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A critique of deBoer's book by another socialist, Current Affairs' Nathan J Robinson, which I enjoyed: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-

A critique of deBoer's book by another socialist, Current Affairs' Nathan J Robinson, which I enjoyed: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-potential https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/09/we-dont-know-our-pote...

ywei3410 6y ago
Thank you very much for sharing this! It was a really, very well thought out piece. If I had a particular criticism though, I would wonder whether the section on shared environments wasn’t missing the point — as a society we need to have a single shared environment; that there exists one which would lessen the impact of all perceived heritable factors equally is not obvious to me. If that is indeed the case, are we not back at square one?
someguydave 6y ago
That rebuttal mostly offers stereotypes and emotional appeals.
lambdatronics 6y ago
It wouldn't surprise me if the evidence for a genetic component to intelligence is weak. It's hard to imagine there's NOT a genetic component (genetics effects all the rest of the body, so why not the brain?), but given the sorry state of statistics in social sciences,the evidence may well be poor. Also, Robinson is right to point out that this entire question is irrelevant to the question of equality vs equity. The latter is simple a matter of values, after all. But holy smokes, look at the contortions Robinson makes to claim that we can't possibly know whether academic performance is limited by genetics! It's laughable. I do like his story about Sara Slow -- I was that kid in grad school stat mech. The prof was a terrible lecturer. I got stuck on the assumption of equal a priori probabilities in phase space, and I had a hard time with the rest of the class. In fact, grad school largely destroyed my curiosity b/c I didn't have time to stop and chew on things like this, I just had to soldier on to the end of the course.

ywei3410 6y ago

Thank you very much for sharing this! It was a really, very well thought out piece. If I had a particular criticism though, I would wonder whether the section on shared environments wasn’t missing the point — as a society we need to have a single shared environment; that there exists one which would lessen the impact of all perceived heritable factors equally is not obvious to me. If that is indeed the case, are we not back at square one?

someguydave 6y ago

That rebuttal mostly offers stereotypes and emotional appeals.

lambdatronics 6y ago

It wouldn't surprise me if the evidence for a genetic component to intelligence is weak. It's hard to imagine there's NOT a genetic component (genetics effects all the rest of the body, so why not the brain?), but given the sorry state of statistics in social sciences,the evidence may well be poor. Also, Robinson is right to point out that this entire question is irrelevant to the question of equality vs equity. The latter is simple a matter of values, after all. But holy smokes, look at the contortions Robinson makes to claim that we can't possibly know whether academic performance is limited by genetics! It's laughable. I do like his story about Sara Slow -- I was that kid in grad school stat mech. The prof was a terrible lecturer. I got stuck on the assumption of equal a priori probabilities in phase space, and I had a hard time with the rest of the class. In fact, grad school largely destroyed my curiosity b/c I didn't have time to stop and chew on things like this, I just had to soldier on to the end of the course.