any of what you just said, but I fail to see what point you are trying to make or what you are arguing against. Without the (linguistic) act of making distinctions, everything is indeed one and the same, but that's... kind of pointless?
EDIT: Sibling poster also seems to fail to make the distinction whether (a) we're comparing genetics to other causative factors, or (b) we are comparing my statement about genetics to your "all is one" interpretation of it.
In case it's still unclear, (a) and (b) are two completely separate things and I'm not sure how this conversation got to the point of conflating them. It just serves to reinforce my belief that the ambiguity of our language's syntactic structures makes it inordinately difficult to reason about many things in everyday language. Or maybe I'm just a bad communicator. "Me bad", "you bad" that's supremely easy to express lol
EDIT2: Correction, TheSpiceIsLife does actually get it.
> My original comment had the purpose of questioning the validity of the "nature vs nurture" distinction. It just seems like an unhelpful distinction, but then again I'm not a biologist, just a lay person who likes their concepts tidy.
The confusion is in the difference between proximal and ultimate causes, the rest of the discussion is over the ultimate cause of certain phenotypic features being down to genetics, some other mechanism or not significant at all. You've then said "all these different things are just proximate causes and [because free will doesn't exist] the ultimate cause is the laws of physics" to which people have unsurprisingly gone "what the hell does that have to do with anything?" because, well, it doesn't.
The fact that the ultimate cause of me taking a dump is "the laws of physics" doesn't mean the proximal cause wasn't me 'deciding' to go to the loo, and the fact that you can always say "the laws of physics" (or some higher power) is the cause doesn't make talking about higher level causes any less useful.
I don't believe in free will but its such a good trick that you act as though it were true almost 100% of the time, and talking about my 'decisions' as causes is useful the same as talking about 'genetic' and 'environmental' is useful. We talk about the causes of the Big Bang usefully despite time only coming into existence when the Big Bang happened :)
What sprang to my mind when I read the arbitrarily response is that you have equally little control over the genes you’re born with as you do the place, time, family, society, economy, technology, and culture you’re born in to.
> How is this any different from saying "all is one, separateness is an illusion"?
> It's not arbitrary. "Other causative factors" is boundless.
These are distinctly different lines on inquiry. One is an inquiry to in the illusory nature of separateness, the other is an inquire in to the boundless nature of causative factors.
Fair enough. I still believe that tiptoeing around these issues gives power to those who consciously perpetrate and benefit from institutionalized violence.
Like another commenter said, operating with a comfortably skewed mental model doesn't help resolve the actual socioeconomic issues.
I was a little hyperbolic in my original answer. In all honesty, I think it's probably best to continue research in this area. However, in the current state of the world I don't see how that research is especially beneficial. Every finding would have to be taken with such a massive grain of salt that I have a hard time imagining we would find practical applications for it.
In the current state of the world, most scientific research will be co-opted by some violent apparatus or another. Does that mean we should lose hope and stop doing any research altogether?
By current state of the world, I mean that any research into this topic can't control for all the possible variables. That's why we'd have to take it with such a large grain of salt.
That's why I brought up metaphysics and e-prime actually. We can't resolve societal contradictions in a fundamental way if we do not have the tools to reason about them, and the main tool we have for that, human language, can at times be pitifully inconsistent and ambiguous - even if one does, in fact, control for people's automatic emotional reactions to controversial subjects.
How does this not track? It's clearly obvious that there are intellectual boundaries that exist (E.g. if you're not this smart you're going to struggle).
Previous education, upbringing, cultural values, etc are all separate effects that may influence your overall ability, but intelligence __definitely__ influences your ability.
Low intelligence + good education = poor overall ability
> Your previous education, your upbringing, your cultural values, these things all also have huge effects on your aptitudes, and you've just dismissed them out of hand, apparently in favour of pre-determined genetic intelligence.
They didn't seem to do this at all. It can simultaneously be true that there are some who, due to genetics, simply cannot complete a particular task, no matter how conducive an environment they are put in, while for others genetically do not have these hurdles but whose success is still dependent on their environment.
If anything, you are the one dismissing this possibility out of hand, and making leaps of logic.
The thing which I think gets missed out of these discussions is the notion of community. We're such horrific individualists in the West that we seem to see nature and nurture as distinct, which of course they aren't. The nurture of a child is a product of the combined abilities (from nature and nurture) of the people in their family and community. There is no "I"; our DNA and mores are all part of a greater whole.
That's because we haven't yet cornered good ol' "free will" yet like we have this subject, or if we have, it certainly isn't trotted out as regularly and forcefully by the Right, likely because the virtue of the concept is to support punitive discursive apparatuses.
My feeling with math is that moving on too soon is disastrous. If you move past a subject without having grasped it, you don't have a good base for the next subject. This compounds, and the explanations stop making sense.
At that point people are trying to help you but saying things to you as if you are stupid, but you still don't understand. That really sucks, so people get afraid of math. Avoiding it, and nodding when asked "do you understand" when really they do not.
This is hard to fix because you need to go back to the point they did not understand, but the fear and pain makes even teaching that a lot harder to fix as well.
My feeling is that most people should be able to understand algebra. However, I think that requires a very deliberate and personalized approach for some people. Certainly with collective classes, if you go at the speed of the slowest student there will be slow progress and a lot of people who are bored and mentally check-out.
If any approach is going to work for people who have real difficulties, it needs to be small-scale personal teaching, and it needs to come with trust. Someone needs to feel like they can keep saying "no I do not understand" without disapproval, disappointment, or frustration from the tutor.
This is so true. I'm Black and attended one of the worst performing elementary schools in my city for the first four years of school, which gave me an awful base for my math learning when I was finally transferred to a much higher performing school in a Jewish neighborhood on the other side of the city, not to mention high school and college. Only when I started working in programming did a lot of algebra and trig click (probably helps my first junior role threw me in the deep end working with linear algebra and trigonometry in animation and was lucky to have a senior around who chose to take on a mentor role). Math in public schools is basically magical spell incantation and it appears to most kids that you either have "it" or you don't. Math is a subject I believe requires long-term work that doesn't easily fit into the grade pass/fail structure of school, but then again a lot of aspects of mass education are fundamentally broken.
I like to feel the same way as your colleagues about "everyone can learn to code".
I can definitely say that there are many people for whom it is a struggle - even those on college courses.
But a hundred years ago we could easily have the same conversation about simply reading and writing - they (the poor, women, or "lower class" ) luke not be taught to read. But it turns out that if you start young enough, and put enough effort in, 99% of everyone can learn
So, perhaps society is not putting enough effort in, or asking enough effort from, our kids for them all to learn calculus.
As the Agile Manifesto says, the work delivered represents the effort input so far. If society wants all children to learn calculus, we need to pay that price.
Edit: I think that we do need a new conversation about education. We have My father left full time education at 14, at 18 most of my peers left school and only 25% of us went to college. Today it's 50% it the total spend has not gone up in line.
I honestly don't know what kind of world the "universal education" advocates of the 1870s were imagining - but I am damn sure it was not people doing college courses on their iPhones, but it is the world they ushered in.
We need to double down on what worked for the 20th Century (and avoid the, y'know wars and genocide and stuff).
"In the past, I have made no secret of my disdain for Chef Gusteau's famous motto: Anyone can cook. But I realize, only now do I truly understand what he meant. Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere." [1]
> But a hundred years ago we could easily have the same conversation about simply reading and writing - they (the poor, women, or "lower class" ) luke not be taught to read. But it turns out that if you start young enough, and put enough effort in, 99% of everyone can learn
There is a thing called functional illiteracy [1], where people can write and read but mostly only their name and some very basic things like grocery lists. They also cannot comprehend texts even if they can read most words. It's more or less equivalent to being able to add numbers, maybe multiply numbers 1-10 but very far from algebra.
No first world country can claim a 99% literacy rate unless you count in these people, which would stretch things quite a bit.
I can accept your belief, in principle, about putting enough effort in early education and that lack of such efforts contributes to poor outcomes in college. I also think though that some people just can’t grok algebra. You would agree that a mentally disabled person can’t learn algebra, right? So where is the line below which a person can’t learn algebra. I suspect it is much higher than being mentally disabled.
I am not sure what "mentally disabled" means in this context.
I would be surprised that a psychiatrist would find it a useful term - in the same way that any doctor would not look at the paralympics and see only one illness / disability but dozens of conditions.
I am fairly certain there are Rain Man like people who can do algebra or calculus but would for most people sit under the term "disabled".
Perhaps it might be good for you to ask, "the people I see who can do algebra also can act in certain other ways, socially and mathematically. How much am I looking for people who can do maths, people who can do maths like I do, and people like me who can do maths"
Edit: yes I suspect I sit to the left of you, but the important takeaway here is not that some people are more "intelligent" than others (I agree for whatever definition we choose) but that raising the education level of all in society massively benefits us all. Oh and ranking peoples value in society based on intelligence is not a good idea. It's only just above ranking on physical disability, or your parents aristocratic connections.
I used the phrase in a colloquial sense. Replace mentally disabled with intellectually disabled. That’s the proper modern term for what was once called mental retardation.
I gave no indications that people ought to be ranked in terms of value to society based on intelligence or any other criteria.
I can’t prove this a priori, but I think like the line would be pretty low in a vacuum. It’s hard to tell in the real word though, since we have so many compounding factors in people’s educational careers that affect their abilities.
Mental disability and intelligence isn't one variable. And intelligence isn't one dimensional. Asking for a threshold makes about as much sense as asking how many pawns you need to win a chess game.
I started programming with a friend, I remember our first Js and PHP, he got stuck often, stopped for months while I was getting some first contracts, he was in awe about it and I thought he is hopeless, he always kept saying we will make it. He continued to go to local meetings where most people used phyton,c ,anything but what we used. Then I moved away, couple years later, he informed me he is some sort of full stack engineer at IBM, still is.
That was a big lesson to never judge one based on early results. This guy didn't understand function arguments and how return works for a long time.
I was bad at geometry initially as well, but with the help and encouragement of teachers, i managed to improve beyond class average.
Some other topics, there was no help nor will and I stayed well below average.
Motivation and dedication and external factors like help can neutralize intelligence adv/disavantages at times, seen it happening over and over.
To address your question about "universal education advocates", they were not the reason that we got it.
Their argument was purely an philosophical one, stating that a well informed society operates better, makes better decisions, ect. And a well educated person can make better decisions for themselves and have a higher quality of life.
The reason that universal education caught on was because large businesses realised that could have more efficient factories if they didn't have to teach everyone to read. Thus college and university because the place where the 'universal education' dream could be realised. Where every person could go and receive an education that would afford them a higher quality of life and allow them to better engage with the world.
Then, factories became more specialised and 90% of universities became slaves to some "industry"
Many universities "computer science" programs are hardly that. Rather they've turned into a coding bootcamp with slightly more math.
I think we can still have discussion about functional illiteracy. That is group who can technically read, but not at level needed for every day life. Very likely there is certain part of normal distribution who can't reach that level. But how large we can expect it to be is good question to consider.
Kids are savant at learning ”muscle memory skills”.
But there is a reason 2nd graders dont do book reviews of classic literature. Even though they can absolutely read the complex words out loud on autopilot any day of the week.
Yeah. it isn't that just saying there is a difference between a 10 year old and a 19 year old
Edit: Actually, I think your premise is wrong. Children don't read words they don't understand "like muscle memory". The differences in meaning between, idk, betrothed, engaged, wedded and living in sin are superficial but they carry with them implications of social value, history and more. Children are supposed to read books and pick up context and understand meaning as they go along. We don't expect a 10 year old to grok calculus any more than we expect them to grok social/sexual arrangements. But we have different standards for 19 year olds - in the case of sexual arrangements it's obvious why. Perhaps less so for calculus.
Reading and comprehension levels are hard to guage for this reason - at a certain point the words are placeholders for political positions. And it's hard to tell if someone does not understand the word or disagrees with the politics. Please see every election for past ten years for reference
Looking at your observation that "a hundred years ago we could easily have the same conversation about simply reading and writing - they (the poor, women, or "lower class" ) luke not be taught to read." I would not be so sure that the fact that nowadays 99% of everyone can learn proves that this historical observation was mistaken.
It's known that intelligence can be significantly negatively affected by environmental factors like malnutrition (both of child and mother during pregnancy), childhood disease, pollution and injury, and there is some evidence (also mentioned in the article we're discussing) that a century or two ago the average person was significantly dumber than now, presumably because of those factors - especially to the poor and women, which often experienced more severe childhood malnutrition than their male siblings.
So it would seem plausible that a hundred years ago a nontrivial percentage of people actually were too dumb to succeed in literacy and perhaps the fix for that wasn't just starting young enough and putting effort in, but rather that we started getting much fewer kids with severe environmental damage to their intelligence.
> if you start young enough, and put enough effort in, 99% of everyone can learn
The richest kids at my highschool were also the smartest. There were one or two rich kids who didn't make honor society. There were also only a 5-6 smart kids who were middle/lower-class. Graduating class of ~500 in 1985, about 50 honor society (top 10%).
> Years of administration telling the math department that our passing rate is too low have led me to pretty much pass everyone who takes the final exam. Last semester 80% passed but only around 50% deserved to
Doesn't this contribute to lower the reputation of the universities?
I mean, I did sociology in a small university in northern Spain and there was debate between the stats and methodology professors and pretty much everyone else about this.
In the end I'm grateful to my stats and methodology professors, because having to work very hard is the only thing that actually gave me something useful to go and fight with the world.
Many of my peers had to go to other unis because they couldn't pass there, so in the end they get a pass like me, the same in the eyes of employers, but they know it's bullshiting, and I know too.
IDK, It seems to me that there's a lot of lazyness in social sciences, and this kind of hard attitude to it is not only good for the students, but needed in the field.
IDK in the US, but this professors got a lot of heat for their stances on what a university is about, but they stood their ground, even when they've got hit by political bullshit, denied money for research, etc.
There's another thing (again, IDK if it's the same in the US), but why don't you see it in CS or Engineering faculties? I mean, I remember in my uni the students of this faculties had maybe a couple of professors that where ok to lower the bar a bit, but most of them just assumed that you gotta learn what you gotta learn. And many of them where pretty hostile to students, 180º stance from what I see in Stanford Moocs for example.
Yes, this has long term negative effects but I need a job and don’t need the stress of being hounded by administration. In the old days the state funded a much higher percent of a student’s higher education. In those days, society was the client. Today the student is the client and the student does not want to fail.
> Yes, this has long term negative effects but I need a job and don’t need the stress of being hounded by administration.
The way to make sure your students all pass is to do your job, those students need a teacher that cares and not one that 'needs a job', and preferably one that does not start off with the self-reinforcing viewpoint that a good fraction of them are too dumb to learn the material on offer.
Seriously, consider changing jobs to something with less of a negative effect on people's lives.
I've been on the receiving end of this attitude and it harmed me quite a bit, later on, with better teachers some of the damage got fixed but I most certainly would have traded two of my math teachers that 'needed a job' for some of the (much) better ones. Thanks to Fred Pach and one Mr. Groot I'm not a total loss at math and it ended up not being my skills but those of the teachers that were deficient.
You know nothing about my teaching or what I do for my students. Did I say a good fraction of the students can’t learn algebra? I never said or implied anything of the sort. All I said is that some people can’t learn it. I gave an extreme example of such a person. I didn’t say anything regarding how large the set of people who can’t learn algebra is other than that this set is larger than the set of intellectually disabled people.
It appears you are letting your past personal experiences distort your judgments about me. It’s ok. I understand this. It’s natural but it makes it hard to have a discussion about whether or not it’s the case that everyone can learn algebra.
You made a statement that the way to pass everyone is to do my job. Clearly you have not taught much in a classroom with a wide variety of students. Consider the possibility that you simply don’t know anything about the craft of teaching other than your very limited experience of being a student and that as such you should be wary of making negative conclusions about me.
Here’s one reason I know you’ve don’t have much experience teaching. You’ve mentioned that the way to pass all of my students is to do my job. No one who has extensive experience in classrooms with a wide variety of student backgrounds can possibly make such a statement. Even the most ardent, hardcore teachers at my college who advocate that everyone can learn any topic don’t think this.
When I mention that I just mostly pass my students now they understand that grades are an administrative aspect to the job and know that this is detached from my desire to get as many students as possible to learn as much as possible. People with extensive experience don’t harp on my statements about grading. At most they’ll claim they don’t lower their standards but they don’t make any wild conclusions about me like you did.
But you, you’ve made wholly unjustified conclusions about me and that says you don’t know the nuances involved. You don’t immediately understand that one can think not everyone can learn a topic and still be passionate about learning.
You don’t because I’ve never said anything about my teaching. Your conclusions are not supported by the available evidence.
You’ve obviously not taught much in the classroom. Why is it so obvious? Consider the possibility that your thinking on this issue is clouded by your past.
I have always found the university ranking game to be screwed up.
Are the best Universities good because they have the best teaching, or are they just selecting the best people, who would be successfull no matter what?
The universities are penalised in rankings when a student fails to pass, but they are not penalised if they are so selective that the student never got a chance to study in the first place. This breeds an elitist system that does not let students rise to the challenge. Thats also one of the reasons why european universities do worse in rabking than UK ones - it's common there to start with a huge class, but only small part will co plete the course. In UK its harder to get in, but vast majorty seems to pass.
If universities worked like a normal business does, you'd expect that the best universities would grow, expand, and eventually there would an Oxford in every major city, with oxford teaching methods. But that's not how it works. But people still keep trying to appply 'free market theory' to education, when it obviously works very differently.
Lastly there is perpetual conflict between research and teaching - many professors want to do research and don't like teaching, many post graduate teaching assistants are folks that, no matter how briliant, were afraid of the job market, etc.
Maybe this is a stupid question, but is there any indication that most US universities cared about their academic reputation in the first place? I don't see any.
Well in Spain everybody says to care, yet I see what I see. Not to mention that everyone complains about the low rankings of spanish unis, but I'd say that's mostly a consquence of money and some biases at play.
> I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.
I think most people agree that there are extremes. There probably exists a small number of people who literally cannot (just like how 1 in a million could probably teach themselves calculus at age 10, also exists). However it's a big jump to conclude that even a small percentage of the people at your college cannot in the literal sense - i.e. if their life depended on it, they had all the resources they could want, they had no other distractions.
> i.e. if their life depended on it, they had all the resources they could want, they had no other distractions.
You just gave the definition of "cannot". Those circumstances will never happen, they're pure hypotheticals. Sure, hypothetically I might be able to play competitive tennis against Nadal. Practically, though, that'll never happen, I cannot and will never be able to do that - pretending otherwise is just naive and purely theoretical discussion.
I'll go one further and say that very few people in the entire human population would be competitive with Usain Bolt in the 100 meter when he was setting records, no matter what kind of training they had. There would be a few more beyond the world class sprinters Bolt was demolishing. Similarly, there would be very few people who could beat Nadal in 5 sets on a clay surface. Djokovic happens to be one of those few. But, those are extreme outliers.
Still though, we could ask how many people in the entire human population could run under a 4 minute mile with any amount of training, time and resources? Obviously more than have done it, but how many? Certainly not remotely close to everyone.
If the original claim was merely that a certain percentage of the population are not going to learn algebra - it would be uncontroversial and i would agree with it. After all, we all know that some people fail classes.
If the claim was merely that math comes easier to some than others - again it would be an uncontroversial claim and i would agree with it.
However, my reading of the original comment was that a good portion of the population literally are physically incapable under any circumstance, including the silly hypothetical circumstances i laid out, to learn algebra. I think that is false. It sounds like you do too. So i guess we're in agreement.
Not exactly. I read the original claim that they are "incapable to learn algebra even in very good/way above average (but still realistic) circumstances".
* How do you differentiate between someone who doesn't get it because it's beyond their mental skill level versus someone who doesn't get it because they'd rather be doing literally anything else?
* When you say "mentally disabled", what exactly does that mean in the context of a spectrum of ability levels across the species?
* There are a lot of reasons people might fail your class. What are they? What's the percentage breakdown?
* What are the dangers of thinking that not all people can learn math? What are the dangers of not thinking that?
Oh, I’ve thought a great about these things. None of your questions are new to me or are ones I’ve not considered. I did not come to my conclusion quickly.
Here are some more thoughts to ponder:
Children are easier to brain wash than adults and teaching basic math involves a great deal of brain washing. To what extent is it the case that a person with no exposure to algebraic concepts growing up is at a disadvantage to learning algebra as an adult? There is a theory that if one doesn’t learn a language in childhood then it is impossible for them to learn one as an adult. Is something similar applicable to Mathematics?
I do think something similar is applicable - for any subject. I was/am a math teacher and what I've found is those who couldn't learn algebra often didn't understand the 'language' or have a good grasp of what math means (like what is a fraction, what does it represent in real life, etc). Taking time to go over these basic concepts with them vastly improved their mathematical abilities, and eventually most got to the point where they could easily do algebra.
I don't think the issue is necessarily that they're incapable, it's more that they don't have the necessary background intuition or knowledge. At least in the state i taught in, this is not surprising as elementary school teachers often dread math and fail their standardized teaching test math portion several times sometimes. It's the blind leading the blind.
I've also noticed it in reading, when they have teachers who aren't readers themselves trying to teach it to them.
Though I don't know of any studies about algebra in particular, kids show greater neuroplasticity in general than adults. So learning anything as an adult tends to be more difficult.
But I live with an American who reasonably fluent in Norwegian after 2 years of study in their 30s. It's certainly not impossible.
I have no doubt that math, like virtually everything, is more difficult for adults to pick up from scratch.
What is theorized to be impossible is learning a language as an adult if you did not learn a language as a child. That is, if at age 20 you know 0 languages then you’ll never be able really learn a language. For obvious reasons experiments in this regard are few.
My conclusion is that some people simply can’t learn algebra. Be it genetic, environmental, lack of intellectual fortitude, lack of “intelligence”, or any combination thereof it is simply the case that some people can’t learn algebra.
I wonder if you are equating "can't" and "lack of intellectual fortitude" with "aren't truly motivated to do so."
Considering that a small percentage of careers require more than basic algebra/geometry/statistics, it's not hard to see that math has a "why should I learn this?" problem more than a "am I able to learn this?" problem.
> I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t.
Not all people can read, it's obvious since the mentally disabled can't. Yet with proper education, all non-disabled people can be taught reading.
But that doesn't mean everyone can read, if you're illiterate by your 20s, you're gonna have a hard time catching up. Same for mathematics: most people reaching even high school are too mathematically illiterate to catch up[1]. Is genetics a factor: definitely, but it's among many others.
The reason why it's a partisan issue is the following: if I say genetics is a decisive factor, then I can say «it's natural, there's nothing we can do so we don't need to spend all that government money trying to help those people». The left-sided point of view goes as «There's nothing we can do about genetics, but we can change everything else. Then we need to find what are all the other factors, because those are the actionable ones». The conservative focus on genetics is mainly a justification for doing nothing.
> There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.
“intelligence” is conveniently pretty ill-defined, but I don't think I'm more intelligent than my doctor friends, yet they struggled a lot to grasp even the most basic concepts of algebra when I tried to help them during our studies. “Not everyone can learn all topic” but I have yet to find evidences that your ability to learn a random topic you're not interested into is correlated with the common acceptance of the word “intelligence”.
[1]: that doesn't mean it's impossible, just likely well beyond the amount of effort they can (or want to) afford.
IMO, biological differences and barriers certainly exist and are non-trivial, but the differences between private and public schools demonstrates the degree to which institutional finesse can accommodate student strengths and shortcomings, including differences in intelligence or disability. In other words, we have a long way to go.
In some schools around the Bay Area, we have half the students on the fastest track, and about half the math faculty as calculus teachers. An immodest minority of students complete Calculus BC early and go on to the local college to continue their math education for their remaining years in HS. And these aren't even the top 50 schools in the nation.
I do wonder what’s gained by this. There are plenty of physics professors (perhaps even most) that didn’t do calculus until college or at least senior year of high school, what’s the advantage?
I'm not sure it's easy to discuss the high school transcripts of people with university posts. How did you get in touch with this information?
The gains become clear depending on the degree to which you know what you want, and especially if you're thinking about graduate programs.
1. Calculus in some sense is somewhat disorganized, and it sucks that it's a gateway to more math in the US. By finishing Calculus early you can move on to the math you wanted to learn, such as Linear Algebra.
2. University students may have to spend about a year learning Calculus. That's a long time, and to some people they'd rather spend their money better by learning something else or graduating early.
3. If you're thinking about graduate studies in something technical such as Econ or Stats, then you'll probably want at least Analysis. The problem is that in the grand scheme of things, even Analysis does not leave you very prepared to do things, it just makes you prepared to learn more, so you may want to get ahead of this problem.
> I'm not sure it's easy to discuss the high school transcripts of people with university posts. How did you get in touch with this information?
Because 95% of the time high school work doesn't transfer to the college level even if you do semesters at De Anza. You're back to scratch unless you go to flagship in-state, and even then you can only transfer up to a certain amount (at my undergrad it was up to Calc 2 - several people I know took Calc 3 in the same institution in high school but had to take it again).
Every university has a different agreement on how skipping reqs and credits work, but I'm really surprised that you're saying you need to go to a flagship school for Calc 2, because I believe that's normally covered just by the Calc BC AP exam.
Even if a college didn't want to transfer the credits for Calc 3, I'm surprised that they wouldn't allow you to skip the course. Also, for your friends, if they took a class at the same institution... doesn't that mean they got a repeat? Strange.
I also wouldn't generalize these things to people who occupy university posts, as they probably had interesting trajectories.
As a scientist who thinks professionally about things like culture, behavioral genetics, and psychology, I can say: the idea that there /would not be/ humans who cannot learn calculus is the one that is hard to believe.
Some years ago, California tried to make it so that you had to pass Algebra II to graduate high school. I think the state backed down from that, because it meant only 25% of students could pass. Or maybe they just bowdlerized the definition of algebra II.
It’s too bad, because I don’t think anyone should be able to leave high school without understanding compound interest-sorta vital for participating in a modern economy. Also, it’s not like we can stop loaning money to the innumerate, even if that might be the ethical thing to do.
Do you really need to know Algebra II to understand exponential growth? Couldn't you just get by with multiplication and seeing a pattern and learning the FV function in excel?
Could you link to an article about this? I couldn’t find anything substantial.
Context: Recently there was some controversy about Oregon graduation requirements [0] and social media represented the issue much differently than primary/secondary sources.
I wonder how much of the difficulty is due to large class size. If the student to teacher ratio were smaller, would teachers be better able to tailor instruction to struggling students?
My high school had one teacher capable of teaching calculus. His seniority allowed him to fob it off on someone who could not. She left the profession entirely a few years after I graduated.
Of course, one may learn calculus from a book, which was what many of us did in that class.
This is a big problem imo. In my experience teaching high school, a lot of elementary school teachers struggle with basic math... And that's where the problems arise that we have to try to fix later on.
Likewise, it's my my less experienced impression that some people just can't get (or at least it's overwhelmingly more difficult) basic programming concepts with even a visual building block system
I do have an anecdotal conter-example to your theory.
In my country, highschool last three years. The first year, i was living in the dorms with some of my classmates. One, let's call him M, was fairly dissipated and, while everyone would rather play and discuss than study, and had shitty grades in everything but biology. Math was his weakest, with grade ranging from E- to D+ (i try to convert grades here, my grades wer in the A range and the average was B-), and English/spanish were not a lot better.
At the time, at the end of the first year, we had to choose specialities and which kind of diploma we could do. the "general" kind, with to specialities, economics/humanities or science, or the "technological" one, with three (electric, mechanic, civil). He realized at the end of the year that the only thing he wanted to do was biology, but as this subject was only available in the science speciality, he was fucked. Impossible to get to the "general"branch with his grade. He struck a deal with the school administration: 4 hour a week added to his curriculum, one hour every night after eating and before going in our dorms to make sure he worked. The year, in math, did not start well. He had a F/F- as his first grade (the average was D+, top of the class was B), but our professor was exceptionnal. we had 3 math illiterate in our class, and while the notation was pretty harsh on them, he took time to help everyone understand with interesting examples, stories and exercises. He even took hours of his own time for supplementary lessons. Our class relation was special too, we were only 20, and spent a lot of time together, even after college. Last time i talked to M he was doing a Master in marine biology, and aimed for a doctorate
End of the 3rd year, we have to get the national test. Our class ended up with an average grade of A-, M had a B+ and wasn't the lowest scorer in math (of our class). Miles ahead of the nationnal average (C+/B- that year). It was a public technological highscool in a rural area. The other close HS was one dedicated to farming. Culturally, we did not start at an advantage compared to the average kid of our country, i'd say we were at a disadvantage. But great teachers and small, but close class can help you emancipate from some of your determinations.
It seems like you're essentially implying the mean value theorem here. Because there exist some people who cannot do algebra (folks with mental disabilities), and there exist some people who can, there likely must be some sort of transition point where someone doesn't have mental disabilities but can't do algebra. In that graph, you're implying that "mental intelligence" is the independent variable(s) and algebraic ability is the dependent variable.
Another assumption is that the function is continuous. That's one I'm not sure about. I don't think there's a continuum between folks with mental disabilities and folks without. I think there's a discontinuity -- or perhaps overlapping spectrums on different dimensions -- but not a continuum. That's why many mental disabilities are the result of very concrete genetic variations. You can't have 80% of a generic variation. You either have it or you don't, which implies some sort of inherent discontinuity.
My guess would be algebraic ability is a normal distribution. But that's not a death sentence. People who might, because of genetics or more likely nurture/circumstance be unlikely to learn a lot in algebra, are not doomed to that fate. It just means it might require a lot more time and hard work for them and their teachers -- to the point where they might not find it feasible, and instead choose to do something else.
I believe the universe is discrete and that everything in it is discrete. I believe that “intellignece” is not really measurable. A person might have an intelligence as it pertains to art or critiquing art and be utterly clueless in another area. Indeed, I believe all people have a lack of ability in some area. For all of us there are things we just aren’t ever going to be able to learn and can’t learn. There are lots of reasons for this. I don’t know but can believe that genetics plays a role. There is variation on how our brains work so it seems reasonable that genetics plays some role.
I hope you don't think this article in any way supports your belief that some people can't learn algebra/calculus due to any kind of genetic traits, because I don't think the complexity of either rises to the level of "difficulty" that only gifted minds can comprehend. Very, very little in this world does.
Your belief should probably be considered heretical, even among your conservative colleagues, because your colleagues should recognize how deficiencies in one area can be made up for in other areas, sometimes (but not always) at a higher efficiency cost.
Where genetic gifts are lacking, determination and perseverance can almost always make up the difference, especially at a basic algebra/calculus level.
While I'm sure almost everyone can learn the basics of algebra or calculus, no amount of wishful thinking will give everyone the brain needed to master them or even be proficient. I'm not sure where your belief that perseverance can overcome all even comes from.
I have been trying to get better at chess lately. I grew up playing it so I'm already fairly proficient, and I've been putting a decent amount of free time into studying openings and playing puzzles. Yesterday, I played my friend who hasn't played in literally years and never really played seriously anyway, and he beat me handily 3/3 games. I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master, no matter how much time I put in, because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.
I disagree, as it's not a sufficiently difficult topic to warrant some kind of genetic stratification.
Life circumstance stratification, certainly, and you will get no disagreement from me that some people don't have the time or energy necessary to devote to something as not-immediately-useful as calculus, but from an intellect perspective, no.
Everyone who is not experiencing some kind of mental illness has the intellectual capacity to learn calculus, though I will capitulate it is fortunate for me and this statement that we do classify a low enough IQ as a mental illness!
It’s not a sufficiently difficult topic for you. Have you ever taught algebra to a classroom of people from a wide range of intellectual capabilities and experiences? Are you even aware of some of the pain points to learning algebra?
Do I need experience teaching calculus in order to suggest that it's got more to do with environment and situation than it does intellectual capability? No, I don't think that's true.
Are you seriously suggesting trying to raise multiple children while simultaneously learning calculus is approximately as hard as living alone and trying to learn calculus?
Honestly, I think you're trying to find a neat solution where none exists. You haven't stumbled on anything here, you're more likely ignoring the real-life circumstances your students find themselves in, and your colleagues are not.
> Do I need experience teaching calculus in order to suggest that it's got more to do with environment and situation than it does intellectual capability?
Yes, because I'd expect HN readers to understand an ad hominem when they see one.
I could be living in a ditch down by the river, or I could be the leading researcher into how people learn calculus and it wouldn't make a difference with regard to my argument (though, practically speaking if I were the lead researcher on how people learn calculus, I'd be more likely to back my argument up with objective research, and that would strengthen my argument).
Ad hominem occurs when you use someone's reputation in another area to discredit someone on an unrelated matter. For example, you're the worst golfer on the planet so I say you don't know how to cook. Golf expertise has no bearing on your cooking skills. But if you consistently burned toast or you mainly use your oven to heat up frozen pizza, I'm going to take anything you say about baking a cake with a giant grain of salt.
No, ad hominem occurs when you use who a person is rather than their argument to claim they are incorrect. Here's a definition from Google:
> (of an argument or reaction) directed against a person rather than the position they are maintaining.
Nothing about a reputation or using it to discredit them.
For example, I'm not a calculus teacher, therefore I couldn't possibly form a valid argument about how teaching works. That would be an ad hominem, because it focuses on who I am (not a teacher), rather than what I've said (the teacher I was replying to hasn't eliminated any variables at all before drawing their conclusion). (It's also nonsensical, considering how many other things people teach, and how small a percentage of all teachers calculus teaching ends up being, and how unrelated-to-the-science-of-education calculus is).
It's actually funny, because the example you've given isn't an ad hominem, since you have evidence to support the idea that I can't cook (the burnt toast). You're equating an absence of information about me with specific data, which is different.
You don’t know what an ad hominem is. You are incorrectly applying the definition. It is not an argumentative fallacy to ask the basis by which a person’s assertions have been formed. You’ve made lots of claims about teaching but clearly you have no experience to back it up and (this is important) you have not provided any citations to back up your assertions.
People have to make judgments with imperfect knowledge. It’s reasonable to discount the unsubstantiated opinions of someone with no experience with the topic at hand.
It should at least be interesting to you that it was obvious from your comments that you don’t have experience teaching mathematics in the classroom. Why was that so obvious to those of us with that experience? The previous question is rhetorical.
I didn't say it was an argumentative fallacy to ask the basis by which a person's assertions have been formed, I said it was a fallacy to say a person's assertions are wrong because of some aspect of themselves, which is what's taken place here by insisting I must be a calculus teacher in order to challenge your assertion that IQ is the primary source of the problems your students have with learning in your classrooms.
What is interesting to me is the fact that you retreated to this ad hominem the moment you were challenged, because it tells me you don't have any real explanation for how you eliminated other possible causes for your students sometimes performing poorly.
You'd prefer to live in a world where your experience has meaning than to live in a world where your experience is not valuable when faced with this question, which is completely human of you, but ultimately not useful in this discussion, due to its anecdotal and un-rigorously collected nature.
I can't stop you from throwing this New Yorker article, and the other works of Dr. Harden, in the face of your colleagues, but I can hopefully dissuade others from making the same logical mistakes you're making. I believe I've succeeded at that, by clearly highlighting the carelessness of what you've said here.
Ultimately, what I find most fascinating is, in real time, you've demonstrated how right Dr. Turkheimer ultimately is and how dangerous this research can be when put in the hands of folks who don't understand its delicacy or even the basic facts surrounding these arguments.
I'm grateful for your engagement with me, it's been helpful to work through this with someone like you, but I'll commit to the thing you tried and failed to do; I'm no longer going to reply to your comments in this thread. You're clearly (and I mean clearly) wrapped up in a need to think of some of your students as too dumb to learn calculus, and there's literally nothing I or anyone else here can say that would convince you otherwise, and at this point I've done my part in preventing others from thinking that your insight is useful or helpful in this conversation.
I committed to not responding to you in a different thread. I did not commit to not responding to you in all threads. The teacher in me forced me to try to explain to you why your use of ad hominem was incorrect. My previous response had nothing to do with what was being discussed as such. Your conclusions have not been logically valid.
Here’s an example:
… I must be a calculus teacher in order to challenge your assertion that IQ is the primary source of the problems your students have with learning in your classrooms..
No one has said any of these things and no one has implied any of these things. I never said or implied that IQ is the primary source of anything. No one believes that you must be a teacher of calculus to be right. What people have wondered is if you are a teacher because some of your statements seem to the the type of statements only a non teacher would make.
Oh, well, if you're a leading researcher in math pedagogy, you should just say so and save time. Such credibility would offer serious firepower to the debate.
> I have been trying to get better at chess lately. I grew up playing it so I'm already fairly proficient, and I've been putting a decent amount of free time into studying openings and playing puzzles. Yesterday, I played my friend who hasn't played in literally years and never really played seriously anyway, and he beat me handily 3/3 games. I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master, no matter how much time I put in, because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.
Given the immense complexity involved with learning, there's essentially no way for you to describe the situation with enough detail for anyone to be able to make an informed judgement. It's extremely common for bad players to describe themselves as 'proficient', spending a 'decent amount of time' can mean anything, studying openings and playing puzzles is likely the wrong way to practice, the skill level of your friend is impossible to ascertain, etc.
The way you actually get better at anything is by:
1. Dedicating enough time to it, consistently (~20h per week or so maybe if you want any sort of quick results). The incredibly common trap here is that people think that spending time on a game equals getting better at it. There's no way to improve without spending a certain amount of time playing, but spending time playing does not make you better on its own.
2. Doing whatever it is you want to get good at (doing anything else does not count - if you want to learn how to play regular chess, play regular chess; puzzles or anything else does not count).
3. Reviewing your games to find mistakes you've made - this part is crucial, if you can't see any mistakes you made, you cannot improve. If that's the case, get someone better than you to review your game(s).
4. Playing while trying to work on addressing one mistake at a time, until you don't make it anymore.
Chess is actually really easy to improve in - fast, trivially repeatable games, chess engines, lots of learning resources, objective rating system.
> I know that I do not have the brain to be a chess master
I'm not sure what exactly you mean by 'chess master', but for example getting into the top 10% of players is pretty easy. You are indeed incredibly unlikely to be one of the best, because for that you will have to dedicate your entire life to playing chess. But unless you literally want to be one of the best (top 1%+ of players), genetics will not limit you. You may take more time to get to any given level than someone gifted with more working memory or whatnot, but it's still doable.
> because I don't have enough working memory to keep the board in my head.
Because of humans' limited memory and processing power, we play games not by exhaustively analyzing but via building simplified models and heuristics so I don't see why you'd need to 'keep the board in your head'.
My belief comes my experience teaching math the past 20 years. I think we both agree that mentally disabled people can’t learn algebra. Do you have any evidence that these are the only people incapable of learning algebra? I have lots of anecdotal evidence that the set of people who can’t learn algebra is much larger than the set of mentally disabled people.
Do I require evidence to not believe something you've stated? Or do you require evidence to assert something you've stated?
I don't think the onus is on me to prove you wrong, so much as the onus is on you to prove that your experience is scientifically rigorous and representative of more than just your personal experience.
And to be clear, I don't doubt that many people "can't" learn calculus in the same way I "can't" run a marathon; we don't have the desire, discipline, and free time necessary to do the work required. This does not speak in any way towards our capacities to do so, only our desire.
So I suspect the vast majority of your students didn't have the sufficient desire to learn a lot more than they were incapable, and I think it's a critical distinction, because you can change people's motivations, but you cannot change their capacity.
There’s no onus on either of us to do anything. We are just strangers posting on the internet without pay or other compensation. Your experience and knowledge about teaching help me to decide the merits of your beliefs. It appears from my perspective that you know quite little about what you are posting. I know slightly more by having a lot of anecdotal evidence but this certainly doesn’t imply that I’m more likely to be right.
As stated in my original comment I’m quite liberal. In education we talk a lot about social conditions and their effects on education. It’s why teachers’ unions strongly support universal healthcare, school lunch programs, etc.
After 20 years on the job I’ve come to the conclusion that some can’t learn it. This isn’t controversial in some sense since we know retarded people can’t learn algebra. So what level of capability is necessary to learn it? I don’t know but I suspect it’s well above being mentally retarded.
I could be completely wrong but given your lack of experience in the topic my experience ought to at least make you pause a bit. In another comment you wrote about me:
… you're more likely ignoring the real-life circumstances your students find themselves in, and your colleagues are not.
Talk about making an assertion with no evidence! At least I waited 20 years before stating my absurd assertion.
It's clear to me that this belief has wormed its way into your identity somehow, and you're unable to discuss it in a detached and curious way. I'm sad for you that such is the case, but I am now more empathetic towards your colleagues who have to deal with your false assertion that some people are too stupid to learn the math you teach.
Also not for nothing, but "retarded" hasn't been a medical term for some time now, with institutions such as the AMA and SSA both replacing the term with "intellectual disability". The only remaining reasons you'd use it are either because you are thus uninformed, or you're signaling something...
It’s easier to type retarded than intellectually disabled on an iPad. I wrote the modern version in my original comments. Clearly I have been discussing this topic in a detached way. You’ve formed an image in your mind about me that isn’t supported by the evidence.
I’ll read whatever response you have but won’t comment further. I wish you well. Keep up the good fight!
You can use "cognitively impaired" as a more neutral and factual descriptor than either (and "cognitive impairment" as the generic term). It's also more broadly applicable. (I.e. If you got whacked in the head once too many while playing rugby, that might not count as "intellectual disability" according to some since it's not developmental. But it might interfere with learning math, so it's pretty indistinguishable in a practical sense!)
Thanks, I appreciate you taking the time to talk about a view you've held that's been unpopular with your colleagues.
I think you, and everyone who thinks like you, need to take a very hard look at what you've done to eliminate the environmental factors related to your viewpoint that some people aren't smart enough to learn something, because its extremely easy to trick yourself into thinking someone is incapable when in reality other factors abound.
As the article explains, if society refused to educate/feed/raise/nourish red-headed children, there would be a genetic correlation between red-headedness and intelligence.
How absolutely confident are you that you've accounted for every explanation besides the genetic one in determining why some people can't learn algebra?
Its kinda crazy how casual people are with their constraints on explantion when the topic is intellectual disparity. Person you're replying to claimed they weren't arguing for a gentic component to another reply but also doesn't do anything to filter any other factor than a congential threshold for learning math. This is absolutely why the Left is generally leary of this type of discussion because it is so easy to use the information for all sorts of ill-informed or cross purposes.
It's pretty clear you've never instructed a remedial math class.
My university would conditionally admit students who had a math score below a certain threshold on their ACT, I think it was 19 or something. Anyway, as part of their admittance criteria, they had to attend an after class lab for an additional hour an a half for a total of three hours per week dedicated to learning pre-algrebra. There were four modules where they would do some reading, work through some example problems through interactive software, and then have some homework to work through that was almost identical to the examples. Students would try and try and try and try to learn the material, and they would take days to work through the problems on their own (often with my guidance, giving pointers on how to think about the problems) to finish the module so they could take the quiz and pass the module. Near the end of the semester many students made appreciable progress, but for others the inability to retain and apply what they've spent so much time on results in tears, especially because they don't know if this requirement will keep them from being able to graduate.
Given infinite time, could these guys all have figured out pre-algrebra enough to pass? Maybe. But the amount of time it takes them to learn math concepts that are very easy for us means that it's entirely impractical to expect them to ever achieve proficiency in advanced mathematics.
> There were four modules where they would do some reading, work through some example problems through interactive software, and then have some homework to work through that was almost identical to the examples.
This just does not look like a universally effective way of teaching to me, irrespective of the topic. It's hardly any wonder that some people fell through the cracks if they were unfamiliar with the subject in the first place. What about leveraging stuff that's actually been tried and tested, like the Khan Academy videos and their automated interactive, school-like environment?
> And to be clear, I don't doubt that many people "can't" learn calculus in the same way I "can't" run a marathon; we don't have the desire, discipline, and free time necessary to do the work required. This does not speak in any way towards our capacities to do so, only our desire.
Your VO2max, max heart rate, and other factors appear to be significantly determined by genetics, and will absolutely contribute to your capacity to run a marathon. If it takes you a year of hard training, but it takes me a few practice runs a few weeks before, it's not fair to say we required the same amount of desire, discipline, or free time to succeed. I would instead say we had a very different capacity to run a marathon.
Are you saying that similar things could not possibly be true for learning math? Or really anything else that humans do?
I don't think any of those things contribute to whether or not I could complete a marathon, though they do contribute to how pleasant the experience would be. The same holds for learning calculus, or doing anything intellectually taxing. It's differing in difficulty for people, however it's not unachievable for anyone who isn't experiencing some kind of mental (or physical, in this marathon example) impairment.
All healthy people can learn calculus and run marathons, with varying degrees of success and effort, due to genetics and environmental factors.
I don't see how if you can agree that it requires varying degrees of effort for different people to run a marathon or learn calculus, that you then think it is impossible that some people won't be able to do those things. Just like the amount of effort required will be small for some, it will be impractically large for others. Even in the theoretical sense, there is only so much time in a day.
I also don't think "healthy" and (presumably) "not healthy" are useful categorizations. There are many people in that fuzzy in between area between "healthy" and "not healthy", for both physical and mental health.
Is it really worth so vigorously arguing the semantics of "some people are incapable of learning algebra" and "it requires an impractically large amount of effort for some people to learn algebra"?"
Yes, I think it's absolutely worth arguing the difference between "it's hard" and "it's impossible", because those are two fundamentally different things.
You can overcome difficulty, you cannot overcome (by definition) impossibility.
What you keep ignoring in what I'm saying however, is that I do think certain things are impossible for some people. I will never play in the NBA, for example, but that's a far cry from being "very good" at basketball.
Learning calculus and completing a marathon are not the point at which "healthy" (and yes, it's fuzzy, but precision is impossible on this topic) people are sometimes unable to do things. Winning a marathon and getting a Ph.D. in mathematics, I would acquiesce to your argument.
In other words, I think anyone can dabble in anything, but you do need an alignment of genetic and environmental circumstances to be in the top 1% of something. I could be argued into top 10%, but below that, it appears the data supports almost anyone being able to do almost anything, or at least well beyond whatever artificial lines we might draw to discourage people from achieving.
> I don't think the complexity of either rises to the level of "difficulty" that only gifted minds can comprehend
This is a strawman. They never said 'gifted', they just said that some people have it and some don't.
> deficiencies in one area can be made up for in other areas
Not what we're talking about. GP is probably great at things that aren't chess. That doesn't mean they're good at chess.
> Where genetic gifts are lacking, determination and perseverance can almost always make up the difference
Determination and perseverance aren't (at least partially) genetic gifts?
Honestly I think 'genetics' are a bit of a red herring here anyway because the real underlying assertion being challenged is that all humans have equal potential in all things (which anyone who has ever taught any mildly difficult topic will know is trivially disprovable). The precise mechanism whereby innate human potential differs isn't important if you can't even agree that it differs.
There are some questions science is not allowed to ask now. This is, of course, because they fear the possible findings. And I laugh every time some progressive I know shits on the Republicans for being "anti-science." (not that they are any better)
My english teacher/class master till 8th grade insisted I follow a profession that doesn't involve math -- she even recommend me to be a radio host for a children program -- she thought highly of me, but she thought math was not my thing.
She was half right -- I have ADHD and even though my blood relatives are highly successful (doctors, lawyers, judges) NOBODY was good at math.
Anyway, my parents thought otherwise and promised to buy me a PC if I get admitted to a math/programming class in highschool and paid for math tutoring. My math skills completely turned around in a year and I ultimately loved math, especially calculus.
If you want everyone to pass, lower the standards. The end result will be that certificates from schools without high standards will be worth less in the eyes of employers (while still costing the same to the student). As they progress through such a system, some students will be placed in advance of their abilities and fail out at a higher rate than they might otherwise when they reach an institution with non-negotiable standards, like the hard sciences, demoralizing those who might otherwise have found their place of achievement, self-respect, and independence. Or, even those institutions will cave to such pressures and simply "mark 'em up, ship 'em on", as you have described. Caveat emptor.
First, there are clearly a large number of people out there who have no business trying to pass algebra 101. Even if they theoretically could with sufficient effort and tutoring, it is not worth their time, nor is it going to lead to that much that is beneficial.
Second, teaching is already hard. Teaching math also requires an understanding of math that is rare. Hence finding people who are good math teachers is hard. Finding people who are good math teachers and willing to do it for a math teachers salary is even harder. If it were trivial to improve our teachers we would off course do it. But it is not at all trivial.
I think this matters less in a liberal arts college, but especially if you are going to ask students to build on their algebra 101 with other courses. If passing algebra 101 took a lot of effort, chances are that the other courses are going to take the same amount of effort, if not more.
Why, indeed. Maybe our standards for teachers are too lenient. In any case, it is possible that there is no quality of teaching that will change a student's natural aptitude. It's a disservice to huge swaths of the population to funnel them, ill-prepared, into colleges. Maybe a network of high-quality trade schools would be a better fit for some.
The obvious answer is you lower the standards that year because somewhere the system broke down. (It being much more likely that there is an issue with the system than some kind of statistical anomaly with the students)
Then you evaluate and attempt to improve techniques as is done every year.
I come from a third world country where to graduate high school, you HAVE to take Calculus I, II and little III. Planar Geometry, linear algebra etc. And thats only if you through the Life Sciences track (Biology and Organic Chemistry)
I truly don’t believe my people are genetically smarter because we have a truly awful abysmal track history in governing.
My guess as an immigrant who went to community college here and then to University here is that students just have too much choices/freedom. They are told they should strive to whatever they want. I and my friends grew up told you need to choose a major that will bring bread on the table, that should be the only priority.
> I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus.
This is the "As a mom"-argument applied to iq. When it comes to child-rearing mothers will not infrequently claim to know what works best in general because they have had children of their own. I mean an equally valid interpretation of your anecdata is that not all people can learn how to teach mathematics at community colleges.
Certainly not all people can learn how to teach mathematics. That is not at all disputable in my mind. I may be in the set of people who can’t learn to teach math. I’ve tried for over 20 years and appear to be just average at it. Maybe I’m below average.
My collection of anecdotes that not everyone can learn math works as an anecdote that not everyone can teach math.
I think in the paedagogy community genetics is often an excuse for the unwillingness to develop right teaching concepts. It's then the "fault" of the pupils.
Polya did good works, especial regarding Mathematics.
Of course there are genetic influences and not everybody can be an Einstein or rocket scientist. But below that level there is a lot possible that has nothing to do with genetics.
Most things are more influenced by motivation than the ability. And on that the real cause does not matter.
If the people would spend only a fraction of the energy, they waste with questioning if something is genetic or not, in the development of skills by learning - they would improve beyond the proclaimed "genetic" level.
Reduce media consume. Reduce politics. Almost the whole discussion is toxic.
The right proclaims everything is genetic but on the other side punish people not having the "good genetics".
"The right proclaims everything is genetic". I don't know what kind of "right" are you talking about. I don't believe it is mainstream conservative thought to claim family/school training/displine/education does not matter but only genetics matters.
Some people can certainly reach an intuitive understanding of mathematics that will never come naturally to "normals".
It's worth noting however that we often consider these people "disabled" (or euphemistically "differently abled"). The point is that there's no genetic dial you can turn from "worse" to "better", it's more like a massive board of switches that feed into each other.
The problem with learning advanced math is that math is isolated.
Like if I learn accounting, I know why I'm learning it; to learn how to create, audit, or read the financial statements of a business. If I learn math, it comes across more as "here are these arcane puzzles you need to solve." Like no one does double entry bookkeeping in the abstract; you learn the history, the methods, etc in the confines of an express purpose.
But trying to learn precalc as an adult (which i do get), what's striking is how little purpose or context there is to it. Why do I need to know how to factor imaginary numbers, or know the slope of something?
I think math when isolated is a big reason why its so hard to learn. They teach the toolset but people don't have the need to use the tools unless they go into a separate subject.
Here's a thought I've been tossing around: It's a community college, everyone is supposed to pass. At some point at the bottom of intelligence but with motivation to go to school and try and work and do the assignments, meritocracy literally doesn't matter. Because a diploma is needed even for minimum wage jobs.
Why penalize people who are trying by failing them out of the simplest classes?
Rich idiots fail up, poor idiots end up homeless. No reason to penalize the poor who try when the entire game is arbitrary. This position tends to make certain groups bristle, especially those with a classist sense of "fairness".
It does matter in this sense. Students who are poor end up taking on debt for college and this debt is currently (mostly) unforgivable. If we had universal higher education this objection of mine goes by the wayside. But then a new objection rises up.
perhaps some people cannot learn algebra / calculus the way it is traditionally taught in the classroom. perhaps the students who are failing just need a different environment, more time, more patience, different resources?
Obviously there are people who couldn't learn a given topic under one type of educational regime but who could under a different regime. But that doesn't eliminate the obvious: Some people can't learn a given topic at all, under any circumstances. OP's example of the mentally retarded (which I learned recently is a valid medical descriptor) is just an extreme example.
It's so funny watching people scramble to avoid admitting that genetics has a huge impact on humans and their potentialities.
Granted, as a species, we are the closest to blank-slate out of any species ("niche-switching is our niche"), but reality doesn't go away just 'cause we don't like it.
A good deal of the folks enmeshed in various delusions related to their belief that reality is socially constructed, I've found, are folks that have little concrete experience with reality. Academic types, those who've exclusively worked in knowledge-production or in offices. Rock climbers and farmers are very much not prone to these delusions, for a couple of examples.
Try to convince a dog breeder that dopey English Mastiffs are just an environmental change away from gaining the intelligence of the German Short-Haired Pointer, which can practically solve Sudokus.
Look, there's a "valid medical descriptor" for grandpa who is in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease, but this kind of thing is totally immaterial to people who are in school today. There's no way that they'd have that level of cognitive impairment. Saying that "some people just can't learn" so-called "advanced" math such as college algebra and calculus, or programming for that matter, is just pointless speculation with zero evidence to back it. Most likely they can, we just can't be assed to teach them effectively.
> Saying that "some people just can't learn" so-called "advanced" math such as college algebra and calculus, or programming for that matter, is just pointless speculation with zero evidence to back it.
What about the anecdotes of millions of people who self-profess that despite very much effort, they just can't wrap their head around some advanced math concepts? That doesn't count as evidence?
There are also plenty of anecdotes of people who self-profess that for years or decades they couldn't wrap their head around some math concepts, and then one day they met a teacher who explained it in a different way than any teacher before had done, and it "clicked" for them as adults.
I don't know how to weigh these anecdotes, but I think that's suggestive that the methods of teaching might be relevant even to people who struggle with math for decades.
Honestly no. Most people say i can't do X when really they mean, i've decided that its not worth the effort/i dont want to.
If you were arguing that math comes easier for some people than others, sure that's strong evidence. If you're arguing that they are literally incapable, and no set of curcumstances would allow them to learn - that is a very different claim and needs very different evidence.
I'm a farmer, not a teacher, so I can't answer this question as asked.
But I would speculate that of the set of people who bombed the class, they could fall into a number of buckets. E.g., one bucket is people who were mentally capable of learning the concepts, but were to lazy to put in the effort (then we can quibble about whether inherent laziness puts people into the "not capable" bucket). Another bucket is people for whom alternative learning environments might have brought them to understanding and a passing grade. Another bucket is people who just lacked the preliminary background and with a couple years of effort could be made to pass the class as it exists. And finally, another bucket is people who are genuinely incapable, regardless of environment, of understanding the concepts.
This shouldn't be surprising. I have tried to deeply understand quantum mechanics, and while I can parrot some of the most well-known and more simple concepts, I truly believe that I lack the capability of grasping the very core, deep insights in an intuitive way. I might pass undergraduate level classes in the topic, but I am fairly certain I couldn't achieve a PhD. I'm not the dumbest bulb in the shed, but I can see that there are people much, much brighter than I, and it is obvious that their ability to understand more advanced and deep concepts is greater than mine; This leads to the observation that of the set of understandable knowledge in the universe, some of it is available to some people but not available to me, no matter how hard I try. (I take solace in Feynman's quote, "If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics.")
Then look at every human capability and its distribution across the universe of humans, and it's pretty clear that we all can't do everything, every one person has some cutoff beyond which they aren't capable of understanding in any given topic. For some people (and hey, maybe it's a really small slice of the population), that cutoff is somewhere before Calc II.
I think we're getting closer to the actual situation with this description. There are a lot of buckets of people who don't do well in a particular class.
And we both admittedly don't know the size of the bucket of people who cannot, given a lifetime of 80 years continuous study and tutoring, understand a topic.
But in my teaching experience, it's dwarfed by the group of people who doesn't care about the topic and bombs because they don't put in the effort.
From my point of view it seems that the US educational system clutters their curriculum with too much unnecessary cruft.
Students need to focus on the basics and no where is this more true than in mathematics. Too many students muddle through middle and high school mathematics without gaining mastery or with multiple gaps in their knowledge. By the time they get to calculus they're simply unprepared to put all their previous knowledge to use. "Calc 101" is the first time that many students are required to apply theorems and then use algebra, trigonometry and arithmetic to arrive at results to problems. If there's any weaknesses in their fundamentals it's going to make the problems intractable (and, yes, they are for many students).
It's better to track students and only advance them to the next level in math when they've demonstrated mastery of previous topics. That would mean, of course, that a good fraction of students would never "reach" calculus (or even algebra)-- but that's OK if it means they have enough numeracy to balance a ledger or learn avoid blowing money on the lotto. At least their time would not be wasted on trying to do "Business Calculus" in college.
That's not really rebutting the original claim, is it? If, due to genetics, they need a different environment, resources, more time and patience.. how is that not agreeing with the premise that genetics matter?
Yes, different environments exclude and include some people, those who may be on the border of capability seem likeliest to be impacted here. That still doesn't mean that ALL people can learn calculus, given enough attempts to find the right environment for each of them.
Shows, also, the silliness of this argument. Some people can pick up calc at age 10 no sweat whatsoever. Others struggle mightily with the basics in their 30s. Should we as a society invest 1000x the resources in the strugglers to ensure they can achieve the same understanding?
>Should we as a society invest 1000x the resources in the strugglers to ensure they can achieve the same understanding?
There's no need for everybody to reach the same level of understanding, but I think the pandemic has shown the importance of teaching as many as possible the basic concepts of calculus. "Flatten the curve" doesn't mean much when you've never heard of integration. The same applies to climate change. People will have more faith in mathematical models if they think it's something they could have done themselves if they really wanted to (overly optimistic judgement or not) instead of some bullshit the so-called experts made up to bamboozle them.
Recently I read things about our school system in tabloid. Wholly unscientific, but popular anyway. The result is that trying to teach these students in regular environments might negatively effect everyone and specially those who are borderline. That is there is a group who need extra support and inside regular lecture could learn, but can't as groups needing even more support take resources.
This doesn’t necessarily have to do with genetics but with the environment you live in when going to school. My parents and grand parents were both born in the countryside and couldn’t get algebra or calculus (whereas myself and my siblings didn’t have issues learning) because they were lacking the basis that you now more easily get in primary and secondary school if you have supportive parents and teachers.
By the time you’re in college, it’s already over. It’s why good daycare / preschool / school for everyone matters, otherwise you’re just missing out on a lot of potential talent.
> I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.
You know, if you were trying to teach Chinese to 18-year-old English-speakers at community colleges with three hours a week of lecture, you might come to the conclusion that only a few rare geniuses had the ability to learn Chinese at all, and none would ever learn more than a few hundred words. But of course over 98% of people born and raised in China learn to speak Chinese fluently by the age of 5, and that's not because of genetics; it includes almost 98% of white people born and raised there too. There are several factors that I think of as key to this difference:
1. Plausibly there is a critical period for language acquisition, and if so, it very likely ends before age 18. Looking at an 18-year-old you can't tell whether their deficits in Chinese-speaking ability are due to genetics or environmental effects in the previous 18 years. There probably isn't an early-childhood critical period for calculus (I think you need formal operational reasoning for that) but maybe there are other things you need to develop early on for calculus to be easy for you when the time comes. Like, fluency in reading, for example.
2. Three hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for two years, is a total of 216 hours. Native language acquisition more typically involves over 20,000 hours of language exposure by age 5. Sometimes it's surprising how much more you can achieve when you apply literally over a hundred times more effort. Or, to look at it a different way, how little you will achieve when you're applying less than 1% of the effort necessary to get good results.
3. Schooling is a really terrible way to learn things. Extrinsic motivation displaces intrinsic motivation, massed practice displaces spaced practice because it gets better exam scores (especially if you know when midterms are coming up), the feedback necessary for improving is delayed by hours or days by the nature of homework grading, and the pacing is inevitably far too fast for some students and far too slow for others. It's well established that individual tutoring produces results two standard deviations better than ordinary classes (Bloom's two sigma problem). That's 30 IQ points. And Bloom wasn't even spacing out practice over decades the way you ought to; he was working within the semester structure of traditional schooling, extrinsic motivation and all.
Is there a possible human culture where 98% of everybody routinely learns to do symbolic integration? Or does human nature render that impossible? Maybe. (Hell, when I have an integral to do in my head, I myself invariably settle for just approximating it unless it's a fucking monomial. Maybe I should spend a few semesters doing them on the blackboard in front of a class, I bet that would help.) But the meat grinder of community college doesn't give us much evidence about that one way or the other, except to know that we don't live in that culture today. It doesn't help us at all with the question of what to attribute to environmental effects and what to attribute to genetics.
(One indication that such radical changes may be possible is the gradual transformation of literacy; hieroglyphics were the province of the priesthood and the quasi-priestly scribes, and even after the invention of alphabets, Charlemagne and Genghis Khan were illiterate. Can you imagine trying to teach a classroom full of 18-year-olds hieroglyphics in three hours a week, if they had no previous experience with reading and writing? Yet today literacy rates are over 95% in most countries, though countries with non-phonetic orthographies like Chinese and English lag a bit behind.)
Math notation is very consistent and it’s optimized for convenience. It’s been constantly refined over last centuries. People who complain about notation usually actually have problem with the substance, and the complaints about notation is just a coping mechanism, to deny hurtful reality that one can’t understand something hard, blaming external factors instead. Ask yourself: if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly?
Now, to be sure, some people and some books are better at teaching than others, but it typically has nothing to do with notation used, and everything to do with the order of introduction of concepts, level of detail of explanation (which can be both too high and too low), amount and quality of examples, etc. However, the core issue here is that some things are actually genuinely hard, and people of average intelligence simply cannot grasp them without expending ludicrous amounts of effort.
If you have some concrete suggestions about mathematical notation, ways it could be improved in more than superficial manner, I (and the rest of mathematical community) is very much open to hear them. Improvements in notation do happen regularly, and when they are valuable, they reach wide acceptance. For example, in the second half of 20th century, the notation of commutative diagrams have been invented, and it spread like a wildfire, because it genuinely facilitates understanding.
>Ask yourself: if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly?
I think its pretty clear that momentum causes a lot of nomenclature pain. You can't just redesign entire fields of understanding every couple decades. For instance, what other fields use single greek characters to label concepts in a seemingly unpredictable arrangement? Often, local maxima are found because concepts are added in the context of the field as it already existed.
And its not just math. Most sciences have this problem. It is what it is but its silly to say we're in the best of all possible worlds just because math has been around a long time.
> For instance, what other fields use single greek characters to label concepts in a seemingly unpredictable arrangement?
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about. Greek letters are typically used in opposition to Latin ones in order to distinguish what programmers can think of as “type” of concepts. For example, when doing geometry, you might want to designate angles with Greek letters, and points or line segments with Latin ones. This makes it much easier to mentally keep track of what name correspond to which object.
Yes, learning Greek letters for the first time is some amount of initial overhead (not much, as typically used ones are similar to Latin anyway, nobody starts with psi or xi). However, crucially, this overhead is paid once, and pales compared to the difficulty of learning the concepts being represented in the first place. It is never the case that replacing Greek letters with Latin makes students go “oh thank you, now I understand everything!”, instead, things are typically just as hard as before. However, replacing Latin with Greek might actually do that, by reducing the mental overhead through introduction of categories (types) of objects.
>Math notation is very consistent and it’s optimized for convenience.
Hard disagree. The most important thing I learned is that it is all made up on the spot to the point that the lecture material explicitly says that books have used 6 different forms of notation for the exact same concept. When you understand that you drop any pretense of "design" in the notation. That helps you abandon foolish ideas that it is "consistent" and that the only thing it is optimized for is the author. When you understand that then it's just a meaningless barrier to overcome but it also becomes easy to overcome precisely because it is that trivial. You just get used to it and e.g. learn the alphabets of the dozen languages (including klingon because the lecturer had to make that joke) from which the variable names where sourced from. Once you did the meaningless grind the barriers are gone.
> People who complain about notation usually actually have problem with the substance, and the complaints about notation is just a coping mechanism, to deny hurtful reality that one can’t understand something hard, blaming external factors instead.
No it is quite simple. You can't understand an easy or hard concept if you can't read it. I still remember how I understood nothing in the first semester. Then when I was preparing for the exam everything was extremely easy because the notation was understood by that point.
>If you have some concrete suggestions about mathematical notation, ways it could be improved in more than superficial manner, I (and the rest of mathematical community) is very much open to hear them.
As I already said that is meaningless because there is no universal notation. "The mathematical community" will adopt a fraction of proposals and further splinter into separate "factions".
> if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly?
Because they are unable to change it. Just like with any thing evolved over a long time, like music notation, languages, even, to some extent, programming languages. Every change brings a lot of pushback, it's a monumental task to create a new one and even more so is getting any traction with it.
That doesn’t square well with the fact that notation keeps getting refined and improved. There is no pushback for genuine improvements. Biggest problem here is that there rarely are changes that clearly and meaningfully improve situation over status quo. I gave one example above, but overall, I am not going to take complaints about notation being obstacle to understanding seriously without concrete ways how to meaningfully improve it. You can of course keep complaining that it’s confusing, but without proposals for improvements, you’re actually complaining about the difficulty of substance, not the notation, and it says more about you than about notation.
That's a bad example: first, it's a question of definition, not of notation. Second, it's defined pretty consistently within physics, and pretty consistently within electrical engineering (none of which is mathematics).
> Ask yourself: if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly?
Sometimes notation elides 'obvious details'. The details are obvious to those that have already gone through the learning curve, which is easier if one is strongly connected to other working mathematicians than for outsiders. Mathematicians barely notice inadequate or unusual notation. Outsiders struggle and spend significant energy just deciphering the notation.
Anecdote 1: Sometimes notation is too terse: single letters. Granted, efficient for whiteboard scribbling. Would be really nice to standardize an appendix for notation. E[X] = <expr>. Hmmm, what could E be? By the fifth paper, somebody bothers to write 'expected value' in plain English and the mystery in unambiguously clarified. In a voice-based interaction this is a non-issue, not so for those that only have text to deal with. This compounds as a novice has to juggle a set of mysterious symbols with tens of elements.
Anecdote 2: Long long time ago (before ubiquitous email or http:// took off) a young student spent some time working through a handful of type theory academic papers that somehow trickled into his corner of the Universe. The type inference rule notation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_rule), which is rather straightforward in retrospect, ate up more time that he's willing to admit. Γ is just a set of judgments and Γ |- expr is just a notation for 'Γ includes the judgement expr'? Then why don't they use the standard expr ∈ Γ, this is confusing? Are there some examples? Is there some code that one could possibly run through a debugger? The questions remained unanswered, as there was noone he knew in the same linguistic sphere interested in the topic. And the papers themselves never detailed such obvious notation details.
PS. I agree that the bigger obstacle is the lack of proper big picture 'why do we even bother with these concepts / theorems'. At an extreme, there is (used to be?) a certain style of math books consisting exclusively of a dry litany of 'Definition 1.2.3', 'Theorem 3.2.4', 'Corollary 2.3.1'. Very rigorous and very difficult to ascertain what problems they were trying to solve.
> Anecdote 1: Sometimes notation is too terse: single letters. Granted, efficient for whiteboard scribbling. Would be really nice to standardize an appendix for notation. E[X] = <expr>. Hmmm, what could E be? By the fifth paper, somebody bothers to write 'expected value' in plain English and the mystery in unambiguously clarified. In a voice-based interaction this is a non-issue, not so for those that only have text to deal with. This compounds as a novice has to juggle a set of mysterious symbols with tens of elements.
I really cannot conceive how one can learn what the concept of “expected value” of a “random variable” means, without encountering E[X] notation. This is a technical concept having a technical meaning, and any place that actually defines this meaning will teach you this notation. If you see this notation for the first time in some academic paper, but haven’t ever read any probability textbook, it means that you almost never actually learned the concept, which is my entire point. You might have some intuitive understanding derived purely from the literal meaning of the words “expected value”, but without actually getting technical, this intuitive understanding is mostly superficial, and, as such, not very useful. You won’t be, for example, be able to answer such fundamentally important questions like “is expected value of sum of random variables a sum of expected values of each? Is expected value of product a product of expectations?”. You can’t know answers to these questions without having ever seen E[X] notation, and if you don’t know the answers, your problem is with the actual concept, not notation.
> PS. I agree that the bigger obstacle is the lack of proper big picture 'why do we even bother with these concepts / theorems'. At an extreme, there is (used to be?) a certain style of math books consisting exclusively of a dry litany of 'Definition 1.2.3', 'Theorem 3.2.4', 'Corollary 2.3.1'. Very rigorous and very difficult to ascertain what problems they were trying to solve.
I agree that it very much often is a problem. It’s not a problem of notation, though.
Technically speaking, there are other cultural spaces than US/English. In one such space E[X] is written M(X) and called 'average value'. But that's quibbling. 'Expected value' is simply 'weighted sum' over possible values with respective probabilities as weights: weighted average value. Not exactly rocket science if one groks what a probability distribution is. But even that is quibbling. The more interesting point is that some would rather starting learning from concrete applications instead of pacing through a seemingly endless dry litany of definitions. Cryptic notation is unhelpful for this style of learning.
Ken Iverson thought mathematical notation was inconsistent, so he wanted to invent a better notation for thinking, which became the programming language APL. But APL syntax never captured the mainstream. Neither did Lisp for that matter. It was C-style syntax that ended up dominating.
Do you believe everyone can learn algebra? What evidence do you have for this belief? Have you taught in the classroom much to students with a wide range of educational backgrounds?
I don’t believe everyone has equal intellectual talent in all areas. My talent for math far exceeds my talent for physics. I’ve tried to learn physics but I just can’t. I have no intuition for it. There is variation amongst our brains and how the connections in our brains formed in childhood. In some people the wiring is such that learning a given topic is not feasible. Such is my belief.
Do I believe that everyone should attend college? I do not. Of the people who should attend college, is it frequent that people can't grok single-variable algebra?
I'm not disputing your superior experience on this topic (hence "well-informed position"); I'm just saying that it's fairly depressing.
In case you don’t know this, community colleges are generally required to accept everyone who applies that has a high school diploma or a GED. We are open enrollment institutions.
I understand now what you meant by fairly depressing. Thank you for the clarification.
Hello, fellow mathematician. The first step in your proof which doesn't convince me is the claim that, in general, "levels of intelligence" exist, admit a partial order, and can reliably predict whether certain people can learn certain topics.
In general, you'll find that "leftists" believe that psychometrics is bogus in terms of science. Instead, it masquerades as science in order to fool the public into believing that biased public policy is neutral. There's no denial that some folks have brain damage, developmental disabilities, etc. but a denial that standardized tests are an appropriate proxy for genuine medical diagnoses.
Community colleges should present themselves as a public benefit. We shouldn't ask that everybody pass any class, simply that everybody has the opportunity to attend/audit any class. It is unfortunately true that the typical university administration is clueless and money-grubbing, preferring graduation rates to other metrics.
I don’t claim that there is a partial order to intelligence. Indeed, I think it’s clear that no such can exist. Let me put it this way. The set of people who can’t learn algebra (using any reasonable standard for this) is nonempty as it includes the set of mentally retarded people. I further suspect that this set is considerably larger than the set of mentally retarded people.
I further suspect but didn’t state this that if one doesn’t have exposure to algebra growing up then it is extremely difficult to learn as an adult. Children are easier to brain wash and in low level Mathematics we do a great deal of brain washing.
Correlation doesn't always imply causation, right? For example, there's a correlation between IQ and income. There are several causative possibilities:
* IQ causes income
* Income causes IQ
* Some unknown thing causes both income and IQ
* The correlation is spurious; IQ and income are unrelated
Evidence strongly suggests that the third bullet point is true; socioeconomic class causes both income and IQ. Richer people living in nicer neighborhoods both have better opportunities for income, and also better opportunities for education; education causes IQ. This is why redlining is brought up so often as a root cause of so many of the disparities in quality of life; redlining deepened socioeconomic divides.
Is a mental disability not caused by genetic disorder, injury or illness. This would invalidate your claim. You wouldn't use a contergan victim as a example for the thesis that not all can learn shot put.
Isn't the whole point that you can't simply look at the gene of a person and know what his mind is capable of except for genetic defects and even then it's hard to estimate.
Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. Certain ethnic groups and families, on average, are more likely to have certain traits and less likely to have others.
But genetics doesn't matter, in that just because you have "bad" genetics doesn't mean you'll suck, whether it comes to weightlifting, intelligence, temperment, etc. Maybe you won't be in the top 0.0001%, but except for some very specific circumstances, you can defy the average. If you want to know if someone's bad at something, actually testing them is much more accurate than looking at their genetics.
If you look at the top 10 distance runners, they're all from Ethiopia and Kenya. But as you look further down the list into the top 100, you start to see Americans and others. Furthermore, the Americans' times are really close to the Ethiopians and Kenyans.
So, even if we know for a solid fact that some ethnic group is on average dumber than another, or more violent, it doesn't mean anything. Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages.
Sure, that's a good point generally but doesn't seem at all the problem the article is addressing. Skimming it, it's about progressives denying group differences at all and calling those who research them 'equivalent to Holocaust Deniers'.
From following genetics research and researchers, I've seen plenty of that, and I don't see the relevance of your point here.
In my experience, it depends on the group. It seems conservatives are more likely to defend the idea of IQ differences among racial groups, but also more likely to reject the studies showing that liberals tend to have higher IQ's than conservatives[1].
Fundamentally, though, I'm not sure what the use of highlighting group differences is. I tend to skeptical of such studies (in my own experience datasets can be very misleading if sliced the wrong way), but if the studies about political alignment are true, then what? Should I start separating people based on what group they belong to? As the above poster said, when you're measuring an individuals aptitude then the group aptitude is basically meaningless.
>In my experience, it depends on the group. It seems conservatives are more likely to defend the idea of IQ differences among racial groups, but also more likely to reject the studies showing that liberals tend to have higher IQ's than conservatives[1].
This may be true, and a perfectly fair point ... but it does not actually prove the argument wrong, it simply points out that groups are susceptible to motivated reasoning. ie, there are some measurable IQ differences among groups which may be related to genetics, and this point is not invalidated because different people supporting it or criticizing it are hypocrites.
Comparing a single study to a whole subfield is just odd.
Also again, no. You generally don't make individual judgements based on group differences. You can make population-level decisions based on them or allocate funds more effectively or reach a deeper understanding on group differences with such research so socially outlawing it is counter-productive even if you personally won't use the results in your day to day life.
The research isn't specifically about group differences, or differences between populations anyway. That issue inevitably gets all the attention, but it's just one dimension. The vast majority of genetic differences between any two individuals have nothing to do with whatever arbitrary groups society categorises them with, and most genetic differences that do correlate with anything like race are basically cosmetic.
Nevertheless genetic differences can make a huge difference to individuals. Many factors we uncontroversially categorise as disabilities have a genetic basis.
In UK schools children categorised as on the Autism spectrum, or dyslexic receive additional support and consideration with regard to exam rules. I don't want to sideline into an argument about to what extent these specifically have a genetic basis, but broadly if we are going to agree that such factors are taken into account, it's flat out incoherent to then ignore or deny research into the origins, characteristics and influence of these factors.
"most genetic differences that do correlate with anything like race are basically cosmetic."
But those that aren't cosmetic can matter a lot. For a noncontroversial example, sickle cell anemia. It absolutely makes sense to screen people of West African descent for sickle cell anemia.
The backlash by progressives is usually specifically centered around the group differences part. And I don't buy that's the one that gets all the attention - all the negative one maybe, but most accepted and talked about genetic research isn't about that at all.
Different ethnic groups have meaningful difference in various allergies and disease risks, but that doesn’t get attention from the general public.
That stuff is basically all interesting but largely meaningless because it’s so binary. It doesn’t matter if your part of a group that’s 10x as likely to be lactose intolerant, you are either lactose intolerant or your not. Sure the dairy industry might care, but the only impact on individuals is what they can bring to very large family gatherings.
Even where it is actually meaningful to an ethnic group, people rarely from a single ethnic group. A large chunk of African Americans are whiter genetically than their black.
If you might remember a somewhat recent controversy when they tried to remove race in the eGFR (kidney effectiveness, sorta) calculations. This was not done for performance reasons, or to find a better measure. The impetus was the idea that it was racist, never mind the performance or benefit to black patients.
For lactose intolerance maybe it doesn't matter. There are a lot of diesesases for which screening is not worth it if your risk is too low due to a high false negative compared to your risk (which is part of why we screen young people for a lot less).
To fine tune what you said, the article (to leave the actual scientific work in question aside for now) focuses on progressives denying genetic differences between groups, but modern behavioral genetics focusing on differences within groups, between individuals.
(Between groups being entirely too muddled by confounding factors)
And the stridently progressive crowd (read: Twitter) rage-cruising right past the distinction, and using arguments against the former to dismiss the latter as anathema.
And then, as these things typically go, coming to their senses and being somewhat embarrassed by where they end up, but unwilling to concede their obviously righteous point and so making increasingly intellectually ridiculous justifications.
Well, a major problem is that the groups being studied are often either very poorly defined - things like 'black people' or 'Ashkenazi jews', which are entirely social categories, with little to no effort in most IQ studies to actually establish genetic group markers.
Other times, studies look at groups with much more proeminent socio-economic differences than genetic ones (countries, neighborhoods). Here the genetic factor is impossible to isolate from the other factors, making genetic claims dubious.
The point is that progressives should stop being so afraid of accepting genetic differences, because they don't go against the type of policies most progressives are after. And because genetic differences are probably real, when progressives argue against racism etc. because "genetic differences don't exist" they actually hurt their position.
Policies that discriminate based on genetics are bad, not because genetic differences aren't real, but because they're a) inaccurate, especially compared to measuring the differences themselves, and b) usually immoral, because having good genetics is luck and doesn't make you deserve a better life. Chomsky (see above comment) probably does a better job explaining this.
The catch here would be thinking in distributions, and from that separating individuals from said distributions.
A current topic would be representation within a given domain. Particularly since in most representation cases (high paying jobs, celebrities, top universities, etc), we're already looking at the tails of the distribution. There, small shifts can heavily affect the quantity of users in the right tail, especially for domains with stronger requirements (see your case with the runners).
Of course I won't try to discount potential cultural impact, but anyone trying to sell you a story of how it's all nature or all nurture is typically spouting bullshit.
But it's a bad idea to compare the world's fastest runners with people getting high paying jobs - that's the main point of the GP's comment. Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion. If you look at top 100k runners, the group differences are almost entirely gone. Even more, the top 100k runners are probably within a second or two of each other - entirely irrelevant if you were to hire based on a bar of performance, and not some elitist concept of hiring the very best possible.
> Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion.
Sure, but there is no social contention arising from racial differences in the world's fastest runners. What gets us in trouble are the the racial differences in high-prestige jobs. To really understand the impact of differences in distributions, you need to look at some numbers. The excerpt below comes from Douglas Murray's new book. I am not going to attempt to convince you that racial differences in IQ exist. But he makes a strong case that if such racial differences did exist, the impact on the distribution of high-prestige jobs would be absolutely enormous:
"...Why are there so few minorities in these high-prestige jobs? It's a numbers game in which the odds are against a Latin (he uses geographic indicators in place of the colloquial 'black' and 'white', and 'latin' in place of 'hispanic') achieving one of those positions are high and the odds against an African are prohibitive, even if we assume that there is no racism whatsoever among the employers for high-prestige jobs.
To illustrate, I'll use the cohort of young Americans ages 25-29, the age at which the potential candidates for such jobs are coming out of law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate STEM departments. In 2019, there were 23.2 million Americans in that age group. About 228,000 people in that age group can be expected to have IQs of 135 or over.
The racial distribution of Americans ages 25-29 in 2019 was more multiracial than among the older population. Only 54% were European while 20 percent were Latin, 15 percent were African, and 6 percent were Asian. But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool that contained about 2,800 Africans [~1%] and 9,500 Latins [~3%] compared to 50,700 Asians [*~22%*] and 160,000 Europeans [~70%]." [~3% being 'other']
So, while the marginal IQ differences between individuals do not matter not one whit, when considered at the population level, these differences can hardly be ignored.
> But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool [...]
This is one mistake, and the danger of using IQ as anything more than a trend indicator. Employers don't need 'people with an IQ over ${ARBITRARY_CUTOFF}'. They need 'people who can do X and Y'. And IQs over 100 quickly stop having significant predictive power for mental abilities other than IQ tests. Even exams which focus on pass/fail of an aptitude rather than excellence show little 'racial' variance in general.
The numbers in that paragraph also seem entirely fantastical to me. It basically claims not only that there are IQ differences between the "races", but that they are huge.
Finally, and most importantly, the whole set of observations is meaningless in the way it is used. Even granted that there are such huge differences in IQ between various "racial" groups, the social justice response won't change - we need to focus on eliminating the social and environmental causes at the root of these differences. Murray could claim that the differences are genetic, but I am very curious what is the scientific methodology by which he defines these groups - how much genetic testing did he do determine whether one particular person is 'European', 'African', 'Latin', or 'Asian'? What genes in particular was he looking for that make someone European? (For that matter, are Italians and Spanish people "European" or "Latin"?? Is Eva Longoria, whose family came from Spain to America with a royal land grant 400 years ago "European" or "Latin"?).
> This is one mistake, and the danger of using IQ as anything more than a trend indicator. Employers don't need 'people with an IQ over ${ARBITRARY_CUTOFF}'. They need 'people who can do X and Y'. Even exams which focus on pass/fail of an aptitude rather than excellence show little 'racial' variance in general.
The scientific literature is very clear on this point--IQ is predictive of job performance. If you need people who can do X & Y, IQ is the best predictor[0] of whether a given individual will be able to do X & Y.
> And IQs over 100 quickly stop having significant predictive power for mental abilities other than IQ tests.
I would love to see a source for this claim.
> The numbers in that paragraph also seem entirely fantastical to me. It basically claims not only that there are IQ differences between the "races", but that they are huge.
The numbers in the paragraph are partly due to differences in IQ, and partly due to the nature of distributions. IIRC, Murray claims a mean IQ difference of ~15 points between 'Africans' and 'Asians'. Here's an image[0] of two distributions with an equivalent mean difference. Note how, the farther you get from the center, the greater the proportion of red:black. At 1 standard deviation, the ratio is 3:2, at 2sds, the ratio is 4:1!
> Even granted that there are such huge differences in IQ between various "racial" groups, the social justice response won't change - we need to focus on eliminating the social and environmental causes at the root of these differences.
The point of this conversation is that, if these differences are due to genetics, then no amount of 'eliminating causes' will address the root cause of these differences.
> Murray could claim that the differences are genetic, but I am very curious what is the scientific methodology by which he defines these groups - how much genetic testing did he do determine whether one particular person is 'European', 'African', 'Latin', or 'Asian'? What genes in particular was he looking for that make someone European? (For that matter, are Italians and Spanish people "European" or "Latin"?? Is Eva Longoria, whose family came from Spain to America with a royal land grant 400 years ago "European" or "Latin"?).
All the data he uses relies on self-reporting of race. Self-reporting is always how race is assigned. Self-reporting is how we know that certain minorities are 'underrepresented' in certain jobs--folks self-report their race when hired. It's the same way we know that there are differences in incomes and in educational achievement between races--self-reporting. You can doubt the veracity of self-reporting of race, but that doubt would have to apply to all data with a racial dimension. And, anyway, if race was some sort of fuzzy, meaningless construct (as you appear to be implying), then we would expect there to be little correlation between race and anything, let alone IQ. And yet the data show these differences (according to Murray).
Longoria would be 'Latin' (Hispanic). The whole race vs. ethnicity thing is weird, but he explains it well in the book.
> Self-reporting is always how race is assigned. Self-reporting is how we know that certain minorities are 'underrepresented' in certain jobs--folks self-report their race when hired.
Sure, because race is entriely social construct. It's impossible to find a genetic link between the vague notion of 'black' and IQ, because people who are in the social category 'black' or 'latin' or 'european' have a wide variety of genotypes.
As such, the only possible conclusion from IQ studies is that IQ is a measurement of social and perhaps early childhood environments. So, improving conditions for marginalized groups will improve IQ and implicitly improve other success metrics (to the extent those are correlated with IQ).
Note - IQs below 100 are a different matter entirely, and they mostly represent known developmental disorders such as Kleinefelter, or severe malnutrition in early life (a preventable condition, but irreversible).
Socially, who makes it to the top hundred matters a lot. We can know only so many people by name: Nobel awardees, composers like Bach and Dvořák.
Our own brain capacity for knowledge makes us concentrate on the top 100s. While the 100k top scientists do matter scientifically, they do not matter culturally.
> If you look at the top 10 distance runners, they're all from Ethiopia and Kenya. But as you look further down the list into the top 100, you start to see Americans and others. Furthermore, the Americans' times are really close to the Ethiopians and Kenyans
The Americans still almost certainly have very favourable genetics for distance running, they're just less favourable than the genetics of the Kenyan runners.
If you compared the American runners in the top 100 against the average American I would be very surprised if they had similar physical attributes (Lung capacity, muscle fibers, etc).
America in this case is a very bad country to measure with considering the amount of people that may actually be of very similar decent as your first examples..
Kenyans, Ethiopians and (white) Americans are not genetically homogenous. Even two siblings can be quite different genetically.
The great American distance runners have genetic talent - they didn’t just train harder than their middle school mates who were out of breath while the champions ran faster and longer than anyone else weeks after beginning training.
True, but the talent isn't as obvious. Similarly, you could have two very slow runners give birth to a fast runner, and most of their speed would ultimately come down to getting the right recessive genes.
Almost every trait, even willpower itself, is influenced by genetics. But for most traits it's very difficult if not impossible to reliably determine what genes influence what. Most things aren't determined by one gene, they're influenced by many genes, as well as randomness and your environment.
> have genetic talent - they didn’t just train harder than their middle school mates who were out of breath
Who knows if it was only due to genes? And more importantly, there isn't a gene that's about running faster. (sure, some genes are helpful and might get you in front - not discounting the work the athlete goes through)
Getting to the podium is a mix of several characteristics: Some people might be more prone to muscle recovery/injury resistance. Another one has a better muscle fiber mix. Another one has different muscle attachment positions. And another one feels less pain.
Though yes your genetics probably will push you towards a sport. Take the 100m finalists and put them to train marathon (and vice versa) and they'll probably go to the back of the pack even with good training.
Amusingly, it is literally what you are writing about. Certain variants of that gene confer exactly a) better recovery b) sports injury resistance c) fast twitch fiber synthesis.
Simply because we have not pinpointed something with laser precision, propagated the knowledge to every human with internet access and papered it up with indisputable evidence strong enough to pacify the eternally-online exception finders and fact checkers - does not mean such things do not exist.
You are your genes. just a tiny 2% difference - and you would end up a dolphin.
Sure, that's one gene that helps. Saying that you only need that to get to a podium would be a stretch.
And there might be other genes. Someone missing this beneficial change might have other helpful mutations. As even the article points
> In addition, whilst Kenyan and Ethiopian endurance runners are highly successful (Wilber and Pitsiladis, 2012), the frequency of the XX genotype within this group is very low at 8% (Ethiopian) and 1% (Kenyan) (Yang et al., 2007) (XX is the endurance variation)
Or are you saying that Track programs should genetically test for this gene and drop whoever doesn't have it?
> Or are you saying that Track programs should genetically test for this gene and drop whoever doesn't have it?
They don't have to. There is almost certainly a lot of self-selection going on. Anecdotally, I got one of those genetic kit tests done 10 years ago, and it included results on a "fast-twitch vs slow twitch muscle gene". I, who was a sprinter in high school who struggles immensely with long distance running, unsurprisingly have the gene for fast-twitch muscles. My wife, who has never participated in any kind of sport involving sprinting at any level but competes in long-distance races, unsurprisingly has the slow-twitch gene. Neither of us had any of these genetic tests available when we got involved in these activities. We just learned over time what we were naturally good at and what we struggled with. Does it mean that I can never run long-distance at the level my wife does, or that she could never have competed in sprinting? Maybe, but not necessarily. However if possible, it would take far, far more effort than sticking with the things we are good at.
Between people gravitating to what comes naturally, and other filters (like making or being cut from a track or XC team), a lot of the genetic filtering already occurs without actual testing.
The point isn't that there is a "best" set of genes. The point is that there can be genetic advantages or disadvantages. Physical reality has an impact on experiential reality.
Where it gets dangerous is when people start using this as an argument for eugenics or an "ought" rather than "is" (i.e. constructing hierarchies out of physical attributes).
The US military routinely tests recruits for IQ and assigns roles appropriate to that level. They even outright reject some people for being too stupid.
Nobody seems to be up in arms about it, why?
We also already do all sorts of soft eugenics in our own lives, from assortative mating to academic scores and schools one attends, social circles that one enters because of their achievements and so on. At some point it will become a lot more quantitive, to reduce the currently large factor of luck.
Societies that refuse to take advantage of optimizations this could bring will eventually lose out, for better or worse, this is entirely inevitable.
The progress of technology is not always progressive. There is a reason most of sci-fi reads downright dystopian.
Yeah, considering the actual day to day life of all people, Michael Phelps's genetic advantages are pointless. They confer advantage only in a specifically designed field that society has created and that is really a tremendous waste of time all things considered; it's just a performance.
But the aim of all this genetic stuff is not saying "well, Kenyans can make better marathon runners if we stick them into a sports contest." It's usually a lot more pernicious than that, and involves intelligence. And ordering society in some manner around genetic expressions in a way a lot more dangerous than recognizing some people are better at public performance than others.
> Who knows if it was only due to genes? And more importantly, there isn't a gene that's about running faster
Do you interpret “genetic talent” as “there is a single gene that explains everything about this skill”? I don’t.
Would you say it’s unreasonable to say cheetahs are faster than turtles due to genetics unless you can pinpoint the one gene that causes the running speed difference?
> Some people might be more prone to muscle recovery/injury resistance. Another one has a better muscle fiber mix. Another one has different muscle attachment positions. And another one feels less pain.
> If you look at the top 10 distance runners, they're all from Ethiopia and Kenya. But as you look further down the list into the top 100, you start to see Americans and others. Furthermore, the Americans' times are really close to the Ethiopians and Kenyans.
> Because it doesn't say anything about the individual people, who vary much more than the difference in averages.
It's not clear it says anything about the difference in averages. Say someone is born in Syria with great genetic potential to be a distance runner, you might expect they are unlikely to "live up to that potential" because of all the obvious things that get in their way.
Is it not possible that individuals who are biologically very well suited for distance running in Kenya have a better chance of ending up as distance runners than they do in America, because Kenya specializes in distance running and America does not, and because America actually specializes in other comparable things that are more remunerative? Or perhaps that in Kenya, amateur athleticism is a relatively lucrative career compared to outside options whereas in America it is not.
Let me model this mathematically; say countries are homogeneous such that all persons born in the country j are characterized by a two parameter model that for the sake of argument we'll take to be normal: mean_j and sd_j. A draw from this distribution assigns natural talent theta_i to each person i. If they choose to train and run, we see theta_i, so the observed outcome is: y_i = D_i theta + (1 - D_i) 0. Thus training to run is a treatment (D_i); if you are treated you reveal your talent theta, if you are control, you don't run and no one knows. Then the characteristics of the population as a whole are characterized by mean, standard deviation, and n (population) and the observed distribution is just the distribution of y_i.
In all countries D_i = f_j(theta_i, p_j); p_j refers to the fraction of the country that runs; in a country where everyone runs, the function is constant 1. In a country where runners are a random sample f_j has no theta_i term. You could imagine other functions that are positively or negatively correlated with talent. An easily implementation of this would be to draw a bernoulli variable with p_j and some correlation rho_j with theta_i; you can do this with a copula or the analytic formula for biserial normal-bernoulli correlation, but let's say the detals of the function are irrelevant.
Finally, competition reveals max(y_i) for a country, and thus for the planet.
It is easy to find a world where the identity of the winning country j is the country that has the highest mean. It's also possible that the identity reflects mean-sd-n (e.g. all countries have the same average but some have more variation; or more births = more outliers). But it's also easy to assign viable p_j or f_j(theta_i) p_j such that the "wrong" country wins because of cultural factors.
It's true the model is a toy model (countries aren't homogeneous, talent may well not be normal, theta is not perfectly revealed and training has varying degrees of quality, individual race times have stochasticity), but even accepting the toy limitations wherein every cultural factor goes through f_j(theta_i) and p_j, it's clear we don't have a bead on mean_j.
I don't follow your argument well. If a country trains more people to get into distance running, it could definitely skew their average even if their etnicity has bad running genetics.
But "doesn't say anything about the individual people" point is that, if you take any one person, no matter what their parents' genetics and environment say (barring extreme examples), they have a chance to become a great distance runner. A very slim chance, but a chance. Similarly, there are people born from poor families who show a suprising amount of intelligence.
I'm not really sure how to re-state any clearer -- just try to follow the math -- but my underlying claim was that "differences in distribution don't tell you anything about individuals" misses the point: yes, of course differences in distributions don't tell you about a given individua. I'm saying observed differences in winners don't provide very strong evidence for _differences in distributions_.
There are several issues: winning reveals the maximum of the distribution, not the mean or sd. An observed pattern of one country winning might reflect different distributional means. It might reflect same means and different standard deviations. It might reflect that the number of observations is larger and thus the probability of an outlier at a certain number of sd above the mean is higher. But beyond that, there are also obvious non-genetic processes that even in a toy distribution can produce a winning country that has lower genetic capability. The entire enterprise of saying "Kenyans win running, so Kenyans are more genetically talented at running" is unsupported.
> The entire enterprise of saying "Kenyans win running, so Kenyans are more genetically talented at running" is unsupported.
Or as my father once framed the argument: "It's because they've only recently come out of the jungle right" and when I yelled at him explained his reasoning with, "That's not racist, stands to reason they'd be better at physical things, we've evolved over millions of years to not need that sort of thing any more." at which point my mum told me not to call my dad a racist and to leave the dinner table, which I most certainly did.
It's amazing looking back how racist the 80s were when I was growing up. The framing has gone from outright racism that was "common knowledge" everyone accepted, and been dog-whistled into this seemingly academic debate about the effects of genetic differences between population groups, which is so far removed from the original that it's hard to tell who really is "just asking questions" and who wants to talk about "coming down from the jungle" without being labelled a racist.
On a more technical level, was your equation meant to be
Genes describe lot of things from obese tendency to height to IQ to your looks. If someone has an IQ of 70, there are very likely to live a difficult life. Yes IQ is not intelligence you will say but still there is a limit to everyday functioning if someone's IQ is low. Ask a conventional ugly person(specially female) about their life.
Hard cases make bad law. In other words basing our precedents and rules on extreme cases is not a good idea.
While extreme cases are useful for illustration and thought experiments, they are quite distracting when the real issue is small variances in the top ranges of ability.
Which should make you rather skeptical of inferring just how innate IQ really is (assuming it's a valid concept).
The heritability correlations for obesity are only slightly weaker than IQ. Yet we know for a fact the logical complexity of losing weight is simple (doesn't mean it's easy). Anyone can and people do lose weight, even if statistically it may be rather unlikely.
It's completely plausible to me that intelligence can be simple but hard to increase too.
If it's not a statistical anomaly and the genes truly do contribute to obesity, the causation must be very indirect and situational.
Not to mention, obesity has increased by an order of magnitude in 50 years, with no signs of stopping. It's actually a nice example of how little genetic variance can actually matter at the population level, especially since it is a much more objective measure than IQ tests.
Every phenomenon has both sides. While many people grew obese, there are still significant outliers among us who chug beer, consume current obesogenic diet and stay slim.
Is it genetics? Is it gut microbiota? (E.g. genetics of other species?)
> Is it genetics? Is it gut microbiota? (E.g. genetics of other species?)
If you don't control for portion size comparing people who all have a burger and fries for dinner every night is basically useless, those meals could be hugely different in composition, portion size or how much is left over. Even if dinners are identical, snacking can be thousands of calories a day that you might never see happening. You've also missed what activity they do as well...
Two people who both "chug beer and eat greasy takeaways" whenever you see them out can be very different the rest of the time. If one stays slim and one doesn't it's far more likely to be that the former eats smaller portions overall, snacks less between foods and does more activity overall, before reaching for more exotic answers.
Portion size is notoriously hard to control for in freely moving people. If people self-report their foods, they are likely to make mistakes.
I know of one study only where the numbers can be trusted, and it was done on prisoners, where every single gram of food that passed their lips was accounted for. They were fed the same diets, but their weight gains varied a lot:
The only place you can see weight gains is by looking at Table I and working it out yourself for each subject, and only the last subject PW had an outlying weight gain in absolute terms but his starting weight was also an outlier - his relative gain was the same as all the others as well.
The paper is about how the weight of fat cells changed at different subject weights, not how much subject weight changed for a fixed food size - the only mention of food portions is with respect to ensuring weight was maintained, gained and lost for the different stages. "After desired or maximum obtainable weight was reached" indicates they weren't using weight as the outcome here.
The only place you can see the weight gains is by looking at Table I and working it out yourself for each subject, and the relative gains are all very similar: 23.3%, 25.3%, 21.4%, 20.0% and 18.0%. I'm guessing they wanted them to put on 20-25% of their body weight to give consistent and measurable changes to the fat cells.
Obesity among US adults has gone from 10-15% in the 60s to 40% now. It's extremely unlikely that genetics changed in 60 years, but environmentals did.
I understand that some have genetics that make it harder for them to keep off weight, either by metabolism, neural hunger stimuli or otherwise, but then we're still back to the fact that environmental changes made the biggest effect, not genetics. Why can't this be the case in your other examples too?
TL;DR: Yes, genetics matter. What's more relevant is, how much?
I've always viewed genetics and talent as essentially your maximum potential. Lots of ways to drag you down from being all that you can be (lead, malnutrition, a good knock on the head), but given a sufficiently good environment, genetics (or perhaps inherent ability might be better) then become the limiting factor on how far you can go.
Your random guy on the street ain't going to be Newton, no matter how much he studies or loves math. Similarly, the man born with muscular dystrophy isn't going to be setting marathon records.
This is a simplification of course, but I hope it conveys the point.
Epigenetics does not change your DNA or what you pass down to your children, and is reversible, so I wouldn't call that "shaping genetics", at least not in the way I was referring to.
But epigenetic changes during foetal development could effect the likelihood of being successful at passing ones genes along at all, although I've no idea how you'd manage to isolate or replicate these effects in any scientifically useful fashion.
Someone in these discussions always brings up epigenetics at some point, its impact there far exceeding its impact on population genetics I would guess :) Nobody ever talks about genetic drift or gene flow however, probably because despite being actual things that affect population genetics talking about "nearly neutral drift in small populations" is really hard to wedge into an ideological shouting match dressed up as a scientific debate.
I agree with you, but an IQ of 70 is mentally disabled, so it's not really a good example of "bad" genetics, so much as it is an example of a disability.
Sure, but it's unlikely that you would have an IQ that low, and not have a specific medical disorder that is causing some of your impairment. E.g, Down Syndrome is a chromosomal change, something that can be measured outside of a 'bad genetics'.
What? You somehow think that if there is a named thing then it's not genetics. It's genetics both if it's a named thing, and if it's yet unnamed thing too.
There is a thin line between disability and just different genetics.
E.g. is it bad for a primate to have bad bite strength? What if that disability enhances their thinking ability (by both allowing their brain to expand more since the muscles holding the jaw are weaker and by forcing them to use something other than their bite strength)?
Isn't that a rather arbitrary distinction? Feels you are making it easy for yourself to just dismiss a certain amount of "not-normal" people as not relevant to the discussion? So, what do you define as "bad genetics", then?
These difference in distribution though start to appear when you do statistics. And often an extreme percentile is used as a measure of whether there is discrimination (top engineer at google, board member at an international company, olympians). And it only takes minor differences in distributions (mean, standard deviation) to have big differences on such extreme percentiles.
People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons.
If not everyone can be expected to learn and be proficient in everything due to genetics, then suddenly merit itself is also based strongly on luck, and now the belief that people with greater merit should have better lives no longer seems fair. Intelligence is now just another gift to the fortunate who are destined to have a better life. How can you feel good about using your considerable advantages to the detriment of others if your merit is the result of a jackpot paid out at birth?
Even if you believe that with enough time and perseverance you can overcome your lack of intelligence compared to another person, you have to ignore the fact that having to spend more time on something (but actually, everything) than everyone else will put you further and further and further behind everyone else in a way that compounds quickly.
Modern society is ostensibly structured this way: the smart will win. If intelligence becomes genetic, it can instead be said that "the lucky will win." And successful people desperately want that to not be the case, because they want to believe they deserve their considerable advantages. And they want to be guilt free about the miserable lives some people lead; it's their fault for being stupid, after all.
I don't believe this idea because few or nobody sees a moral problem in acknowledging there is a strong genetic component to physical attractiveness, or physical features (like height) that give an advantage in "merit" in some paths of life. Nor do people have a problem acknowledging your parents, the country in which you were born, their wealth and fitness as "good parents" for the early years of your life plays a massive role in your chance of "success" in life, however you define that. I.e., all components of luck.
You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else.
I don't think it's unfair or morally wrong that an attractive person can be paid to model whereas I can not. Or a very tall person could be paid to play basketball while a short person who has more skill and practiced much longer and harder can not.
My hypothesis is that people believe intelligence is less genetic and more changeable than physical features purely because it makes sense intuitively.
It's hard to change you height, but your mind? Of course you can change that!
I don't think it makes more sense intuitively at all. With the vast range of physical differences we see in people due to genetics, it is not at all intuitive to me to stick to some old dogma that says the brain -- one of the most highly specialized and evolved organ of the animal kingdom -- would not have significant diversity due to genetics.
You can exercise and train your mind of course, as you can with your body. I don't see that as a plausible reason people believe this way. I think they are stuck in the anti-scientific, anti-intellectual dogma for reasons that are not rational.
Then why are the Leftist professors in the article so opposed? Why are they comparing her work to climate change denial and Holocaust denial? Why are they so opposed to the obvious logical conclusion
Because you have to adjust your mental model to explain IQ differences in ethnic groups. That really shouldn't be a problem, but it's my best guess as to why.
All people turn anti-science, anti-curious reality deniers when they feel their cultish extreme views are threatened by questions. And some turn into nasty hateful bullies.
A leftist is not immune, and a professor is certainly not immune to this.
> You can believe it's reasonable for a person who can create more value for any reason deserves to be paid more, without believing their "merit" as a person is any different to anyone else.
I think progessives care mostly about the economic consequences, not a judgement of someone as a person.
What are the economic consequences? Whether or not it is genetic or due to any other confluence of luck or upbringing or other personal attributes, the end result is the same.
Also as I said, there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
The end result between nurture vs nature might be the same, but if it's all nurture, than "we can change it" and no price is too high to get to "the new man".
If it's not, even the best funded policies with the best intentions can only get you so far, and inequality will remain. Not because of a conspiracy that is keeping some down while lifting others up, but because of nature.
I do believe that it would be good on all counts if they would accept genetics, because it would allow for asking much better questions, but I can see why they can't: they're heavily invested in the opposing position and few people are happy to just throw away an investment.
> there seems to be no issues acknowledging reality of differences in physical attributes that are due to genetics.
That's true, but maybe that's because they matter less? I.e. if inequality was primarily defined by height or beauty, they might have a harder time with it. Intelligence & related non-physical things are more important, I believe everybody intuitively accepts that.
None of this seems plausible t me. Why should physical attributes matter less, and how much less exactly cross this supposed threshold between freely acknowledged and taboo on par with holocaust denial? Clearly the general idea of a "luck" element of advantage is not a problem in the slightest.
And furthermore, looking into extremes, it's also perfectly clear that people are not actually against the idea that there is "unchangeable bad luck". A person with a severe genetic based mental disability (let's say downs syndrome) is clearly extremely unlikely to ever create much value or be paid much money and nobody has a problem with that (again I'm talking purely economically, not their value as a person or the love and happiness they bring to others).
> Why should physical attributes matter less, and how much less exactly cross this supposed threshold between freely acknowledged and taboo on par with holocaust denial?
I believe they matter less because they're not a great predictor for success. You have plenty of very attractive people working the checkout at the super market, but few very smart people. At the same time, the super successful people aren't considered beautiful by most people. The same is true for essentially all other physical attributes -- having great hearing won't teleport you into the top 10% of wealth. I don't think either idea should be taboo, obviously.
Fair point about people with severe genetic disadvantages. I guess most people broadly categorize them into a different group and measure their success relative to that group ("he's doing great, he can often manage his daily chores alone"), not compared to "normal" people. It's more of a achievement vs perceived potential, I think.
> I believe they matter less because they're not a great predictor for success. You have plenty of very attractive people working the checkout at the super market, but few very smart people.
You can see whether or not they are smart, can you?
> At the same time, the super successful people aren't considered beautiful by most people. The same is true for essentially all other physical attributes -- having great hearing won't teleport you into the top 10% of wealth. I don't think either idea should be taboo, obviously.
This just all seems like complete handwaving to make observations fit the hypothesis.
What we do know for sure is that people are not at all hesitant about attributing to luck/genetics many things which affect a person's ability to contribute, create value, and earn money. Both physical and intellectual conditions, as well as circumstances of birth. So the burden of proof required to claim otherwise for specific cases has to be far higher than this.
It only becomes a moral issue if someone who does not happen to stand out along one if the axes that is currently rewarded by society ends up suffering significantly as a result and cannot find ways to succeed in life. Individuals may possess a great many valuable traits that are worth encouraging but simply aren't rewarded as well when it comes time to divvy up the loot. Sort of like being an essential worker during Covid who holds the line against a pandemic to keep society functioning but can't afford to raise a family in the income from that ostensibly important job.
It would be a real moral problem to have others judge the value that someone is able to contribute by strange factors like this -- some faceless "expert" decides the NBA player has to forfeit their income because they are over 7'2".
The real moral issue is popularizing the idea that it is unfair or the gains ill-gotten if people are successful, that their earnings are like loot that should have been "divvied up". It comes from and breeds jealously, resentment, division, hate, and crab mentality.
If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.
I also think there should be various safety nets so the poorest and least skilled people can have at least basic access to necessities and training if they would be otherwise unable to support themselves.
> The real moral issue is popularizing the idea that it is unfair or the gains ill-gotten if people are successful, that their earnings are like loot that should have been "divvied up". It comes from and breeds jealously, resentment, division, hate, and crab mentality.
That's not really what I'm saying. The ways in which society hands out wealth and power today are not necessarily the ways in which it always has or always will. What specific traits lend one toward success are a bit subjective and take different forms at different times and places. So if right now, some individual cannot succeed as easily as another, those tables may very well turn at some point in the future.
To the degree that we justify whoever is being rewarded now, because they are smart/resilient/beautiful (by current standards) or whatever allows them to succeed, we must also acknowledge that under different circumstances it may very well be that we would be congratulating someone else for completely different justifying reasons. By the same token, if someone is not rewarded by society, we should resist the urge to justify their lack of success in terms of some intrinsic deficiency, when indeed they very well may have succeeded with the same traits in a different version of society. The arbitrary nature of how society chooses to reward individuals clashes with attempts to justify the status quo, which would much prefer to describe outcomes as an inevitable consequence of various conditions, like genetics, that can be used to explain why some are wealthy/powerful and others destitute.
It is this framing that I find to be morally suspect, because it tries to justify the current social hierarchy in absolute terms, when the reality is a bit more complex and subject to the prevailing whims of the times we live in.
> If people do well because they are intellectually gifted, physically gifted, because they work hard or because their parents raised them well or because a coach just happened to see them playing basketball while sitting in traffic driving through a poor neighborhood. Then great. Someone else doing well does not make my life worse.
Agreed. I only want to acknowledge that these are but a few of the many ways society can choose to value its individual members. The genetics, or upbringing, or nutrition, or behaviors of those who have achieved success are not predictive of obtaining wealth or power in all versions of society, past and present, and so should not necessarily be treated as more important or superior in any universal way.
Even without genetics this problem still exists. What about the people with parents who push their kids harder? What about the people born in areas with better education?
You could push these questions all the way to debating if you ever had any free will to begin with or if your whole life was the result of your environment. And ultimately does it even matter what the answers to these questions are? If rewarding people for being smarter drives the population to move towards the goal, then why not keep things like that?
The problem isn't rewarding people for being smarter, it's predatory practices to take advantage of people who don't know any better, or leaving those who will never be smart enough for a really good job to rot in minimum wage hell.
I think time well spent is a huge factor to anyone success. Most pro athletes, chess champions, musicians, artists, etc, picked up their hobby at a young age in most cases, and just stuck with it until adulthood and enjoyed the compound effects of having a teacher or coach spend time with you multiple times a week for decades.
I think you can put anyone in that environment and they would become elite in whatever you push them into if they stick with it. On the other hand when you look at people that have bad outcomes in life, they generally don't have any good role models or much parental presence in their lives, and that seems to be a much stronger factor than genetics in terms of finding success in this world.
No, some people are so stupid that they will never be able to do tasks much more complicated than e.g. sweeping the floor. You are trying to conjure a vision of the world that is comfortable to believe, but that vision does not reflect reality.
Assuming you have your mental faculties completely in check, I don't see why anyone couldn't have been the text Tiger woods when born in the correct environment to be honest. Tiger woods isn't the strongest person in the world, he isn't the most flexible person in the world, and he isn't the smartest person in the world, but compared to others he has probably tens of thousands of hours on them practicing the correct things, and that is what makes him elite rather than anything about his physical body or intelligence. He actually has a pretty frail body and over his various controversies has shown remarkably poor judgement at times. You find anyone who has spent this sort of time on any activity and they have serious prowess, whether it be putting a golf ball or playing violin or running down an antelope.
I'm not sure the assumption that the comment above you is somewhat delusional is not necessarily reasonable here. I do think its that people are interpreting "everyone" differently.
To me, 'everyone' does not mean literally every person but rather the vast majority. Whether this number is 95% or 90% is going to be interpreted differently. I think nearly all of us can agree that as intelligence falls on a bell curve there will always be those unfortunate enough to not be able to do certain tasks. However the nature of the bell curve does mean that around 90% of people are above ~80 IQ.
If you take someone with an IQ of 100 and train them for a decade I think it's still very unlikely that they would become an elite chess player/musician/etc.
I see intelligence mostly as your rate of learning. That means you're competing with people who will get better faster than you. The only way to beat that is to outwork them, but there are only so many hours in the day.
Your understanding is the correct understanding Alice! But I think you're assuming most people understand it as you do, and that's not correct. Most people haven't learned to think with probabilities or distributions, and I would just downgrade that to "many" even here. I think many of the people commenting and reading here actually believe that one could e.g. teach calculus to everyone, it's just a failing in our efforts.
> People strongly want to believe that intelligence doesn't have a strong genetic component, I think mainly for moral reasons.
More so because there is no proof for that.
Individuals exhibit different levels of intelligence. Sure, life is unfair.
However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
What we observe could be explained by many other more convincing factors: early learning activity, more care to the child's education, logical and clear answers to the kid's questions about the world around him, help with the homework, etc. With proper early learning activity for the baby, and amazing teachers for the early teachings, the kid has a strong foundation. From there, compound returns.
> However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes.
Do you have an alternative explanation for the results of twin studies on IQ then? It's also not just IQ, so many things very strongly correlate between identical twins.
> Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
Does natural selection only work on non-humans then?
One could argue that we've decoupled ourselves from natural selection in significant ways by moving toward more egalitarian societies where huge numbers of people who would've been shut out in our more brutal past aren't shut out any longer. Non-humans don't have anything comparable in terms of scale.
Alternatively, it could be viewed as more of a reshuffling, where selection will still take place in the long run but with very different pressures.
The way I see it, none of us asked to be born, so if we really are trying to be 'fair', everyone should be granted a base level of material support regardless of their ability to contribute. I also think all of us would be much better off we collectively valued happiness more than material wealth. There is definitely a place for incentives, but when those come with the baggage of class warfare, past a certain point they become more destructive than constructive on aggregate.
> Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
Yes, definitely. Ask anyone who breeds animals for a living. You can select for even more abstract traits like "willingness to train", obedience or fearlessness.
> However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes.
While they do not necessarily inherit intelligence, there is a non-zero likelihood that eg. intelligence is a gene-thing. This non-zero likelihood might be bigger than a primarily by moral standards led discussion might suggest us to be.
> What we observe could be explained by many other more convincing factors: early learning activity, more care to the child's education, logical and clear answers to the kid's questions about the world around him, help with the homework, etc. With proper early learning activity for the baby, and amazing teachers for the early teachings, the kid has a strong foundation. From there, compound returns.
I don't see why that would be more convincing. As a hyperbole, if two completely different species (say a monkey and a primate) are exposed to the same learning environment, one would definitely end up fairing better than the other due to the differences in their brain.
The twin studies just show that, given most other factors for twins are likely to be the same.
>However, individuals do not necessarily inherit intelligence from their parents' genes. Seriously, who could think that you could build a lineage of "gifted persons" solely by genetically selecting the parents among the population of "gifted persons"?
Genes determine differences in intelligence between say a human and a dog or a human and a bird.
Genes also determine physical size, skin color and basically every difference in human attributes.
What black magic makes it so that these genes just happen to not at all influence intelligence among humans?
You can't see it but ideology is influencing your bias. You are unable to see how ludicrous it is to say intelligence isn't inherited when literally every single other thing is.
I don't particularly have a problem accepting that intelligence could be genetic.
But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have.
The exact same argument was made back when we had slavery.
Now its just used to justify wage slavery and gross wealth inequality and policies which punish the poor.
(It also is grossly oversimplified and discounts reversion to the mean and that two dumb parents can absolutely have a smart kid -- along with the fact that a smart kid born in poverty is going have a much more difficult time getting their net worth up into tends of millions than someone who is just literally born with that much -- plus neglects the effects of e.g. malnutrition on childhood development)
The main problem with tying specific skills to genetics is that it's not yet possible. We can't even figure out how to get a car to drive itself reliably, and we build the car from scratch. We are not even slightly close to figuring out how genes correlate to advanced complex behaviors that involve learned elements. There are endless factors and interplay between them that determine an already vague concept such as "intelligence". How could you possibly say "these three genes mean you are capable of calculus"? Perhaps you might find some correlations through statistical analysis but that entire in-between is still a blackbox and you can't draw conclusions at all about what is or isn't possible. It wouldn't serve any valuable purpose.
The cognitive dissonance is real - it's an echo chamber in here about how self-driving is a pipe dream, and yet a much more difficult problem of determining ability driven by genes is easily swallowed.
The thing is, you don't need to know in detail how a car works to see that car A is faster than car B or that that self-driving car crashes less than that other one.
Similarly, you can tell how much of intelligence is genetic for a given environment (and the "for a given environment" bit is forgotten by so many) by comparing clones (identical twins) to non-clones (non-identical twins).
Additionally, sometimes even if you don't understand about how anything happens you can still influence the result. E.g. you don't need to know anything about protein expression and brain development to breed more docile foxes. (Not that I would recommend trying breeding experiments on humans)
>But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have.
It's ironic. Because genetics are so vague and ambiguous unless it is about skin color. People attribute their success to themselves. So they automatically declare their genetics to be superior. The reason why it is so appealing to explain things with genetics is that genetics are permanent. If you are rich you will always be rich and the poor always poor. It then becomes a self fulfilling cycle because everyone falls for it and tries to keep people rich or poor with their genes as the justification. It's just a more scientific version of believing that god gave you your role. If genetics matter then genetics are just another form of luck where people want to read tea leaves.
> But then people use that to argue that the people at the top deserve everything they have.
Doesn't genetic endowment imply the exact opposite. If the "people at the top" got there because of a factor over which they had no influence—what was once called a gift—how can they deserve their place? You might argue that they are the people who should be at the top because of their abilities, but that has nothing to do with whether they deserve it or not.
Yeah, that's where I'm trying to go with this argument.
Them: You just need to believe that genetics matters!
Me: Okay, fine I do.
Them: Well, then you must agree with <probably something about meritocracy and billionaires and awarding wealth to the top 1%>
Me: Nope, I still want to tax billionaires out of existence and use that to support your "stupid poors" and your ideal of a ruling class and an underclass with unlimited market exploitation created by birthright of genetics is wrong (again, for the sake of argument, it still doesn't really work this way). "From each according to his means, to each according to his needs" and they need more. Economically, Elon Musk should be playing with nightmare-mode level taxation levels, all the "stupid poors" need the difficulty slider backed off for them -- instead we have that nearly reversed.
Whatever you call it (leftist/progressive/socialist) isn't founded at all on a rejection of genetics, attacking that gets you nowhere.
I think this just us back to the basic questions society has considered for hundreds of years.
How to balance of equality of outcomes vs equal treatment.
How to enable individuals to develop their productive ability.
What quality of life we want to provide with charity to those with low economic productivity.
What tax policies achieve these goals and favors the kind economic growth that raises all boats.
In my opinion, I think all of the discussions about economic fairness and what people 'deserve' is just a side freakshow distracting from these real questions.
The problem is tying the idea deserving to be at the top to some imaginary concept of I influence in the first place. All that matters is ability, it doesn't matter how you got it. Personal influence doesn't exist in a scientific world without a soul. People are born with better or worse operating systems and hardware. Their conditions improve or deminnish their OS and function over time.
We can strive for a society where the environment produces the best outcomes, but some will always be better than others at any measurable task.
Saying that someone is better at something because they have better genes, better upbringing, better schooling, doesn't take away the fact that they are better.
The people with the best ability do deserve to be at the top.
The only question is what we can do as a society to enable individuals to develop ability to the greatest extent possible.
> If the "people at the top" got there because of a factor over which they had no influence—what was once called a gift—how can they deserve their place?
Essentially: I'm rich because I'm smart, and I'm smart because God wanted me to be, therefore God wants me to be rich. Conversely God wants poor people to be poor. If He didn't want that, then He would have made them smarter.
As a somewhat progressive from the US-perspective (so: European, living in Germany) I don't recall saying genetics didn't impact things. Genetics is just not a lever I am willing to pull in order to influence things. As some of you might recall, the last time Germany tried just that it went into the direction of ultimate genocidal horror. Also there are much more low hanging fruits with a bigger impact on a societies wellbeing (tackling monopolies, corruption, reorganizing work spaces etc.).
The reason why people on the left defend against the notion that genetics are everything is because this is the thing fascists use to divide people and make them kill each other. So cool — genetics matter, just like education, nutrition, social situation, security of ones environment etc — but what do we do with this? Argue that some people do rightfully suffer because they chose to have been born into the wrong body? Try to weed out the bad genetics? Who will decide what is bad genetics? The aryan master race? People of color?
There are so many other levers we can pull I don't think we need to bring genetics into it from a political improvement perspective. When we think about healthcare that is a different topic.
> So cool — genetics matter, just like education, nutrition, social situation, security of ones environment etc — but what do we do with this?
Not claim that everything is due to a secret cabal of structural racism/sexism/hate on the poor? As long as you have that as your perfect explanation for the state of the world, you won't really make a difference, because you're attacking the wrong issue.
Exactly my point. As useful genetics are in medical applications as dangerous genetics get when non-scientists try to explain their existing world view using it.
I don’t think they ever said genetics play a large role or as large as a role as those other factors. Maybe you made that association by them grouping them together with things that matter but I think clean drinking water has a far greater impact than genetics ever will. Does it mean genetics are worthless to discuss? No. But in the scheme of the worlds issues and achievements of people - we’re at clean drinking water level. Genetics influence on average is so little compared to others and it’s so very obvious as to not need much research to be so clear. (As you can easily see how people change when in different environments alone - same genes, different environment)
> But in the scheme of the worlds issues and achievements of people - we’re at clean drinking water level.
On the world level, yes. On a Western country level? No. Well, maybe in the US, in some parts, flammable drinking water probably doesn't help.
But if you look at Sweden or Germany, "it's the drinking water" doesn't work. To discount genetics is to close your eyes to reality -- not incredibly helpful when you're trying to understand something. And understanding helps if you want to change something, which progressives do.
Since when does fascism / alt right need facts to further their agenda? Cutting off research funding for sensitive topics does nothing to stave off our fall into dystopia.
If it's ok to do affirmative action based on race, it's also ok to do it based on other genes. I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is ok to discriminate based on known skin color (as long as it matches their notion of who should be discriminated against).
> Since when does fascism / alt right need facts to further their agenda? Cutting off research funding for sensitive topics does nothing to stave off our fall into dystopia.
Did I say I wanted to cut funding to genetics? What I did was explaining a perspective which I don't share for the most part. What I said is that the idea of willfully designing the shape of a society based on some features of the body (blood, genes, shape of the skull, ...) stands in the tradition of horrible genocides. My grandfather was a Nazi, so this is not some abstract thing for me, but him explaining that e.g. people from the balkan region are "just thieves" because it is "in their blood" would be a thing that he would certainly also read out of genetics.
I am all for research of genetics for medical purposes, there lies great potential there. I think exploring links between sociology and genetics is also quite interesting.
What I am vehemently against is to divide people based on genetics and make policy based on that alone.
> I wonder why every progressive in this thread is suddenly afraid of having to discriminate people based on yet-unknown gene factors when their crowd is ok to discriminate based on known skin color (as long as it matches their notion of who should be discriminated against).
I guess american progressives think they need to do this to correct centuries of the pendulum leaning into the other direction. While I aknowledge the fact (centuries of opression against non-white people), I don't agree with the conclusions in extremo. Of course a majority white society has the duty to deal with it's racist heritage pay reparations to the ancestors of that violence and opression etc. If Germany pays reparation to victims of the Holocaust this isn't racism against Germans, it is the pure minimum any decent free society would do. Similarily the significant injustice that has been dealt to native americans or people of color has to be confronted in a serious and fair manner. Giving justice to that injustice can of course look from the outside as if they get a unfair advantage over us who had the luck not to have had such a history. That doesn't feel good, because one has to accept the injustices the own society and nation has done and it lessens our role in the story. But it is necessary.
It does sound like you want to cut funding for genetics research that could tie genes to intelligence, performance, and stuff like that. Is that not the case? Because picking which science should be funded based on your preferred social order is not science, it's politics. It's the same as conservatives cancelling weather satellites so that they don't have to see the climate data being produced so that they have an easier time continuing to deny climate change.
Science is about learning things. How or whether those learnings should be applied is a question of politics. Blanket-censoring entire fields of research for political reasons is not the answer to anything.
You talk about how you don't want extreme race-based policy, but at the same time the only injustice you're contemplating on correcting is based on race. I don't hear any calls to pay reparations for any past injustices that were based on non-racial issues, not from you, not from "the left" in general.
I don't think this fundamentally changes how I've thought of the relationship between genetics and experience, specifically because of this line:
> [Harden] told me, “As a parent, I try to keep in mind that differences between people are examples of runaway feedback loops of gene-by-environment interaction. People have some initial genetic predisposition to something, and that leads them to choose certain friends over other friends, and these initial exposures have a certain effect, and you like that effect and you choose it again, and then these feedback loops become self-reinforcing.”
Feedback loops sound about right, where some tiny minute preference leads to positive reinforcement, leads to more positive reinforcement, until you've got a full blown preference/predilection/talent for something (or the opposite).
The idea that genetics play zero role seems silly, but it also makes sense that society shapes the experience of someone with a given genetic combination in a way we can still control.
This (very long) article reinforces my belief that society is best off when it finds a place for everyone, and not when it idolizes one set of talents/skills, and acknowledges just how little genetics really matter to be "competent" at any given thing.
I very much look forward to reading the book this article is promoting.
I tried once to ask reddit's Anthropologists about what cultural artifacts are affected by genetics e.g. how lactose intolerance can affect a local culture. The question was apparently racist and then taken down.
What's weird, is that if you believe in equality , you 'd WANT to know the genetic determinants of anything, so you can truly equalize it with genetic engineering.
Anthropology split into science-anthropology and deliberately-rejects-science anthropology a couple decades ago. As I recall, there was a specific meeting of a society that was the cleaving point. For instance, biological anthropologists tend to actually do science, while cultural anthropologists tend to do work that does not rise to that standard. It's too bad that it takes insider knowledge to tell them apart.
I'm reminded of a time back when I was in university where the cultural studies professor vehemently denied the existence of potential genetic differences between two ethnic groups.
I don't remember the context any more, but it hella set the stage for my opinion on that field.
Can conservatives be convinced that individual choices and education matter more? God i hate those dissent-sew-click-bait titles.
In feudalism, being poor, is your fault. You are morally suspicious, of lower blood and any theory that fits will be used to justify this world order before itself. Thus why national-socialist attracted so many nobles. Thus why "differences" written in stone are so abhorrent to the left. Cause nothing should be written in stone, in a enlightened world.
Then, there are differences. But to my mind, the differences are quite universal. Cause those differences were shaped by the environment and the environment was for the last 10.000 - 200 years pretty universal for the species. We have neuro sub-types everywhere, adapted to the ebb and flow of resources and the rise and fall of overpopulation. Somebody optimized to survive a civil-war, might not be optimal for calculus, but might be better at improvisation than someone born into the calm waters of post-(civil-war/genocide) societies. We might even one day learn to suppress the epi-genetic stress triggers that make this wheel go round.
We can learn to detect those differences, and learn to work around those differences and it might even benefit us. Or we can shun the "other" - like we already shun those optimized for conflict - and watch the world go down the drain. Cooperation yields higher reward, so research away, but the endgoal should be here to stay.
Genetics are discussed as social issue instead of as a missing practical technology, only because the tech isnt there yet. But it will be and soon, and once it is the left will embrace it like they did with prenatal vitamins. Embryo genediting and embryo selection works just fine, and the databases required to find polygene traits are beeing created, the techniques required beeing researched. Even today there are dozens of genetic traits that are screened for, and the parents given the choice to abort, or in the case of IVF, to pick another embryo for implantation. And people do abort, if given the screening and the choice. Trisomys like downs are going away in civilized countries, with more than 99% abortion rates. Religion can slow progress down, but nothing, absolutely nothing, will stop parents from wanting the best for their kid, or more specifically the kid they will have. Genetics and the impact on society is a fascinating topic, as is the identification of genetic traits and the experiment methodology. But the popular discussion is profoundly stupid. People seem to forget that we arent discussing how to order the society of the last century, this is all about preparing for the next one. Parents will fight over what skin color their kid will have, and the kid may disagree and change it, but only cultists will fight over if the kid should be in the optimal health, or have a low IQ.
> But it will be and soon, and once it is the left will embrace it like they did with prenatal vitamins. Embryo genediting and embryo selection works just fine, and the databases required to find polygene traits are beeing created, the techniques required beeing researched.
https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection is a good overview of how practical this is today, IME. TL;DR: Selection is barely worth it at reasonable valuations of IQ points, but will be massively worth it in the future due to improvements in models and the ongoing reduction in price of polygenetic screenings. I believe this was last updated in 2016, though.
Sperm banks select highly-educated males (i.e. recruiting at Stanford and Harvard) for sperm donors, so it seems obvious that most people know there is a hereditary component.
Sperm banks select highly educated donors because clients are willing to pay for it. That's all. You are describing capitalism. It's not like these clients are running double blind studies in their wombs.
Going to Stanford or Harvard doesn't mean you're genetically superior though, there are a lot of other things selecting people who go there before ""intelligence""
Yeah and Christians don't follow the word of Christ and live like there is no future after they are dead. Watch what people do, don't listen to what they say.
I guess the word progressive here isn’t helpful because there’s a huge diversity of thought that gets swept up under that label. But if you take it to mean the intersectional flavor of progressive that focuses on issues of disadvantage and discrimination, then the idea of a generic lottery seems right up their alley.
If the genetic lottery has winners and losers, surely that’s pure gold to progressive politics! It’s official, scientific confirmation of the existence of oppressors and victims, along a multitude of axes. And the policy implications are so obvious: equity is achieved by giving extra help to the genetic losers. A whole class of hitherto-wishy-washy political activity suddenly gains scientific cover: the activity of quantifying exactly how much disadvantage each group suffers, and correspondingly how much assistance to render.
Why are progressive think tanks not totally on board with this already?!
This is a clear misunderstanding of practically everything about progressivism. Progressivism is an evolution of liberalism which acknowledges that liberalism had failed to bring the equality it promised.
Having scientific proof of differences does nothing. It's not the starting stats that progressives see as the thing that needs to be equalized, but the opportunities. Maybe the outcomes. It depends.
I’m not sure what anyone was promised, but just from a basic logical perspective, if opportunities are really equal then, over time, outcomes will equalize as well.
I’m not a progressive, but if over decades of pursuing liberal policies outcomes are not equalizing, it seems to make sense to try to figure out why and find something better to try.
The constitution of the US (a liberal system) contains this phrase you might be familiar with. "All men are created equal". Equality is a central tenet of liberalism.
The argument that your parents make you not equal is exactly what liberalism is trying to reject. Someone should not be treated differently based on their heritage (monarchies anyone?).
In fact, since you believe you can't be equal due to parentage, you probably agree with some of what progressives have to say. The current system isn't equal.
> Why are progressive think tanks not totally on board with this already?!
Possibly because they'd have to completely rewrite their ideological framework. Right now, it's based on active influences (racism, sexism, discrimination against the poor), and with genetics playing a (larger) role, it would shift to more passive influences (fewer women are in tech because they don't care as much for tech as men, not because they're oppressed) that you can't change via revolution + labor camps.
If you read the article, you'd see there are "progressives" in positions of power of what science is funded and what isn't, who take the position that genetics don't matter at all, and any research into them is done because it's motivated by rightist hatred of minorities.
I think dismissing that as "progressives being progressives" is dishonest.
Most scientific research into eugenics, "racial differences" and such is motivated by reactionary value systems. Most of it can also easily be classified as pseudoscience and is published in fringe journals (e.g. see Emil Kirkegaard's "research" and his "journals").
Since this topic is so overrun with reactionaries trying to scientifically justify their views, it's extremely risky for a serious journal to publish research into it and for institutions to fund this research in the first place. Because in all likelihood that reasonable accredited scientist prompting you about wanting to do the research is either personally pursuing such ideological goals or representing the interests of such a group.
In other words, because of all the incredibly unscientific "research" actual racists and eugenicists have done in this field before, it's extremely hard to do any work in this field without either risking being perceived as supporting their views (by opponents) or as validating their unscientific prior work (by supporters).
It's a bit like debating the Israel-Palestine conflict: if you criticize Israel for their actions in Palestine, you might have genuine human rights concerns or you might just do so as a proxy for anti-Semitism. If the people doing the latter wouldn't exist (and there wasn't such an obvious historical precedent for why they're scary) it wouldn't be such a hot button issue. Go ask a leftist how this usually plays out for them.
IQ is misunderstood by most people and the common misconceptions are extremely harmful.
In reality IQ matters much less than people think. The top 5 rated chess player of all time (Hikaru Nakamura) has a ~105 IQ. People with an average IQ are capable of performing at the 0.1% level with the proper structured training and time.
In my experience IQ mostly impacts the rate at which you learn things. So it took you 2 years instead of 1.5 to master a certain skill -- so what? As a society we should put more emphasis on hard work and results, and less on inherant traits.
IQ matters less than people think at some things, like chess. However, it does matter for other things, like mathematical analysis. Moreover, there is a correlation between IQ or proxies of IQ (like test scores) and income. While it isn't a super-strong relationship, there are few other variables that have as strong an impact.
Have you studied chess at an advanced level (1500+ elo)? Your assertion makes me seriously doubt that you have.
And like I said, it's pretty hard to deny IQ is a proxy for learning rate (which is extremely beneficial practically). But it is not the deciding factor in human potential.
There are much more impactful and practically easy improve environmental factors like culture, school system, diet, parenting that are a much more fruitful place to focus our effort.
Have you studied mathematics at an advanced level (ie Principles of mathematical analysis by Rudin)? Your assertion makes me seriously doubt that you have. Learning chess and mathematics is nothing alike. People who do well on math also do well on IQ, that not being true for Chess would mean that Chess is different from most other topics.
So for example, if you want to train someone to be a human calculator, really fast at crunching numbers, then you don't need intelligent people. That is what chess is like. But if you want people to build and understand huge complex systems all carefully interconnected like Math then you need intelligent people.
And intelligence is no more than a crude guideline for determining human potential.
The fixation on intelligence is a reflection of a culture that don't recognize hard work and is ultimately lazy. We don't want to put in the grueling effort it takes to master, and hone a craft over decades. We would rather cash in on "genetic lottery" points for the rest of our lives.
You see people bragging about their university or SAT score from 30 years ago, but have accomplished nothing since then.
I have no moral objection with studying IQ among individuals and groups. But I think compared to other factors that influence human potential, it is the least interesting and least actionable. It also perpetuates the myth that it really matters on an indivual level.
For anyone interested in this topic I highly recommend Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky's book "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst". It does an excellent job showing the nuance and complexity between genetic determinism and social construction. After reading this book I understood the nature vs. nurture debate is somewhat artificial not terribly useful.
Imagine (semi-publicly) telling a colleague that their field is broadly (morally, by implication) comparable to Holocaust denialism. What an absolute ass. In a sensible world, anybody bringing that kind of attitude into the scientific community would be treated like the social equivalent of a barrel of toxic waste until they learn to act like an adult (in the intellectual sense).
The problem here is not study of genetics, but the tacit assumption that society must be constructed for the elevation of whatever the 'best' is, and the suppression and destruction of the 'worst'.
The rest is just where you place the line, and if you grant that, you are establishing the threshold for genocide.
Things would be a bit simpler if the argument wasn't 'never talk about any differences among people', but 'never place that line, because society is not constructed for the destruction of the least among it'.
It is NOT an inevitable requirement that society is constructed for the destruction of the least among it.
I think Charles Murray's position is misrepresented here. At least in his latest book (Facing reality), he doesn't talk about genetics (of which he is not a specialist), but about inheritable characteristics. His point is that you don't know where the cursor is between genes and early education/environment, but since you can't take children away from their parents at birth, the distinction doesn't really matter from a public policy point of view.
He doesn't say that genes (or early environment) is the only thing that matters either, and points at evolution in the IQ distribution over time, and takes the argument that if you were to put an "asian tigger mum" behind each children, you would most likely get an impact on scores.
For those interested, his debate with Coleman Hughes is interesting [1]. Coleman makes an good objection. He says that these studies on variations in IQ distributions may or may not be correct, but that we shouldn't publicise them because most people are incapable of thinking in term of distributions, and will treat an individual differently based on one of the metrics (mean, percentile, standard deviation) of whichever way you cut the population. I am conflicted on that. On one side I oppose the idea that you shouldn't look at the facts because the facts could be misused (the "chemistry is bad because Zyklon B" argument). On the other hand I have seen enough educated and smart enough people incapable of thinking in term of distribution to acknowledge that Coleman has a point.
My own experience suggests that whilst yes, genetics is an important factor in life outcomes, other things that are hugely important also aren't adequately researched, because genetic determinism is so widely accepted.
I've been experimenting with some self-improvement techniques for nearly 10 years. I found them after a few years of personal crisis and a quest for understanding, as I was very confused at what was causing my inconsistent life success/happiness/satisfaction/health. I'd had plenty of cases where I'd done well in life (in school work, career, friendships, relationships, sport, physical health) and plenty of other cases where I'd done terribly. "Trying harder" didn't seem to improve things, and in many cases made things worse. It didn't make sense that it was all explained by hard-coded genetics, as, well, it made no sense that my patterns were selected for by evolution, and it was hard to understand how genetics had given me a brain that was quite good at things one week but terrible at the very same things the next. And it didn't seem like these tendencies mirrored either of my parents'. It sometimes did seem like sometimes it was one parents' tendencies competing/conflicting with the other's, but other times the patterns seemed completely unlike anyone in my family. Genetic determinism just made no sense as an explanation, even after multiple doctors/psychiatrists said some version of "that's just how you're wired".
Just by chance I ended up connecting with a practitioner who practiced a form of "subconscious emotional healing", and whilst I was skeptical I was exasperated and open to trying anything at that point. After starting these practices, I felt immediate relief to a lot of the anxiety and fear I was feeling, and over time, all aspects of my life have gradually improved.
A particularly significant example of how this work has been beneficial has been in my career, and particular instances where I needed to learn a skill or deal with a challenge, and was finding myself very stuck, but by undertaking the healing work I was able to let go of the fear/anxiety/resistance I was feeling, then I found I was easily able to learn the skill or work through the obstacle, and have ended up being able to increase my capabilities and progress my career much more effectively. I've also been able to have a much better time with friendships, relationships, and my physiological health.
Some notable experts on the topic, such as Gabor Maté, assert that deeply held emotions like trauma influence our genetic expression, a mechanism known as epigenetics [1]. Others heavily dispute the role of epigenetics or the possible effectiveness of "subconscious healing" in altering life outcomes. It all seems to be derided as nonsense among conventional biomedical professionals and devotees.
The thing is, I don't see any significant research either proving or disproving anything in this area, but I do see plenty of non-mainstream practitioners and individuals undertaking this kind of work and having really good outcomes. I’ve often thought of trying to gather data on my own progress, of physiological indicators and perhaps even IQ tests, but it’s hard to get any meaningful testing done when you’re just a guy who reckons he’s onto something.
But it seems like an important thing to study, because, unlike genetic determinism, it has the potential to substantially change life outcomes for people living today. When I think about the times in my life when I was struggling, particularly as a deeply confused/terrified school student wondering why I was making my teachers and parents happy one week and disappointing them the next, and realise how much of it was influenced by the subconscious emotions that it's taken until now to identify and resolve, my heart breaks for the many people still experiencing those kinds of feelings, but believing or being told that they can't hope for anything better due to society's embrace of genetic determinism.
If anyone reading this happens to be working in fields related to epigenetics or behaviour-change, or is connected with anyone who is, and wants to talk to someone who has spent 10 years undertaking emotional healing work with great success, please feel free to get in touch.
> My own experience suggests that whilst yes, genetics is an important factor in life outcomes, other things that are hugely important also aren't adequately researched, because genetic determinism is so widely accepted.
This.
IQ !== Success.
I used to go to college with two very bright people. I couldn't catch up with them. Because one of them was ridiculousely intelligent and the other was up there close.
20 years on, the first one is working at Mcdonald's. Yes, I couldn't believe it too. The second one is a teacher (not that this is a bad job), who told me he hates the job and how much he messed up his career.
For me it's persistence/perseverence >> IQ / Intelligence.
If you have someone who is average IQ but is willing to go through hell to achieve what they want, then I'd rather go for the average IQ girl/guy.
Another thing that doesn't get mentioned when discussing IQ and race is humility. If you have a high IQ and think you can do better than other people/race why not invest that gift and give back to this world. Why not be humble about it and help your fellow humans making this world a better place. Sitting there and claiming you are better than X and Y because your race is Z shows how weak you really are. Be humble about what you have and invest your time and effort in becoming better as a person, be a role model for your family, son, daughter, your community and your country.
Which is also horribly unfair, as that's done almost entirely to upbringing, genes, sleep and food. Only the last two can be changed by the individual.
You're partially right, but the point of my comment is that it's not established fact that genes (in the sense of hard-coded, deterministic genetics) is the major factor.
Sure these patterns may be somewhat inherited, but quite possibly inherited in such a way that it can be altered with effective techniques, like those that I've been using.
I'm not claiming any proof, just arguing that proper research needs to be done into this.
Ironically the realization of us being diverse and having different strengths, weaknesses, goals, perceptions etc. shifted my social/political views stronger towards the libertarian left.
This is an important subject but it's also toxic, particularly with political headlines like this which I don't think should be on Hacker news. Better to focus on the science.
This is a story which was likely written at the behest of the publisher as a pre-release book review. Harden's participation -- and her own book by the sound of it -- is explicitly political. To read between the lines a bit more one can infer that Harden is trying to build a brand beyond academia. My point being that the principal scientist in the piece is no longer just a scientist, so it's appropriate to widen the scope.
I agree with you though that the headline, much of the article, and arguably some of Harden's presentation of her work is irresponsible.
Ofcourse genetics influence stuff, but so what? Does being less good at something means you are less human or less worthy? Does belonging to a population with certain traits an individual have those traits?
Humanity has gone through this road before, it turned out ugly, why do we need to actively persue a narrative that focuses on biological determinism given that it proved to be an extremely dangerous narrative?
And yes, this is a narrative, even when we find scientific evidence for facts that support this narrative, the organization of these facts and acting on them is always mediated by narratives which fill in the gap about the things we don't really know which are not these very specific facts.
The framing of the title here is a nice example for this fallacy. What are progressives that the title is mentioning? Is it an actual organised thought, or just some tribal strawman? It's just a narrative, and narratives are very effective in creating reality, we should be careful about them and not consider them just a force of nature we can't and shouldn't control. Exactly like how we as individuals don't blindly accept a determinism about our actions and abilities. So we shouldn't accept it for us as a society.
As nobody has made any of the claims you are attacking - least of all the impeccably left wing Paige Harden - I can't help wondering whether you've read the article.
the question I have is why shouldn't we believe that works in these areas might not be used as justification for deterninal policies a la eugenics?
what is different this time around to prevent someone with power from using some research results to advance discriminatory policies (even if the results are overblown, purposefully misinterpreted, etc.)?
ignoring the science isn't great, but using the science as a basis for creating policy is still a very scary idea
That's true, but i hope if more people talk about it, and if techniques similar to cloning [1] get used more often in medicine, it will become possible.
Having grown up in a rust belt mining city and having gone to school with a lot of non-intellectual classmates, I can say that "regular people" are much more ready to accept inborn differences in mental abilities as self-evident (similarly to, say, facial beauty) than intellectuals themselves.
Smart and highly accomplished people, on the other hand, often try to deflect, dispute, water down and distract, once the topic of heritability of intelligence comes up.
To a part this is given by the fact that intelligence is a hard topic, but I wonder to which degree this semi-denial is psychological. Smart people might resent the possibility that part of their success could be traced back to random unearned biological privilege that cannot even be taxed and redistributed. "Just World fallacy" is an attractive one, especially in a society that verbally celebrates equality and equity.
If we're talking about personal decision making, dig in, help me improve myself, warn me what to look out for... But too many of these conversations are actually masking conversations about trying to charge more or outright deny opportunities to people who are deemed to have inferior genes.
And let's be honest, it's not about "genes" it's more about right-wingers looking for a scientific reason to deny equal protection to groups they deem inferior.
The left often accuses the right of being anti-science -- e.g. on climate change, and now vaccines -- with good reason. But it's true that the left has its own troubles with being opposed to science, and genetic effects on behavior is one example.
Being egalitarian-minded, many progressives are inherently hostile to the idea that our personalities and behaviors may be hardwired on some level...except that they don't generally have trouble accepting it for, say, sexual preferences. So it's not even a consistent opposition.
To me, the idea that our behavior is a combination of both nature and nurture seems kind of obvious, and the idea that we should refrain from scientific inquiry here because people might use the knowledge improperly feels...wrong. Very wrong.
Surely you see the negative consequences of past inquiry as, at the very least, a cautionary tale?
The idea of, "Science at all cost!" should, by now, be thoroughly debunked for a number of very clear reasons, some specifically in this area of genetics and psychology (is there an exception for Poe's Law when talking about genetic behavioral outcomes?).
We must be careful, and Dr. Harden does seem to understand that, which is good.
The vast, vast, vast majority of the consequences of doing science like this have been positive. We are only able to sustain so many humans on this planet because we have bothered to understand stuff like this. You can't selectively understand it for plants and non-human animals, but not for humans. It is obvious to everyone that the same basic principles apply.
That doesn't disagree with anything I said. Being careful in scientific inquiry is fine; saying, "we shouldn't research X at all, because maybe the knowledge would be used badly" is not.
If there were only possible negatives, it might be more understandable, but of course that's not true. Learning more about how genetics affect behavior could, for example, lead to better treatments for behavioral disorders.
In my mind, there's a distinction between science-as-knowledge and science-as-practice. There are obviously many potentially unethical scientific practices, but I don't think gaining scientific knowledge can ever be wrong, in the sense of merely having the knowledge itself being wrong (of course, it's possible for it to have been gathered in an unethical way).
Nuclear power and GMO's. And some particularly extreme social justice elements have decided that "objectivity" or "rationality" are part of white supremacy, or at least part of "white culture".
Oh, I guess there's sex differences in personality/behavior/preferences, though arguably that's the same thing as genetic causes of personality.
You don't consider objectivity to be part of the hard sciences? Because that's what some on the left are opposed to. That, or the scientific method more specifically. Granted, it's a fringe opinion for sure.
No no, as in: gender/women's/political studies where that kinds of stuff comes out of isn't a hard science, so I'm not adding that in as "anti-science".
Why would that matter? It's part of the left, coming out against science. Most conservatives against science aren't themselves researchers in hard science fields.
dis·sim·u·la·tion: concealment of one's thoughts, feelings, or character; pretense
Watch how the most vocal egalitarians just happen to send their kids to the most elitist private school they can possibly afford and collect the most credentials proving they are vastly more capable than the flyover rubes.
You can't convince people of something they already know. It's the same reason arguing with religious people is futile. It's a mistake to assume people only deny things they believe are untrue.
One thing you will notice is how if you do say IQ is genetic, certain people will call you racist. This strikes me as very similar to looking up rude words in the dictionary.
There are things you know and you know others know, but you never mention. Most of the time that's because there's no reason to mention it. There's no point talking about uncomfortable things just because you can. What's worrying is when something actually important but still can't be talked about.
> The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.
Try to have a nuanced view on covid mitigation strategies and you'll feel the same way. Even on HN which encourages rationality.
There are lot of very polarized topics where it's pretty much impossible to have a rationale conversation. I have the feeling pretty much everybody choose what they want to believe and then build a rationalization to justify their views. Pretty depressing.
> Harden was surprised that she’d elicited such rancor from someone with whom she was otherwise in near-total political agreement.
This matches my observations for the last half decade, but more so from progressives and left leaning people. Any deviance from "the narrative" results in instant ostracizing! Other political groups just make excuses to walk away for the time being, in my experience, which isn't inherently good either, but better than this.
There was a study on twitter that quantified this: left leaning people do not follow right leaning people, right leaning people follow left leaning people. One group has only a caricature of the other, while the other has a clearer picture of the opposition party's belief set.
I really hate the idea that people must be blocked if they didn't reach the same conclusions. It assumes that people are static, irredeemable deplorables even if they weren't exposed to the viewpoint by that point in their life. Harkening back to an old campaign point from the left also half a decade ago.
Then of course there is the assumption that I must therefore be "on the right", especially given the adjectives I used as well as being frustrated more with the left. Which is why the ostracizing occurs for questioning anything, nobody considers the possibility of an "ally" having introspection, or the possibility of evaluating the world outside of a false dichotomy? Super productive, everyone.
This is really more of a science-religion issue than a science-science one. It is more akin to Galileo being tried for heresy for claiming that the sun is the center of the solar system. Though in this case the religion is progressivism. And the keystone of progressive dogma is that "All groups are born completely equal and any achievement difference is the result of racism by white people or sexism by men." And if it could be proven scientifically that this is not the case (which it has been [1]) then the whole ideology collapses.
If you've ever tried to convince someone to disregard a deeply held religious belief, you know how much of an uphill battle it can be. And it can be downright impossible for the more zealous, especially if they believe they're constantly battling some sort of "other" (mostly theoretical Nazis).
It doesn't look like things will be getting better any time soon. In fact, with the increase of deplatforming and ideology-driven power mods on social media sites like Reddit, it seems like we're moving into a sort of digital dark age.
It's understandable for people to collectively react negatively to genocidal tropes getting pushed once more with great enthusiasm. This shit never goes away, and Nazis were not in the least theoretical: one could say what made Nazis Nazis was a game plan, one that's very specific.
Also, the keystone of progressive dogma is that there is VALUE in the wellbeing of all types of people, contrasting with conservative dogma that hierarchy is both inevitable and deeply moral: that there are and will always be underpeople, which must be kept in their place.
Progressive dogma is more akin to your basic Ratatouille trope: that the good idea, the new concept, the innovation can come from ANYWHERE. I think that's a defensible position, and it puts a completely different spin on the idea of not starving the underpeople to death or killing them outright.
>progressive dogma ... contrasting with conservative dogma
That's a false dichotomy and really the core of my complaint. Instead of dogma, we should be striving towards facts based on empirical evidence. Science.
It's far from a false dichotomy. Typically, part of the assumption that the world must be broken down into hierarchical power structures and the subhuman valueless people must be suppressed, is an insistence that empirical evidence has established these things as facts.
Further investigation (for instance, Shaun's video on 'The Bell Curve') reveals this evidence is faked.
Some of us have had our patience with this sort of thing eroded, over time. You cannot simply assert you have the evidence, you have the facts, any other interpretation is wrong, and therefore you automatically win. That ain't gonna fly, except among a subset of HN commenters and system-participants.
And their brigading only discourages the participation of those who still think all this is about exchange of ideas. In my experience 'we define the facts, the evidence, and use systemic means to stifle anybody who gets in the way' does not enhance the free exchange of ideas.
Even if progressives can be convinced that genetics matters (re-using the OPs title), what next? In how far shall this insight be used to re-consider our living-together?
Shall this lead to a scientifically backed reason to stigmatize groups? Shall this lead to a blessed segregation of people?
Would this lead to a better co-existance of people or a worse one?
Perhaps this could lead to less political polarisation and extremism? Perhaps Western society could come to terms with the idea that an observation of the state of the universe might not necessarily imply some kind of political or moral position? That is at least what I'm hoping for.
We already segregate people based on intelligence, it’s called selective school admissions (and Google HC). People like me are left out for good reason - we simply are genetically defective.
Unfortunately I don’t see much way out of this outside of exiting society (and perhaps life) permanently.
imagine that scientists find the genes that makes you predisposed to homosexuality. how long is it before a repressive regime starts testing its citizen and systematically killing anyone with it?
should the scientist have still released the study or is there some sort of ethical consideration?
The benefit of course is that without "genetics", and being able to discount "luck" as unmeasurable, one can still cling to "merit" as the single factor that justifies one's elevated station and privileges (once we've stamped out all the -isms). "Merit" is the last Progressive bastion of the modern world's social structure. Even the slogan "Land of opportunity" implies that your own slothfulness is the only thing holding you back from taking your seat among the elites. To lose the meritocracy is to lose the faith (and the country), so it's no wonder that people fight back so fiercely.
But avoiding scientific inquiry puts one at a disadvantage, because the research WILL happen with or without you. And if it's without you, you won't have any say in how it's used, or how society restructures itself (because it will). Without your voice, we could end up with Gattaca or Brave New World. With your voice we could have something better.
But take note: The world WILL change. You can't stop it, but you can guide it.
As an academic matter, maybe. As something that we should make decisions based on, either as individuals or as a society, hell no. The benefit to society seems quite scant, but the risk of having such system taken over by a eugenicist is quite high.
A potential benefit is figuring out how to make us smarter. For instance, let's say for the sake of argument that a group of people who all have gene seem to have lower IQ. We research the gene and discover it's a malformed enzyme that doesn't function as well. We give them all free supplements of the enzyme and as a result they get back to average IQ and everyone is better off.
> “ She directed me to a comprehensive World Bank data set, released in 2020, which showed that seventy-two per cent of inequality at the primary-school level in the U.S. is within demographic groups rather than between them.”
“ It would assert that the most important difference between the races is racism, with its origins in the horrific institution of slavery only a very few generations ago.” - Ignorance of the world history in this statement is pretty incredible.
I wouldn't put too much weight on it...she's got to say something about racism because of her social environment, so she chose to say something empty and meaningless so she wouldn't have to say something obviously false.
In these comments: people doing apologetics for a vision of the world where everyone is born with equal potential.
I am a scientist, I work on these things, and I am here to tell you that:
--Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited
--Your personality is largely determined by genetics and is pretty much settled in to what it will always be by ~30
--If you don't learn to count right by ~4 you never will
--There are, in fact, many people who could never learn calculus
--Sex differences in behavior are driven by genetics and the effects are large
The broad strokes here are not up for debate, and denying them makes you analogous to a flat-earther. The details will change.
There are huge portions of the educated populace who will go to great lengths to spin stories about how it ain't so. They do this because it is comfortable to believe given the normative ethics we were all programmed with as children. Trying really, really hard to believe manifest falsehoods has a lot of practical drawbacks, though. Like the constant, expensive performance of searching for just the right way of teaching calculus to people who will never learn it--public policy that hasn't a chance in hell of ever working.
If you've read this far, and you're feeling upset or angry or uncomfortable with the facts I've listed, I encourage you to reflect on which problems in the world are really important to you. Write them down. For each one ask, "Is continuing to believe in a broken model of how things actually are going to help me solve this problem? Or would I be better off facing an uncomfortable truth and doing what I can with it?"
Thank you for reading my rant, I'll be here all day :-D
Forgive me, but my understanding is that the heritability of IQ at ~70% is limited to those of higher socioeconomic status, and that it's closer to ~10% for those of lower socioeconomic status.
(I should note that beyond an undergraduate degree in linguistics I have essentially no professional qualifications in anything related to neuroscience. Most of my understanding comes from having read some Sapolsky and Steinberg cover to cover a few times, with a limited deep dive into late adolescent risk calculation and risk-taking related to a homicide case I was on.)
Not OP, but have genetics background in other fields (not intelligence). The following is a bit of a mix
A way you could look at this would be to think as heritability here as the cap of your intelligence. No matter how hard you try, barring some sort of magical medical intervention, your maximal intelligence is limited by your genetics. However, that's the maximum. There are many ways to reduce IQ (lead a famous example here, nutrition another).
I think it's not an unreasonable hypothesis that those in lower socioeconomic brackets might increasingly encounter the damaging effects which might have an outsized effect on IQ. More factors than just heritability might create that effect you've mentioned.
>Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited
Also a scientist here....
Intelligence, however measured, is largely inherited. However, that inheritance is not genetic, but social.
It's now been rigorously demonstrated that common variation in genetics has very little to do with intelligence as generally conceived.
Just for some examples of well-powered studies:
>A genome-wide polygenic score constructed from the GWA results accounted for 1.6% of the variance of intelligence in the normal range in an unselected sample of 3414 individuals, which is comparable to the variance explained by GWA studies of intelligence with substantially larger sample sizes.
>in 2016, a second meta-analytic GWAS analysis with a sample size of 294,000 identified 74 significant loci. This analysis produced a GPS, EA2, that predicted 3% of the variance in years of education [a proxy for intelligence] on average in independent samples.
Our inability to identify the genes responsible for intelligence doesn’t equate to them not existing. Our understanding of genetics is still extremely nascent.
I'll tell you what genes are responsible for intelligence if you can tell me which machine code instructions are responsible for Mario. ;-)
(
I might need to expand on that a little:
I predict that "the genes responsible for intelligence" are not a thing. I think that genes tend to work together to make a living organism similar to how machine code instructions work together to make a program run.
So for example: I'm pretty sure that looking at the design of eg. a 6502 can't directly predict the existence of Mario:
If you can't easily predict what neurons will do based on their layout, what chance do you have to predict the exact outcome of the genes which specify that layout?
You're going to need more data than just the genes alone.
The analogy doesn't work as we have indeed identified genes for many biological traits. For example, whether someone is vulnerable to certain diseases. So if iq is a biological trait, like eye color or height, it is odd that we haven't yet found any iq genes.
This isn't a strong 1:1 mapping. Genes are not horoscopes!
No gene works in a vacuum. Genes code for proteins that work together to perform diverse functions. Sure: in some situations you can indeed directly identify that a gene knock out or substitution might affect certain functions, but this is rather misleading!
Genetics is actually very much Turing complete and Genes might best be looked at as a kind of software (this might be considered an understatement).
For comparison: I'm sure we agree that a single machine code instruction by itself is meaningless. However, if you knock out or add a JSR (Jump to SubRoutine aka function call) at the right spot: sure you can claim that the JSR codes for a particular functionality. But: JSR is 3 bytes on a 6502, would you really believe someone who told you that 3 bytes is what it takes to "make Mario jump"?
In reality there's a lot more instructions behind it (with perhaps calls to further subroutines, and more subroutines past that). Genes are not quite 6502 code of course, if anything they're rather more sophisticated.
To look at some of your examples:
You mention eye color which is determined by quite a number of genes working together (eg. location, color select, pigment) .
Height is affected by ... almost everything all at once over a longer period of time (eating, sleeping, age, eating at a particular age, metabolic rate : which itself is fairly sophisticated... there's wall charts that span an entire room). This to the point where some people give up and say "height is actually mostly environmentally determined". (Of course in reality it's an interaction between Genes and environment)
Vulnerability and immunity to diseases is very interesting indeed, if you eg. look at the role of somatic hypermutation in acquired immunity.
And all of these would obviously not work without working cells with DNA transcription, metabolism, membranes, replication, etc. ;-)
In short: be a little bit careful with claims in newspapers that say people have found a "Gene for X".
I bet one could change one or more of several different sets of bits in several different parts of the program that would change the color of mario's hat.
(Perhaps thinking of it in terms of "what bits you should change" is asking the wrong question, instead it might be handier to look for the sprite definition, or to look for the sprite plotting subroutine)
These studies are highly powered statistically. One conclusion you can definitely draw is that common variation in intelligence is not primarily caused by common genetic variation.
Evidently, our genes determine our brain, and are what makes us more intelligent than other animals. But between individual humans, genetic variation contributes to only a few percent of variation.
Yeah, sfblah is right. We will be able to predict based on our knowledge of the little molecules inside you at some point, we just can't do it now.
The 70-80% is heritable and not via parenting. It is contingent on an environment that provides things like food and air, and the basic idea is that we control for the environment in some simplistic way via twin studies.
To illustrate, there is almost no difference between the genetics of humans 20,000 years ago compared to today. Yet there is a vast difference in what people understand and how they interact with the world, i.e. there has been an increase in "intelligence" in the past 20k years without there being any alteration to genetics.
It is also shown by the so-called "Flynn effect" [0], which is a substantial rise in measured IQ by over 1 SD in numerous populations during the 20th Century alone. This is comparable to the mean difference in intelligence between individuals, and absolutely cannot be accounted for by changes to genetics.
> To illustrate, there is almost no difference between the genetics of humans 20,000 years ago compared to today.
There is also almost no difference between genetics of humans and chimpanzees. No difference, except in a few areas that happen to matter a lot.
As it turns out, 20 000 years is plenty enough for natural selection to make dramatic change in the genetic makeup of the population. For a most obvious example, look at the spread of lactase persistence mutation, which occurred and started spreading less than 20 000 years ago.
> It is also shown by the so-called "Flynn effect" [0], which is a substantial rise in measured IQ by over 1 SD in numerous populations during the 20th Century alone. This is comparable to the mean difference in intelligence between individuals, and absolutely cannot be accounted for by changes to genetics.
The Flynn gains are hollow, though. They are not on g factor, and it’s the g factor that’s responsible for the predictive validity of IQ.
Imagine a society where people use human foot length to measure distances. After a century or two, they observe that everything is getting shorter, a sort of anti-Hubble effect. Nobody noticed, however, that people have become taller on average, and so their feet became longer, so the actual change is only in the used metric, not the latent variable they are trying to measure. Flynn effect is like that.
I've never heard a number as high as 70%. Where does that come from? Otherwise: any idea how intelligence was operationalized?
I also think we can only accept that we're born different, but human. If we should aspire to anything, it should be to make life good for every individual, taking their capacities into account, not to give everyone an academic degree.
70% is actually on the low side of today’s results. Observed heritability is lower in early childhood (meaning the amount of variance in intelligence among children explained by genes is “only” 20%-50%, “only” in quotes because it’s still large amount, as far as phenotypical traits are concerned), but grows to 80%+ in adulthood, even higher than that if you correct for attenuation (i.e. measurement error, which will always push the heritability down), and consider g factor instead of IQ scores (which is how intelligence is usually operationalized). IQ has been found to be exceedingly good vehicle to study the notion of intelligence, as the (most replicated finding in psychology) existence of positive manifold (google it) and g factor means that all non-contrived ways of measuring what humans usually understand intelligence is, yield pretty much the same thing, especially once you perform factor analysis.
Here is an overview paper by one of the leading researchers in the field (and one of the most distinguished researchers in psychology at large) Robert Plomin: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/
Unlike the rest of psychology, psychometry as a field does not have any kind of replication problem: all major results have been replicated many, many times on many different data sets. You can go to Google Scholar and find probably hundreds of replications (keyword is “heritability of intelligence”). Here is for example one from Japan: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01067719 which finds heritability to be 50% among 12 year olds, here is one from Norway https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/On-the-quest... finding 70% among military recruits, you can go on and on.
> I also think we can only accept that we're born different, but human. If we should aspire to anything, it should be to make life good for every individual, taking their capacities into account, not to give everyone an academic degree.
Clearly, but if the society denies reality, the result is expansion of higher education among people who can’t benefit from it, bullshit degrees, student debt, and general misery.
It's interesting that you cite that Plomin article, since it actually concludes that only a small proportion of intelligence is genetically inherited. To quote:
>Using years of education rather than intelligence per se, the meta-analysis mentioned earlier with 125 000 individuals in a discovery sample yielded a GPS that accounted for 2 and 3% in two independent samples.16 More variance in intelligence is likely to be explained with GPS derived from larger samples, whole-genome sequencing and more novel strategies such as using networks of functionally linked genes.
Accounting for 2-3% of variance in intelligence through genetics is pretty weak support for genetics being an important contributor to variation in intelligence (however measured).
The denialism here lies with those who wish to believe that intelligence is largely genetically determined, rather than socially and environmentally determined.
You completely misunderstand the part you quote. What Plomin is saying is not that genetic heritability accounts for only 2-3% of the variance, but rather the GPSs, that is, the polygenic scores.
What that means is that we can now point to concrete genes that contribute to intelligence, and assign them weights that tell us the significance of this contribution. This means that this 2-3% figure is not about reality of genetic contribution to intelligence on the ground, but rather about our explicit understanding thereof in 2014, when this article was originally published.
Since then, our polygenic scores have significantly improved: for example, Lee et al in 2018 constructed polygenic scores that describe 11-13% of variance, a significant improvement over 2-3% result Plomin cites. There are probably even better results now, as the progress in the area is quick.
Of course, 11-13% is still short of 80%+ that we already know is determined by genes, but our explicit understanding is slowly getting there. Importantly, as we get there, the goalposts of critics are constantly shifting: when we couldn’t point out to specific genes, the entire notion of heritability was attacked. Now that we can, the alleged problems are with spurious correlations resulting from population stratification etc. Alas, the science moves forward, despite fierce opposition.
> The denialism here lies with those who wish to believe that intelligence is largely genetically determined, rather than socially and environmentally determined.
I think your inability to distinguish between heritability and polygenic scores makes you thoroughly unqualified to make statements like that.
Polygenic scores are measures of the contributions of many genes to hereditability, what else do you think they are?
There are two questions here:
1) What genes contribute to human intelligence? Evidently there are some, as the structure of the brain humans are uniquely endowed with at birth is mostly determined genetically.
2) Do common variations in these genes contribute to common variations in human intelligence?
For 2) the answer is categorically "a few percent at most", even according to the sources you provide yourself. It's pointless denying this fact. Repeating that ~80% of variation in intelligence is genetic is displaying a limited understanding of inheritance.
To answer 1) it may be possible to identify those genes that contribute to intelligence by performing large scale genetic studies to identify the rare cases where a small signal is detected from one or several of these (a polygenic test, for example, as you are fond of).
Once these genes have been identified, one could then in theory investigate how they function, etc, in order to better understand the genetic basis of human intelligence, but it is unlikely to help understand the basis of the difference in intelligence between individuals.
> Polygenic scores are measures of the contributions of many genes to hereditability, what else do you think they are?
They are not “measures” in the same sense measuring tape is a measure of length. They are like credit scores: they are useful to predict likelihood of defaulting on a loan, but they do not give you full understanding of the entire reality on the ground. With better constructed credit scores you can get better at predicting defaults, just like Lee et al got better at predicting educational attainment than the 2-3% figure Plomin quoted. No sane person would say that Experian credit scores give you complete understanding of given persons credit ability and their future credit behavior, and no sane person will tell you that polygenic scores of intelligence/educational attainment give you complete picture of a person’s intelligence or education. Do you understand it now?
If you’re still confused, try to think about this: if what Plomin meant, like you suggest, that genes only explain 2-3% of variance in educational attainment, how is it possible that only 4 years later, Lee et al exhibited PGS explaining 11-13% of variance? Have genes got 4 times stronger in 4 years?
> For 2) the answer is categorically "a few percent at most", even according to the sources you provide yourself.
No, it is not. I encourage you to put some effort into understanding what is being talked about here.
Well, yes, because he studies intelligence and doesn’t mindlessly repeat socially acceptable nonsense. This necessarily means controversy. You’ll find that most researchers in that field are “controversial” in some way, but it really tells you more about how society views the results, not the people obtaining them.
I agree with your sentiment in the second paragraph. Human gets a little fuzzy, though...I think you really mean to point at personhood. There are humans who definitely aren't people, like those born without brains. And with the computers our grandkids will install--oh my! I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
The percentage without context does not give any actual information. E.g. one could argue that environment affects 99 percent of intelligence as for example if someone dies due to environment there's no intelligence at all.
So there must be some poor environment A and good environment B, and some poor genes A and good genes B that a comparison must be made between to understand exactly what this percentage means and of course there must be a definition of intelligence and a way to measure it.
Thanks for asking, I should've explained. The percentage here is percent of variance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variance). What it means, basically, is the extent to which you can predict a child's intelligence just knowing the parents' intelligence--not assuming the child was raised by those parents.
In your second paragraph, you've actually hit on one of the apologetic clichés that's popular now. People will say, "Yes, 70-80% of variance...GIVEN OUR CURRENT ENVIRONMENT". And they will act as if they've said something profound. Yes, that's true, and we don't know about the heritability of intelligence in environments that don't exist...but we can make really good guesses. Further, from a public policy perspective, we've got to work in the environment that we've got. And in that environment, the number is 70-80%.
There's some intelligence difference between population groups, let's say Group A and Group B. Lets say that Group B is measured to be on average 5p more intelligent based on whatever arbitrary measure we took.
The debate here is about whether we should try to change the environment in such way that Group A and Group B would be more similar. We know that Group A in general has poorer environment however there's an argument that improving those conditions won't bring Group A to Group B level anyway since it's mostly genetical. Progressives want to change the environment, conservatives think it's a futile effort.
How would you determine in the following scenario whether levelling the playing field would cause the averages to be the same? Would 70-80% imply that, yes, it's likely and under what circumstances?
If the variance for a single person's measurement could be around 40p, then if genetics is causing 75% of it, then it would be responsible for 30p of that and environment 10p, then can we deduce that Group A given similar environment would actually be 5p higher in intelligence?
In this case while genetics describe 75% of the variance, environment is still enough to make naturally more gifted group less successful. So without knowing the other variables the 70-80% is still not meaningful.
No, from a public policy perspective, the important question is what environment can we create that benefit as many people as possible. The current environment, from prenatal care to availability, cost and quality of higher education is something that is created by public policy. It is certainly not anything given.
> No, from a public policy perspective, the important question is what environment can we create that benefit as many people as possible.
The problem is that since there already is substantial variance in environment that different people experience today, but nevertheless the amount of variance explained by shared environment is very, very low, this means that if we want to increase intelligence using environmental interventions, you can’t designate some environment that some (eg. well off people) already experience, and get everyone into that environment, because it simply won’t work. If it did, it would already show in the amount of variance explained by environment.
Instead, what you need to do is to intervene by putting people in environments very few if any people today experience. This is the only approach that can work, as it can overcome the low amount of variance explained by environment. Suffice to say, nobody yet figured out what those unusual environments actually would be like, as you can’t simply copy whatever well off or genius people grow up like. If you do come up with something, it might end up being a hard sale too, given that this will be necessarily stranger than what people normally expect. But, if it works, you’ll improve the world massively and make history. Chances are against you though, as millions of people in the education industry worldwide have already tried almost anything you could come up with, and nothing really works.
But you can't base the decision that should lead to the desired situation on any present knowledge, and it's in practice impossible to research. You can't know the desired outcome, let alone the path towards it.
> However, for intelligence, heritability increases linearly, from (approximately) 20% in infancy to 40% in adolescence, and to 60% in adulthood. Some evidence suggests that heritability might increase to as much as 80% in later adulthood but then decline to about 60% after age 80.
It does not corroborate the claim "Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited".
I hope this need for a citation comes from genuine curiosity and not some misguided ideological want to uphold the notion of equality in intelligence.
It just doesn't make sense given a more macroscopic view of things. If inheritance obviously controls the difference in intelligence between the human brain and the dog brain, or the cat brain, or the monkey brain, what black magic makes it so that among humans themselves inheritance controls very little of intelligence?
The 70% - 80% statistic seems like a ballpark estimate he pulled out of a anecdotal conclusion based off of a broad spectrum knowledge of the related scientific research. You likely aren't going to find a citation that proves this claim definitively. It does not mean that his point is incredulous nor does it mean that his point isn't part of common sense.
His point makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. The same sense as the fact that the covid vaccine protects against the virus even though for the longest time it was NEVER FDA approved (aka no strong citations). The conclusion was obvious despite not meeting the stringent verification of the FDA and many people were able to arrive at this conclusion without the science. Yet many people refused to believe the efficacy of the vaccine due to their political ideology.
I believe there's a similar biased attitude coming from the far left side of thinking. The unwillingness to see that the science and common sense points to an inescapable conclusion. There is no unseen magical force that makes all races, all genders and all peoples equal. There are differences, and the differences are biological and obvious.
Like literally genes control how ugly and how tall you are but not intelligence at all? By some crazy magic intelligence is the one thing that isn't at all influenced that much by genetics? Seriously, which viewpoint is more realistic here?
Seriously the same ultra left people who were calling out the anti-vacc people as stupid and unintelligent for refusing the vaccine are unable to see the exact same kind of ideological stupidity within themselves.
Yep, I agree with basically all of this. A reasonable rhetorical move when speaking to science-deniers about inheritance is, "Do you have a principled way of telling people from rocks on the basis of intelligence, then?"
My point is that if you can produce twins, one of which will be taught how to speak, read and write and the other not and the difference in intelligence between them will be so significant, then the genetic component can't possibly amount for most of intelligence.
Yes, it's the nature vs nurture argument all over again, but I think that regarding intelligence it's far from settled.
Well, that's why I wanted to know how intelligence was operationalized. But even in your Gedankenexperiment, there are ways to estimate heritability of intelligence: you'd need 100s similar cases, and, e.g., test them on puzzle solving and learning skills.
Edit: sorry, I asked that question in another thread...
People like me would be more convinced by your rant/flamebait if you provided sources for your claims. You claimed that the "broad strokes here are not up for debate" so it should be trivial for you to provide sources. Since you don't, it's hard to take your arguments seriously. Everyone can make unsubstantiated claims, providing evidence is the difficult part. I'm sure you understand that the "trust me, I'm a scientist" argument doesn't fly around here. :)
> People like me would be more convinced by your flamebait if you provided sources for your claims.
To be honest, from what I've read in these comments: I doubt it. There's a lot of goal-post moving and deflection ("but what even is intelligence", "but what if we never taught people to speak", "but why should it even matter") that I believe
Betteridge's law of headlines still holds.
Yeah, as I said elsewhere this is a reasonable request. I was writing in a moment of passion very late at night. I am supposed to do a variety of "real work" today but I'll see what I can gin up.
The things I listed are "the sky is blue"-type claims to people who do evolution stuff.
Regardless of your credentials, as far as I am aware the scientific consensus on this topic is that genetics is nearly impossible to separate from other causal factors. Mainly other causal factors that we have clearer and more direct evidence of having an influence on cognitive ability.
So, quite frankly, I don't care if you spend a lot of time thinking about it, it's irrelevant. The consensus is clear.
If you would be so kind to explain to me why I should believe you, a random person on the internet claiming to be a "scientist" who "spends a lot of time thinking" about this subject, over thousands of peer reviewed research articles and case studies stating that even if genetics is a factor in intelligence then it is so closely tied to other causal factors that it is effectively impossible to control for, then I am happy to listen.
So please, I am begging you, tell me why I should believe you over everyone else.
That is not, in fact, what "thousands of peer reviewed research articles" state. You might be confusing the % of variance we can predict from genetics (e.g., knowing your ATGCATAGCCGTAG code), which at present is maybe 4%(?), with what we can show is due to heritability (70-80%). We didn't even know about DNA when people started measuring this kind of stuff with twin studies in the early 20th century.
So, to reiterate because I'm realizing that para wasn't so clear: guessing how smart you are based on your genetic code is something we're only just learning how to do. We're getting better at it though. Estimating how smart you are based on how smart your parents are is a totally different game that we've been playing for a century.
Why shouldn't intelligence be inherited while other traits are? It makes little sense to me, especially because intelligence is so important for survival.
How does your science control for differences between parenting, access to education and nutrition though? I would expect doing so to be unethical and therefore not allowed.
You are misunderstanding. Calculus is just a placeholder for something that requires a particular level of intelligence.
It's about whether it's possible or not, not whether you actually do learn the thing.
Someone with an IQ of 120 may not ever learn calculus, but they probably have the ability to do so. You cannot say the same of someone with an IQ of 80.
Yeah, but the whole debate is about how much is genetics responsible for intelligence vs the environment. There was a claim that genetics is responsible for ~70-80% of variance. Pick any intellectual ability and lack of environment can cause for an individual to not be able to achieve that, so how can genetics be responsible for that much variance?
The question is where and how does the 70-80% come? How is it meaningful and how is it measured?
It's 70-80% conditional on (some sampling from) our current environment. Obviously if your environment is boiling sulfuric acid you aren't gonna be smart.
It wouldnt matter what subject was picked, the point they are making that 70% of your ability in a domain is going to be genetic. It could be distance running, calculus or marble sculpting.
Thanks for your rant! It was wells stated. I did not know anything of these things in the sense of having any academic knowledge about this stuff.
I didn't know about the counting one and am not surprised by this. In a thread on another post I wrote that there is a lot of brain washing that occurs in the teaching of low level mathematics. It's easier to brain wash children in this sense than it is for adults.
It's a very reasonable ask. I'm not on my work computer, and anyway I don't have the classic papers at the tip of my tongue, so I'd have to look them up. So I guess I've got nothing for you but an apology. Perhaps when the sun rises.
Cool, so malnourishment throughout life will only account for at most a 30% decline. Or is that "inherited" because it's environmental, but determined by parents?
The assumption is your environment is pretty similar to everyone else's environment, which means you don't die of hunger or get boiled in acid.
But you raise a very important point, and you're right: as far as I'm aware, latest evidence says that being malnourished as a child does significantly impact intelligence as it does height (stunting). Though I believe the last piece of work I read on it claimed the effect was smaller than previously believed. That was ~2 years ago.
For any given trait X, the question about how much it is "inherited/genetic" or "environmental" is a commonly used shorthand, even amongst professionals, but it can be subtly misleading. All traits are 100% inherited, and all traits are 100% environmental. What do I mean by this? How is the ability to speak Russian genetic? How is the colour of your hair environmental?
Well, put it this way: is the difference between a human child brought up in a Russian family and their pet dog who has lived with them for the same time genetic or environmental? And what is the difference between a pair of identical twins, one of whom bleached their hair with peroxide–genetic or environmental?
The above are of course exaggerations, but they're just obvious examples. The correct way of phrasing the question is this: given a population A, what percentage of the variability of trait X is inherited and what percentage is environmental? Given the population of mammals, is the ability to speak Russian mainly genetic? Yes. Given a pair of identical twins, is any difference in their hair colour environmental? Also yes.
So, to the question as to how much of a decline in intelligence can be accounted to malnourishment throughout life (and how much to other environmental factors, genetics, etc.) we need to specify what population we're talking about. I'd be willing to bet that:
1- the variability in intelligence due to malnourishment in the population of middle-to-upper class children is negligible,
2- the variability in intelligence due to malnourishment in the entire child population of a developed country is detectable,
3- ...and the variability in intelligence in the due to malnourishment in the worldwide child population is significantly higher.
You can see how much genetics matter with how people treat ugly/deformed people. They pretend they're not biased while forcing you to jump through hundreds of hoops to prove yourself and then gaslight you into saying looks dont matter.
Denmark doesn't have a testing requirement, nor are people only born with downs if a test failed. (It does have very high testing rates and corresponding high rate of subsequent abortions though)
Universal screening had unintended eugenic consequences. That scientific fact isn’t controversial, what is controversial is to say whether it was good or bad.
This article gives me big "progressives don't know that a penis is not a vagina" energy.
Except for a very small lunatic fringe minority, progressives generally aren't saying genetics "don't matter", they're saying that they shouldn't. Someone might have a neurological learning disability for example but that doesn't mean you should disregard them but accommodate them to the fullest extent possible.
Sorry for the following tangent but I promise it's relevant:
There is a lot of "progressivism" in the media where "not saying color" is portrayed as a solution to racism but this has become so ubiquitous that even conservatives have started copying this line. That's because it doesn't actually address the underlying impact of racism, it just hides it and makes acknowledging its connection to "color" a social faux pas.
At this point progressives are the ones saying "race absolutely exists and is tied to someone's physical reality", where they disagree with race realists is the degree to which race is a useful concept outside addressing racism (where it is necessary because you can't talk about racial discrimination without acknowledging that people are being grouped into racial categories). Same with sexism, sex and gender differences. That something is a "social construct" doesn't mean it can't interact with physical realities -- "species" is a social construct but it's obvious almost any way you look at it that there is some kind of utility in grouping creatures into "hamster" or "human".
She mentions autism and deafness as examples for genetic differences but it's progressives who are the ones pushing the concept of "neurodiversity", i.e. accepting that there ARE differences between the way human minds work and that we should be more accepting of people whose minds work differently (e.g. some autistics being bad at reading social cues but intuitively engaging in systems thinking). Traditional mainstream liberalism again pushed the opposite approach, of treating disabled people not as disabled but "differently abled" (again, a viewpoint now often propagated by conservatives when celebrating individuals who "overcome" their disability, setting an expectation for others to do the same rather than ask for affordances), thus encouraging a view that ignores their need for accommodations and not engaging with the idea of what affordances are or aren't socially normalized and what is seen as a "burden" (because it only benefits a marginalized group) vs a "necessity" (because it benefits the dominant group).
A lot of this discourse was recently fueled by companies making accommodations because of COVID that they had previously dismissed as impossible and unreasonable when disabled or neurodivergent people asked for them.
So yes, it can absolutely be true simultaneously that genetics can have a massive impact on an individual while the effects are overshadowed by in-group variation. No two people are created equal, yet we should not use that as an excuse to disempower or elevate arbitrary groups but ensure they are given equally the affordances they need to participate in society and contribute what they can. And sadly where we've done so in the past we need to compensate for the generational harm they have been burdened with.
> Given the difficulties of distinguishing between genetic and environmental effects on social outcomes, he wrote, such investigations were at best futile: “There will be no reason to pursue these types of research programs at all, and they can be rendered to the same location as Holocaust denial research.”
> Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes.
This is absolutely disgusting, to blatantly attack scientific inquiry this way. Shame on these reactionaries.
To be fair, I know quite a bit about how social sciences are done, and most of such research is not reproducible. Nine out of ten social scientists know barely enough statistics to p-hack the outcome into what they want to believe in the first place.
I am sure that if first order effects of genes is allowed, you get a never-ending stream of “tall people are diligent”, “blonde people are empathetic” and similar false results that are not only useless, but also might upset general public or sponsors.
This feels like the “nature versus nurture” false dichotomy all over again. Even the tagline tries to frame the debate as a false dichotomy of two extremist positions:
> The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.
Most reasonable people know that human beings are the product of both nature and nurture. Your genes alone won’t make you successful, but they can help (or hurt) your progress in many ways.
The article touches on the actual nuance of the debate further down: The real debate seems to be about whether or not the genetic influence should be studied. Opponents argue that studying it could open the door to discrimination or, at the extremes, eugenics. The opponents would rather not look, under the idea that if we ignore it then nobody can use it against us. I don’t find that argument very compelling, and I kind of doubt it’s very common anyway. I think it gets attention because it’s a way to inject controversy into the subject, which is a way to get more clicks.
Well, in the past we've had eugenics, sterilizations and discrimination based on IQ tests, which is going to the other extreme with genetics. So it's not just something irrelevant. Doesn't mean we should ignore the influence of genetics just because of past wrongs, or because we wish the world to be more egalitarian.
Like what? Serious question, not trying to be snarky. My understanding of these “nature vs nurture” discussions is that environment commonly refers to anything other than genetics - effects not “in-built” that could be caused by upbringing, society, nutrition, etc.
Please don't do "shame on you" comments on HN. We're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here. Ditto for name-calling ("despicable"). I'm sure you can make your substantive points without any of that.
For example; are the Nordics or most of Europe socialist?
If they are and are functioning it means it can work. If they are not, maybe people have differing opinions of what socialism entails.
What usually is a "no true scotsman" argument is when someone only calls something socialist when it's not working, because if an implementation is working that would deflate the argument. See a few posts above.
The socialists I am aware of are openly anti-capitalist, and want to focus on oppression above anything else, placing race and gender based oppression at the top of a hierarchy to be countered.
They are explicitly opposed to many aspects of the Scandinavian model which is largely market based, for example School Vouchers which are used in Sweden, would unthinkable to an American socialist.
They were introduced because the existing school system was in decline. The fact that they haven’t reversed the trend doesn’t mean they are the underlying cause.
Regardless, the point is that Scandinavian countries are not “socialist” in the way leftist Americans think of socialism.
> They were introduced because the existing school system was in decline
Not true at all. Why are you making shit up?
They were introduced to "give choice". And marketed - by the right-wing government at that time btw - like small teacher-led "idea-based" companies or similar would be the primary result, rather than the large stock-market school corps that have been the natural result.
> Regardless, the point is that Scandinavian countries are not “socialist” in the way leftist Americans think of socialism.
Just because Scandinavia (Sweden in particular) too has suffered with a massive wave of neo-liberal privatizations the last 30 years or so doesn't mean that the former more "socialist" way was in any way shape or form worse than the corrupt mess that we have here now.
Then the issue is with the self-described socialists who don't want socialism. Market based capitalism with wealth distribution and strong social safety nets is not the same thing as a society in which the means of production are communally owned. In fact, the two are in direct opposition of one another, and cannot coexist.
I don't disagree with you that most "socialists" want what is essentially a government modeled on the Nordic states. But its highly problematic for those people to delude themselves into thinking that is socialism. I think it boils down to a bunch of lemmings who essentially want social democracy who don't realize a fraction of their comrades genuinely want to abolish private property and install an authoritarian government. At the very least it makes one doubt how seriously their loud opinion should be taken when those opinions are completely internally inconsistent.
Communal ownership of the means of production is not the definition of socialism. It's merely compatible with the actual definition, which is worker ownership of the means of production.
Some socialists, such as Marx, argue that the logical endpoint of socialism is communal ownership of the means of production at some point in the future when the average worker produces more than their need.
Worker-owned enterprises are something perfectly achievable now, in the existing free-market societies we currently have. The reason you don't see many is because they still require capital, and the majority people with capital aren't interested in giving it to companies that then give all ownership to the workers.
So the issue becomes that for socialist-structured companies to become effective and commonplace extensive government intervention is required. At that point the line between "worker" and "communal" means of production becomes pretty thin. Like a large amount of socialist theory, there is a lot of verbiage and effort devoted to theoretical concepts that, when the rubber meets the road, boil down to irrelevance.
I fully disagree. If you were to declare by decree that all companies must be worker owned, you would create a vastly different economic and social structure from if it was actually owned communally, for example, you would have serious differences in income and capital ownership due to market competition, as well as incentives against vertical integration.
This is not extensive government intervention, it boils down to a simple change in property ownership laws.
Also, loans are fully compatible with worker-owned companies, so you can still have capital transfer.
So I disagree very strongly that this "boils down to irrelevance".
Well, we could call that "socialism with Scandinavian characteristics" for the sake of clarity. Though I'm not sure if that's what most socialists understand socialism as.
Its not an objective fact in the sense that there is nothing rigid in political and economic science like we have in mathematics or physics, but yes, every instance of attempts at building socialist governments have been tied at the waist to authoritarianism. In all cases, they have resulted in collapse (USSR), limped along under authoritarian rule (Cuba, Venezuela, Madagascar), or have thrived after jettisoning actual socialist economic policies while maintaining heavy handed authoritarian rule (China, Vietnam). In all cases authoritarianism is propped up as a means to an end of achieving an equitable, socialist utopian state. But in all cases, the socialism has shriveled or died, while the authoritarianism remains.
Perhaps one day there will actually be a socialist state that manages to successfully create the egalitarian society it promotes, without requiring heavy-handed authoritarianism to bring it about. But until then, the association between socialism and authoritarianism is about as well established over the last century as anything can be in the realms of political science and economics.
> every instance of attempts at building socialist governments have been tied at the waist to authoritarianism
Hence the fierce insistence from large parts of the socialist movement throughout history that it must be radically democratic - otherwise oppression, rather than liberation will be the result.
The issue with being radically democratic is what to do with the portion of the population who doesn't want socialism? The communist parties thought they had to be authoritarian to force the transition. Or at least that was their justification.
The answer is broadly to get enough people on board so that you can implement radically democratic policies, and then those that oppose them have to infringe on the rights of others violently to get their way, at which point democratic force is justified.
Which is why I recommended Hayek, as he convincingly argues that authoritarian oppression is non severable component of socialist economic system. He argues that the design and incentives inevitably lead to the same, authoritarian outcome. Experience of 20th century has repeatedly validated his predictions.
And yet, no such democratic socialist government ever materializes. Because all nations must allocate capital efficiently to function and resist outside hostile forces. The capitalist option is to allow people to own private property, and trust that the supply and demand of a marketplace and individuals looking out for their personal best interest will align to allocate that capital efficiently. The tradeoff is that some individuals will be more successful than others, leading to greater accumulation of capital, and inequality between individuals.
The socialist option is to deny individuals the right to own personal capital at all to prevent said inequality, and instead to create a system to allocate capital in a way that is best for society, i.e. through the government. But it turns out that all the ways that society requires capital are practically beyond counting, and the system is so complex, that any government looking to even be minimally successful in overseeing that allocation process requires large amounts of power over virtually every aspect of society. Guess what? That's authoritarianism.
Take this thought experiment. Say we decide we want to make a new entertainment service to compete with Netflix. But creating it requires capital: money to pay programmers, money to pay for servers, money to pay for content production, etc. In a capitalist society, we just have to convince enough people that there is enough return on investment to give us their money. They don't even have to like watching TV, they just have to be convinced its a good use of their excess money. And they could be millions of people, or it could be a single individual. On the other hand, in a socialist society, we have to convince the proxy for society in charge of doling out society's collective capital (i.e. the government) to give us their money. So now the decision on what content to produce is directly influenced by the government. Even if these people are democratically elected, they will cater exclusively to the majority opinion, and in the more likely case, they will cater to whatever consolidates their power. Oops! Now you have state-controlled media. Seems unlikely the people controlling said media will devote much air-time to opposition parties or ideas, or that your functioning democracy will last very long in that scenario.
The point is that socialism without authoritarianism is a paradox. Socialism cannot function without authoritarianism, because the process of allocating capital in society is far too complex for a reasonably constrained governmental body to undertake. It needs an authoritarian level of power to effectively manage society's capital (and as history shows us, even then it rarely is actually effective). Insisting on non-authoritarian socialism is like insisting on a diet consisting exclusively of ice cream and cake while also living a long, healthy life. Perhaps it sounds nice, but it is fundamentally impossible.
You assume representative democracy is the only way to make democratic decisions. With our current technology we could make such decisions using direct democracy. Imagine a collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process. You'd propose your idea for a Netflix competitor, and after a period of public debate the bank invests in the ideas that people decided are worth investing in.
Combine direct democracy and collective ownership with fully transparent decision processes everywhere (every decision made documented and freely available to view by anyone) and I have a hard time imagining any authoritarian system emerging.
> Imagine a collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process. You'd propose your idea for a Netflix competitor, and after a period of public debate the bank invests in the ideas that people decided are worth investing in.
There is no difference between what you write here and my example. Whether you call it a "collectively owned bank with a democratic decision-making process" or simply "ruling government, it's still a government body deciding what will and won't receive funding, and if you disagree with it there is no opt out or alternative route to investing in competitors, resulting in state-owned media.
> With our current technology we could make such decisions using direct democracy.
Direct democracy is impossible given the scale of the number of decisions required. We can't even get 50% of the populace to show up for elections once every 4 years. Every single issue the constituency might vote on in a direct democracy wouldn't involve 99.9% of the actual populace's input. What proportion of the population have the time and will power to follow and investigate even a fraction of the bills being voted on by their national representatives? Their state representatives? Their local government? Their school boards? Their HOA? All of that represents a pittance of the amount of decision making that would be required for the government to assume the decision making that goes into managing what currently happens in the free market. Do we really expect direct democracy to work there?
That's the hubris of socialism. It assumes that the aggregate direction required to manage modern day nation-states is something that can be handled in a centralized way. Which is how the largest famines in human history have been self-imposed through communist regimes trying and failing to do so. Capitalism, for all its many faults, is decentralized enough to offer more resiliency.
No, it's people deciding what will and won't receive funding. It's not that much different from today, where people vote with their money. The number of votes would just be the same for everyone. It could even result in better investment, since the voting process would guarantee some level of demand for the product as well.
You don't really need competition if anyone can influence the organization by making propositions, debating issues and voting. If there's a problem with the media, you can propose a fix for it. That's already much better than what we have today, where very few rich people own most of the media and therefore decide what most people think and talk about.
Even if you need competition, it can be done in such a system. There's no reason there couldn't be multiple competing collectively owned, democratic banks, newspapers, etc. Capitalism is not a requirement for markets.
You don't need everyone to vote on everything. You just need the process to be open to everyone and fully transparent. If any small group were to start abusing the process, it would immediately be visible and fixable. People would notice and start voting against the group. Mostly they would vote on things that interest and affect them. If that's not enough, you could have randomized voting duty on issues that need it.
Your image of socialism is so tainted by state and soviet-style socialism that I think you need to dig a bit deeper into the history of socialism before assuming so much as you do. Bertrand Russell's "The Practice and Theory
of Bolshevism (1920!)" is a good start, even if just the introduction. Basically that it's a really clear contemporary criticism of it from other democratic socialists.
It's fascinating how uncomfortable it is for some to even acknowledge the existence of democratic minded socialists, even when we've existed as long as socialism itself (obviously).
My image of socialism is tainted by history. I'm well aware that there are democratic minded socialists, but I'm also well aware that democratic minded socialists have never actually been able to establish a democratic socialist regime anywhere. At what point am I allowed to connect the dots that democracy and socialism are inherently incompatible, as nice as they sound on paper?
No it's not. "Leads to" signifies that something turns into it. The regimes that are commonly referred to never turned authoritarian, they started authoritarian - much to Chomsky's and other libertarian socialists dismay.
“The regimes that are commonly referred to never turned authoritarian, they started authoritarian - much to Chomsky's and other libertarian socialists dismay.”
Didn't you get the hint with Chomsky being both a socialist and anti-authoritarian may mean that socialism is not just those regimes? I'll assume you're just being willfully obtuse at this point (and given your comment history, I'm not surprised).
And 250 years of economic history shows that unhindered capitalism is a disaster. The only reason capitalism appears so so successful is because it has been balanced with more progressive policies.
Times when capitalism has been unhindered have led to market crashes, galloping inequality and depressions. Times when capitalism has been balanced with progressive policies have led to stability and growth, not only for the already rich.
That's certainly a respectable opinion, yes, but some believe that these progressive policies are only possible temporarily or in countries that use various legal and kinetic means to maintain an advantage over other countries, etc..., so it's not a settled question that social democracy is the end of history.
I think the trouble other folks are having with your prior comment was that there has never been an "Unhindered capitalism" anywhere on Earth within the last several hundred years. Religious, societal, political, etc., factors beyond, and in addition to capitalism, have always held significant sway in any society that has been realized so far.
Capitalism is to be understood as a political economy, not as some abstract economic-only concept that is impossible. A political economy is more capitalist in so far as private ownership of capital faces fewer restrictions and insofar as power is correlated to political ownership. Like all political systems, there are practical limits, but a system in which the power of capital is unrestrained and where very few restrictions to capital ownership exist can be called "unhindered capitalism", and these certainly existed.
No, I mean unhindered capitalism, capitalism being a real political economy rather than the impossible to define purely economical conception of capitalism. Capitalism is not just an economic system, it has necessary political implication, such as a strong state, an active police force, a class system, etc...
Why would you assign 100% of the ‘real political economy’ to capitalism, given the very obvious existence of non-capitalist forces that exist in the ‘real political economy’?
I don't, but it's clear that there were societies where the vast majority of the political power served capital, so from then on you can say that they were unhindered capitalism. Of course, there is always some political power that is not wielded by capitalists, even merely because the state requires a military and capitalism requires the state, but since that is inherent to capitalism it can still be said to be part of capitalism without any restraint.
If they don’t have 100%, how can they engage in unhindered capitalism? If the other forces hold even 1% of the total, they by definition can hinder the capitalist forces.
In year 2021, I can tell you, not only genetics is taboo, culture is also taboo now. If an academic dares to say that culture matters in student outcomes (learning, discipline), the person can also get canceled.
>In year 2021, I can tell you, not only genetics is taboo, culture is also taboo now. If an academic dares to say that culture matters in student outcomes (learning, discipline), the person can also get canceled.
An example of culture mattering is Britain, where you have three groups from the Indian subcontinent:
* Indian Hindus
* Indian Sikhs
* Indian and Pakistani Muslims
Sikhs and Hindus have been very successful; they are more likely than the average to be part of the British middle class (<http://www.theguardian.com/money/2010/dec/14/middle-britain-...>). Muslims are, by contrast, worse than average in every single social measure despite being, racially speaking, indistinguishable from the other two groups to any outsider (since none knows, or cares, about the myriad of caste differences); they are all "Asians" in Britain.
It's not a fair comparison because the Sikhs (mostly rich landowning Jats) and Hindus (mostly Brahmins and Baniyas) coming over have a lot of preselection. Muslims are a) more of a simple random sample b) largely from Mangla dam area in Mirpur in PK case c) part of endogamous lower caste groups (less likely)
I disagree with the premise of the article. It's attacking a straw man. Progressives believe that genetics matter. It's just that they believe other things matter more (such as fairness, equality, etc).
The problem is that these research studies tend to narrowly focus on trying to prove that white people are superior. Why? What is this the only question that interests such supposedly academic individuals? It's because, yes, they are Nazis. They can't figure out any questions worth asking that don't boil down to the same old race baiting.
I find myself reading and thinking and quietly ranting about this (and similar) topics often. The reason being that fundamentally I feel we are witnessing an erosion of the acceptance of the scientific method itself.
The scientific method simply put is "Truth has more validity then beliefs". Of course we don't have access to Truth so we use evidence as a proxy to Truth via interpretation.
Obviously interpretations may vary and even contradict, but that's a good thing and discussion should be encouraged, not censored, as we hopefully stirve towards consensus.
In the spirit of this I have no problem with holocaust deniers moon landing truthers etc insofar as the presentation and discussion of evidence is concerned.
I think that there should be strong public unacceptance of any kind of scientific discussions being shot down.
Science is about making a hypothesis and then verifying that hypothesis against observations. That's it.
One thing to note is that within science and therefore the universe as we know it, no hypothesis can be verified to be 100% true. In other words no statement about the universe can ever be proven true.
This occurs due to a number of things. First, all observations have statistical inaccuracies attached to them. Nothing is ever 100% accurate. Thus because observations aren't 100% accurate, observations can never be used to prove a statement with 100% accuracy as a consequence.
Second, the universe is unknown and thus at any point in time we can suddenly uncover and observe a completely new piece of evidence that totally invalidates all previous hypothesis.
I know what you're talking about in your post. But when you truly understand science you will see that the line between truth and belief is actually really blurry. Science has given us zero verified truths. It has only given us probabilities and likelihoods that we just assume (aka believe) to be true.
In fact the foundations of science function off axiomatic assumptions that logic is real and probability is real. These two aspects of reality can NEVER be verified as they are the tools we use to verify other things.
It's always weird to watch people on the left argue about things that are eye-rollingly obvious.
But it's true: If progressives get it into their collective heads that genetics are a huge factor in economic, social, and psychological outcomes, eugenics will be right there on the table (again). While conservatives might use this knowledge to stop welfare, progressives will be self-righteously sterilizing people (again). So, the danger is real.
Many (most?) people value conformity and loyalty oaths over honest understanding of the world, regardless of the damage that this does. What you're describing isn't any weirder than Biblical literalists ignoring "eye-rollingly obvious" self-contradictions in scripture.
In both cases, the complaint is missing the point: some subset of progressives and some subset of other religious extremists aren't even having the same conversation you are.
https://archive.is/Qs3EL