Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

In these comments: people doing apologetics for a vision of the world where everyone is born with equal potential.

I am a scientist, I work on these things, and I am here to tell you that:

--Intelligence is largely (~70-80% of variance) inherited

--Your personality is largely determined by genetics and is pretty much settled in to what it will always be by ~30

--If you don't learn to count right by ~4 you never will

--There are, in fact, many people who could never learn calculus

--Sex differences in behavior are driven by genetics and the effects are large

The broad strokes here are not up for debate, and denying them makes you analogous to a flat-earther. The details will change.

There are huge portions of the educated populace who will go to great lengths to spin stories about how it ain't so. They do this because it is comfortable to believe given the normative ethics we were all programmed with as children. Trying really, really hard to believe manifest falsehoods has a lot of practical drawbacks, though. Like the constant, expensive performance of searching for just the right way of teaching calculus to people who will never learn it--public policy that hasn't a chance in hell of ever working.

If you've read this far, and you're feeling upset or angry or uncomfortable with the facts I've listed, I encourage you to reflect on which problems in the world are really important to you. Write them down. For each one ask, "Is continuing to believe in a broken model of how things actually are going to help me solve this problem? Or would I be better off facing an uncomfortable truth and doing what I can with it?"

Thank you for reading my rant, I'll be here all day :-D

I think the more people can learn algebra than OP implies, but as a former math educator my experience also indicates some people are genetically limited in mathematics. For reference, my specialty was working with very remedial students and only ever had a few students not make progress (~2%) but I do think that small percent was genuinely hopeless and I don't say that lightly. I have a pet theory as to why those students could not do algebra that that you might find convincing:

To start, I believe that the idea of "working memory" is largely valid. Think of it as the number of distinct ideas you can hold in your head at once, sort of like trying to hold a phone number in your head when you've just heard it for the first time.

The general consensus in psych is that this number for the average person is in the single digits and is relatively static in adulthood till a decline in old age. It's been my observation that people with really incredibly small working memory cannot do algebra. The amount of numbers/ideas held in their head is too large, and multiple students in this group described the experience of attempting an algebra problem as feeling like sand constantly slipping through their fingers.

Many of these students grew up in rich neighborhoods with good parents. They had most advantages you can imagine, seem reasonably intelligent when you talk to them, but Algebra will always be beyond them.

There are too many causitive factors to attempt to make a point at genetics. Any attempt to do so is racially motivated, or will be co-opted to institute racist policies.

Studying genetics and how they affect one's life, future, cognitive ability, ect, is interesting and worthwhile. But genetics are not easily separated from other causal factors. However, there are certain other things that we know affects ones outcomes, mainly socioeconomic status and education level. These issues have not been addressed, nor fixed. Until then, I would like to keep research that can be very very easily twisted towards the goal of eugenics off the table.

my concern is something along the lines of this.

imagine that scientists find the genes that makes you predisposed to homosexuality. how long is it before a repressive regime starts testing its citizen and systematically killing anyone with it?

should the scientist have still released the study or is there some sort of ethical consideration?

Math notation is very consistent and it’s optimized for convenience. It’s been constantly refined over last centuries. People who complain about notation usually actually have problem with the substance, and the complaints about notation is just a coping mechanism, to deny hurtful reality that one can’t understand something hard, blaming external factors instead. Ask yourself: if notation was genuinely confusing, why would mathematicians make themselves suffer needlessly?

Now, to be sure, some people and some books are better at teaching than others, but it typically has nothing to do with notation used, and everything to do with the order of introduction of concepts, level of detail of explanation (which can be both too high and too low), amount and quality of examples, etc. However, the core issue here is that some things are actually genuinely hard, and people of average intelligence simply cannot grasp them without expending ludicrous amounts of effort.

If you have some concrete suggestions about mathematical notation, ways it could be improved in more than superficial manner, I (and the rest of mathematical community) is very much open to hear them. Improvements in notation do happen regularly, and when they are valuable, they reach wide acceptance. For example, in the second half of 20th century, the notation of commutative diagrams have been invented, and it spread like a wildfire, because it genuinely facilitates understanding.