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The first argument that I find convincing against the standard libertarian positions is that most people are actually really stupid and a paternalistic government that treats them like children generally creates better outcomes(this is the real secret to Singapore). Take a normal Algebra or English class at a middle of the pack state school, most of the people in the room are still just guessing passwords. I am skeptical that anyone under 110 IQ can actually understand Algebra or get anything from text beyond the explicit meaning of the words without heavy priming. I would put the bottom 60% of Americans in approximately the same bucket as thirteen year-olds and think a kind government should make more choices for them, not less.
The second argument is zero sum positional status games, we would all be better off if society could collectively agree that all jobs get two months paid leave(or whatever) and don't allow any 'sane individuals' to trade that away for higher pay, because they all will, even though the marginal value of an extra dollar is trash, because humans.
Let’s say they are dumb. It doesn’t follow from that government is the rigger decider. First, government is also staffed with a lot of stupid people. Second, government suffers from Acton’s problem coupled with little skin in the game. Third, dumb people with local knowledge will outperform smart people lacking said knowledge (Hayek’s key insight and proven with the Soviet experience). That is, even a government of angels often will underperform.
Singapore is interesting but my perhaps faulty understanding is that Singapore depending on the issue is either super authoritarian or super liberal. It doesn’t get stuck in the middle.
I think things like clean air and water, cfc ban, lead, seat belts, and social security are all examples of governments being able to do exactly what I think they can do/want them to do, so I don't feel much need to argue about the platonic ideals of various organizational structures which imply that my preferences are impossible. They are possible, we live in a world where they are being satisfied to an extent, and I just want more.
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I think I disagree. I have limited experience teaching dumb-seeming people algebra and they were able to solve simple linear systems of equations eventually.
My experience teaching dumb-seeming people is just tons and tons of password guessing with no fundamental understanding of what they were doing or why. I was constantly confronted with what I started to call 'magical-thinking' where I would notice that students had no underlying grasp on or seeming belief in a consistent reality governed by legible rules. They were just memorizing strings of characters that they were told produce certain other characters. The learning plateau is so short for these people I doubt education beyond basic reading and arithmetic has much real value. Anything they don't use for a month will be lost.
I suspect that there are IQ thresholds for 'cognitive milestones' in the same way that a new born is incapable of object permanence, the two big ones that have stood out to me are reading comprehension and algebra. Again, in a school environment these people can pass a class that is ostensibly testing this skill, but my single biggest frustration as an educator was noticing how good students are at guessing passwords. I also saw this as a student, I am not as highly educated as the average motte users, I took classes at a community college and three different middle-tier state schools all of which are full of students who can pass these classes(and plenty who can't), but try digging into what they read even a little bit outside of the script that they memorized for class and they have no idea what is going on. I suspect that smart people in general overestimate the cognitive toolkit that average and below average people are working with and underestimate the ability of such people to fake it.
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I presume they weren’t referring to “2x + y = 10, y = 4, what’s x?”.
While I use the content of HS algebra daily, I remember nothing about how it was taught in high school, lol. That said, looking up 'algebra 2 exam pdf' on google, and I think an average IQ person could, with high-quality instruction, get a B or A. Things like the quadratic formula, factoring, reduced form, solving equations equations with polynomials, multiple variables, and ratios, drawing graphs, word problems, etc. My memory of tutoring is the slower students (still not below-average iq I think) were able to grasp that eventually, but maybe there was still some selection bias. This is the sort of thing one's default intuition might be bad for.
Looking for data on algebra knowledge for current students, the closest measurement I can find is that "Only 26% of 12th grade students scored at or above the proficient level on the NAEP math assessment". 38% were basic, the remaining were below basic. But apparently NAEP proficiency measures a significantly higher level of skill than grade-level, algebra is grade 8-11. Some of this is just guessing passwords I suppose. But when tutoring, students who were blatantly guessing passwords on specific kinds of problems, even things as basic as 'x + 1 = 2 ... durr .. x = = 3 ????' were perfectly capable of learning the real thing if you taught them well, so I think that with good tutoring most median IQ people could grasp most of algebra. I'm not entirely confident in that though, and I can't find any very strong evidence on this.
I'm not sure about calculus, and anything above that is probably beyond the limits of most, although I'm uncertain where the lines are.
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