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Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,
[…]
I do not see how you can object to anything in there. Genetics drives the differential ranking of humans; environment drives the absolute magnitude of what's possible for every given percentile; it seems to be the society-wide environment and not some school or teacher's ultra clever nudging or a bit of extra resources. The evidence really suggests that, as long as you don't hit the kids over the head with a lead pipe, don't starve them or force into pit fights, and provide merely reasonable learning conditions by the standards of modern pedagogic science – which are in many cases cheaper to achieve than some extravagant progressive practices – they basically reach up to their genotypic potential in the contemporary society. Which is unequal in predictable ways.
Sure, ruining education remains easier than getting it right, just like producing inedible slurry is easier than running a decent food stall. But the latter is still not rocket science. It's reasonable, arguably necessary, to enforce some standards of hygiene and ingredient quality; it is inane to assert that, say, differences in height of New Yorkers of different races are driven by distribution of ethnic food stalls in their neighborhoods. Likewise with education.
…But of course you understand all that, you [expletive deleted]. You were trolling @Folamh3 back then as well:
etc. etc.
You just refuse to engage charitably on this matter, and in fact seem to take some pride in that.
Look man, you and I have been doing this for years. 10 years this October by my count. What do you think my "engaging charitably" would look even like in this context?
The way I see it I have been eminently charitable, and in the decade I've been participating in this specific community I've seen an HBD post that rose above tired "arguments as soldiers" or "look at me I'm so edgey" maybe a handful of times at the most.
What this look likes from my end you have staked out a position in the Motte, and because your position in the Motte may have some merit (emphasis on the may) I am expected to cede the Bailey as typified by the linked post without a fight in the name of "charity".
If that's what is expected of me then, yes. I will admit that I do take a certain amount of pride in refusing to "engage charitably".
How did you ask the question
after being quoted, 24 hours earlier, DeBoer saying
You're consistently misinterpreting the statements of people who disagree with you in ways convenient for your arguments, that make their positions seem much more extreme than they really are. Please just ... try to notice when you make a mistake and correct for it in the future?
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What are your responses to Freddie DeBoer's arguments on this topic? Education Doesn't Work 2.0, a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps and Genes Believe in You are blogposts, and the book is The Cult Of Smart (pirated). These aren't about race, which he sort of ignores, but make strong arguments about individual differences in ability, and ones that readily generalize to race.
My response is that as a member of the educational establishment DeBoer is likely trying to deflect blame for poor educational outcomes away from himself and his colleagues and on to the children.
To quote @FCfromSSC in the previously linked thread...
Otherwise see above
Note that this issue is not in any way specific to black kids. Do you imagine they're disproportionately exposed to the «whole language» claptrap while whites are getting reasonable methods like phonics?
For a toy model: say reading ability is normally distributed in your society; and you establish a binary criterion for "can read" or "can't read" that cuts your whole population exactly in half; and there are two factors contributing positively to the reading skill, namely educational method (Good vs Bad) and innate IQ (which can only be 6X or 5X); and you have two races with different innate average IQ. The race with the lower innate IQ will have fewer people above the threshold initially, and benefit more from the switch to the better teaching method; and will still have proportionally more people below it.
This is pretty trivial.
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There are also blood pressure medications that work better for black people than white people and vice-versa. Is that also culturally driven? Some black people think this is racist. In fact so many that the meme made itself into an episode of House.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=RCGLyLUNMv8
Phonics is a program designed to help poor performing students no? No wonder it did more for black kids. But it is a mirage, like pre-k, the gains evaporate over time and sometimes there is even regression past the mean.
Personally I agree with the premise that educators have little power to influence outcomes. I went to school. Unlike, I feel, most other adults, I remember what it was like. Unlike most people on this site (in most likelyhood) my school was ranked in the bottom 50% of schools in my state. In fact, there were more than 1 stabbings during my matriculation. Yet, me and both my siblings got full academic ride scholarships to flagship state schools. Weird. In fact, weirdly we weren't the only ones. It seems at "middling-to-poor" schools scholarships and admissions to high end universities tend to cluster in families. So odd.
Now, families share more than just genes, of course (although that is just passing the buck for one extra cycle wherein we must ask why families have different cultures) but it does disprove, largely, the impact that schools have, at least on the upside. And on the downside, its pretty obvious that bad schools are caused by having ungovernable students, rather than bad teachers. Most of the "worst schools" have much higher than average teacher compensation for their state.
Is it?
The linked discussion was about a reading program instituted in the usual crappy inner-city schools, which showed massive improvements on reading ability by all the school's metrics, with exactly the students who never, ever show massive improvement. And faced with this improvement, the teachers refused to continue the program, because they didn't like teaching it.
Not that it stopped working. Not that the gains weren't sustainable. Not that it only worked with a specially-selected sub-population of students. The kids who couldn't learn to read were learning to read, and the teachers refused to continue the program because doing their fucking jobs was too much of a downer. And we know that this is how it was, not because their private emails leaked, or someone dragged it out of them through FOIA, but because they said so publicly in interviews with the press, apparently oblivious to how fucking monstrous this sounds to anyone with a brain.
Of course, this is only an isolated incident, so it would be irresponsible to imagine that if a whole school system can fuck up this badly and have no one call them on it, maybe others could be suffering similar fuckups, or maybe even that they might be fucking other things up as well. Like when they did a push nation-wide to cap the amount of discipline black students receive, resulting in a total breakdown of school discipline, or when they make it official policy to retain disruptive students despite solid evidence that such students impede the learning of the rest of the class... just minor details like that, you know?
The standard HBD argument is that we've tried all the environmental interventions, they didn't work, so HBD is the only explanation remaining. Only, we haven't tried all the environmental interventions. We tried the environmental interventions popular with the exact set of people who gave us the replication crisis, and no others.
Maybe you're right, it's down to genetics, and there's nothing to be done. I'm willing to accept that after we've burned down the institutions that have been operating with a degree of incompetence indistinguishable from pure malice, forced the people who built and staffed those institutions to accept full personal responsibility for their failure, and then at least tried the things that we have solid reasons to believe would actually work.
And sure, that's not easy to do. And sure, there's no reason to humor the bullshit accusations of racism for even a single second more. But before I'm willing to accept that it's all down to genetics and there's nothing to be done, I want to see a rigorous test of the thesis that actually, this mess is the fucking Progressives' fault.
I totally believe this about teachers. It still flies in the face of everything everywhere that what they were doing was sustainable, and those kids' improvements would persist into their 20s. No educational intervention ever has done that at scale.
No, actually, that is the most believable part, that the school system would be evil to placate teachers. That is par for the course.
Sure, but if caning black students worked to make them on par with uncaned Asian students, that is still HBD. They would be thriving in completely different environments, and unless the caning persisted into the workplace, there's no reason to expect the caning gap to not reopen.
But you have to choose which to attack harder. And you've chosen to attack HBD harder, in this post at least, which makes your post, overall, odd. Sure HBD is sorta the topic of this thread. But in the subthread it is HBD within the context of the education complex, which is a complex dominated by progressive spaghetti monsters, so any anti-HBD point would, appropriately be a tiny appendix at the end of a bunch of discussion about how BS the idea of systemic racism was. Like 30 lines about that bs, then a meek comment like, "and the HBDers are like 23% more confident than I am comfortable with."
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I agree losing phonics is bad, but throughout the phonics discussion a consistent theme is 'for better-off kids, they don't need phonics, they'll learn to read anyway. for worse-off kids, they need phonics'. It's imagined the worse-off kids are so because their parents aren't teaching them to read at home. I think 'innate capacity for intelligence' is as big of a factor here.
All of the remaining interventions we have are ones that apply equally to both white and black kids. And we can tell because the IQ gap remains at higher deciles, with both rich and poor black parents. There are a lot of black millionaires, yet no black nobel prize winners.
(also, genes-cause-individual-differences is more important here. Many black kids learn to read fine without phonics. Many, more as a percent than black, white kids learn to read without phonics. If we divide the population up into '<90iq' and '>90iq', the differences in outcomes between the two are so much starker than the differences between white and blacks.)
What is the value of discussing the educational cap of students, when we have solid reasons to believe that we have not hit the educational cap?
We know that Black families completely collapsed. We are pretty sure that this was due to an environmental intervention, because it happened very dramatically, and very suddenly. We are even pretty sure we know what that intervention was: the introduction of no-fault divorce, which did exactly what its critics said it would do, and worse besides. You can claim that blacks are more predisposed to dysfunction than whites; maybe this is true. But the current system is not a physical law, nor even a particularly good idea, and we know for a fact that better results are possible under different systems, because we saw better results before we implemented this system.
Ditto for education and crime and every other damn thing.
And sure, Blacks had relatively worse outcomes previously, all the way back to slavery, but it is my understanding that the gaps do in fact widen and narrow over time, rather than being fixed. Black crime is ~30% worse than it was three years ago. That is not a small increase! It is definately environmental!
It's not as though HBD is some option we are forced into by hard political realities. It is very nearly the least plausible political avenue in all of American politics. It is a dead-end, a kill-zone, the fucking Valley of Death. It offers no practical solutions, no path forward, no actual workable plan. As the above discussion shows, it does not even retain the virtue of honesty, because it is appealed to as a "last resort" by people who claim that no environmental intervention works, while fucking ignoring environmental interventions that absolutely work, specifically because they don't like them.
This behavior displeases me, and I think it deserves to be called out.
I agree that black crime is clearly not a genetic inevitability independent of culture, and is basically cultural. White people of similar incomes or similar IQs commit crime at lower rates. Black crime and crime culture would end quickly if the state/elites were willing to use sufficient force to end it and change the culture (and no democratic constituency successfully opposed it). You could draw a parallel to criminal gangs of other cultures in american history that have since assimilated and now have low crime rates.
I think there probably is an indirect genetic contribution to single motherhood, as lower IQ whites also have higher rates of that, but that is also mostly cultural, and could easily be another way, as it was in the past.
I do think most of the black-white IQ gap is genetic, though. As intuitive evidence - there's a wide variety in black experience of America. Quite a few rich black families, 20% of black households have 100k+ income. Why are there so few high-achieving black scientists (and so many jewish ones)? And white kids in single-parent homes - I haven't seen this, but I'd strongly suspect they score better than black kids in similar single-parent homes with similar incomes. I think poor schools impact white and black kids of similar incomes/IQs in about the same way, and the gap remains between them (and of course IQ impacts income somewhat).
We can do embryo selection right now and add '3-8 points' to the 2% of children already born via IVF (by choosing which embryo to implant based on genetic screens, instead of randomly). As technology improves over the next few decades, this kind of thing will just become better and more widely available. (but AI will improve faster, :|)
(Also, we could just have smarter parents donate sperm or sperm/eggs for surrogacy or adopt out babies. This is obviously unworkable as a general policy, because people want to raise their own children. I agree this has all sorts of bad second-order effects, but you can't just notice them and declare it bad, and I think it is probably net positive if you compare the benefits of 'more very smart people'. With gene editing, we'll be able to do 'intelligence genes of smart person, appearance genes of you' and that may be popular).
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No. I suspect you are thinking of Hooked on Phonics Phonics/Phonetics is simply the traditional "dead white guy" means of teaching someone read/write an alphabetic language that was the default standard in most places until the late 90s early oughts, these days it's gone the way of memorizing multiplication tables and is now primarily a Catholic/Classical education thing.
I understand that this is the conventional wisdom here, I just don't think it has any basis in reality. I've seen way too many instances of a team showing a marked improvement after a change in coach, platoons turning around/going to shit under a new CO or Top, and students doing better once they got a tutor, with my own two eyes to buy the claim that teaching is some sort of "special case".
I don't think it's "education" or even "educators" that are useless, I think it's our educational establishment.
The consistency with this is it is consistently inconsistent and consistently not scalable. Coaching, of course, is a zero sum profession. Wins and scholarships that go to team A are subtracted from other teams. Same with war. Tutors can't scale as well. Those tutors can't run a 100000 person zoom classroom and get similar results, thus what they are doing doesn't resemble public education at all.
...and none of what you've just written comes anywhere close to actually rebutting my point.
You say coaching is a zero sum game? what of it?
That "public" education bears no resemblance to effective education is not a mark against education in general, just the opposite in fact.
Means infinitesimal improvements can improve results significantly due to the zero sum nature of the game.
Sure, but we are still talking about scalable solutions because we are talking about population sized problems. I don't really see you proposing education interventions in a way that is testable without circling back to HBD winning. You cited that phonics was working for some black kids in California. That's great, but, does that mean A) We should do it for white kids too? If we did would they maintain the advantage? If so, HBD wins. If not, we go to B) If it doesn't work for white kids, but the other method keeps white kids ahead. We are back to HBD. Even if Phonics for blacks means equal reading skill for the other method, its still hbd, just one that doesn't mean there is an aboslute disparity and superiority, just merely diversity. The only way the culture argument wins is if phonics is the best for everyone, and it generates equal outcomes.
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DeBoer is not "a member of the educational establishment". He is a first a journalist, then blogger, then guy who writes on education policy. Most of his writing is about random topics of interest to him and readers. He is currently looking for work as a ghostwriter. The educational establishment mostly dislikes him for saying all of the things they do are stupid.
Even if he were, that doesn't refute his arguments. Since almost all reasoning is somewhat motivated, plenty of motivated reasoning is correct. Isn't it curious how chemists think chemistry has important economic applications, ML researchers believe ML has important applications, historians of literature believe that literature enriches the spirit ... yet they're arguably correct! He makes many well-composed and strong arguments that stand on their own.
Black and low-iq kids who go to great schools still get low test scores. Regressed-to-the-mean 115 iq kids in high school who do a lot of test prep still score lower than 130 iq kids from middle-class families.
I agree that public schools are suboptimal. But they're suboptimal in similar ways for white and black kids. Even at preppy good mostly-white schools, there are still a ton of bad teachers, and a ton of students who do poorly in good classes. Bad schools and good schools are, really, pretty similar, and the surrounding economy (giving opportunities to people who are smart but didn't fit well in school) compensates for a lot of what schools miss out on.
Your quote is about phonics versus 'rich literary experience'. And phonics was better for black kids. But the thing is, the high IQ kids, and to a 50x lesser extent the white kids, did fine with non-phonics. The entire premise of the phonics debate is that many kids do fine with both methods of instruction, but that some group of kids does better with phonics (although still not as well as the group who it doesn't matter for). And - the needs-phonics group is disproportionately black. Why is that?
I kind of feel like it does. At the very least it significantly undermines them. It's not enough to just propose a new theory, the new theory has to both account for everything the old theory did, and produce better predictions. If DeBoer is correct that education doesn't matter, how does he explain the fact that scores were going up before the change in policy?
Edit to Add: You and DeBoer are trying to argue statistical distributions, and "regression to the mean", but I'm still stuck on the part where we stopped trying to teach kids how to read.
I don't know what to tell you. If you had read the post I linked, you'd have read (note: this is from Education Doesn't Work v1, the post i linked is v2, which has a rephrased version of this):
Culture and education have improved dramatically, but, like everything, it has limits, you can only take it so far before you have to try something new to keep getting results. And no matter what we try, even if it raises both white and blacks, the gap isn't closed.
Yet somehow, black test scores are still massively better than they were five decades ago. The gap still isn't closing. Including in schools with phonics. Including in schools with top 10% blacks and top 10% whites, and phonics.
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So is your excuse simply that this shit is your nature and no amount of educational efforts can fix you? A bit inconsistent given the argument you advance, innit?
No, I'm saying some level of reciprocity is required, or proverbial carrot provided, if you want me to choose "cooperate" after the other guys have already chosen "defect".
I actually recall the precise moment the switch flipped, and I stopped considering the HBDers here worthy of engagement. It was summer of 2021 during CW discussion of the NFL's "race norming" scandal and a number prominent HBDers (including a few who are still active today) defended the practice of artificially lowering the scores of high performing black individuals as necessary to "improve accuracy". After all if HBD is true, and a black man scored well it must be because the test was flawed and not because that individual black man in question might have actually been smart.
I pointed out that that if you have data that falsifies a theory, you're supposed to update the theory not the data, only to receive a bunch of downvotes, snide comments about my lack of intellectual bone-fides, and lectures about distributions, set theory, etc... Yet the whole time the simple fact that these guys were (by their own admission) editing observational data to support a pre-arrived-at conclusion was sitting there staring me in the face. Given that, why would I trust anything further they had to say?
That out of the way I will give you a chance to start a new hopefully more cooperative cycle by offering you (and anyone else who cares to chime in) the same basic case against HBD that I've been making since we started having these discussions in the open comments section of SSC.com.
HBDers like to claim individual and environmental factors largely don't matter and that everything can be boiled down to genetics. When I observe the world around me, I find that exceedingly hard to believe. My go-to example is that someone can have all the genetic potential in the world and still end up a flabby bastard if they don't eat well or work-out. Or in the case of the linked thread, all the genetic potential in the world isn't going to make a kid read well if nobody teaches them to read. From these simple observations I have arrived at the conclusion that the effect sizes of individual/environmental factors like having an engaged adult who teaches the kid to read, or getting off one's ass and going to the gym are far more predictive of outcome, and thus must have substantially greater effect sizes than that of genetics assuming such effects exist at all.
The replies I get (assuming anyone engages at all) are typically something along the lines of "Maybe, but if we control for all those other factors, genetics will be the only one left". And that's often where the conversation, breaks down because they haven't actually adressed my claim about effect sizes, they're just explaining what the term "Controlling for" means.
The statement that "If we eliminate all considerations that are not X, X will be the only consideration remaining." Is a tautology, not a proof that "X" is true, or that "X" is more meaningful than "Y".
This is incorrect. There was a billion dollar lawsuit, and in a settlement the NFL had to pay based on estimates of the loss in cognitive function caused by concussions. The 'race-norming' was assuming that black people (with concussions) started from lower IQs than white people, to reduce the NFL's payouts. Which is reasonable, because large-scale IQ testing of black people does find they have lower IQs. They are not claiming that the black person is 'too smart', and his IQ should be adjusted down. They're claiming that he has the average IQ of a black person, not a white person, and thus his score of (past IQ - current IQ), i.e. his IQ loss, should be adjusted down. Again, you persistently mischaracterize the statements of your opponents, instead of engaging with their arguments.
Can you make a direct analogy for the cases of education and income here, so we can address it directly?
It's very relevant that we have phones, school-provided tablets, libraries, and closed-caption tv shows. These massively equalize the 'environment' people experience relative to the past!
What's an intervention that you think would have a comparable effect size to genetics?
To be clear, I'm not talking about the lawsuit, I'm talking about the culture war thread discussion about the lawsuit.
...and there is no need to "assume" anything because the NFL has a Wonderlic Score for every player who's entered the league since 1968.
As I argued at the time, adjusting Tomlinson's Wonderlic score down because he's Black is about as central an example of old-school "racism" as it's possible to come by these days.
Hm. I highly doubt the exchange occurred as you describe, because the IQ tests were taken post-concussion and were very low and already had basically nothing to do with baseline black IQ. But if I'm wrong then I'm wrong.
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You do seem to just ignore those of us who are proponents of HBD and don't fall into this obvious trap. Yes, the environment also matters, no this does not actually disprove HBD and it is ridiculous to assume it does for the same reason a dump trunk being able to plow through a barricade does not prove barricades to have no efficacy. The world is more complicated than only one thing being able to contribute to an outcome. The HBD position is not that HBD has a greater effect size than environment, this is trivially proved by the ability to deprive babies of oxygen enough to leave them mentally handicapped. The HBD position is that genetics matter at all and vary between groups.
You know what, it's fair cop, and if I have that's on me. Mea Culpa. At the same time the immediat question that springs to my mind is where have you been? Why haven't you been weighing in? Is this one of those "no enemies to the left" type situations, or have you been weighing in this whole time and I just haven't seen it?
I've probably commented on HBD threads on the motte several dozen times over the years and remember replying directly to you more than a couple times.
Edit: here I am about a month ago pushing back in the same topic.
Here I am clarifying that HBD need not be able racial supremacy
As far as no enemies on the left goes, I work at a mega bank and some groups of leftists have expressed to me a desire to have me take a place in front of a wall. I know you have a kind fo esoteric understanding of left VS right but I assure you that I recognize enemies to my left.
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If you don't consider HBDers worthy of engagement, then stop engaging with me. Stop tagging me in comments as part of conversations I'm not part of.
I don't want to interact with you ever again in any capacity, but you're the one who keeps forcing the issue. Just stop interacting with me and we can go our separate ways.
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