It’s time to break up the Ivy League cartel

>If certainty has not been achieved, then you should remain skeptical

This is like saying you should be skeptical of all scientific claims. But such a claim is in tension with the obvious successes of science and engineering despite the inherent tentativeness of scientific conclusions. Clearly we need something more nuanced. We can draw tentative conclusions and move forward with knowledge while also acknowledging the tentative nature of said knowledge. Global skepticism regarding all scientific results is paralyzing.

>The studies that determined this used datasets from wealthy Western countries that are more ethnically homogeneous than average.

It has to be for any such measure to be meaningful. For example, if you put a toddler in a box and starve it to death, its development stops completely. But this doesn't mean that environmental influence is 100% for all phenotypes. Heritability is a blunt measure for something highly multidimensional. As such, care must be used in its interpretation. What heritability tells us is that given similar environments, what variation in measurable traits is due to variation in genetics or variation in environment. An ideal measure of heritability is a function of environment and would be proportional to the rate of change of environmental influence at every step change in environment.

Of course, such a measure is impossible and so we're left with our current blunt measure. But we can reason about some features of the ideal measure. For example, environmental influences have diminishing returns, thus there comes a point at which the rate of change of environmental influence is zero, meaning better or worse environment has no bearing on the trait and genetic variation dominates outcomes. On the other extreme, environmental influences are dominant. The relevant questions for the validity of heritability is whether the rate of change of environmental influence is steep at the current average environment. If it is steep, then it invalidates drawing conclusions based on measured heritability as the value is unstable.

But your point about Dutch average height does not bear on this. The heritability measure is blind to global average changes in quality of environment. The fact that average height grew so substantially implies that the average environment changed substantially over that period. The Flynn effect is another example, where the average IQ across the population grew substantially over a similar time period. But this doesn't have any direct relevance to the heritability measure of IQ. The question is whether current measures of heritability are stable for typical variations in environment. Regarding height, I would guess yes as calories are abundant in the western world, even among the poor.

>You are literally invoking a textbook ad hominem fallacy.

Notice the word fallacy. Identifying logical fallacies by name is to help recognize patterns of invalid arguments. Ad hominem is only relevant if the argument is not valid. But my point a vacuous conceptual framework leading to specious conclusions is a valid argument.

Correct. Even making UTAustin guaranteed acceptance to the top 14% of the class instead of 7% would be better than adding another Harvard in Texas.

The non linearity of the rewards is the problem. I’m orders of magnitude worse off than my valedictorian, who went to an Ivy, because I didn’t get into any good schools. Abolish all of the top schools.

> All of us got deficient humanities educations at TJ.

Perhaps. For those of us who didn't even receive a mediocre STEM education at our take-all-comers schools and still certainly got a significantly worse humanities education than you, it engenders bitterness and anger that you're arguing for pulling up the rug behind you and preventing the next generation of children from having access to a high quality education.

> A ton of my friends who are TJ alumni now share stories (well over a decade later) of how TJ was the most toxic learning ecosystem they have ever been in.

Is it more toxic than having classes where kids turn up drunk and threateningly brandish knives?

> Perhaps. For those of us who didn't even receive a mediocre STEM education at our take-all-comers schools and still certainly got a significantly worse humanities education than you, it engenders bitterness and anger that you're arguing for pulling up the rug behind you and preventing the next generation of children from having access to a high quality education.

My wife went to a public school in Fairfax County. Her humanities education was much better than the one I received at TJ. I believe that this is the least controversial thing I've said on the topic. The humanities at TJ was just bad. Only two years of history. Curricula rigidly defined by the College Board. No approaches designed to really stretch students, since faculty were told that the humanities were a second class citizen and students should have more work time allocated to STEM. I know at least one teacher who resigned in protest (from what was otherwise a dream job) because of how terribly the humanities were treated.

Even if you believe that the only way to get a quality education in northern virginia is to attend TJ (which is just false), the proposed changes do not change the number of people who are able to attend. Different children would attend TJ, yes. But nobody is taking a stick of dynamite to blow up the school.

> Is it more toxic than having classes where kids turn up drunk and threateningly brandish knives?

I'm not sure you are super familiar with the rest of FCPS. The other public schools offer a large suite of AP or IB classes (depending on the program) that make it very very easy for smart students to avoid what you are describing. If you are actually concerned about this, go complain about the accelerated middle school programs - which are largely designed to stick accelerated programs in the lowest performing schools so they can bring the grades up.

TJ also had its fair share of this stuff. I know some people a few years off from me who had class with a kid that would regularly masturbate in class. I know students who were preyed on by teachers.

I’m aware of the general wisdom. If you can find any research supporting it my email is in my profile. Selecting by SAT and GPA alone would be very much against the interests of the socially elite. They wouldn’t be able to stop so many Asians getting in. See what happened in California after ending affirmative action in college admissions, a 20% jump in Asian admissions. That is the reason for the big push against the SAT and ACT. You can pay for higher grades by selecting the school with lower standards, you can pay for all the extracurriculars you want, you can lean on your connections for letters of recommendation but the gains from SAT tutoring and coaching are trivial no matter how much you pay. Holistic admissions is for the less gifted children of privilege.

The SAT, GRE, LSAT and similar lightly disguised IQ tests are designed to be as close to culture fair and uncoachable as possible and they do pretty well. Mostly the children of the well educated and rich get higher scores on them than the less fortunate for the same reason the children of professional basket players are tall. People resemble their parents.

The anecdote you recount about a question with a yacht never happened. The analogy question was removed in 2005[1].

[1] https://www.clearchoiceprep.com/sat-act-prep-blog/the-most-i...