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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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It's a long post, but it doesn't say much; largely it's an extended sneer. Yes, we who oppose progressive politics know the framework is bullshit. We know that if you attempt to dig through the morass of contradictions that it claims as principles and internal logic that you will find either nothing or just power politics -- "who/whom". And yes, it is true that much of the online right comes from a progressive (though usually not "woke") background, though some do not. That does not mean they are still progressives.

I don't know how bright your average Kenyan cabby is; unlike some HBD believers, I find IQ measurements in the Third World to be extremely suspect. But while you may find it admirable that they "hustle" constantly, that doesn't make them highly intelligent. Again, perhaps they are. There are similar types in the US -- some of them fitting the stereotype of the late '80s Jamaican immigrant who has three jobs and is always looking for more work, and others always looking for a new con/scam. The former may be admirable for their work ethic but it says nothing about their intelligence. The latter aren't admirable and most often tend to prey on those of a similar class; they're not lazy but that doesn't mean they're intelligent, just a little brighter (or just less trusting) than whoever they scam. And certainly your average Kenyan cabby has better real-time problem solving ability in his domain than your average Motte poster does. But the reverse is almost certainly true as well.

The reason your professors graded on a curve was that your professors were lazy and stupid.

Some of them were, some of them were not. There are good reasons for not grading on a fixed scale other than laziness, the main one being that if you change your test questions, it's possible you erred about its difficulty. Professors don't have the luxury of trying their questions in advance on calibrated students and seeing how hard they are.

Professors don't have the luxury of trying their questions in advance on calibrated students and seeing how hard they are.

I had one particularly likeable professor that did grade on a curve, but also threw out questions that seemed to get outlier quantities of incorrect responses on the basis that even though the question seemed clear to him, the number of bright people getting it wrong demonstrated that he had either failed to teach it correctly or had asked it poorly. His approach certainly wasn't some red in tooth and claw vision of pitting students against each other, it was genuinely trying to get kids to work hard to understand the material.

This happened to me literally once, in an advanced engineering statistics course. The class average was like 16/100 and the professor decided he would rescind the exam. Except for 3 of us. We had curiously scored in the low 90s. He just told us we'd be getting 105/100 for the exam and could go home for the week.