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Comment by bell-cot | Hacker News Reader

Admitting that I'm older, and haven't kept up with ideology on the subject of human differences - which of the following statements would be "best kept to yourself", these days?

- Some people are taller than others, Basketball Coach

- Some people can run faster than others, Track Coach

- Some people have more musical talent than others, Piano Instructor

- Some people are sicker than others, Emergency Room Nurse

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An abstraction of the old "follow the money" argument is to figure out who politically benefits from dogma, then decide if you want to align with them, then determine if you'll be permitted not to obey.

Tends to be a lot of "convert at the point of a sword" from the authoritarians, as usual for them.

> figure out who politically benefits from dogma

“Some people are taller than others” is dogma?

Height discrimination is a thing.

> Height discrimination is a thing

Sure. That doesn’t make the underlying variation non-empirical, i.e. dogmatic.

It is one thing to say that there is height variation, which is clear to anyone and easily empirically tested. However, saying that the quality of someone's height is attributable to genetics, diet, diet of the mother during pregnancy, social standing etc, is a bit harder to ascertain. The same with this research. Saying there are smart people or stupid people is not what the article concludes. They are already testing within a selected nonrandom group (college kids). The claim they are making is that prior knowledge is a very big differentiator in "speed of learning". Now, to claim this means that the kids with more prior knowledge are not "smarter" is a very weird claim. Smartness is not some metric that exists without a society. We all know the stories of the feral kids. Smartness is mostly cultivated, this article underpins this further by identifying prior knowledge as an important factor. So important, that other differences seem trivial. How the kids gained the prior knowledge is not part of this study and could be the focus of a future study.

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