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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.

And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.

But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.

And they've had the reigns and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.

pretty much:

https://i1.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/ccf_20170201_reeves_3.png?w=768&crop=0%2C0px%2C100%2C9999px&ssl=1

The black-white achievement gap has proven impervious to all efforts to fix it

same for the gender gap

https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/satnew.png

But individual absolute ability may have increased , but group differences persist. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that enough hasn't been tried. Policy makers have invested considerable money and effort at narrowing such gaps, with piss-poor results to show for it.

Regarding the gender gap in math ability, has any country tried to just make girls take twice as many math classes as boys do for a generation to see if that would reverse it?

Don't most girls not participate in such programs? You can only really expect to have an effect on the ones who participate, so if most don't participate, you are closer to not having the program at all than you are to having it for all the girls.

However, it seems difficult to explain lack of girls' participation in an all-girl coding camp by any form of male behavior. In that sense, code camp intervention has not been tested, but has been attempted, which is itself a test. Of course, motte = "patriarchy is fully general and can be hosted on female brains", bailey = "men are sexist and that's why women don't code".

If we take this entirely seriously, dismantling patriarchy here would require forcing girls to go to code camp.

AFAIK the mainstream hypothesis among child developmental psychologists is a self-socialization theory, where children mimic adults in their culture. The whole patriarchy thing is more of a feminist activist thing that doesn't necessarily generalize to the expert's views. Of course the experts might be wrong too, but I'm just saying, as far as I know nobody has tried whether raising children in a culture where math and technical subjects is more of a women's thing works.

Hm, that seems interesting but unfalsifiable. Even if parents try to pretend really hard that everyone is living in such a culture, can't you always say that the children are picking up on their deep-seated true social beliefs?

That said, it would be fascinating to attempt this. (If all kinds of unethical.) Gonzo homeschooling girlcoder conspiracy when?

edit: Of course, another problem: "We formed a community of 500 female programmers." How do you screen off genetic causes? Everyone adopts?

edit: If self-socialization is correct, but so is sexual preference differences, wouldn't this cause significant suffering as boys and girls attempt to fit themselves to a role they're not suited for in an attempt to fit in with their parents? Then again, plausibly "not much more than ordinary growing up."

edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.

edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?

edit: I wonder to what degree growing up in a progressive family and school environment already approximates this.

edit: ! Can you test to which degree girls who grow up in prog environments go into programming vs trad? If this thesis is true, shouldn't it have some effect?

The theory is that children mimic same-sex adults, not that children do as same-sex adults tell them to. Doing what adults tell them to would be highly exploitable, so children often contradict instructions from adults.

Masculine/feminine work interests are fairly independent of progressivism/conservativism, so children would not be exposed to more gender-atypical work interests from their parents that way. However I've seen feminists provide a study showing that girls who had more masculine mothers grew up to be more masculine in lifestyle as adults.

But that study seems obviously genetically confounded. However you could adjust for the genetic confounding because the genetic effect should apply to both parents whereas the self-socialization effect should be sex-specific. I considered setting up a study for that once, but I got distracted.