Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

The benefit of course is that without "genetics", and being able to discount "luck" as unmeasurable, one can still cling to "merit" as the single factor that justifies one's elevated station and privileges (once we've stamped out all the -isms). "Merit" is the last Progressive bastion of the modern world's social structure. Even the slogan "Land of opportunity" implies that your own slothfulness is the only thing holding you back from taking your seat among the elites. To lose the meritocracy is to lose the faith (and the country), so it's no wonder that people fight back so fiercely.

But avoiding scientific inquiry puts one at a disadvantage, because the research WILL happen with or without you. And if it's without you, you won't have any say in how it's used, or how society restructures itself (because it will). Without your voice, we could end up with Gattaca or Brave New World. With your voice we could have something better.

But take note: The world WILL change. You can't stop it, but you can guide it.

Can conservatives be convinced that individual choices and education matter more? God i hate those dissent-sew-click-bait titles.

In feudalism, being poor, is your fault. You are morally suspicious, of lower blood and any theory that fits will be used to justify this world order before itself. Thus why national-socialist attracted so many nobles. Thus why "differences" written in stone are so abhorrent to the left. Cause nothing should be written in stone, in a enlightened world.

Then, there are differences. But to my mind, the differences are quite universal. Cause those differences were shaped by the environment and the environment was for the last 10.000 - 200 years pretty universal for the species. We have neuro sub-types everywhere, adapted to the ebb and flow of resources and the rise and fall of overpopulation. Somebody optimized to survive a civil-war, might not be optimal for calculus, but might be better at improvisation than someone born into the calm waters of post-(civil-war/genocide) societies. We might even one day learn to suppress the epi-genetic stress triggers that make this wheel go round.

We can learn to detect those differences, and learn to work around those differences and it might even benefit us. Or we can shun the "other" - like we already shun those optimized for conflict - and watch the world go down the drain. Cooperation yields higher reward, so research away, but the endgoal should be here to stay.

> I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely convinced that not all people can learn algebra or calculus. To me it is obvious this is so since the mentally disabled can’t. There’s a level of “intelligence” that’s necessary to learn a given topic. Not everyone can learn all topics.

You know, if you were trying to teach Chinese to 18-year-old English-speakers at community colleges with three hours a week of lecture, you might come to the conclusion that only a few rare geniuses had the ability to learn Chinese at all, and none would ever learn more than a few hundred words. But of course over 98% of people born and raised in China learn to speak Chinese fluently by the age of 5, and that's not because of genetics; it includes almost 98% of white people born and raised there too. There are several factors that I think of as key to this difference:

1. Plausibly there is a critical period for language acquisition, and if so, it very likely ends before age 18. Looking at an 18-year-old you can't tell whether their deficits in Chinese-speaking ability are due to genetics or environmental effects in the previous 18 years. There probably isn't an early-childhood critical period for calculus (I think you need formal operational reasoning for that) but maybe there are other things you need to develop early on for calculus to be easy for you when the time comes. Like, fluency in reading, for example.

2. Three hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for two years, is a total of 216 hours. Native language acquisition more typically involves over 20,000 hours of language exposure by age 5. Sometimes it's surprising how much more you can achieve when you apply literally over a hundred times more effort. Or, to look at it a different way, how little you will achieve when you're applying less than 1% of the effort necessary to get good results.

3. Schooling is a really terrible way to learn things. Extrinsic motivation displaces intrinsic motivation, massed practice displaces spaced practice because it gets better exam scores (especially if you know when midterms are coming up), the feedback necessary for improving is delayed by hours or days by the nature of homework grading, and the pacing is inevitably far too fast for some students and far too slow for others. It's well established that individual tutoring produces results two standard deviations better than ordinary classes (Bloom's two sigma problem). That's 30 IQ points. And Bloom wasn't even spacing out practice over decades the way you ought to; he was working within the semester structure of traditional schooling, extrinsic motivation and all.

Is there a possible human culture where 98% of everybody routinely learns to do symbolic integration? Or does human nature render that impossible? Maybe. (Hell, when I have an integral to do in my head, I myself invariably settle for just approximating it unless it's a fucking monomial. Maybe I should spend a few semesters doing them on the blackboard in front of a class, I bet that would help.) But the meat grinder of community college doesn't give us much evidence about that one way or the other, except to know that we don't live in that culture today. It doesn't help us at all with the question of what to attribute to environmental effects and what to attribute to genetics.

(One indication that such radical changes may be possible is the gradual transformation of literacy; hieroglyphics were the province of the priesthood and the quasi-priestly scribes, and even after the invention of alphabets, Charlemagne and Genghis Khan were illiterate. Can you imagine trying to teach a classroom full of 18-year-olds hieroglyphics in three hours a week, if they had no previous experience with reading and writing? Yet today literacy rates are over 95% in most countries, though countries with non-phonetic orthographies like Chinese and English lag a bit behind.)

To address your question about "universal education advocates", they were not the reason that we got it.

Their argument was purely an philosophical one, stating that a well informed society operates better, makes better decisions, ect. And a well educated person can make better decisions for themselves and have a higher quality of life.

The reason that universal education caught on was because large businesses realised that could have more efficient factories if they didn't have to teach everyone to read. Thus college and university because the place where the 'universal education' dream could be realised. Where every person could go and receive an education that would afford them a higher quality of life and allow them to better engage with the world.

Then, factories became more specialised and 90% of universities became slaves to some "industry"

Many universities "computer science" programs are hardly that. Rather they've turned into a coding bootcamp with slightly more math.