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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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