“Teaching is a skill we have not yet mastered, save for to those happy people for whom it is almost superfluous.”
We have known intelligence is heritable for a long time. Anyone who has lived for a great length of time in a small town has seen this in their neighbours.
We have had twin studies basically confirming it for ages; and soon cognitive genomics will confirm it beyond the smallest shadow of a doubt.
It is a testament to what epistemic hacks humans are that we allowed these extreme priors to be overwhelmed by empty political fashion.
These are not just correlations. By looking within families, we get an unbiased estimate of the true causal effects of these genetic variants (because DNA is randomly assigned among siblings by the "lottery of meiosis"). Effect sizes are smaller than if we look across different families, but still significant and large.
Lee, J.J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, M., Nguyen-Viet, T.A., Bowers, P., Sidorenko, J., Linnér, R.K. and Fontana, M.A., 2018. Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature genetics, 50(8), p.1112.
The political 'fashion' is perhaps more about not pigeonholing people by fallible means, and more about giving them a chance regardless?
Why do you associate farmer with lesser intellect?
Change it to:
> Yet there's the exceptional young man from the local family of village idiots, who got a philosophy degree at Auburn, first in his line to do so.
Now that'd be surprising.
I know lots of “farmers”, and I can’t think of any that I would consider to be of below average intelligence.
I come from a family of idiots yet both myself and later my my sister got college degrees in STEM fields. And I'm not talking about a little dimwitted, my parents are really, really dumb and lack any form of self awareness or critical thinking skills.
I don't see it as particularly surprising.
My grandparents on my dad's side aren't particularly dumb, my mom's parents are though.
And in fact, its not a hypothetical case. I know the family; I know the young man. My wife helped him apply to Auburn.
People learn quite a bit from the educational system, from reading and math to history and philosophy to chemistry and physics.
Reading, writing, basic math... those are things our education is quite good at teaching.
Anything else is forgotten by most students soon after they pass the exams. Those who remember are usually the ones who are interested in the topic; they often independently read more about the topic in their free time.
The system would be improved if those who forget the stuff wouldn't have to study all of it; and those who remember the stuff would be given opportunity to study it from books and have conversations about those books afterwards.
Look around this HN thread and similar discussions. What is the current fashion? It looks like it is the genetic determinism, and disregard for human liberty and self-determination. It's trendy to disregard the latter and engage with these ideas, in the political realm from nationalists to fascists - a large political trend around the world now - to the social realm with genetic determinism. It's no coincidence that the trendy political ideology has found science to cover it - it's exactly what happened in the 20th century with both Nazism and Communism.
The outcomes of these trends, if successful, are predictable; it would take ignorance, not a genetic defect, not to know what the consequences are. What do we lose when we sacrifice individual freedom and self-determination? Who gets to choose, if not the individual for themself?
Note that the two monstrous systems you cite had almost exactly opposite views on the matter. Nazism as everyone knows glorified what you call genetic determinism, but Communism was strongly against such things, for both humans and wheat. They were going to sculpt the new soviet man, remember, by fixing his environment, and they failed at this. Isn’t the existence of evil on both sides of a question evidence against the idea that one side is obviously evil?
Both regimes were pretty keen on sacrifice, and not so keen on individual freedom. On the other hand, I’m pretty keen on freedom and self-determination. I’m also keen on knowing stuff about how the world, I don’t see how keeping ourselves in the dark will lead to better decisions.
The problem isn't the science or anti-science. The problem is absolute power, which is all too easy to use for evil.