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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Not that it stopped working. Not that the gains weren't sustainable. Not that it only worked with a specially-selected sub-population of students. The kids who couldn't learn to read were learning to read, and the teachers refused to continue the program because doing their fucking jobs was too much of a downer.

I totally believe this about teachers. It still flies in the face of everything everywhere that what they were doing was sustainable, and those kids' improvements would persist into their 20s. No educational intervention ever has done that at scale.

Of course, this is only an isolated incident, so it would be irresponsible to imagine that if a whole school system can fuck up this badly and have no one call them on it,

No, actually, that is the most believable part, that the school system would be evil to placate teachers. That is par for the course.

he standard HBD argument is that we've tried all the environmental interventions, they didn't work, so HBD is the only explanation remaining. Only, we haven't tried all the environmental interventions. We tried the environmental interventions popular with the exact set of people who gave us the replication crisis, and no others.

Sure, but if caning black students worked to make them on par with uncaned Asian students, that is still HBD. They would be thriving in completely different environments, and unless the caning persisted into the workplace, there's no reason to expect the caning gap to not reopen.

And sure, there's no reason to humor the bullshit accusations of racism for even a single second more.

But you have to choose which to attack harder. And you've chosen to attack HBD harder, in this post at least, which makes your post, overall, odd. Sure HBD is sorta the topic of this thread. But in the subthread it is HBD within the context of the education complex, which is a complex dominated by progressive spaghetti monsters, so any anti-HBD point would, appropriately be a tiny appendix at the end of a bunch of discussion about how BS the idea of systemic racism was. Like 30 lines about that bs, then a meek comment like, "and the HBDers are like 23% more confident than I am comfortable with."