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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28508 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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The difference in outcomes of governance in otherwise-adjacent states is, um, certainly notable.

Ditto the inverse. The standard HBDer take is that culture doesn't matter, and that by extension Lee Kuan Yew's efforts at economic and cultural integration were a waste of time/resources, and yet (as you yourself observe) the differences in outcome are notable.

I imagine that someone will be along in a bit to argue that if Singapore had massacred all the ethnic Malays on the Island rather than integrating them they would have been even more successful but I don't buy it. That's the kind of policy that causes "unrest"

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

Do you realize that he was paraphrasing DeBoer and you can look up what else the guy has written? Specifically, from the same link,

This perspective is both buttressed by a tremendous amount of evidence and yet considered impermissible in polite debate. And teachers and schools pay the price, as they are asked to control outcomes they have limited influence on. The abstract of this paper sums up the reality.

Over the last 50 years in developed countries, evidence has accumulated that only about 10% of school achievement can be attributed to schools and teachers while the remaining 90% is due to characteristics associated with students. Teachers account for from 1% to 7% of total variance at every level of education. For students, intelligence accounts for much of the 90% of variance associated with learning gains.

[…]

Kids do learn at school. You send your kid, he can’t sing the alphabet song, a few days later he’s driving you nuts with it. Sixteen-year-olds learn to drive. We handily acquire skills that didn’t even exist ten years ago. Concerns about the Black-white academic performance gap can sometimes obscure the fact that Black children today handily outperform Black children from decades past. Everyone has been getting smarter all the time for at least a hundred years or so. So how can I deny that education works?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. People don’t know something, or don’t know how to do something, and then they take lessons, and then they know it or can do it. From algebra to gymnastics to motorcycle maintenance to guitar, you can grow in your cognitive and practical abilities. The rate that you grow will differ from that of others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals; a seasoned piano teacher will tell you that anyone can learn some tunes, but also that most people have natural limits on their learning that prevent them from being as good as the masters. So too with academics: the fact that growth in absolute learning is common does not undermine the observation that some learners will always outperform others in relative terms. Everybody can learn. The trouble is that people think that they care most about this absolute learning when what they actually care about, and what the system cares about, is relative learning - performance in a spectrum or hierarchy of ability that shows skills in comparison to those of other people.

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:

I must confess a certain amount amusment/schadenfreude reading this.
If ability to read really is, as you just so confidently asserted, "all genetic" why shouldn't teachers pick their methods based on what's fun for them?

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".

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...

Teachers: "We totally figured out how to teach poor black kids! we just didn't like doing it, so we decided to not teach them instead, figuring that ought to work just as well!"

Otherwise see above

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.

Phonics is a program designed to help poor performing students no?

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.

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 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.

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