The Luxurious Growth
It’s always slightly discomforting to me when a much better writer than I gets into some subject that is an obsessive interest of mine. David Brooks, in his column in today’s New York Times, provides an outstanding quick introduction to the topic of why science has not yet cracked the problem of the human mind, and the implications this has for political philosophy. He generously cites and quotes my recent article in National Review on this topic. If these questions interest you, you should read his piece.
One more time Jim, complexity is not chaos.
You and Brooks seem to want to throw up your hands and run back into the environmental wilderness.
Murray argues that we have hit the environmental wall on the bell curve already.
Do you agree or disagree?
http://www.aei.org/publications/filter.all,pubID.27962/pub_detail.asp
— matoko · Jul 15, 07:24 PM · #
And the first transhumans will be “Meths”, methuselahs.
Biological anti-senescense is far more tractible than anti-agression engineering, with far greater payoff.
Is the christian right planning to be shortlifes?
— matoko · Jul 15, 07:35 PM · #
makoto:
I don’t think that’s quite true, but then I wouldn’t, or else I’d have a different opinion. I think it’s important to recognize when we don’t know something, which is of course quite different than saying we can’t know it or never will know it.
I have not (yet) read Charles Murray’s book on this topic. I will do so, and can comment more fully once I have done that.
In terms of the article that you cite, when he says that:
I agree.
When he says that:
I agree, and agree with the implicit point that it is some version of political correctness and/or romanticism that prevents this from being raised openly as a possibility.
But when he says that:
I think he assumes too much. Let’s grant the premise for the sake of argument that “A large and unrefuted body of evidence says that … dfferences among schools do not have much effect on test scores in reading and mathematics.” It could easily be the case that the variation in the ways schools are run in a non-market-based system has been so limited that we can’t see clear relationships between different school approaches and results. By analogy, if we looked at different approaches to steel making in the old Soviet Union we might concluse that it is economic romnaticism to believe that there is any better way to make steel, since “look they all do about the same”. What we would have missed was the innovation that a market could create.
Just as it is common-sense to anybody who’s gone through grades K-12 that some people pick things up faster than others, I think it’s also common-sense that it matters what teachers you have, what books you read and how hard you work in school.
— Jim Manzi · Jul 15, 08:22 PM · #
No.
There are still charter schools, private schools, parochial schools that all take the same NEAP testing.
Teachers in the Detroit school system meet the same state standards that are used all over the state.
The single greatest correlate with within-group acheivement is socio-economic status of the local neighborhood. That is established by the parents….who represent both the environment and the hereditity of the students.
The only costviable way to approximate SES is by decreasing the student teacher ratio. Or go to teacherclones of the outstanding reps. This is the environmental wall.
Vouchers are useless.
Having failed to force all students to be “above average”, do you now seek to force all teachers to be “outstanding educators”?
Both impossible goals.
— matoko_chan · Jul 15, 08:59 PM · #
All vouchers will do is drag down the high SES of the targeted high performance schools, by diluting it with, NOT subaverage students, but with subaverage parental SES.
lol
NECBAL
(not everyone can be a lawyer)
— matoko_chan · Jul 15, 09:11 PM · #
Over at NRO’s Corner, John Derbyshire is less enthusiastic about David’s op-ed:
http://tinyurl.com/6lyvk3
— Steve Sailer · Jul 16, 02:02 AM · #
Jim writes “Just as it is common-sense to anybody who’s gone through grades K-12 that some people pick things up faster than others, I think it’s also common-sense that it matters what teachers you have, what books you read and how hard you work in school.”
Amen. It’s one thing to point out the difference in intelligence among students, and the limits thereof. But I don’t agree that the quality of teaching, and of the teachers themselves, has no or negligible effect. The argument that great teachers and vouchers will make everyone “above average” is a straw man.
A Charles Murray who thinks acid is groovy and doesn’t study public policy will not be as smart as the one we know today. I’m sure a teacher or two can influence individual students to realize their potential and steer students away from bad choices, however cheesy that sounds, even if the potential is not as great as for guys like Murray.
— Ferrell · Jul 16, 12:25 PM · #
Ferrell, as i pointed out.
That is the parents contribution, genes and environment.
You simply cant make teachers into parents.
SES is the correlate, not “outstanding teachers”.
— matoko_chan · Jul 16, 12:52 PM · #
Murray says we have hit the wall on using educational environment.
All vouchers will do is cause regression to the mean, the “good” schools will become less good.
;)
— matoko_chan · Jul 16, 12:57 PM · #
Look Jim.
I quoted Pagalia on another thread, but it didnt seem to sink in.
It is NATURE, not society, that is our greatest oppressor.
It is the selfish genes that require that we die, that we promote memetic and genetic tribal kin, that make some of us supersmart and some of us…. not.
Until such time as we overthrow the tyrant of nature, we need to find a way to deal.
NECBAL, remember?
There is a window of hysteresis within which genetic determinism can be influenced by environment.
We have exhausted that hysteresis in education.
We need to find a way for trade schools to have equivalent cachet and status to be peer with a 4-yr college education.
— matoko_chan · Jul 17, 12:12 AM · #
Thanks for the pointer to the Brooks article. This sentence is fantastic:
“This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know; that the best political actions are incremental, respectful toward accumulated practice and more attuned to particular circumstances than universal laws.”
— mk · Jul 17, 03:39 AM · #
haha, that is exactly true.
we cant ever know ALL, godelian incompleteness.
i for one would be very sad if i thought we could explain everything. ;)
but this is why Dawkins, Myers, Harris et al fail so badly in trying to convice people that religion is the root of all evil.
religion evolved for the benefit of the species….and most people need religion.
PZ and the rest of the elite should be respectful, not scornful.
— matoko_chan · Jul 17, 01:56 PM · #
…and I’m totally speaking as someone that drank the haterade on IDT and Expelled. I was appalled and repulsed.
But I have reformed. :)
Reading Manzi, Pournelle, and Thomas Jefferson has transformed me.
— matoko_chan · Jul 17, 02:08 PM · #