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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Okay. I don't think all other factors outside of genetics can be discarded as inconsequential. Probably if you transferred some of the students from the public school to the private school you would, in some cases, see modest improvements in educational and socialization outcomes. Go back prior to they started school, and you'll probably find that the private school kids had better early childhood nutrition and lower incidence of e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome relative to the public school kids, which is bound to have a knock-on effect on their intelligence and educational outcomes.

But the girl I was dating at the time seemed to be denying that genetics plays any role in intelligence or educational outcomes, and that these are entirely attributable to the environment. I know this might seem like a bravery debate, but the blank-slate enviro-determinist worldview espoused by the girl I was dating seems far more widespread and influential than mine (it implicitly underpins virtually all modern education policy and every argument in favour of affirmative action in education, for instance), so I think it needs to be pushed back upon far more aggressively than the biodeterminist worldview.

Here you claim...

Okay. I don't think all other factors outside of genetics can be discarded as inconsequential.

but in the rest of this thread you've been posting things like...

I found her optimism touching, even heartbreaking, and immediately started reciting all of my best talking points from Freddie deBoer: it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

You can't have it both ways. One of the above statements was a lie, which was it?

When I said "it's all genetics" I was exaggerating for rhetorical effect. I apologise for my imprecise wording.

I don't believe that your words were "imprecise". I think you knew exactly what you were saying.

You're entitled to your opinion. I know what I do and don't believe.

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