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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   31313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:

  • The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
  • The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
  • The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
  • They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
  • The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
  • Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
  • I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.

Call me a dirt poor europrole, but I would rather get $480K (plus interest/stock increases) when turning 18 years old, instead of my parents paying half a million for Duolingo.

It tickles the mind though how education could be disrupted/advanced by modern tech.

Or maybe it is not so important after all? One comment on the blog claimed that Finland and Japan have similar PISA scores, despite Japan/Asia being famous for forcing children to grind obscene hours for school.

How much of the Asian academic system is spent on teaching/necessary repetition of core subjects, as opposed to ridiculous grinding scoremaxx training on standardized tests? Asian countries are rather famous for this.

PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.

Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country

I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.

Finland collects fairly granular data on languages spoken in Finland, which are often used as a proxy for "foreignness". Here's a table with the numbers of approximately school age children by language family, showing that a large majority continues to be Finno-Ugric speakers and the next largest groups are Germanic speakers (including Finland-Swedes) and Slavic speakers (including recent Ukrainian refugees).

this interesting chart,

Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.

That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.

If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.

I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.

tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???

Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.

That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.

I suspect that it's some amount of selection bias as well. Specifically, being multi-racial is higher class than being single-race, so people with X% of their genes from one race and Y% from another would answer differently on the survey based on their class.

I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds.

Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.

Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.

I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.

Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."

We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.

thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are

Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.

Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"

That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."

I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.

To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...

A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor

A + B ⇒ C

So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)

Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.

I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:

It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,

But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.

We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.

The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal. You can't make it up by emphasizing word "empirically". SES is not a confounder because there are genetic differences in SES. Higher IQ allows for person to have upwards mobility and trasmit their higher IQ genotypes to their children. This process has been run many times.

"IQ" of 2 year children in these plots is ludicrous. Certainly it does not measure same thing at 2 yo as it does for 16 yos. People may have different IQ trajectories in childhood and only final thing is what matters.

that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing

Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems. Maybe smell either.

The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal.

And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.

Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems

Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.

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Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there

I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.

Exactly. Korean tests are, by their very nature, actually not good at assessing intelligence. It's all multiple choice. You can't do writing as multiple choice, you need an essay response to assess real comprehension. But if there's an essay then it becomes subjective and open to endless appeals and lawyering, whereas multiple choice is consistent, uniform and totally fair. Just get the right answer loser!

I remember having to study the 'theme' of 'belonging' in some awful book English teachers probably think is profound. That did not help me understand or wield English any better. The only way to get better is to read and write widely, not obsessively study a single text at 10x the intensity of what I was doing just because it's on the test.

The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.

The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.

The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.

You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".

To add to these examples, in later rounds of the US physician licensing examination (USMLE Step 3) they will sometimes ask questions which are designed to be novel - no way you know this specific fact or have seen it in a board prep resource. You are then asked to determine what would be the most likely answer based off of your understanding of the underlying biology and so on.

These are hard to do so you don't see too many of them, but it is possible.

Not much of a comment on the rest of your post- I broadly pretty much agree and appreciate the exponentiation on my point- but I think a huge supermajority of Finnish immigrants are very recent, so all of them are first or second gen.

I suppose it's possible that there was some large Sami-Finn fertility differential that opened up exactly the right time ago, but my guess is that the Sami don't have scores that much lower than the Finnish majority anyways. My guess would be changing teaching practices with bad results, but I don't think we have the data to really tell.

this interesting chart

I don't think this really means anything. It certainly doesn't imply that 'actually the US education system is a good as X's'. If you let all the other countries filter out their historic underclass then they'd probably go up as well. Whatever reason you ascribe that underclass status to, it has to be at least partly self-reinforcing a la Ogbu.

I have a genuine question- most of continental Europe uses a three tier education system with kids destined for college, trade school, and unskilled labour literally in different schools. Do European countries administer the PISA test to all levels of school or only the gymnasia? If the latter, it would have much the same effect as only testing middle class white kids in the US.

A bit of a late reply but it includes all types of schools. If you dig into the data there's a division between academic and vocational streams. It doesn't include kids that have completely dropped out of school though, which is relevant for some countries.

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