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note: I think it'd be more productive for everyone if you directly responded to the (different) arguments we're all making, instead of picking on one individual example of hypocrisy.
Take the rare very smart black kid in 1800. He's a slave. His masters notice he's clever, and give him more complex work. He remains a slave.
Take the kid post-reconstruction. He's the son of a farm laborer. He grows up, goes to the city, and gets a job at a factory. He's paid less than similar white workers for explicitly segregationist reasons. He's still given more responsibility than his black coworkers though, maybe even more pay.
The kid grows up in 1980. He's sent to a bad public school. Fights break out every day, teachers don't understand half of the material in most classes. But the teachers still read from the book, the textbooks are still available, so the smart kid picks up a lot. And he does well on the standardized tests. He goes to a good college, helped in part by affirmative action, and gets a job as an engineer. Or maybe he finds school stifling, does well on some classes but neglects others, and gets sucked into a culture of drugs and violence, becomes a sad statistic. Both happened.
The kid grows up in 2020. Bad public school, but with 2x the funding. The kid spends half his time on his phone, but still does well on tests. Test scores -> decent college -> decent job. Or, he finds school stifling. But now, he's naturally attracted to online communities with people of similar intelligence, and imitates their interests. With this, he makes connections, learns the tacit parts of upper-middle-class culture, and builds a desire for the kinds of occupations successful people pursue. Via one of those, he gets a good job.
This is why culture and environment 'don't matter'. They do matter, in the absolute. But, first in cities, then via technology, modern life exposes people to every other type of person, allowing people to effectively sort themselves by ability. And this heavily smooths out any differences in outcomes attributable to differences in culture or circumstances. Some still remains, of course, but much less than in the past. Innate ability, by contrast, is as strong a differentiator as ever.
A question: Jewish kids, Black kids, Hispanic kids, White kids, and Asian kids all have access to computers and the internet. They all post on all the major platforms. Why are so many of the best writers or smartest anonymous posters, even via the constrained medium of twitter, jews? Why are so few black?
You might explain this via lack of access, or systemic racism. But the second question is: Why, at least to my eyes, are the racial gaps in ability as large, and often larger, (both in terms of jew/white, asian/white, and white/black) in the realm of self-driven achievement on anonymous internet platforms than they are in educational institutions or real-world occupations?
Just to be clear, you're asking me to imagine a lineage of people who were smart and capable but held back by cultural and policy issues like slavery and segregation...
...and the conclusion that you expect me to draw from this example is that cultural and policy issues don't matter?
I think you're going to need to unpack your reasoning for me.
The idea is that the extent to which culture and policy has held them back, in the specific areas of education and the economy, has been significantly reduced over time, by a combination of intentional targeted policy and the general free association and exchange of ideas in the modern world. It makes sense that genes would eventually start taking precedent over culture if massive pressures exist on the part of the gap caused by culture.
This is intended as a reply to both this comment and your comment below.
I interpret the phrase/claim that "it's all genetics" as exactly that. Genetics is the only variable worth considering when it comes to evaluating individual or group outcomes.
Even if I concede the claim that specific issues of policy and culture matter less now than they did say a century ago, how do you get from there to the claim that they are not meaningful now, and will not be meaningful in the future?
Likewise, it seems to me that being a couple generations behind in the "building generational wealth game" due to past policy would be a significant handicap that is non-genetic in nature even after preexisting barriers had been removed.
I do not care about whether self_made_human was lying or being dishonest when he said "its all genetics". Most people, most of the time, are dishonest when they argue. What I care about is if the specific claim "variation in genetics matter more than variation in modifiable environment in contributing to educational outcomes".
The fact that we closed the achievement gap a lot in the past two centuries, but despite more and more effort put into reform the achievement gap isn't closing. And the fact that things like tutoring, while they help, seem to help smarter students as much as they do dumber students, so the gap isn't going to close more.
Crucially, this does not mean better education couldn't help. This means the current ways we approach education aren't helping. Maybe a tutor GPT-7 would add .5 stddevs of test scores to each student.
But the problem is, we've reached severe diminishing returns in 'cultural solutions to student test scores and mathematical/scientific knowledge'. I do think there's still juice left to be squeezed in entirely new cultural paradigms, like the AI 1:1 tutor or perhaps entirely reworking school as a series of practical competitions where students have to use math/science knowledge to do something intermediate to 'playing minecraft/factorio', 'working a real job', and 'self-directed survival-oriented problem solving as a hunter-gatherer'. But I think there's just not that much juice left, and most of the benefit of the new paradigms will be in areas other than 'test scores', like 'being economically productive' or 'capable independent people with character'.
But there's a ton of juice left to squeeze in genes. The easiest way to squeeze, technically, although socially unworkable, would just be to normalize average families adopting the excess children of smart/successful families, and then paying/culturally encouraging the latter to have ten kids and adopt them all out. This would cause test scores to skyrocket. (Crucially, this doesn't have to be done on test scores. If you care about metis or tacit knowledge, just have people adopt the children of parents successful on your metric! You could even have people make individual decisions based on their own preferences.). Then, we have embryo selection and gene editing, with the exact same properties.
There are many rich black people. 20% of black households make $100k+ in household income. 50% of jewish households have $100k+. Those numbers are probably off, but within an order of magnitude. 14% of the population is black, and 2% of the population is jewish. Yet. Is scott alexander black? Yudkowsky? Yarvin? Where are all of the intelligent black bloggers? What about nobel prize winners? I agree historical household income has to have some impact. But let's assume it's responsible for the entire wealth, achievement, and income gaps between jewish and black people. The gap in black vs jewish achievement at the highest levels (e.g. nobel prizes, accomplished mathematicians) that remains is still several factors of ten. Why? Why isn't it intelligence?
Fair enough, and for what it's worth I feel like this here might represent some genuine common ground between us because that is ultimately what I care about as well. At the same time I also expect that we will be butting heads shortly on the definition of "modifiable".
Ironically I agree with the statement as well, whole-heartedly even. The difference, I believe, is in where we lay the blame for the apparent failure. The woke-left and alt-right both are both looking for excuses to blame the kids because their ideology depends on it, but I believe that ultimate responsibility must lie with the adults IE the parents and "the educators".
I'm not convinced this is true. I think that what we have is less a situation of "X was attempted and found impossible" and more a situation of "X was found difficult/inconvenient and then abandoned." DeBeor all but admits that the upward mobility of black families in the bay area was becoming inconvenient to progressive policy goals just around the same time that they decided (for totally unrelated reasons we swear) to
sabotageoverhaul the educational system. What if they had just not done that?Again doubt, or at least I doubt that there is anywhere near as much juice as there is left to squeeze out of overturning obviously counter-productive progressive policies. In my mind this is one of those "If you're serious about ending fossil fuels you should be supporting the construction of nuclear powerplants" type situations where the fact that the median Green-new-dealer/HBDer almost never does, seriously undermines the cause's credibility.
As for the last paragraph, the obvious rejoinder is what exactly makes you think Elizer Yudkowski or Curtis Yarvin is more qualified to be a supreme court justice than Clarence Thomas or more qualified to play quarterback than Patrick Mahomes? Be specific, Be precise.
I think this is an important disagreement. I claim that if you cloned Scott Alexander or Eliezer Yudkowsky a hundred times, 90% of them would be obviously extremely talented in ways that outstrip 95% of the population. I claim this both because of GWAS and twin studies, which find that genes cause >50% of the variation in both personality and intelligence ... and because we have a natural experiment. Scott's brother, who he refers to in the parable of the talents, excelled at piano so much as a child that he was flown out to Japan to meet the piano manufacturers, and is now a world-class musician with a wikipedia page. I also claim that it's obvious that the children of two extremely intelligent parents will in most cases themselves be very intelligent in a way that is obvious to external observers. This basic fact that 'children are like their parents' is both scientifically and intuitively and anecdotally justified. And isn't that the biggest low-hanging fruit of them all? Taken literally, we could just replace every child with a clone-of-the-top-99.9% (and again, even if you dispute IQ and innate talent and all that - whatever clone Thomas and Mahomes, they're still very much above average on some metrics). This isn't happening, but it could, physically, and everyone would be much, much better off. Both the much-more-talented individuals and all of those who can enjoy their fruit.
I do think Thomas is qualified to be a supreme court justice, and isn't distinguishably worse as a justice than other white or jewish conservative justices. (That's held weakly, though, entirely due to my lack of legal expertise). But both parties really want black political figures, and they had to try hard to find him. I think the pool of people who are indistinguishable with respect to qualification for supreme court justice-hood is probably 3% black or lower. And being a good justice doesn't require making novel contributions to either something abstract like mathematics or something practical like setting direction and execution for a massive organization, it just requires being a very good writer and lawyer and choosing between non-obvious tough decisions. I think the skill-cap is a lot lower. Von Neumann as judge or Ramanujan as judge are going to be quite difficult to distinguish from midlevel-math-professor as judge, imo. And in areas that are still practical but require intelligence like engineering, the rate of indigenous blacks is quite low. More generally, the rate of black success in professions that require high intelligence is just ... low. And Jewish success is higher, even for secular jews (and half-jews) raised in a home that's modern culture, not jewish religious culture.
I think the skillset that makes one QB is just less intelligence-loaded than either SCOTUS justices, it depends on reflexes, muscle composition, body shape, and a ton of other niche things. Whereas intelligence genuinely does generalize across domains, from aesthetic writing to engineering to politics to math to philosophy. Thomas (obviously) has a ton more generalizable intelligence than most whites. I think he also obviously outclasses Mahomes.
People love to hate on common core, but it was a genuine attempt to teach better. The often-mocked tricks like "when you add 53 and 49, move 1 from the 53 to the 49 to 50, then 50 + 50 + 2 = 102" are actually the kind of things that smarter kids do (sometimes without being taught it specifically) when adding numbers. But it just ... didn't help much. (DeBoer is much more knowledgeable on this than me). I'm not sure what kind of improvements are available within the current institutional constraints. And I think those institutional constraints hurt smart as much as dumb ones, in terms of educational outcomes. Plenty of smart students only take courses one grade level ahead, when they should be doing two or three. Part of my point is that, even though education sucks, why wouldn't improving education just move the smart kids forward along with the dumb ones?
Like. Let's say you take 15 year old Mahomes and a randomly-selected 15 year old black kid. You fast-track them both for 1 on 1 sports training. Who's going to benefit more? I don't think any gaps will close. The same goes for math students - perfect individualized instruction will make individual achievement gaps caused by genes (and group gaps, if they exist) worse, as you'll remove any environmental
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