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Comment by NotGMan | Hacker News Reader

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Second ‘genetics’ comment — wow, we’re really far down the supremacy hole

The key era of tech was when the Jobs and Wozniak built things in their garage, and considered them a bicycle for the mind

You don’t need genetics to ride a bike and improve — but you do need that argument to justify the unjustifiable.

Dark days

> You don’t need genetics to ride a bike

Depends on how you define genetics. Starfish cant ride it; There exist genetic conditions that would make it difficult or impossible to ride a bike (first google search: inherited retinal diseases).

Yeah - while it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc, even if we assume for the sake of argument that this is only some tiny fraction of the population, we should still expand access to the resources as much as possible to catch those kids in the net. It's just better for everyone. Arguments about spending the money on food instead miss the point - if OLPC reaches even a few tech-disposed kids out of every thousand, those kids have a much better shot at being force multipliers for their own local communities and country 20 years from now.

> it's not unreasonable to say there likely is a sizeable nature component to someone's propensity towards tech/math/etc

It is unreasonable, a lazy argument of supremacists. We don't know how much (could be minimal), how many, what exactly the effects are ('propensity' is quite vague - exactly what is affected, in what ways, and to what degree?), etc. It's also the anti-democracy, anti-freedom crowd trying (again) to create intellectual cover for seizing power.

Comparing bike riding and innate talent for math has to be one of the stupidest analogies I have heard in the last few months.

How many people can ride a bike? Everyone, all humans, except those with certain physical disabilities can do it.

How many people can code software competently or do science? Not many.

The fact that you cannot acknowledge your own childhood experience in school, that is, that you had smart and stupid schoolmates, is very telling that your comment is ideology based.

Would you make the case that reading comprehension is genetics as well?

I know it is. I've seen it with my own two eyes in school.

Besides innate ability, there's any number of other things that could be a limiting factor before access to information becomes the blocker. Like perhaps whatever factors caused the covid "remote learning" experiments in richer countries to have issues.

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