Shame on you, this is a "no true scotsman" argument.
"I don't want to argue X but proceeds to argue X" is a common yet despicable rhetoric trick.
Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
441–450 of 756 posts
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#442From the article: Over the next year, a biosciences working group revised the program’s funding guidelines, stipulating in the final draft that it would not support any research into the first-order effects of genes on behavior or social outcomes. The fact that this area is controversial suggests to me that it is worth exploration. I’ve taught mathematics at community colleges for over 20 years and I’m absolutely con…
Here's a thought I've been tossing around: It's a community college, everyone is supposed to pass. At some point at the bottom of intelligence but with motivation to go to school and try and work and do the assignments, meritocracy literally doesn't matter. Because a diploma is needed even for minimum wage jobs. Why penalize people who are trying by failing them out of the simplest classes? Rich idiots fail up, poor…
It does matter in this sense. Students who are poor end up taking on debt for college and this debt is currently (mostly) unforgivable. If we had universal higher education this objection of mine goes by the wayside. But then a new objection rises up.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#443Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. Certain ethnic groups and families, on average, are more likely to have certain traits and less likely to have others. But genetics doesn't matter , in that just because you have "bad" genetics doesn't mean you'll suck, whether it comes to weightlifting, intelligence, temperment, etc. Maybe you won't be in the top 0.0001%, but…
Sure, that's a good point generally but doesn't seem at all the problem the article is addressing. Skimming it, it's about progressives denying group differences at all and calling those who research them 'equivalent to Holocaust Deniers'. From following genetics research and researchers, I've seen plenty of that, and I don't see the relevance of your point here.
Well, a major problem is that the groups being studied are often either very poorly defined - things like 'black people' or 'Ashkenazi jews', which are entirely social categories, with little to no effort in most IQ studies to actually establish genetic group markers.
Other times, studies look at groups with much more proeminent socio-economic differences than genetic ones (countries, neighborhoods). Here the genetic factor is impossible to isolate from the other factors, making genetic claims dubious.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#444Genetics has a huge influence on what someone is predisposed to and what they can achieve. Certain ethnic groups and families, on average, are more likely to have certain traits and less likely to have others. But genetics doesn't matter , in that just because you have "bad" genetics doesn't mean you'll suck, whether it comes to weightlifting, intelligence, temperment, etc. Maybe you won't be in the top 0.0001%, but…
The catch here would be thinking in distributions, and from that separating individuals from said distributions. A current topic would be representation within a given domain. Particularly since in most representation cases (high paying jobs, celebrities, top universities, etc), we're already looking at the tails of the distribution. There, small shifts can heavily affect the quantity of users in the right tail, espe…
But it's a bad idea to compare the world's fastest runners with people getting high paying jobs - that's the main point of the GP's comment. Even for something as clearly and uncontroversially genetically influenced as running ability, the group differences only really matter for the top 100 people out of 7 billion. If you look at top 100k runners, the group differences are almost entirely gone. Even more, the top 100k runners are probably within a second or two of each other - entirely irrelevant if you were to hire based on a bar of performance, and not some elitist concept of hiring the very best possible.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#445Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don’t know what an ad hominem is. You are incorrectly applying the definition. It is not an argumentative fallacy to ask the basis by which a person’s assertions have been formed. You’ve made lots of claims about teaching but clearly you have no experience to back it up and (this is important) you have not provided any citations to back up your assertions. People have to make judgments with imperfect knowledge. I…
I didn't say it was an argumentative fallacy to ask the basis by which a person's assertions have been formed, I said it was a fallacy to say a person's assertions are wrong because of some aspect of themselves, which is what's taken place here by insisting I must be a calculus teacher in order to challenge your assertion that IQ is the primary source of the problems your students have with learning in your classroom…
I committed to not responding to you in a different thread. I did not commit to not responding to you in all threads. The teacher in me forced me to try to explain to you why your use of ad hominem was incorrect. My previous response had nothing to do with what was being discussed as such. Your conclusions have not been logically valid.
Here’s an example:
… I must be a calculus teacher in order to challenge your assertion that IQ is the primary source of the problems your students have with learning in your classrooms..
No one has said any of these things and no one has implied any of these things. I never said or implied that IQ is the primary source of anything. No one believes that you must be a teacher of calculus to be right. What people have wondered is if you are a teacher because some of your statements seem to the the type of statements only a non teacher would make.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree - we have excellent tooling avaliable to cram and compile code into smallest CPUs, but our teaching methods are still the same as they were in 1800's
I think this reveals a lot of ignorance on the huge amounts of different teaching methodologies and techniques that have risen and fallen over the last 100 years.
I have spent 15 years in the educatuonal system and I feel I am qualified to state that the methods are very obsolete.
A week of playing Kerbal Space programm gave me better understanding of orbits than years studying calculus, physics, general and special relativity.
It has poor applicability in everyday life - we learn all the biology of a cell but kid's don't know the difference between aspirin and ibuprophene.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#447This is really more of a science-religion issue than a science-science one. It is more akin to Galileo being tried for heresy for claiming that the sun is the center of the solar system. Though in this case the religion is progressivism. And the keystone of progressive dogma is that "All groups are born completely equal and any achievement difference is the result of racism by white people or sexism by men." And if i…
It's understandable for people to collectively react negatively to genocidal tropes getting pushed once more with great enthusiasm. This shit never goes away, and Nazis were not in the least theoretical: one could say what made Nazis Nazis was a game plan, one that's very specific. Also, the keystone of progressive dogma is that there is VALUE in the wellbeing of all types of people, contrasting with conservative dog…
>progressive dogma ... contrasting with conservative dogma
That's a false dichotomy and really the core of my complaint. Instead of dogma, we should be striving towards facts based on empirical evidence. Science.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#448Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, this has long term negative effects but I need a job and don’t need the stress of being hounded by administration. The way to make sure your students all pass is to do your job , those students need a teacher that cares and not one that 'needs a job', and preferably one that does not start off with the self-reinforcing viewpoint that a good fraction of them are too dumb to learn the material on offer. Seriousl…
You know nothing about my teaching or what I do for my students. Did I say a good fraction of the students can’t learn algebra? I never said or implied anything of the sort. All I said is that some people can’t learn it. I gave an extreme example of such a person. I didn’t say anything regarding how large the set of people who can’t learn algebra is other than that this set is larger than the set of intellectually di…
> You know nothing about my teaching or what I do for my students.
I actually do because I read all of your comments in this thread.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
Genes describe lot of things from obese tendency to height to IQ to your looks. If someone has an IQ of 70, there are very likely to live a difficult life. Yes IQ is not intelligence you will say but still there is a limit to everyday functioning if someone's IQ is low. Ask a conventional ugly person(specially female) about their life.
> from obese tendency Which should make you rather skeptical of inferring just how innate IQ really is (assuming it's a valid concept). The heritability correlations for obesity are only slightly weaker than IQ. Yet we know for a fact the logical complexity of losing weight is simple (doesn't mean it's easy). Anyone can and people do lose weight, even if statistically it may be rather unlikely. It's completely plausi…
Not to mention, obesity has increased by an order of magnitude in 50 years, with no signs of stopping. It's actually a nice example of how little genetic variance can actually matter at the population level, especially since it is a much more objective measure than IQ tests.
Re: Can progressives be convinced that genetics matters?
#450Chomsky 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…
> assumptions which he brilliantly lays bare and then demolishes. He also questions the scientific significance of the research, even if it is true - a phrase he uses a lot. Absolutely true. Even if it's true, the society should not give ammunition to closet racists with their attempts to stealthily legitimise racism. Equally so, in the current immigration debacle, we need to call things their own names. What these p…
I wonder how many people who throw accusations of "closet X" and "stealth Y" so easily are, in fact, themselves closet X and stealth Y and generalize about other people based on their own carefully hidden prejudices.