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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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But I also don’t know if we have evidence to compare “hereditary profession in meritocracy” versus “free choice in meritocracy”.

We absolutely do. No society free from nepotism has ever existed, but societies with proportionately less nepotism have consistently outcompeted societies with proportionately more nepotism.

I can’t really think of a “free choice” nation in history that was dominant, can you?

The United States of America. Not only is this literally true comparable to other cultures throughout history, it's our national creed.

Those kids aren’t getting injured because of some cosmic law that you ought to diversify activity. They are getting injured because they overtrained a particular muscle through an unnatural repetitive physical movement.

I brought up TJS, because it's super direct and easy to follow cause/effect. What about the injuries in Basketball? In youth soccer?

Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them. I should be clear: if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five, I support you doing so. But I expect that if we apply such a theory to the mass of people, we'll start to see the same problems crop up.

I think it’s possible that the physical training was so intensive that it left a long distaste for exercise after the fact. I think this is possible. But that has more to do with the training being coercive.

Moreso the aforementioned injuries from intensive training than anything else, combined with going from a highly regimented training regimen built around competition to having to steer oneself. They're an example of what happens to specialists left behind in scalable professions.

And if we're starting from age five, training will always be coercive. Many five year olds require coercion to get dressed and to eat. If you're suggesting that a child who wants to do nothing but mathematics should be encouraged, within reason sure I agree with that. But we'll probably run into the same problems we do with athletics. And we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world.

Hereditary profession is not quite the same thing as nepotism, at least that’s not how I took it. Hereditary profession could mean that a lawyer purposefully raises a lawyer and a composer a composer, and that this is expected; nepotism means that a lawyer hires and promotes his kin who are lawyers, and a doctor his kin. My proposal doesn’t entail anything about nepotism, but it would involve an element of hereditary influence on profession. I think 1 in 5 American physicians are children of physicians, and there are 3.5 physicians per 1000 Americans, so clearly the children of doctors are influenced to be doctors.

Doing anything to the exclusion of everything else is "unnatural." That includes mathematics. We don't know how those things would go because we haven't tried them

I don’t follow. Many people in history did one task repetitively for hours on end, eg farming or weaving or milling or fishing. We have cases of people focusing on one skill and they improve in that skill. They might nominally be in school, but they attend special schools that are online and not taxing. So we know that Magnus would spends hours a day on chess. We know pianists spend hours a day on piano. We know marathon runners spend hours a day running. Faker, the best strategy gamer, spent 10-15 hours per day practicing. So it’s been abundantly tried, and the results show that the more practice the greater the result. (With the right kind of practice, and with rest, and with diminishing returns).

if you want to take your kids and move to the Adirondacks and force them to learn math every day for hours from age five

How about you just place your kid in fun math contexts for 3 hours a day, and then an hour a day of challenging practice, and then the rest is for enjoying life and maybe some exercise? They will be better at math and they will have more free time. They won’t know about ovaries, orangutans, Ontario or Othello, but they will be better at math than anything else you could do. If they want to read a good book, they ask someone. If they want to know the capitol of California, they look it up. Seems perfect to me, just requires each specialist human to trust the other specialist humans. Adirondacks sound nice though. He can go there on vacation with the time and money he has saved up from not knowing about colonial period.

we certainly shouldn't be trying to specialize everyone in the world

Well you haven’t really shown why that is so certain. If my beloved friend is a trucker, I know that specializing in trucking at an early age will be better for his health, reduce accidents, reduce stress, and increase his earnings. I can’t think of a line of work that wouldn’t be aided by specialization.