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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28504 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

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

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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?

Even if he were, that doesn't refute his arguments.

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.

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

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):

The title of this post is, I acknowledge, something of a troll. Kids learn at school all the time. 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 what’s the issue?

The issue is that these are all markers of absolute learning. That is, 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 others, and most people will admit that there are different natural limits on various learned abilities between individuals, but everybody can learn. **People think they care about this absolute learning. But what they actually care about, in general, 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. **

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.

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.

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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