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It makes almost as much sense as saying: "Do fish live in water? Nonsense! Throw a fish into boiling water and watch how it dies." If you throw a naturally gif

It makes almost as much sense as saying: "Do fish live in water? Nonsense! Throw a fish into boiling water and watch how it dies." If you throw a naturally gifted child into a volcano, or abandon it on a deserted island, sure, it will die. Therefore, no gifted kids, QED. But the standard assumption is that the gifted kids grow up in normal environment (and the fish swim in non-boiling water), and then do better in math that average kids growing up in the same kind of normal environment. The argument is "different outputs for the same input", not "excellent output for any kind of input". School definitely can (and should) be improved, including math education. But instead of making everyone equally good at math, the optimal kind of math education would make everyone better at math, and the gifted kids even more better.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Yes, this is all fine, until the parent of the fish who gets sent to the ocean says to the parent of the fish sent to the volcanic geyser, "well my kid is just naturally gifted, that's why we put them in the cool ocean water, all you volcano fish were holding him back, I mean just look at your test scores". And then a fish says, maybe they're not naturally gifted, but just not poached, and everyone suddenly starts talking very specifically about fish in some alternate world that all share the same water. "What, are you saying there's no biological differences between fish, what kind of nonsense is this? If we explicitly assume there's no other factor involved then what is left but raw natural intelligence?" as if they're trying to miss the point intentionally.