1) It's awful what Penn is doing to Wax. (Now, if she'd only sided with Hamas....)
2) I like Glenn's point about: Are we OK with the percentage being whatever it is, or do we want (for some social) reason to force a change?
a) this will require a double standard
b) (Glenn's concern) even blacks who met the higher bar will always be looked down on.
c) How much will society suffer because the standards are lowered? How dangerous is it to have dumber pilots, or engineers who aren't as good at designing airplanes that don't fall off? There is a real price in economic inefficiency to be paid.
Still, if we had some sense of the numbers we might well decide the price was worth it.
My real problem with the affirmative action group (who want to force a change to the percentage) is that if they really cared, they'd address root causes. Which might be some combination of:
a) Genetic. Making no claims. Just saying "Do we know enough to take this off the table?"
b) Economic. Rich vs poor matters.
c) Culture. Are smart blacks attacked for "acting white"?
d) Single parent families. This is obviously huge, and the fact that "no one" on the left will even talk about it makes me doubt their sincerity.
(I'd focus on single parent families. Fix this, and see how much problem remains...)
(As an aside, when it comes to sex-based differences, there's clearly preferences as well that would need to be considered -- even if male and female have identical innate intelligence, males have clear statistical preferences for some activities, females for other activities. Are genetic-based preferences that correlate with race possible?)
There are even more factors, specifically good nutrition, a stable home life, a vision of a future that motivates them to succeed (or short term, meeting high expectations of parents). Perhaps a part of culture, there are behavioral and social norms (including the acceptability of fights, the ability to de-escalate, respect for authority figures, respect for common and personal property, respect for other people’s time, treating peers with respect, etc) and cumulatively these take away from time in school learning and the ability to make the most of resources that are available. I spend a lot of time with 6th graders and the energy they spend on undermining themselves is heartbreaking.
As an aside, in my opinion sex-based differences are really mostly gender-based differences in that women and men are socialized very differently. With the exception of some specific hormone linked deficits (ex. testosterone and spatial reasoning) abilities are consistently similar between the sexes (females seem to have a natural advantage in communication) so these “preferences” are probably not genetic.
I'm certainly no expert here.... but I thought that there were studies done on non-human primates (chimps?) where they gave dolls and some stereotypical boy toy (I don't recall what they were) to infants and the females showed a preference for the dolls and the males showed a preference for the stereotypical boy toy. Again, it's not "ability", but "interest", and it seemed to show that even non-human primates show sex-related interests.
Hi Steve, I think you are right that there are behavioral differences in the average girl and the average boy starting early on. But even early on, those differences can be amplified by socialization. Even in new born babies, if you dress the baby as a girl the baby is responded to more quickly and with more compassion than if dressed in boy clothes (at least in one study I read about). In that case, it was balancing the difference that as early as 6 weeks testosterone production is believed to impact expressiveness of baby boys with the socialization idea that boys shouldn’t be rewarded for crying, as horrifying as that is. I don’t know about you, but if you are looking at 10 week old babies and having trouble sussing out what is biological and what is socialized at that point, by the time the kid reaches adulthood it’s going to be impossible.
I think people underestimate the impact of socialization. I was the kind of girl who did boy stuff, and there was always a lot of friction from that. I am sure for a person who didn’t violate gender norms, they would never have experienced that and thus feel there weren’t those strong pressures. Do you know what I mean?
Agreed. There's no single explanation. I guess I was pushing back on "it's all socialization" -- which of course you never claimed it was! We'd probably disagree some on the details, but I think we agree on the big picture.
Really interesting!
1) It's awful what Penn is doing to Wax. (Now, if she'd only sided with Hamas....)
2) I like Glenn's point about: Are we OK with the percentage being whatever it is, or do we want (for some social) reason to force a change?
a) this will require a double standard
b) (Glenn's concern) even blacks who met the higher bar will always be looked down on.
c) How much will society suffer because the standards are lowered? How dangerous is it to have dumber pilots, or engineers who aren't as good at designing airplanes that don't fall off? There is a real price in economic inefficiency to be paid.
Still, if we had some sense of the numbers we might well decide the price was worth it.
My real problem with the affirmative action group (who want to force a change to the percentage) is that if they really cared, they'd address root causes. Which might be some combination of:
a) Genetic. Making no claims. Just saying "Do we know enough to take this off the table?"
b) Economic. Rich vs poor matters.
c) Culture. Are smart blacks attacked for "acting white"?
d) Single parent families. This is obviously huge, and the fact that "no one" on the left will even talk about it makes me doubt their sincerity.
(I'd focus on single parent families. Fix this, and see how much problem remains...)
(As an aside, when it comes to sex-based differences, there's clearly preferences as well that would need to be considered -- even if male and female have identical innate intelligence, males have clear statistical preferences for some activities, females for other activities. Are genetic-based preferences that correlate with race possible?)
There are even more factors, specifically good nutrition, a stable home life, a vision of a future that motivates them to succeed (or short term, meeting high expectations of parents). Perhaps a part of culture, there are behavioral and social norms (including the acceptability of fights, the ability to de-escalate, respect for authority figures, respect for common and personal property, respect for other people’s time, treating peers with respect, etc) and cumulatively these take away from time in school learning and the ability to make the most of resources that are available. I spend a lot of time with 6th graders and the energy they spend on undermining themselves is heartbreaking.
As an aside, in my opinion sex-based differences are really mostly gender-based differences in that women and men are socialized very differently. With the exception of some specific hormone linked deficits (ex. testosterone and spatial reasoning) abilities are consistently similar between the sexes (females seem to have a natural advantage in communication) so these “preferences” are probably not genetic.
I'm certainly no expert here.... but I thought that there were studies done on non-human primates (chimps?) where they gave dolls and some stereotypical boy toy (I don't recall what they were) to infants and the females showed a preference for the dolls and the males showed a preference for the stereotypical boy toy. Again, it's not "ability", but "interest", and it seemed to show that even non-human primates show sex-related interests.
Hi Steve, I think you are right that there are behavioral differences in the average girl and the average boy starting early on. But even early on, those differences can be amplified by socialization. Even in new born babies, if you dress the baby as a girl the baby is responded to more quickly and with more compassion than if dressed in boy clothes (at least in one study I read about). In that case, it was balancing the difference that as early as 6 weeks testosterone production is believed to impact expressiveness of baby boys with the socialization idea that boys shouldn’t be rewarded for crying, as horrifying as that is. I don’t know about you, but if you are looking at 10 week old babies and having trouble sussing out what is biological and what is socialized at that point, by the time the kid reaches adulthood it’s going to be impossible.
I think people underestimate the impact of socialization. I was the kind of girl who did boy stuff, and there was always a lot of friction from that. I am sure for a person who didn’t violate gender norms, they would never have experienced that and thus feel there weren’t those strong pressures. Do you know what I mean?
Agreed. There's no single explanation. I guess I was pushing back on "it's all socialization" -- which of course you never claimed it was! We'd probably disagree some on the details, but I think we agree on the big picture.