I'd be willing to bet good money that those who score higher on SAT/ACT tests have cohesive family units. Or stable lives. And, I'd bet that works across all income levels, too. Not all, obviously, but I'd imagine it's more likely than not. We are focusing on the wrong solutions.
Probably so, but having a cohesive family unit or stable life is also a significant predictor of college success (and success beyond). We're not helping anyone by putting people who are unprepared into an upper-level college. Instead, we're setting them up for failure. You're more likely to be successful if you don't "reach" too high. I saw another Substack that showed that students with a mid-level LSAT score are more likely to pass the bar if they attend a mid-level law school than an elite one; attending the elite school was not just unhelpful, but actually detrimental to their success. Likewise, students whose SAT score is substantially lower than the median for their school are more likely to drop out, saddling themselves with debt and little to show for it.
The solution to racial disparities is better education at the lower levels, not hiding the impact of grade school failures. That includes recognizing the impact of chaotic family lives on student learning, which is not easy to resolve. But it also includes school choice particularly for those currently trapped in the failure factories of urban government schools. The NEA hates the SAT because it reveals the truth of their failure to educate millions of kids.
I agree with everything you wrote. All of it. The habit of passing kids to the next grade just because the teacher doesn't want to deal, the system encourages it, etc. is only harmful for both sets of kids. The slower learners fall further behind and become disruptive because they don't know what's happening and the quicker learners are ignored completely. It's a terrible system. People are less confident when they are in over their head, so we are doing them no favors. It's harmful to self-esteem in the long run.
And, I agree with school choice. However, I also think we should be doing more to normalize and encourage stable homes and families for children, at least up to age 8.
I attended a famous and occasionally notorious Connecticut boarding school in the early 70s. Though I came from solid upper- and upper middle class Midwestern stock, my Kansas forebears might as well have been serfs for all the social capital they furnished me among the sons and daughters of great generational wealth and the Eastern Establishment.
It may be hard to believe, but in the period 1971-1973 nobody there was sweating college admissions. The topic was almost never discussed.
In my experience, there was a direct relationship between my classmates' socioeconomic standing and their SAT scores. I was a dud in math, but having newspapermen on both sides of the family and having hung out at the dinner table when my parents entertained colleagues, even my verbal scores were high. My conclusion then was that high SAT scores were a function of nurture not nature.
Are we using merit as measured by objective tests such as the SAT as opposed to subjective assessments based on measures such as essays which are easily gamed in our decision making to determine who is being admitted to the top universities, hired or promoted to the best jobs or are we currently discriminating against whites, Asians and men in an attempt to compensate for the past discrimination against others?
If we are currently discriminating based on race and sex and recent Supreme Court cases suggest that we are, then don't those currently being discriminated against have the same legitimate grievances that women and blacks had in the past? Just asking.
In the good old days, say, before WWII, the main question elite admissions committees sought to answer about their applicants were whether they were the right sort of people. Sure, they made room for some bright kids from nowhere provided they weren't Jewish, but by and large the Ivies and their ilk were private schools for the elite on a par with today's prep schools.
I continue to think that places such as Harvard and Yale work out best for children who were born into the upper crust. Unless they screw up and get sidelined, they'll step right in to jobs that are waiting for them.
However, over time those schools have been forced to admit applicants who are long on brains and low on social capital. If they're white, they have to fend for themselves. If they're the right type of minority, the school will see to it that they have a home in a racial or ethnic identity center that will relieve them of ever having to find a white friend group.
And, until recently, they've been admitting some minorities who are painfully underqualified and who haven't the faintest inkling of the lives of their more privileged classmates. I suppose some of them compensate - our used to compensate - by going all in on wokeism and becoming insufferable censorious scolds. Today, with the DEI industry on the decline, they may be falling on hard times.
The stats for MIT's class of 2028, the first that was admitted after the Supreme Court ended racial preferences, show that black admissions plummeted and Asian admissions soared. If I recall correctly, whites make up just 37 percent of the class. What's happening at MIT is that highly qualified Asian applicants are displacing all other racial groups now that they're not being excluded to make room for blacks and perhaps for whites.
Thanks for sharing his essay. The preface to the essay mentions " American project of self-governance", however, the author of the essay seems to implicitly reject any amount of the policy variability and decentralization in policy that is requisite for self government when he wrote that "standardized testing be made “freely available and compulsory for all high school students.”" And that rejection *slightly appears* to be woven throughout the essay within every other policy area he mentioned.
I think eliminating the SAT had little to do with helping black people. Instead, it's more like:
"The SAT is a racist, moral blight. We thus need to purify ourselves of this moral blight by getting rid of it. The outcomes of the alternative are not very important."
In its woke and racist wisdom, the Oregon School Board eliminated the requirement that all seniors pass certain proficiency exams in order to graduate. The reason? Well, the majority minority state school board in our overwhelmingly white state determined that proficiency testing "harmed" blacks. The felicitous result is that blacks' competence will always be suspect for lack of proficiency results and white students will never be able to point to passing proficiency scores because the tests were deemed to harm blacks. It's a real ebony-and-ivory wonderland they created.
re: "Either way, he appears to have told a noble lie" -- I do not follow this argument. I can see why a lie about masks being unnecessary to save them for the medical personnel could be an example of a Noble Lie -- but I cannot find any nobility in lying to people saying that they were necessary if you believed they were not. Looks like _preference falsification_ to me ...
Hanania came up with the idea that wokeness is consolation prizes. Everybody knows a thin white woman will do better than a thick black woman everywhere where looks matter. But we can at least call the thick black woman beautiful so that she feels a little better.
Thing is, the SAT will not be abolished, too useful, and if it will, other ways of detecting who is smart will take its place. But we can tell kids who are not doing well in SAT that it does not imply they are not smart. They are, um, differently intelligent. Sure.
So basically this is not a bad thing. It is just being careful about other people's feelings. Otherwise not much will be done.
I think it is mostly about women having more of a voice so social norms shift towards more typically female behaviours. This is one.
Another virtuous lie, repeated in this essay, is that George Floyd was murdered. There is ample evidence he died from other causes. See piece by Candace Owens. This also serves to show how vehemently defensive and damning people behave about something they want to believe. Try questioning that on campus.
When we talk about virtuous lies, we can also discuss the attempts by various people to discredit the hereditarian hypothesis in regards to average racial and ethnic IQ, criminality, et cetera gaps. Some of them have even attempted to reject this hypothesis on *moral* grounds *regardless* of its scientific validity, according to Nathan Cofnas.
I see no reason that human evolutionary processes *must* stop at the neck. Nor do I see why exactly human group differences cannot be created over thousands or even hundreds of years, as they might have very well been with Ashkenazi Jews, according to Greg Cochran. (I'm 1/4 Ashkenazi Jewish myself, identify as Jewish, and am also a dual US-Israeli citizen, so please, no accusations of anti-Semitism towards me! It's not like I was insulting Ashkenazi Jews by pointing out that they might very well be smarter than gentile whites for genetic reasons.)
Hard disagree about rejection of hereditarian "explanations" for group differences being a "virtuous lie." The irresolvable core problem is inferring cause from correlation. At best, all one has is correlations between some better or worse (a whole nother issue!) measures of genetics and group outcomes. To infer that genes cause those group outcomes is very difficult and has never been accomplished in any of the hereditarian work.
This is a stark contrast to work *with individuals.* It is not hard to demonstrate that genes cause all sorts of outcomes for individuals, because it is way easier to rule out alternative explanations, which almost never can be ruled out for hereditarian "explanations" for group differences.
She does not discuss hereditarianism per se. She does discuss what it takes to infer cause from correlation. The hereditarian work never meets those standards. To give you a flavor (though I recommend the whole paper), consider this quote:
"The central problem of observational data is confounding, that is, the presence of a common cause that lurks behind the potential cause of interest (the independent variable; in experimental settings, often called the treatment) and the outcome of interest (the dependent variable). Such a confounding influence can introduce what is often called a spurious correlation, which ought not to be confused with a causal effect. How can a DAG be used to figure out how to remove all such noncausal associations so that only the true causal effect remains?
To do that, one must make sure that the DAG includes everything that is relevant to the causal effect of interest."
DAG refers to a Directed Acyclic Graph depicting causal influences on one or more outcomes.
Hereditarian studies have never included (as predictors) "everything that is relevant to the causal effect of interest." And they probably can't do it. How would they possibly control for, say, societal racism (past and present), in explaining racial group differences in anything? (that's a rhetorical question because, at least for now, there is no way to do it). And that's just the beginning. There are many more variables that could explain both and though one will occasionally see some effort to account for 1 or 2 (SES is common), efforts to comprehensively control for alternative potential causes are nonexistent.
You can disagree, and because, as far as I can tell, the scientific methods to prove or falsify hereditarian explanations for race differences do not exist, I cannot prove it wrong.
But the argument is scientific, not moral, and it is most definitely not a lie.
This will be my only entry here on this topic so you get the final word, if you so choose.
I’ll just say one last thing: As Emil points out in his second article, one doesn’t need 100% certainty. So long as hereditarian predictions will keep passing (fasifiable) prediction after prediction, environmentalist researchers will need to make some testable predictions of their own if they will want to avoid having a degenerate research program. Science, after all, sometimes works in terms of probabilities, not in terms of certainties.
Even when it comes to looking at the effects of racism, for instance, one can try comparing people based on their degree of African (or whatever) appearance versus the degree of African DNA that they actually have. The environmentalist would presumably predict that if racism was a determining variable here, then people’s degree of African appearance would be a better predictor of determining their IQ on average than their degree of African DNA. But if it will end up being the other way around, then this will be another falsifiable prediction that the hereditarian hypothesis will pass, just like it has previously passed the falsifiable prediction that blacks and Hispanics with more European ancestry are, on average, smarter than those blacks and Hispanics with less European ancestry.
BTW, you do know that if agnosticism is the default position here (apparently if one takes your view on this), then one shouldn’t be blaming certain groups for the success or failure of certain other groups. After all, we simply can’t know one way or the other, and therefore shouldn’t jump to conclusions in either direction.
“‘Dark Pirate’ Lee Jussim sure has come a long way during this great awokening. First he spearheaded efforts to promote non-leftist social psychology of stereotypes in Quillette (https://quillette.com/2015/12/04/rebellious-scientist-surprising-truth-about-stereotypes/, 2015), but since 2020 or so, he has joined the can’t know nothing about race differences, and we shouldn’t look with available methods, ignorance is bliss camp. A bizarre position for him to adopt, but apparently he was facing https://twitter.com/PsychRabble/status/1345389711808933889, so who can say what really lies behind this change of course for the ol’ pirate.”
“The frustrating thing about people like Cathy Young and Jussim here is that they profess to be interested in the topic, but they are also curiously unwilling to actually engage with it, that is, get their hands dirty. One can look at Cathy defending her views on Twitter:”
Emil Kirkegaard also offers various ways to solve this question:
Whether George Floyd was murdered or not is an institutional fact, like whether Coco Gauff's ball was in or out, not a brute fact, like whether it's raining. If the ball is called out by an appropriate institutional authority, it's out. Similarly with murder. We have a procedure for making that call, and murder is what was determined through the appropriate institutional process. Thus, to say GF was murdered is not to lie. It is to report accurately an institutional fact. The cool thing about institutional facts is that, unlike the question of whether it's raining, you don't have to agree with them. You can think the referee screwed up and Coco's ball should have been called in, or you can think GF was not murdered. You don't have to agree but you do have to respect the fact that that's the determination that was made.
By that logic, though, the claim that the US Constitution does not protect or confer a right to legal abortion nationwide is also an institutional fact after *Dobbs*, correct--however much most of the American people might disagree with it?
Pretty much, yes. It might be more accurate to say that the institutional fact is that with Dobbs, SCOTUS determined that the US Constitution does not protect or confer a right to legal abortion nationwide, and that therefore there currently is no national right to a legal abortion. With constitutional interpretation, what the Constitution does or does not guarantee changes periodically, so to state the full institutional fact, it may be necessary to add something about the relevant SCOTUS decision. Stepping back to the general level, the whole point of institutional facts is to confer powers, permissions, privileges, obligations, and disabilities. Thus, the Constitution established a bunch of institutions/institutional facts (the presidency, legislature, judiciary, etc.) and SCOTUS has ever since been in the business of refining, adding to, and subtracting from those facts.
Not OP but correct IMHO - the constitution doesn't confer such a right purely because the supreme court says it doesn't and therefore laws could be passed restricting legal abortion -> de facto do not have that right anymore.
In the context of any one specific case, such George Floyd's, especially since it was adjudicated in a regular and centuries established court of law to deal with publicly made and widely agreed upon for centuries elements of the criminal code, you're reasoning about institutional facts may indeed hold. However, you should clarify the boundaries of this line of reasoning. If this reasoning is applied universally across all spheres, it risks implying that any determination made by an institutional authority is beyond reproach, which could lead to a situation where dissent or even basic interrogation of ideas or policies are prohibited. This would essentially be a form of dictatorship, where the legitimacy of all institutional decisions is unquestioned, regardless of context or merit.
To avoid this, it's very important to delineate where the authority of institutional facts should be respected and where it is necessary to allow space for disagreement, debate, and the possibility of error correction. And in what major spheres institutional authority should hold at all. This distinction is necessary to maintaining a balance between having institutional machinery working where needed with the authority they need to be effective while also preserving the democratic principles of free thought and speech and the ability of citizens to manipulate and effect policies.
What do you think of the tweaking of the online SAT testing that adjusts question difficulties based on how you answer prior questions? That seems to be trending towards giving equivalent scores for vastly different abilities.
As I understand it, you get a score based on the difficulty of the questions you answer, not the number or percent you get correct. If so, people would get very different scores for answering questions of different levels of difficulty.
This is by the actual company that designs the SAT as opposed to ... some guy grinding an anti-woke ax. See especially THEIR graph of how scores correspond to whether one gets more difficult or easier questions.
Thank you for this very interesting piece... Regarding the issue of racism and standardized tests, I would like to point out that I've written several in-depth analyses of the ACT. And, the misconceptions have to do with misunderstanding of the actual results of the tests… one example with references to other articles is is this "The ACT Isn’t Racially Biased Because “Black" and “White” Aren’t Races" https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/the-act-isnt-racially-biased-because
I agree wholeheartedly that black and white aren't races! They're US Census classifications. Thanks for the link to your piece! Will check it out ASAP.
Nice catches. Fixed. Glad I qualified the GBS quote/meme. Probably half the time I find some such quotes, they are misattributed, though this one looks probably true.
I'd be willing to bet good money that those who score higher on SAT/ACT tests have cohesive family units. Or stable lives. And, I'd bet that works across all income levels, too. Not all, obviously, but I'd imagine it's more likely than not. We are focusing on the wrong solutions.
Probably so, but having a cohesive family unit or stable life is also a significant predictor of college success (and success beyond). We're not helping anyone by putting people who are unprepared into an upper-level college. Instead, we're setting them up for failure. You're more likely to be successful if you don't "reach" too high. I saw another Substack that showed that students with a mid-level LSAT score are more likely to pass the bar if they attend a mid-level law school than an elite one; attending the elite school was not just unhelpful, but actually detrimental to their success. Likewise, students whose SAT score is substantially lower than the median for their school are more likely to drop out, saddling themselves with debt and little to show for it.
The solution to racial disparities is better education at the lower levels, not hiding the impact of grade school failures. That includes recognizing the impact of chaotic family lives on student learning, which is not easy to resolve. But it also includes school choice particularly for those currently trapped in the failure factories of urban government schools. The NEA hates the SAT because it reveals the truth of their failure to educate millions of kids.
I agree with everything you wrote. All of it. The habit of passing kids to the next grade just because the teacher doesn't want to deal, the system encourages it, etc. is only harmful for both sets of kids. The slower learners fall further behind and become disruptive because they don't know what's happening and the quicker learners are ignored completely. It's a terrible system. People are less confident when they are in over their head, so we are doing them no favors. It's harmful to self-esteem in the long run.
And, I agree with school choice. However, I also think we should be doing more to normalize and encourage stable homes and families for children, at least up to age 8.
I attended a famous and occasionally notorious Connecticut boarding school in the early 70s. Though I came from solid upper- and upper middle class Midwestern stock, my Kansas forebears might as well have been serfs for all the social capital they furnished me among the sons and daughters of great generational wealth and the Eastern Establishment.
It may be hard to believe, but in the period 1971-1973 nobody there was sweating college admissions. The topic was almost never discussed.
In my experience, there was a direct relationship between my classmates' socioeconomic standing and their SAT scores. I was a dud in math, but having newspapermen on both sides of the family and having hung out at the dinner table when my parents entertained colleagues, even my verbal scores were high. My conclusion then was that high SAT scores were a function of nurture not nature.
The next thing you're going to tell me is that lesbian's don't have a penis - right? : )
Excellent essay. Much appreciated.
More on the digital SAT.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/breaking-the-sat
The question that everyone needs to be asking is:
Are we using merit as measured by objective tests such as the SAT as opposed to subjective assessments based on measures such as essays which are easily gamed in our decision making to determine who is being admitted to the top universities, hired or promoted to the best jobs or are we currently discriminating against whites, Asians and men in an attempt to compensate for the past discrimination against others?
If we are currently discriminating based on race and sex and recent Supreme Court cases suggest that we are, then don't those currently being discriminated against have the same legitimate grievances that women and blacks had in the past? Just asking.
In the good old days, say, before WWII, the main question elite admissions committees sought to answer about their applicants were whether they were the right sort of people. Sure, they made room for some bright kids from nowhere provided they weren't Jewish, but by and large the Ivies and their ilk were private schools for the elite on a par with today's prep schools.
I continue to think that places such as Harvard and Yale work out best for children who were born into the upper crust. Unless they screw up and get sidelined, they'll step right in to jobs that are waiting for them.
However, over time those schools have been forced to admit applicants who are long on brains and low on social capital. If they're white, they have to fend for themselves. If they're the right type of minority, the school will see to it that they have a home in a racial or ethnic identity center that will relieve them of ever having to find a white friend group.
And, until recently, they've been admitting some minorities who are painfully underqualified and who haven't the faintest inkling of the lives of their more privileged classmates. I suppose some of them compensate - our used to compensate - by going all in on wokeism and becoming insufferable censorious scolds. Today, with the DEI industry on the decline, they may be falling on hard times.
The stats for MIT's class of 2028, the first that was admitted after the Supreme Court ended racial preferences, show that black admissions plummeted and Asian admissions soared. If I recall correctly, whites make up just 37 percent of the class. What's happening at MIT is that highly qualified Asian applicants are displacing all other racial groups now that they're not being excluded to make room for blacks and perhaps for whites.
Thanks for sharing his essay. The preface to the essay mentions " American project of self-governance", however, the author of the essay seems to implicitly reject any amount of the policy variability and decentralization in policy that is requisite for self government when he wrote that "standardized testing be made “freely available and compulsory for all high school students.”" And that rejection *slightly appears* to be woven throughout the essay within every other policy area he mentioned.
I think eliminating the SAT had little to do with helping black people. Instead, it's more like:
"The SAT is a racist, moral blight. We thus need to purify ourselves of this moral blight by getting rid of it. The outcomes of the alternative are not very important."
In its woke and racist wisdom, the Oregon School Board eliminated the requirement that all seniors pass certain proficiency exams in order to graduate. The reason? Well, the majority minority state school board in our overwhelmingly white state determined that proficiency testing "harmed" blacks. The felicitous result is that blacks' competence will always be suspect for lack of proficiency results and white students will never be able to point to passing proficiency scores because the tests were deemed to harm blacks. It's a real ebony-and-ivory wonderland they created.
re: "Either way, he appears to have told a noble lie" -- I do not follow this argument. I can see why a lie about masks being unnecessary to save them for the medical personnel could be an example of a Noble Lie -- but I cannot find any nobility in lying to people saying that they were necessary if you believed they were not. Looks like _preference falsification_ to me ...
Hanania came up with the idea that wokeness is consolation prizes. Everybody knows a thin white woman will do better than a thick black woman everywhere where looks matter. But we can at least call the thick black woman beautiful so that she feels a little better.
Thing is, the SAT will not be abolished, too useful, and if it will, other ways of detecting who is smart will take its place. But we can tell kids who are not doing well in SAT that it does not imply they are not smart. They are, um, differently intelligent. Sure.
So basically this is not a bad thing. It is just being careful about other people's feelings. Otherwise not much will be done.
I think it is mostly about women having more of a voice so social norms shift towards more typically female behaviours. This is one.
Another virtuous lie, repeated in this essay, is that George Floyd was murdered. There is ample evidence he died from other causes. See piece by Candace Owens. This also serves to show how vehemently defensive and damning people behave about something they want to believe. Try questioning that on campus.
When we talk about virtuous lies, we can also discuss the attempts by various people to discredit the hereditarian hypothesis in regards to average racial and ethnic IQ, criminality, et cetera gaps. Some of them have even attempted to reject this hypothesis on *moral* grounds *regardless* of its scientific validity, according to Nathan Cofnas.
I see no reason that human evolutionary processes *must* stop at the neck. Nor do I see why exactly human group differences cannot be created over thousands or even hundreds of years, as they might have very well been with Ashkenazi Jews, according to Greg Cochran. (I'm 1/4 Ashkenazi Jewish myself, identify as Jewish, and am also a dual US-Israeli citizen, so please, no accusations of anti-Semitism towards me! It's not like I was insulting Ashkenazi Jews by pointing out that they might very well be smarter than gentile whites for genetic reasons.)
Hard disagree about rejection of hereditarian "explanations" for group differences being a "virtuous lie." The irresolvable core problem is inferring cause from correlation. At best, all one has is correlations between some better or worse (a whole nother issue!) measures of genetics and group outcomes. To infer that genes cause those group outcomes is very difficult and has never been accomplished in any of the hereditarian work.
This is a stark contrast to work *with individuals.* It is not hard to demonstrate that genes cause all sorts of outcomes for individuals, because it is way easier to rule out alternative explanations, which almost never can be ruled out for hereditarian "explanations" for group differences.
See Rohrer (2018), Thinking Clearly About Correlations and Causation. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2515245917745629
She does not discuss hereditarianism per se. She does discuss what it takes to infer cause from correlation. The hereditarian work never meets those standards. To give you a flavor (though I recommend the whole paper), consider this quote:
"The central problem of observational data is confounding, that is, the presence of a common cause that lurks behind the potential cause of interest (the independent variable; in experimental settings, often called the treatment) and the outcome of interest (the dependent variable). Such a confounding influence can introduce what is often called a spurious correlation, which ought not to be confused with a causal effect. How can a DAG be used to figure out how to remove all such noncausal associations so that only the true causal effect remains?
To do that, one must make sure that the DAG includes everything that is relevant to the causal effect of interest."
DAG refers to a Directed Acyclic Graph depicting causal influences on one or more outcomes.
Hereditarian studies have never included (as predictors) "everything that is relevant to the causal effect of interest." And they probably can't do it. How would they possibly control for, say, societal racism (past and present), in explaining racial group differences in anything? (that's a rhetorical question because, at least for now, there is no way to do it). And that's just the beginning. There are many more variables that could explain both and though one will occasionally see some effort to account for 1 or 2 (SES is common), efforts to comprehensively control for alternative potential causes are nonexistent.
You can disagree, and because, as far as I can tell, the scientific methods to prove or falsify hereditarian explanations for race differences do not exist, I cannot prove it wrong.
But the argument is scientific, not moral, and it is most definitely not a lie.
This will be my only entry here on this topic so you get the final word, if you so choose.
I’ll just say one last thing: As Emil points out in his second article, one doesn’t need 100% certainty. So long as hereditarian predictions will keep passing (fasifiable) prediction after prediction, environmentalist researchers will need to make some testable predictions of their own if they will want to avoid having a degenerate research program. Science, after all, sometimes works in terms of probabilities, not in terms of certainties.
Even when it comes to looking at the effects of racism, for instance, one can try comparing people based on their degree of African (or whatever) appearance versus the degree of African DNA that they actually have. The environmentalist would presumably predict that if racism was a determining variable here, then people’s degree of African appearance would be a better predictor of determining their IQ on average than their degree of African DNA. But if it will end up being the other way around, then this will be another falsifiable prediction that the hereditarian hypothesis will pass, just like it has previously passed the falsifiable prediction that blacks and Hispanics with more European ancestry are, on average, smarter than those blacks and Hispanics with less European ancestry.
BTW, you do know that if agnosticism is the default position here (apparently if one takes your view on this), then one shouldn’t be blaming certain groups for the success or failure of certain other groups. After all, we simply can’t know one way or the other, and therefore shouldn’t jump to conclusions in either direction.
Have you ever read Emil Kirkegaard’s writings and works on this topic? He has actually criticized you for your views in regards to this:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/08/the-hereditarians-bad-people-objection/
“‘Dark Pirate’ Lee Jussim sure has come a long way during this great awokening. First he spearheaded efforts to promote non-leftist social psychology of stereotypes in Quillette (https://quillette.com/2015/12/04/rebellious-scientist-surprising-truth-about-stereotypes/, 2015), but since 2020 or so, he has joined the can’t know nothing about race differences, and we shouldn’t look with available methods, ignorance is bliss camp. A bizarre position for him to adopt, but apparently he was facing https://twitter.com/PsychRabble/status/1345389711808933889, so who can say what really lies behind this change of course for the ol’ pirate.”
“The frustrating thing about people like Cathy Young and Jussim here is that they profess to be interested in the topic, but they are also curiously unwilling to actually engage with it, that is, get their hands dirty. One can look at Cathy defending her views on Twitter:”
Emil Kirkegaard also offers various ways to solve this question:
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/06/the-race-and-intelligence-question-is-solvable/
Is his viewpoint here wrong? Unrealistic with current technology? Or something else?
Whether George Floyd was murdered or not is an institutional fact, like whether Coco Gauff's ball was in or out, not a brute fact, like whether it's raining. If the ball is called out by an appropriate institutional authority, it's out. Similarly with murder. We have a procedure for making that call, and murder is what was determined through the appropriate institutional process. Thus, to say GF was murdered is not to lie. It is to report accurately an institutional fact. The cool thing about institutional facts is that, unlike the question of whether it's raining, you don't have to agree with them. You can think the referee screwed up and Coco's ball should have been called in, or you can think GF was not murdered. You don't have to agree but you do have to respect the fact that that's the determination that was made.
By that logic, though, the claim that the US Constitution does not protect or confer a right to legal abortion nationwide is also an institutional fact after *Dobbs*, correct--however much most of the American people might disagree with it?
Pretty much, yes. It might be more accurate to say that the institutional fact is that with Dobbs, SCOTUS determined that the US Constitution does not protect or confer a right to legal abortion nationwide, and that therefore there currently is no national right to a legal abortion. With constitutional interpretation, what the Constitution does or does not guarantee changes periodically, so to state the full institutional fact, it may be necessary to add something about the relevant SCOTUS decision. Stepping back to the general level, the whole point of institutional facts is to confer powers, permissions, privileges, obligations, and disabilities. Thus, the Constitution established a bunch of institutions/institutional facts (the presidency, legislature, judiciary, etc.) and SCOTUS has ever since been in the business of refining, adding to, and subtracting from those facts.
Not OP but correct IMHO - the constitution doesn't confer such a right purely because the supreme court says it doesn't and therefore laws could be passed restricting legal abortion -> de facto do not have that right anymore.
In the context of any one specific case, such George Floyd's, especially since it was adjudicated in a regular and centuries established court of law to deal with publicly made and widely agreed upon for centuries elements of the criminal code, you're reasoning about institutional facts may indeed hold. However, you should clarify the boundaries of this line of reasoning. If this reasoning is applied universally across all spheres, it risks implying that any determination made by an institutional authority is beyond reproach, which could lead to a situation where dissent or even basic interrogation of ideas or policies are prohibited. This would essentially be a form of dictatorship, where the legitimacy of all institutional decisions is unquestioned, regardless of context or merit.
To avoid this, it's very important to delineate where the authority of institutional facts should be respected and where it is necessary to allow space for disagreement, debate, and the possibility of error correction. And in what major spheres institutional authority should hold at all. This distinction is necessary to maintaining a balance between having institutional machinery working where needed with the authority they need to be effective while also preserving the democratic principles of free thought and speech and the ability of citizens to manipulate and effect policies.
Excellent piece.
What do you think of the tweaking of the online SAT testing that adjusts question difficulties based on how you answer prior questions? That seems to be trending towards giving equivalent scores for vastly different abilities.
As I understand it, you get a score based on the difficulty of the questions you answer, not the number or percent you get correct. If so, people would get very different scores for answering questions of different levels of difficulty.
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/breaking-the-sat
This is not accurate. See “Breaking the SAT” by El Gato Malo on Substack.
What you described is how it should be done but not how SAT is intending to do it.
Thanks for the clarification
Don't believe everything you see on the internet. Even if it has fancy-appearing graphs.
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/sat/scores/understanding-scores/how-scores-are-calculated
This is by the actual company that designs the SAT as opposed to ... some guy grinding an anti-woke ax. See especially THEIR graph of how scores correspond to whether one gets more difficult or easier questions.
I would love to buy The Poisoning of the American Mind. Can't find it in hardcover. Does know where the hardcover version can be purchased?
FYI, Amazon is selling a softcover version. but for $50 vs the list price of $34.50
We're working on getting the hardcovers back in stock at Amazon! Shouldn't be too much longer. Thanks for your interest...
Abe Books says PhinsPlace has one: https://www.abebooks.com
Thank you for this very interesting piece... Regarding the issue of racism and standardized tests, I would like to point out that I've written several in-depth analyses of the ACT. And, the misconceptions have to do with misunderstanding of the actual results of the tests… one example with references to other articles is is this "The ACT Isn’t Racially Biased Because “Black" and “White” Aren’t Races" https://everythingisbiology.substack.com/p/the-act-isnt-racially-biased-because
Thanks again for this post. Sincerely, Frederick
I agree wholeheartedly that black and white aren't races! They're US Census classifications. Thanks for the link to your piece! Will check it out ASAP.
Lee's note has a typo -- 'bullshiy' for 'bullshit'.
also -- re the Shaw quote
Quote Investigator has a piece on it. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/07/24/lunatic-shaw/
Nice catches. Fixed. Glad I qualified the GBS quote/meme. Probably half the time I find some such quotes, they are misattributed, though this one looks probably true.