To summarize and oversimplify, Robinson thinks deBoer is wrong because we cannot know anything about genetics, education, and the potential of children until we have tried it in a socialist...
To summarize and oversimplify, Robinson thinks deBoer is wrong because we cannot know anything about genetics, education, and the potential of children until we have tried it in a socialist utopia.
I’m exaggerating for effect. It’s actually a good point that all heritability studies are relative to their subjects’ environments. (On average, because statistics is about group tendencies.) Scientists can only study how people do in the environments they are in, and many children are growing up in environments that are far from ideal.
Usually I’m sympathetic to arguments that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and when in doubt we should default to uncertainty. However I think this goes a little far? I think it’s important to know what can be achieved in environments that aren’t too different than what we have, perhaps modified using interventions that can reasonably be tried. In particular, it’s important to learn from the experiences of parents and teachers in teaching children.
Generally, this is why I’m more interested in incremental improvements than in vague utopian dreams. A problem with utopias is that it’s hard to say much in advance about how they would work (or whether they would work at all), because they are too different from anything we have experience with.
To summarize and oversimplify, Robinson thinks deBoer is wrong because we cannot know anything about genetics, education, and the potential of children until we have tried it in a socialist utopia.
I’m exaggerating for effect. It’s actually a good point that all heritability studies are relative to their subjects’ environments. (On average, because statistics is about group tendencies.) Scientists can only study how people do in the environments they are in, and many children are growing up in environments that are far from ideal.
Usually I’m sympathetic to arguments that we don’t know as much as we think we do, and when in doubt we should default to uncertainty. However I think this goes a little far? I think it’s important to know what can be achieved in environments that aren’t too different than what we have, perhaps modified using interventions that can reasonably be tried. In particular, it’s important to learn from the experiences of parents and teachers in teaching children.
Generally, this is why I’m more interested in incremental improvements than in vague utopian dreams. A problem with utopias is that it’s hard to say much in advance about how they would work (or whether they would work at all), because they are too different from anything we have experience with.