Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?

Someone in these discussions always brings up epigenetics at some point, its impact there far exceeding its impact on population genetics I would guess :) Nobody ever talks about genetic drift or gene flow however, probably because despite being actual things that affect population genetics talking about "nearly neutral drift in small populations" is really hard to wedge into an ideological shouting match dressed up as a scientific debate.

Sure, but there is no social contention arising from racial differences in the world's fastest runners. What gets us in trouble are the the racial differences in high-prestige jobs. To really understand the impact of differences in distributions, you need to look at some numbers. The excerpt below comes from Douglas Murray's new book. I am not going to attempt to convince you that racial differences in IQ exist. But he makes a strong case that if such racial differences did exist, the impact on the distribution of high-prestige jobs would be absolutely enormous:

"...Why are there so few minorities in these high-prestige jobs? It's a numbers game in which the odds are against a Latin (he uses geographic indicators in place of the colloquial 'black' and 'white', and 'latin' in place of 'hispanic') achieving one of those positions are high and the odds against an African are prohibitive, even if we assume that there is no racism whatsoever among the employers for high-prestige jobs.

To illustrate, I'll use the cohort of young Americans ages 25-29, the age at which the potential candidates for such jobs are coming out of law schools, medical schools, business schools, and graduate STEM departments. In 2019, there were 23.2 million Americans in that age group. About 228,000 people in that age group can be expected to have IQs of 135 or over.

The racial distribution of Americans ages 25-29 in 2019 was more multiracial than among the older population. Only 54% were European while 20 percent were Latin, 15 percent were African, and 6 percent were Asian. But that reduced dominance of Europeans in total population doesn't make a lot of difference in the 135+ pool. Employers seeking these exceptionally intelligent young adults were choosing from a pool that contained about 2,800 Africans [~1%] and 9,500 Latins [~3%] compared to 50,700 Asians [*~22%*] and 160,000 Europeans [~70%]." [~3% being 'other']

So, while the marginal IQ differences between individuals do not matter not one whit, when considered at the population level, these differences can hardly be ignored.

Or as my father once framed the argument: "It's because they've only recently come out of the jungle right" and when I yelled at him explained his reasoning with, "That's not racist, stands to reason they'd be better at physical things, we've evolved over millions of years to not need that sort of thing any more." at which point my mum told me not to call my dad a racist and to leave the dinner table, which I most certainly did.

It's amazing looking back how racist the 80s were when I was growing up. The framing has gone from outright racism that was "common knowledge" everyone accepted, and been dog-whistled into this seemingly academic debate about the effects of genetic differences between population groups, which is so far removed from the original that it's hard to tell who really is "just asking questions" and who wants to talk about "coming down from the jungle" without being labelled a racist.

On a more technical level, was your equation meant to be

y_i = D_i theta_i + (1 - D_i) 0

i.e. "theta" was supposed to be "theta_i"

I've got ADHD that was undiagnosed until a decade after finishing my degree, and maths was my favourite - and best - subject all the way from age 4 through to doing solutions to Einstein's equations involving 10+ A4 pages (both sides) of tensor mechanics for my final year project. My results across that time showed the more maths in a subject the better I did, the more writing it had the worse I did.

Doing maths is like reading is for me - an external cognitive structure that I can follow to make my own brain calm down while in that process. While I don't do much maths nowadays, I literally read whenever I'm not actively doing something else - I read a page or two of my book in-between clicking reply to your comment and starting typing this reply.

Maths involves a lot of "muscle memory" once you get past the initial hump. But it's often poorly taught at an early age to the level of inducing near-phobic levels of discomfort with it which to me seems strange. But I don't think there's any extra issue with having ADHD and maths

ADHD is very comorbid with dyslexia, dyspraxia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia - around 20–60% of people with ADHD also have one or more learning difficulties. Dyscalculia affects as many people as dyslexia, but dyslexia is far more well-known and more likely to get diagnosed and helped with. There's a nice summary box of typical symptoms of dyscalculia in this paper:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6440373/