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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27840 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter

This is a laughable assertion. The standard HBD take acknowledges that culture and environment can cripple any person or set of persons, just that asserting those things apply to some situations is also laughable.

This is a laughable assertion.

No it is not.

Near as I can tell, the sort of view expressed by @Folamh3, @self_made_human, and others here that...

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

...is not an extreme or hyperbolic take, it's the median.

Charitably you are engaging in a very blatant Motte and Baily where you try to play the "group differences in outcome" card right up until someone asks how exactly you determine group membership for the purposes of determining group differences. IE Is a dark-skinned man who votes Republican "black" or is he, as Joe Biden and the Hosts of the View assert, "white". (Edit: See Slate and the LA Times' treatment of Clarence Thomas and Larry Elder)

Less charitably you are simply lying.

  • -11

it's all genetics, the children whose parents can afford to send them to private school tend to be smarter than the children whose parents can't; "school quality" and "teacher quality" have pretty much zero bearing on educational outcomes and are almost pure signalling; if you sent all of the private school kids to a public school and vice versa, you would see essentially zero change in educational outcomes in either cohort; and so on and so on.

No Hlynka, as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.*

The reason that differences in outcome are minimal for a smart kid in a private versus public school is that they both surpass a minimum threshold of quality such that any further difference is down to genetics. Take the same kid and chuck them in the kind of rundown, underfunded schools you might find in the worst parts of India and you're going to see them suffer. If you wish to attribute all the disparities of the world to either genetics or "culture", then that's the latter because it has fuck all to do with genes.

You're so comfortable in your Western skin that you don't notice how almost everything around you is far better than it historically was, say a century ago, and is still better than the majority of this planet.

*Another example of your exasperating tendency to forget anything inconvenient to your narrative. Even my usual desire to adhere to the presumption of good faith and charity here on The Motte has long worn thin for you.

as I've told you before, HBDers don't think genetics is the be all and end all.

And yet HBDers keep arguing the contrary.

To be blunt, you either endorse the linked comment or you don't. Which is it?

To be blunt, you either endorse the linked comment or you don't. Which is it?

Did you stop beating your wife? Yes or no answers only 🙏

I see what you're trying to do, and I am not going to change tack

I am not going to change tack

Have you ever? Not where I've seen it.

Right back at you, link me an example of yourself or some other prominent HBDer arguing that cultural attitudes matter more than melanin content and I'll shut up concede the point.

melanin content

In the comment of mine you linked to, I was discussing the differences in educational outcomes between middle-class students attending private schools and working-class students in state schools - in Ireland. Ireland, as you may be aware, is about 90% white. Almost every student in either the private or state schools under discussion is white. In my experience, if anything the private schools tend to be more ethnically diverse than the state schools, which doesn't impact on their having consistently higher educational outcomes than the state schools. If you think that the comment you linked to proves that I think poor black people are less intelligent than rich white people - well, it doesn't. You are simply, unambiguously wrong.

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