Emil O. W. Kirkegaard is a Danish rational empiricist with some rather strong positions on hot button issues. Freddie deBoer is an American communist with some rather strong positions on hot button issues. Noah Carl is a British Cambridge academic with some rather strong positions on hot button issues.
Coming at the same issue from three different points and arriving at the same conclusion doesn't mean that it is the right conclusion. But it certainly is suggestive.
They are all three arguing that heritable group differences arise from heritable individual differences. If we are comfortable that it is true that there are heritable individual differences, then we should be comfortable that those heritable individual differences aggregate into heritable group differences. They are pointing out that it is inconsistent to want to change heritable group differences if you are not also addressing changing heritable individual differences.
It is worth emphasizing that this is not about race per se. The group can be religion/culture, class, region, profession, etc. The key questions are: are the traits of interest heritable (and to what degree), what are the standard deviations between individuals, and to what degree are those patterns of variation seen between individuals also seen among groups (by whatever trait the group is defined).
From Education Commentary is Dominated by Optimism Bias by Freddie deBoer.
The essential argument of the book is that overwhelming empirical evidence shows that students sort themselves into academic ability bands in the performance spectrum early in life, with remarkable consistency; that the most natural and simplest explanation for this tendency is that there is such a thing as individual academic potential; and that the most likely source of this individual academic potential is [edit] likely influenced by genes. When we look at academic performance, what we see again and again is that students perform at a given level relative to peers early in schooling and maintain that level throughout formal education. (I make that case at considerable length here.) A vast number of interventions thought to influence relative performance have been revealed to make no difference in rigorous research, including truly dramatic changes to schooling and environment. Meta-analyses and literature reviews that assess the strength of many different educational interventions find effect sizes in the range of .01 to .3 standard deviations, small by any standards and subject to all sorts of questions about research quality and randomization. Even the most optimistic reading of the research literature suggests that almost nothing moves the needle in academic outcomes. Almost nothing we try works.This implies that common sense is correct and that individual students have their own natural or intrinsic level of academic potential, which we have no reason to believe we can dramatically change. I believe that we can change large group disparities in education (such as the racial achievement gap) by addressing major socioeconomic inequalities through government policy. But even after we eliminate racial or gender gaps, there will be wide differences between individual students, regardless of pedagogy or policy. When Black students as a group score at parity with white students, there will still be large gaps within the population of Black students or white or any other group you can name, and we have no reliable interventions to make the weakest perform like the strongest.
From Noah Carl, Individual and group differences are the same.
What we know is that surveys of experts in relevant fields have found that between 14% and 84% believe genes contribute to psychological group differences. (The 84% figure is from a recent survey of intelligence researchers.) As the late James Flynn noted, “The hypothesis is intelligible and subject to scientific investigation”.What’s more, the hypothesis (the one Jim Flynn’s referring to) doesn’t posit anything that isn’t already assumed by the well-established theory that genes contribute to individual differences in IQ. The latter says there are genetic variants that affect IQ and they’re not distributed equally across individuals. The former simply says they’re not distributed equally across biogeographic ancestry groups either.Which prompts the question: if genes contributing to group differences in IQ is so awful and horrible and terrible, why isn’t it similarly awful that genes contribute to individual differences in IQ? (This question is directed more at people like Paige Harden than at Grossman, who’s obviously not an expert in this area and doesn’t claim to be.)Why is it fine for genes to explain differences between individuals but not fine for them to explain differences between group means?
From Emil O. W. Kirkegaard, Group differences are just individual differences, really.
Noah Carl has a new post on treating the ethics of individual differences the same as ethics of group differences:Which prompts the question: if genes contributing to group differences in IQ is so awful and horrible and terrible, why isn’t it similarly awful that genes contribute to individual differences in IQ? (This question is directed more at people like Paige Harden than at Grossman, who’s obviously not an expert in this area and doesn’t claim to be.)...The idea that there’s a sharp distinction between individual and group differences doesn’t make any sense. Either it’s bad to claim that some humans are “just inherently dumber” than other humans, or it isn’t.In fact, this general take goes back a long time, and it's worth expanding upon. Pretty much everything is this field has already been said by Arthur Jensen somewhere in his 400+ papers and 5+ books. This particular idea is no different. Here's Jensen in 1998:The relationship of the g factor to a number of biological variables and its relationship to the size of the white-black differences on various cognitive tests (i.e., Spearman’s hypothesis) suggests that the average white-black difference in g has a biological component. Human races are viewed not as discrete, or Platonic, categories, but rather as breeding populations that, as a result of natural selection, have come to differ statistically in the relative frequencies of many polymorphic genes. The “genetic distances” between various populations form a continuous variable that can be measured in terms of differences in gene frequencies. Racial populations differ in many genetic characteristics, some of which, such as brain size, have behavioral and psychometric correlates, particularly g. What I term the default hypothesis states that the causes of the phenotypic differences between contemporary populations of recent African and European descent arise from the same genetic and environmental factors, and in approximately the same magnitudes, that account for individual differences within each population. Thus genetic and environmental variances between groups and within groups are viewed as essentially the same for both populations. The default hypothesis is able to account for the present evidence on the mean white-black difference in g. There is no need to invoke any ad hoc hypothesis, or a Factor X, that is unique to either the black or the white population. The environmental component of the average g difference between groups is primarily attributable to a host of microenvironmental factors that have biological effects. They result from non genetic variation in prenatal, perinatal, and neonatal conditions and specific nutritional factors.
He has a lot more historical documentation as well.
I am comfortable with the evidentiary basis supporting the argument that traits are heritable and that variance between individuals is tied with variance between groups. Being a classical liberal, this is all rather moot because everything is about the individual in the first place. All rights are individual rights. There are no group rights per se.
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