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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34334 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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While I disagree with Freddie deBoer on a lot of things, especially his ongoing war with his commentariat about gender, his thoughts on education seem pretty solid. His new post https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/education-commentary-is-dominated is no exception, though he puts in a bit of boilerplate declaring on faith that of course groups can be equalized somehow, even if individuals can't, despite giving no reason to believe that of any particular group or groups. This seems a pretty paltry fig leaf, but oh well.

I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now. Based on his blogging, he seems to think that moving money from smart, productive people to stupid, unproductive people is the best solution, but this doesn't solve the fundamental question of allowing people who can't contribute much economically to live in a worthwhile fashion that allows self respect.

My state legislature has been debating plans to fiddle about with small levers at the margins to make up for Covid losses and "improve education." The levers are very small indeed. An extra half hour in the day? More private bathroom stalls? The only topic that made some sort of sense was career and technical education. I've been thinking about one side of this, trying to help my husband fix a leak this morning, and reading some thoughts from Internaught at DSL lately about crumbling infrastructure. Every time I interact with a Trades produced physical object, I realize that they are made for the large, strong hands of a young man who has been working on manipulating physical objects with weight and mass for years and decades. This probably makes sense from a materials engineering perspective -- assume that a mechanic or tradesman will be interacting with the object, and it can be heavier, with a tighter seal, probably more durable. But it seems like something of a hard sell, getting people to work with these heavy, sturdy objects for decades at a time when they don't have to, and don't get much status out of it, and most people can't afford . Giving out money doesn't seem all that helpful when we're all living in a crumbling, unfixable physical environment, and the computers can do 80% of the writing, calculating, and art, but can't keep the utilities repaired.

I would like to see more emphasis on humans as embodied, physical, tool using beings, but am not sure what steps might lead in that direction. I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year. I don't really know where to go with these thoughts, though. It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.

I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now.

Read my review instead, my review is substantially better than his book, and that's not my way of saying that my review is especially good.

It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.

Something else deBoer wrote recently really resonated with me, and seems relevant:

like all political movements, the woke political movement is captured by the urge to occupy elevated status within it

Most educators don't give half a damn about genuinely improving the minds of the children they educate. Sure, they'll performatively care, they can talk a good game because that's the kind of signaling they are expected to deliver. But if you released, say, an adaptive computer program that could deliver a K-12 curriculum to a child at their own pace, with as good or better results than the average K-12 in-person education, without the need to leave their house or pay for school buildings or pay teachers--you would not change American public education in any perceptible way. K-12 school exist primarily to provide free daycare, and secondarily to give teachers government jobs. The movement to "educate children" is entirely captured by people who are extracting resources from the public for their own personal and political gain. That doesn't mean there aren't teachers involved who genuinely care about kids! But their care is largely incidental, except as it improves their ability to signal "cooperate" to the people running the show.

And the show in question is anti body. It has been this way from the beginning--read Socrates complaining about sex and tasty food as distractions from the really important stuff, like pure mathematics, and then check the latest memes on horny jail or eating bugs to save the planet and tell me how far we've really come, 25 centuries later. Once we were promised transcendence through death and salvation; today we are hoping for transcendence through mind uploads. "Disregard body, elevate mind" has certainly gotten occasional pushback (e.g. Epicurus, or more recently the free-love hippies) but attending to the well being of whole humans is not, and has not for most of history been, the goal of the greatest thinkers. In fact many of today's purportedly greatest thinkers will pretend to be deeply offended if you suggest e.g. that being born "into" a geno- and phenotypically female body is in any way pertinent to one's personal, human identity.

In that world, looking for ways to give kids more "physical, sensory experiences" isn't just low-status, it's downright subversive (and indeed: self-improvement through physical exercise is often negatively coded, especially when it arises in masculinity-building contexts).

Thank you for the links, the review was helpful.

I've recently become more aware of the extent to which school decisions are governed by things like bus schedules, physical infrastructure, and unwieldy scheduling -- elementary school lunch rooms that can only accommodate one grade level at a time, combined gym/auditorium/lunchroom set ups, so it's extremely difficult to have whole school assemblies, and everything is in tightly scheduled batches, five or six day specials rotations, complex pull-out schedules with mandatory blocks when they can't be pulled out, and so on. Within an existing school or district, almost everything is necessity, almost nothing possibility.

I was substitute teaching for a while at a high school with a culinary arts class that had a real, professional kitchen. The teens seemed genuinely very happy about it, and would bring me tasty fresh food sometimes, so I was also happy about it. It was the kinds of foods teens actually enjoy eating together -- beignets and omelettes and quesadillas. Even if not many of them ended up working in restaurants, I'm sure their families and friends were happy about it. At another school, we made ribbon skirts, and painted a culturally traditional mural. This was also lovely. If I were education czar, and it seemed likely I would probably include "make more beignets" as an initiative, even if the long term goal was Communism.

While we're discussing DeBoer, I want to briefly talk about his post immediately prior to this one, Of Course You Know What Woke Means.

In typical DeBoer fashion, he makes a lot of poignant points about the nature of the woke, but ultimately misses the forest for the trees. Woke isn't a 'school of social and cultural liberalism', nor is the 'woke approach to solutions to politics is relentlessly individualistic'. DeBoer does what virtually every old school anti-woke materialist socialist/Marxist does when talking about the woke - completely ignore the reality the woke/critical social justice is a leftist movement that shares some roots (even if it has developed distinctly) with the Marxism that DeBoer and people like him support. DeBoer obviously would rather incorrectly lay the blame squarely at the feet of 'liberalism' (the arch-nemesis of Marxism), then in anyway implicate Marxist concepts through association with the woke. While DeBoer does vaguely allude to the woke being 'leftist', it's pretty clear DeBoer believes that wokism is liberalism that has evolved into a quasi-leftist movement, rather than wokism genuinely descending from leftism and overtaking liberal sentiment.

Marcuse was not liberal. Angela Davis is not liberal. Bell Hooks was not liberal. Ibram Kendi is not liberal. The underlying ideology and philosophy of woke is not liberal. The fact that 'liberals' have been adopting this ideology while still (mis)labelling themselves liberal does not make woke liberal.

more emphasis on humans as embodied, physical, tool using beings, but am not sure what steps might lead in that direction.

Everyone wants this and everyone want to make sure their kids go to college and become symbol manipulators. Tragedy of the commons, ain’t it great?

I don't necessarily want my daughters to become symbol manipulators. Sure, I'm glad they're not growing up in a society where they have to be oyster shuckers at six, seamstresses at 12, bear, cook for, and clean for 8 children, and blind at 50.

But there's a lot of space between that and a laptop career, which doesn't seem like a great idea either.

I dunno why so many people, including especially college educated people in white collar jobs, are hostile to the idea that the trades are overrated. I have observed this on both sides of the aisle and especially over the past 2 years. Yeah, if the trades are great, then quit your office job and do trades. I don't see anyone taking up the offer. But the catch is, you have to downgrade your living standards accordingly (you cannot just do trades and live off your accumulated savings). There is this romanticized notion that people doing things with their hands is superior or more authentic to dealing with abstractions (although some trades work does require decent math aptitude).

If one cannot cut it in college, then the trades are probably a better alternative , although it's not like that is the only option, but the data still shows college is better, even . The biggest mistake is the college-for-everyone default, which can account for the high attrition rate, not that college itself is a bad deal.

It seems like PMC people have better lives in almost every way compared to trades people, college indoctrination notwithstanding, but yeah, let's choose the worse option instead because it's more pure.

Because white collar types have no idea how much it sucks to work a blue collar job.

A white collar worker pays $400 for a plumber and somehow thinks the plumber gets to keep all that. They don't realize the plumber is just an employee making $30/hour. In any case, the plumbing company has to pay for a million things including an office, someone to answer the phone, trucks, equipment, gas, driving to the job site, health insurance, social security, medicare, people who don't answer the door, people who don't pay, licensing, bonding, worker's comp, family medical leave, Yelp advertising, and all the dozens of fees imposed by city, county, state, and federal governments, etc... The owner of the plumbing company will probably get rich, but only at extreme personal cost. In the end a business making 500k in profit might sell for only 2-3x yearly earnings because everyone wants to collect a paycheck, not to be responsible for a giant hassle.

There's a reason almost anyone who has a choice chooses a white collar job.

It's not unheard of for the plumber to be the owner of the plumbing company ... but yeah, even in white-collar "guy sits at a desk working billable hours all day" jobs the overhead may be more than the salary, and I believe it's much worse for blue-collar non-desk jobs. I sometimes have contractors coming from 60 miles away, and the company may be billing me $400 for an hour's work but they're having to pay for the commute and the downtime too.

I'd also add "someone to do the accounting" to your list. Between tax issues (I just had to file an amended return, over a situation 5% as complicated as what a typical small business deals with...) and money management issues (wanna just trust Silicon Valley Bank to handle everything?) it seems like an indispensable skill for a small business owner to have access to.

IME tradesmen are mostly not ‘couldn’t cut it in college’ types, because the trades generally reward IQ even if there’s no requirement to formally prove your brainpower. Instead what really distinguishes tradesmen from their white collar counterparts is some combination of poor socialization/lack of patience for professional class niceties/general unwillingness to conform with the authorities of the day which prevents or retards academic success. That’s also where the stereotype of all being divorced alcoholics comes from- poor socialization and unwillingness to be polite or follow others’ arbitrary preferences is, well, exactly what I just said.

Personally, I'm probably thinking more of lower middle class, education sorts of people who can't maintain our houses, and also can't afford to hire anyone else to do it either, but this may be specific to my own experience.

In this context, I'm also thinking of Freddie's solution of "so give people money then," which seems like a recipe for more currency chasing less goods and services, since there doesn't seem to be any attempt at replacing symbol manipulation with anything communally useful. But as I've said, I haven't read The Cult of Smart, and there might be more about that there.

I think a big part of the debate is fundemental disagreement about what actually constitutes "the worse option"

I'll be very happy if my daughter learns a physical trade and makes a decent living by it, and rather the opposite if she decides to go to university to get a useless degree or to fail getting a useful one. So please specify who you mean by everyone.

I'll be very happy if my daughter learns a physical trade and makes a decent living by it

Would you, though?

Consider that jobs come with a physiognomy and a daughter who looks like "Barry, 63, Plumber" ain't gonna be fighting off suitors to give you grandchildren. Are you still very happy?

  • -10

Not the OP, but it she's happy, then yes, I'm happy too.

I have some doubts about that. Granted, women in trades are rare, but the few that I know or otherwise see appear normal, and not like old men. Low on make-up, rather tomboyish, somewhat more butch than the average woman but by no means extreme. Perhaps the sample size is too small, perhaps it's a regional peculiarity, maybe it's my perception that's off, but I don't see them as being substantially less attractive or lower-status than women in female-coded jobs.

Unless they all turn bad at some point and become literally indistinguishable from men, in which case ouch, but I have no anecdotal evidence for that.

Low on make-up, rather tomboyish

Note that you have to dress in a practical manner for these jobs. If you do any kind of physical work you can't dress up much, it'll just get ruined and get in the way of your work. You don't know what they look like when they're out on a date.

True. But I'd take that in favor of my observations that women in trades don't look terrible.

If we are pulling extremes - how does the chances of grandchildren compare to those of non binary, blue haired, rabid feminist with useless degree in gender studies writing for something even more two or three tiers below Jezebel?

I would be totally fine with my kid becoming an electrician or welder. I think if he's smart enough he would have a higher quality of life as a member of the laptop class, but in a trade it would still be a lot higher than you get delivering pizzas. I know a lot of people who didn't quite cut it in college and now work as cashiers or baristas or waiters in their early 30s. I think those are the type of people that should really be looking at trade school. They're easily smart enough to work in a skilled trade but are wasting their potential in totally unskilled work because the only paths they saw in life were white collar work like their parents or to just keep doing the part time jobs they had in school.

If you can be a doctor or an engineer or something then by all means do that, but mediocre students should be shunted towards trades instead of being sold a bill of goods that in college they will discover previously unknown academic talents once they take out $50k in student loans.

but mediocre students should be shunted towards trades instead of being sold a bill of goods that in college they will discover previously unknown academic talents once they take out $50k in student loans.

The thing is, people think trades are for slackers ..not really. You need good work ethic to succeed at it. You have to take instruction well, have respect for your own safety and those around you, and 'hustle'. Probably barista or cashier jobs is all these people can do, lacking the brains or the conscientiousness to succeed at college or the trades.

Also ,trades school is expensive too (google search shows a $5-15k, which is not insignificant and even close to college), buying tools, and certification . At least with college debt you have more payment options, lower interest rates, more forgiveness plans and so on, plus a valued credential. If you fail to graduate, then , yeah, the money is wasted.

I was listening to a podcast the other day by a Waldorf kindergarten teacher who had started taking his classes on walks to the park all morning, every morning, and that it worked out very well for them, but this was a nice, safe forest park in a place with decent weather much of the year.

I have a middle-schooler who, last year, was in a homeschool pod with, sort of accidentally, a lot of vaccine-wary Waldorf-defectors. They did the walk/bike to a park almost every day. We pulled her out of that pod this year because the plan was to spend essentially all day every day in the forest. The only math that was on the curriculum was in the spring when it was needed to plot out and build a big garden. All the reading was going to be nature-related non-fiction. No history at all. There's probably a healthy balance between intellectual and practical education, but it's easy to go too far in one direction.

Yes, the Waldorf style of education wherein there is a lot of walking in parks and very little actual education is fine for a five-year-old who basically just needs babysitting, but becomes more problematic for older kids who are actually capable of non-trivial learning.

Because of the risk of stunting children's intellectual development, I wouldn't recommend either for children old enough to attend primary school, but if you must, choose Montessori over Waldorf. Montessori is basically Waldorf without the bizarre pseudoscientific religion and occult agriculture.

Yes, that seems likely. I dropped an application to teach at a school like that once, because it involved a lot of storytelling and very little income.

I was homeschooled, and for several years my study of math consisted of being given a math textbook (not even Khan academy lessons or something!) and asked to study it. I was in my mid twenties when I realized that I wasn't just unusually bad at math, and that I probably could have gone into something tech adjacent if I had taken actual classes.

From the post

performance spectrum early in life, with remarkable consistency; that the most natural and simplest explanation for this tendency is that there is such a thing as individual academic potential; and that the most likely source of this individual academic potential is [edit] likely influenced by genes. When we look at academic performance, what we see again and again is that students perform at a given level relative to peers early in schooling and maintain that level throughout formal education. (I make that case at considerable length here.) A vast number of interventions thought to influence relative performance have been revealed to make no difference in rigorous research, including truly dramatic changes to schooling and environment. Meta-analyses and literature reviews that assess the strength of many different educational interventions find effect sizes in the range of .01 to .3 standard deviations, small by any standards and subject to all sorts of questions about research quality and randomization. Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.

Individualized tutoring shows promise (2-sigma problem), but does not scale well, I suppose. Nor does it ameliorate relative differences; if everyone is being tutored, innate differences of ability will still manifest.

Based on his blogging, he seems to think that moving money from smart, productive people to stupid, unproductive people is the best solution,

This is what any social welfare program does, but some like socialism do it more or worse than others.

Individualized tutoring shows promise (2-sigma problem), but does not scale well, I suppose.

A killer app for gpt 5?

Nor does it ameliorate relative differences; if everyone is being tutored, innate differences of ability will still manifest.

Another reason not to care about inequality - a world in which everyone is two standard deviations smarter is better, even if the variance doesn't change.

I find deBoer very frustrating.

He's a smart guy. He clearly articulates a lot of problems with leftist ideology, and he can speak to those problems more authentically than most critics because he is a leftist. An unapologetic, literal Marxist, not an "anti-woke ex-liberal" or a "disaffected gray triber" but someone who actually thinks most leftists aren't leftist enough.

And yet I feel like he circles around the truth and will sort of vaguely gesture in its general direction, but will not confront it because he cannot stand what he will see.

I say this as someone who has reluctantly concluded that HBD is largely true, and wishes it wasn't. I think that's where Freddie is at, except he can't make the leap from "It would be really unfortunate and sad if this were true" to "It's true."

A lot of his solutions are actually practicable even (especially) if HBD is true! He has a humane and realistic vision of a world where some kids just aren't ever going to be capable of doing higher math or engineering or much beyond basic literacy. But he cannot force himself to consider a gap beyond "individual differences," and we'll never be able to realistically adopt a model that accepts that some kids, by virtue of "individual differences," are just not college material, and also that by sheer unhappy coincidence most of those kids are non-white.

On the other hand, I don't see a realistic path towards acknowledging a reality - if it is reality - that not by coincidence, most non-white/Asian kids aren't cut out for higher education. So we are stuck. But Freddie seems particularly stuck. I wonder if in his heart of hearts, he doubts what he says publicly, or if he really is a true believer.

I think he's very similar on the trans issue. He can very accurately point out all the problems with trans ideology and the logical fallacies displayed by trans activists, except the central one. Maybe he really, truly believes TWAW, or maybe he just believes that the harm of denying TWAW is greater than the harm of admitting they are not.

In liberal countries, I am not sure that it really should matter much on the political level whether HBD is true. Even if it becomes widely accepted as true, in liberal societies that should not lead to any significantly different political policies. HBD being true would not justify race-based discrimination. Even support for affirmative action does not need to rely on the belief in racial equality. It can be supported on the grounds that certain groups of people were oppressed in the past, which leads to modern-day consequences for them.

As long as society stayed liberal, I think that probably little would change if tomorrow HBD being true became the dominant opinion. Now of course we have plenty of authoritarians here on The Motte who will be happy to argue that HBD being true is yet another good reason for why society should stop being liberal. I like living in a liberal society, though, so my ideal would be that people could argue about whether HBD is true or not while decoupling it from the idea of what political policies society should follow. Being a liberal, in my view the truth or falsity of HBD should have about zero impact on political policy. At most, if HBD became widely accepted as true, it would lessen the degree to which people would support race-baiting political programs which depend for their support on the notion of the white boogeyman. But I already do not support those programs, HBD being true or not changes nothing for me in that regard.

Let’s suppose in this theoretical scenario that an investigation reveals that despite making up 13% of the population, African-Americans comprised only 3% of all new hires at, say, IBM in the last fiscal year. When accused of racial discrimination, IBM rejects this and claims that their hiring practices are based on merit. They produce a bunch of paperwork to prove this etc. Since HBD is no longer tabooized in this scenario, a bunch of journalists, pundits etc. side with IBM and claim that their argument is sound. They provide a bunch of statistics, surveys etc. to prove this.

Then what? How do the supporters of liberal democracy react?

They react by saying "Oh, I guess you are not discriminating based on race, you are discriminating based on merit. Carry on then!".

Supporting liberal democracy is completely compatible with believing that HBD is true.

Only in theory.

The theory behind affirmative action is that the formerly oppressed group needs a helping hand to start but it isn’t permanent. The race (as in marathon) example is used. If someone starts on mile 5 it isn’t a fair race. But implicit in this analogy is that the racers are generally the same. If the racers aren’t identical, then it might not be that someone starts on mile 5. They just might be faster.

So instead of corrupting everything by hiring substandard talent maybe we just end affirmative action and make direct financial payments to the “disadvantaged.”

This was the justification for affirmative action 1.0, and is occasionally still evident as a first line of defense, but aa 2.0 is based on two completely different ideas:

  • That diversity makes organizations stronger in a variety of ways.

  • Proportional representation is required for organizations to be "democratic", in the somewhat novel sense of engaging the whole population.

The first one also falls under HBD. Only the last one, that diversity is necessary for race-based democratic representation, remains. Which makes affirmative action into a race based spoils system.

Even if it becomes widely accepted as true, in liberal societies that should not lead to any significantly different political policies.

The entire affirmative action policy regime depends on the assumption that group disparities are a problem that can be rectified. You say that affirmative action can be justified even with belief in HBD, because some of the disparities could be the result of discrimination. Disparities being the result of discrimination would be hard to falsify in a world of HBD-believers, but more importantly I think the same incentives to play the victim would exist as they currently do. I suspect few people will be satisfied accepting that they're innately less capable when they can easily and unfalsifiably claim to be victims of discrimination, systemic or otherwise.

You're also missing the most important policy that would change in a world of HBD-believers: immigration. Once you accept HBD, it seems to me to be straightforwardly horrifying and despair-inducing to witness what our society is doing to itself with its immigration policies, and to contemplate the implications of extrapolating these trends a century or two into the future.

The entire affirmative action policy regime depends on the assumption that group disparities are a problem that can be rectified.

I think there's a redistributive justification too, as well as a representational justification, as well as a justification premised on the purported instrumental organizational benefits of diversity. I happen not to find any of those justifications persuasive, but affirmative action supporters do not have all of their eggs in the remediation basket.

A liberal society that accepted HBD would not be arguing over whether or not to impose race-based immigration policies because such policies would be clearly illiberal. It would instead, just like it does now, be arguing over whether or not to impose immigration policies based on the prospective immigrants' level of intelligence and/or civilizedness. Arguing for race-based immigration policies is very unpopular in current Western society and in a liberal society that accepted HBD it would still be very unpopular because race-based immigration policies are clearly illiberal and unfair in the sense that they would discriminate based on group characteristics rather than individual characteristics. So in a liberal society that accepted HBD, the conversation would still revolve - much like it does in actual modern Western society - over whether or not society should make immigration policies that discriminate based on prospective immigrants' level of intelligence and/or civilizedness (roughly speaking, actual modern conservatives are in favor of such and actual modern progressives are opposed to such). HBD acceptance would not change immigration policies unless society as a whole significantly began to give up liberalism to an even greater degree than current anti-white policies represent an abandonment of liberalism. The anti-white policies at least pretend to be justified by liberalism, whereas a society in which immigration policies were being directly driven by HBD awareness would be a society in which there was not even the pretense of liberalism at least when it comes to this issue.

I don't see why restricting immigration based on group identity is antithetical to liberalism. People who are not lawful residents of a country are not owed the same treatment as that country's lawful residents. We discriminate amongst would-be immigrants all the time and in all manner of ways that liberalism would rightly demand we not treat our own lawful residents. For example, a categorical ban on immigration from people who believe in certain ideologies or who have illnesses likely to make them a public charge.

And while selecting based on individual characteristics rather than group characteristics is ideal in theory, in practice it runs up against the problem of regression to the mean - children of people at the high end of their group's bell curve end up closer to that group's mean than their parents' giftedness would predict.

There's also the additional problem of the possibility of HBD being applicable to group personality differences. We might not want a substantial portion of our population to belong to groups that, for whatever reason, differ in personality in ways that are at odds with our culture (e.g., individualism vs collectivism, work ethic, intellectual curiosity, and so on). It can be hard to test for this sort of thing, and it also probably involves some amount of regression to the mean. We may rightly decide that's just not a risk worth taking for a bit of a boost in GDP.

In the old model of striving for a colorblind meritocratic society, I would agree with you. Individuals would be judged as individuals, and if some individuals fall short, well, them's the breaks (but a robust social safety net should make sure nobody starves).

Unfortunately, the current model of racial justice is based on equity, not equality, and very broad and constantly expanding indictments of "whiteness." Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo are the most visible and oft-cited flagbearers of this model, but when people talk about "CRT" this is usually what they are talking about.

The problem with this model is that it excludes any possibility of differential outcomes except as a result of white supremacy. Thus, if blacks don't make up 13% of Harvard grads, 13% of doctors, 13% of Congressmen, 13% of company CEOs, etc., the cause cannot be anything other than racism.

Obviously, if HBD is true, this would present a problem, as such a model would be based on a false premise, and "equity" could only be achieved by artificially promoting less qualified people.

One could argue, as you do, that we should do that anyway, that AA isn't just about correcting systemic bias but also reparations for past injustices. (Incidentally, this isn't how AA was originally sold - the premise was the Ibram X. Kendi one, that everyone is equally talented and it's only white supremacy keeping black people down, and if you correct for racism, then black people will rise to their correct level.) But if HBD became widely accepted as true, I think you would have a growing problem of people Noticing what presently is impolitic to notice.

I actually do not support affirmative action, I was just pointing out that one could still make rational arguments in favor of affirmative action even if HBD was widely accepted as true.

I also dislike the equity model of racial justice. I am one of those liberals who wants the model of color-blindness, judging each individual by their individual characteristics, and free scientific inquiry unhampered by the fact that the discoveries might make some people feel uncomfortable.

that not by coincidence, most non-white/Asian kids aren't cut out for higher education.

You just went from "some" to "most" here.

There's a reason why HBD has bad associations and it's not all "progressives like to call people racist". You really need to avoid going any farther than you can support, because making mistakes has big consequences.

I have no idea whether it's some or most. That is why I do not embrace the Repugnant Conclusion as readily as hardcore HBDers do.

Most humans are not cut out for higher education. 120 IQ which I think is the minimum for a "real" degree is like 90th percentile of IQ.

Sorry for not counting gender studies and "entrpreneurship" majors.

I say this as someone who has reluctantly concluded that HBD is largely true, and wishes it wasn't. I think that's where Freddie is at, except he can't make the leap from "It would be really unfortunate and sad if this were true" to "It's true."

Every other page of his book is basically him insisting that believing in hereditarianism doesn't compel you to believe in the racial element of HBD.

At a certain point you just have to take him at his word or you'll drive yourself crazy trying to parse how much is just throat-clearing amongst lefties trying to redpill their fellows without alienating them (since you mentioned Jesse, I also often wonder just how much of his "charity" is tactical or not)

You might even be correctly detecting noble lies rather than just anxiety that Someone Could Reach The Wrong Conclusion(!!!) but it's still a crazymaking exercise.

He also is pretty stubbornly wrong about new construction raising rents in adjacent properties. The body of academic research in the last 5-10 years has produced results that range from “maybe only a little” to “not at all”. And the one study I know of that even attempted to use a control group backs this up. But “new development bad” is a DSA shibboleth he can’t seem to shake.

read between the lines. He makes so much, you think he is gonna piss that away to please people like us.

He makes so much, you think he is gonna piss that away to please people like us.

I don't think anyone would say they don't understand why he refuses to admit certain truths even if he believes them. But I also think it's fair to criticize him for it. Dissembling because the truth would get you in trouble is not the worst wrong ever, but it is still wrong.

It is fair to criticize, but he makes an argument in which the only explanation is HBD, but he cannot just say it outright. By excluding the other possibilities or solutions for academic and wealth inequality, then it logically follows it must be HBD. He's indirectly making Steve Hsu or Steve Sailer arguments but with leftism sprinkled in to please the right people. He is a leftist, who also believes in HBD, so this is a combination that is harder to cancel.

There is a lot of 'I also like Borscht' about his writing. I think he is writing for a lot of the heretics forced to wear masks in his readership.

Oh, I know he has a lot to lose if he came out pro-HBD or anti-trans. I just wonder to what degree he really is a true believer. Some people you can pretty much tell are skeptics even if they won't say so openly (example: Jesse Singal). Freddie I am not so sure about.

I can't see him not being a true believer in trans stuff, his pro-trans posts are very forceful and he's a consistent cultural progressive, but 'has suspicions but doesn't look into them' is plausible for HBD

Fair enough (aside from the piles of skulls). I don't know all that much about what lower productivity people do in moderately functional communist societies, but ideally it would be something other than overdosing on fentanyl. My understanding is that communist states are supposed to tell their people what to do with themselves, even if it's sometimes "you're bad at everything, accept this pension, move to the countryside, and keep a small orchard" or something.

I don't have a good sense of what Freddie would do if he were in charge of the communist city state of New York, but get the impression he's thinking of more than half the population when he refers to people who aren't academically inclined, so it can't just be "give everyone money, hope the trash doesn't pile up too high." Or is it?

My impression is that he genuinely thinks (or claims to think) that the moral thing to do is for all the other people to work extra hard to make sure that the uninclined get to enjoy happy, reasonably prosperous lives, with some magic pixie dust sprinkled on top to make it all work out. (and certainly no ordering anyone - except the people working to pay for everything - how to conduct their lives)

Bolsheviks learned quickly that ordering everyone was often the only solution. The Red Army was originally meant to be a democratic institution where the moral thing to do was to fight as hard as you can. What most people did instead was fight only when they felt safe. Trotsky had to use the power of friendship commissars and literal decimations to turn the Red Army into a literal army from a loose confederation of opportunistic partisans.

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