521–530 of 756 posts
Sperm banks select highly-educated males (i.e. recruiting at Stanford and Harvard) for sperm donors, so it seems obvious that most people know there is a hereditary component.
Likewise a "Darwin award" only makes sense if you know intelligence is heritable.
The problem is that socialism inevitably leads to authoritarianism through its very nature. See, for example, Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom”, where he lays this case pretty extensively.
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> 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. That a well-informed position believes that not (almost) everyone who is attending a college can learn single-variable algebra is fairly depressing.
Do you believe everyone can learn algebra? What evidence do you have for this belief? Have you taught in the classroom much to students with a wide range of educational backgrounds? I don’t believe everyone has equal intellectual talent in all areas. My talent for math far exceeds my talent for physics. I’ve tried to learn physics but I just can’t. I have no intuition for it. There is variation amongst our brains and…
I'm not disputing your superior experience on this topic (hence "well-informed position"); I'm just saying that it's fairly depressing.
Chomsky wrote the definitive progressive answer to all this 50 years ago: https://libcom.org/files/chomsky%20-%20iq%20building%20block... Still timely and fresh, especially considering that he was critiquing Herrnstein 20 years before The Bell Curve. Because he's smart and unafraid, either of science or the truth, Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the…
Democracy needs education and clear discourse. Citizens in a democracy are to be treated fairly and as equals before the law. If we cannot even ensure these principles, democracy is in a decrepit state indeed.
I wonder what exactly remains as a political commitment to the people.
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> Chomsky never denies the possibility of a genetic component to IQ, even IQ/race. What he denies are the ideological assumptions people make about the social consequences that must follow if those findings are true The identification of differences between groups seem to be commonly conflated with the act of unfairly discriminating against a group with prejudice based on differences (perceived or real), which is kin…
> the world has become overly sensitive to certain subjects. I'm not sure that the world has become sensitive. Rather, opinions that people didn't feel safe to express about nonsense they experienced in their earlier life are now coming out. I recall a story about a church that held an "Aunt Jemima" event in 1991 and were surprised that so many black families chose not to show up - but none of those folks protested o…
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It's quite painful then that people are obsessed with measuring group differences with the only possible explanation being bigotry. If people ignored identity groups and studied individuals, we might not be in such a political mess.
If outcomes between groups are different, investigation into underlying causes of differences in group outcomes is often useful- bigotry need not be a motivation.
Computer science or video games are an example. The demographics allegedly show very prevalent sexism here that is allegedly responsible for said difference.
The self-reflection about how other fields have similar one-sided demographics with the opposite sex isn't interesting on the other hand. On the contrary, that realization is ignored, because it would endanger the sexism story. A look at the pipeline is also just ignored, even if demographics are one-side before discrimination even could occur.
I don't believe that some people believe their own conclusions though. The bad thing is that states and governments now try to correct something that is based on false assumptions. This is nothing else than totalitarian and absurd behavior.
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I'm always public about my convictions, sometime too public according to the moderators of HN.
Well, to be honest, claiming that people who say A do in fact mean B, is more of an attempt at mind reading of others than just another conviction. This is frowned upon, because there is no bottom to this race downwards. Anyone can accuse anyone else of being a horrible, rotten human being who just puts up a tolerable facade.
You say this as if human beings are entirely unfamiliar with the use of facades in everyday life (need I mention most women's familarity with "the nice guy"), more so in those domains where power and position are at stake.
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> i.e. that differences in distributions is a toxic topic that he has been trying to stay clear of since the Bell Curve, given all the griefs he got for it. This sentence makes it sound as if Murray was acting in good faith when writing the Bell Curve and received undue flack from susceptible people. This wasn't what happened: Murray and Herrnstein used a big corpus of explicitly racist studies (pro-apartheid South A…
Any non video critiques avilable? Videos are much harder to analyze, assess and think about. As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
Unfortunately no. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this.
> As far as I know the fundamental points of the bell curve (of which only a small bit relates to race) are nigh-universally acknowledged by people in the relevant fields to be true.
AFAIK this is really not the case. I've seen a survey (which I can find now :/) of people working in this field and there's actually a clear division between the conservative (genetics first) group and the liberal (society is key) one.
> (of which only a small bit relates to race)
It's not that small, and when you dedicate an entire section of your book to this particular topic and you keep using mainly openly racist studies as a reference, it's unlikely to be an accident.
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Do you believe everyone can learn algebra? What evidence do you have for this belief? Have you taught in the classroom much to students with a wide range of educational backgrounds? I don’t believe everyone has equal intellectual talent in all areas. My talent for math far exceeds my talent for physics. I’ve tried to learn physics but I just can’t. I have no intuition for it. There is variation amongst our brains and…
Do I believe that everyone should attend college? I do not. Of the people who should attend college, is it frequent that people can't grok single-variable algebra? I'm not disputing your superior experience on this topic (hence "well-informed position"); I'm just saying that it's fairly depressing.
I understand now what you meant by fairly depressing. Thank you for the clarification.
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That's not really rebutting the original claim, is it? If, due to genetics, they need a different environment, resources, more time and patience.. how is that not agreeing with the premise that genetics matter?
Whose original claim? syops didn't just say genetics matter. They said some people can't learn algebra or calculus.