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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38243 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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I’m concerned that something that gets lost in these discussions is that there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.

Just because you’re intelligent doesn’t mean you’re a high-quality individual. One criticism you can’t make of the people who run the current western political establishment is that they’re not intelligent enough. There are many intelligent people who are actively malicious, or they’re lazy, they leech off society, or what have you; conversely, some of the people I admire the most are not very intelligent at all.

A eugenics program that optimized for intelligence above all else would be short-sighted.

there are a lot of psychological traits that are worthwhile besides just intelligence - honesty, conscientiousness, perseverance, a sense for fairness, and so forth.

These are all fluid in a way that intelligence is not. I can practice radical honesty, I can force my self to be more conscientious, etc. Intelligence is a hard limit on potential, and no such thing exists for how many lies I tell.

These are all fluid in a way that intelligence is not.

Well, maybe - but what's the evidence for that? How much more fluid are they? Is this something measurable, or does a relative paucity of measurement allow wishful thinking to fill in the gaps? I'm reminded of naraburns' review of The Cult of Smart ( https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/joopge/disappointed_by_the_cult_of_smart/ )

His criticism of American public education seems basically cogent, if occasionally incomplete or, perhaps, symptomatic of motivated reasoning. But when he observes that

We sink vast sums of money into quixotic efforts to make all of our students equal

it does not seem to occur to him, at all, that we could therefore choose to stop doing that. Instead, bizarrely, he recommends we continue doing that--indeed, he thinks we should pay teachers even more money to keep doing that. Only instead of trying to make students equal by teaching them math, we should make them equal by teaching them to care about one another, to be compassionate, to work to the best of their abilities and be grateful to receive from others in accordance with their needs. Why deBoer thinks schools will be any better at teaching children these things, than they are at teaching children math, is never expressed or explored. Why deBoer fails to notice that there is no reason, in principle, to think that people's dispositions are any less governed by their DNA than are their capabilities, I can only guess, but it is an absolutely glaring oversight. What do we do, in his perfect world, with children who are predisposed to be bad at caring? What do we do with teachers who are bad at teaching it? DeBoer seems to be laboring under the delusion that teaching people to behave is substantially less quixotic than teaching them algebra.

If evidence exists that it is substantially less quixotic, then that would be wonderful news (provided the evidence is good.) But considering how much something like this is desired to be true, I think the lack of some well-known solid evidence is probably not an encouraging sign.

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