"A conservative is someone who believes Darwinism only applies to humans, a liberal is someone who believes Darwinism applies to everything except humans" said someone once.
Nope. Conservatives are just as much genetics (and developmental biology) deniers, especially when it comes to retributivist attitudes toward crime. To view violent reactivity as primarily a mental disorder of certain adolescent males, would threaten their narrative of virtue-charged individual free will.
Evolution deniers say that evolution doesn't exist. No one is saying that genes don't exist, they simply aren't taking into account the extent to which they decide our destiny. It would be folly to believe we currently have a perfect understanding of either.
The gist of evolution is easier to understand than the gist of genetics, so it's easier to retain your bona fides as an intelligent person while denying evolution. Plus, the implications are far less political for the former than for the latter, partly because evolution can be theoretically stopped at the human neck, so evolutionary biology doesn't necessarily have any implications for human behavior/society.
Are there still evolution deniers around? All the young evangelicals I know accept evolution as a fact, just that they believe that God guides the process.
My guess is the young evangelicals that you know are highly selected. It has declined among younger generations, but as a Christian conservative Millennial, I'd say it's still common enough my peers. I'd split them into two groups:
1. The intellectually incurious who haven't thought much about the topic, the arguments for evolution never really stuck with them while the stories from Genesis are straightforward and clean. (Calvin argued almost 500 years ago that Genesis 1 was written for this group: "He who would study astronomy and other recondite arts, look elsewhere.")
2. The intellectually-inclined who are suspicious of any argument for liberalizing one's understanding of Scripture, given the very visible decline (numerical, moral, and spiritual) of the churches that led the way in doing so, and so have constructed elaborate arguments for why their reading is correct.
I disagree with those in group #2 about Genesis 1-11, but I sympathize with their position. And on some level, I don't think there's really anything wrong with adhering to a literal reading of Genesis 1-11, if one is so inclined. Most people believe any number of scientifically incorrect things, and yet, for ideological reasons, this is the only one that's considered a heresy.
Interesting. As for group #2, do they truly believe that the world is only around 6,00 years old, or do they maintain that it is because of fear that giving any inch to the liberal forces will lead to the loss of the culture war?
And also, I'm surprised at how many people reading Hanania's newsletter are plugged into CN/integralist/post-liberal circles. What's the appeal of an atheist libertarian to someone that likes Deneen/Ahmari/Vermuele?
Ah, I wrote a longer comment but it somehow got swallowed up.
I'm not going to impugn anyone's motives. There are a range of positions, from those who try to align most closely with the most obvious reading of the text and will always subordinate the science to that reading (which does suggest a recent creation of the world), to those who will always align with the science and are prepared to dismiss the text entirely. With those in between searching for some reconciliation of the two.
As for Hanania, I'd say most of his audience shares common enemies. I'm not Catholic or an integralist, but integralism is a wacky sci-fi idea while Woke is a clear and present danger. I disagree with Hanania on abortion, but I'm much more interested in containing Woke than I am in trying and failing to push out a national abortion ban.
Another factor that we should not neglect is the influence of values, culture, and interests on individual wealth outcomes. I can identify several points in my career where if I had made a different choice I would have made more money, and I was aware of that at the time I made those choices. I knew it when I chose to study history. I knew it when I retired early to try to be a novelist. I knew at at several other career junctures along the way, like the time I was offered an opportunity to move into sales support from technical communication or the time I was offered an opportunity to move into consulting, or the time I had the opportunity to develop a highly lucrative training business. If I had turned towards money instead of away from it at some or all of those junctures, I would be a lot wealthier than I am today.
But I consistently turned the other way, towards the things that interested me, and also towards an easier life that let me work fewer hours and travel less so I could be at home more an work on my other interests more. And I could be spending my time now on almost anything other than the ludicrously unlucrative ambition of being a novelist. But that is what I am doing, knowing full well that it is costing me more than it is making me, and likely always will.
From a purely financial standpoint, therefore, I have not come close to realizing my full potential given the particular set of opportunities and advantages I started out with. And I made the choice not to do so with full knowledge that that was what I was doing. And that is true of most people. Given sufficient resources to live comfortably (by whatever standard we measure that, which is largely a matter of the expectations we grew up with) most of us will choose leisure and interests over spending every waking hour grubbing for cash.
In short, while it is certainly true that we don't all start life with the same resources and the same advantages, and therefore with the same theoretical earning potential, most of us don't come close to maximizing the resources and advantages we do have in that cause because we choose to live differently.
That choice to live differently is no doubt individual in part and cultural in part, and it undoubtedly has consequences for our children. My choices and values were undoubtedly influenced by my parents' values and choices, and by the environment I grew up in as a consequence of those choices. And why should I complain of that? Who says that having the greatest possible amount of money in the bank is the best of life choices? That is a particular cultural and personal value shared by very few human beings.
To argue that those who started with greater advantages might owe something to those who started with few advantages has some merit, though it lies in the realm of charity rather than justice. But to argue that those who chose to devote all their advantages to the pursuit of money owe something to those who chose to devote their advantages to other pursuits is absurd. If Jeff Bezos owes me money because I devoted my time to writing novels rather than to building an ecommerce giant, should it not follow that I owe Jeff a share of the things I devoted my resources to: the time spend with my wife and kids, the time spent reading great books and talking about them, the time spent dreaming up characters and settings and plots. Does it follow that the people who chose to go fishing rather than building an business empire owe Bill Gates a brace of trout and the joy of a lazy day in a boat on a lake?
Yes, this makes sense. On balance, money is more fungible than other things. Some of us maximize for sub-monetary pursuits because we get back in time what we lose in money. Others maximize money (Musk reportedly works 100 hours weeks and has for most of his life).
Seems odd for some to jump to the conclusion that monetary advantage should be redistributed and ignore the choices many make that cost them money. It's not more just, it's just easier to track and redistribute!
I don't think this applies so much to the truly poor. They aren't choosing to become novelists or turning away from consulting. They are gas station attendants and cashiers. They're not making choices to maximize their earnings, but the comparison stops there. The things constraining them are not the things constraining you and it's not really fair to treat all constaints as the same.
Oh, absolutely. There are people who are so limited in the resources and capacities available to them are simply unable to care for themselves, let alone anyone else. There are people who could not raise to the level of cashier or gas station attendant even with the best will in the world. They can no more be blamed for their poverty than the blind can be blamed for not seeing or the lame for not walking.
And yes, we have an obligation to aid those people. We have an obligation in charity, but also a selfish motive to assist them, since none of us wants to live in an armed compound surrounded by a slum.
Figuring out how to do this has never been easy, because as soon as you start giving aid to the helpless, you create a motive for the lazy to pose as the helpless, which eventually leads to them learning helplessness. Figuring out how to assist the genuinely needy without creating a class of parasites and teaching helplessness to those who could help themselves is a genuinely hard problem that we are never going to find a perfect solution for.
But this obligation to raise up the lowest in no way translates into either an obligation or a justification for tearing down the highest. Ask them to contribute more than the rest of us to raising up the lowest, by all means. Most of them are willing to do that anyway, either out of charity or because they don't want beggars on their doorsteps.
But I can think of few measures more calculated to harden their hearts against the entire social project than denying their children places in universities that the deserve on academic merit. Instead, try hitting them up for contributions to improved elementary education in poorer communities. You will find that a project that appeals to them greatly, both on the grounds of charity and the grounds of expediency.
Or we might phrase it that because you have these needs, you need to figure out what contribution you can make to society in exchange for the things you need. Or, at least, you need to figure out what contribution you can make to someone or some organization in exchange for the things you need.
Society is simply all of us together. You are part of society to everyone else, so if society has an obligation to individuals, you have a share of that obligation. So if society has an obligation to supply your needs, then you (as part of society) have an obligation to provide part of the needs of everyone else in society. It follows that it is your obligation to figure out what part of societies needs you can supply in order to merit society providing you with the things you need. Free markets, it turns out, are the most efficient way for all parties to figure out how to fulfil that obligation.
And if you then create goods over and above both what you need to satisfy your own needs, and to fulfill your obligation to society, why should the excess not be yours to keep? Your option, of course is simply to stop working once your needs and obligations are met. If you do that, no one has a claim on you. So why, if you do continue working, and thus produce a surplus, does anyone have a claim on that surplus?
1. People just naturally love underdog stories. Even conservatives. I think it's hardwired for people to cheer on those from scrappy backgrounds.
2. Some may argue that it's societally beneficial to engineer class mobility. I mean that's largely the same argument as race-based affirmative action. But I think where they went wrong with that one was just the sheer degree of weight put on race. Most normies thought that affirmative action was a bit of a "tie goes to the runner" type adjustment. If all else equal, then the favored races get in. I think even today, most don't know that it was worth ~400 points of SAT.
This is true, race based affirmative action is so bad in part because of how extreme the preferences are. Hopefully the class stuff will never get nearly that bad.
There's something to be said for the value of stories. I can agree with fudging the numbers slightly, maybe 30 or 40 SAT points just to push a few underdogs barely above the line. That seems fun. The fear is that the class-in-itself matures into a class-for-itself and advocates to bolster the systems that got them there in magnitude.
What starts as a small for-fun SAT bump metastasizes into the hundreds of points that you mention, new fake 'studies' classes, and skin-wearing CEI (Class, Equity, Inclusion) experts that will take the lead on marching us forward into a dystopia.
"If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor."
People would make the argument that the Janitor's son's achievement is better as he won't have had access to tutors, help from his father and his father's friends etc and that given the same conditions in college the probability favours him achieving more.
Exactly - the SAT can be gamed like anything else. If you can figure it out without 1x1 tutoring I'd see that as remarkably more impressive. I truly don't understand the argument of this piece.
Yeah I wish Richard had expanded on why he doesn't find this reasoning persuasive. He did call it "not obviously absurd", and I'd like to know why "ignoring the power of heredity" is so bad when it's for someone who truly is obviously, anomalously talented
Bezos might not be the best example to illustrate a connection between good genes and family wealth. According to Wikipedia, his genetic father was an alcoholic circus unicyclist and his stepfather made the money.
This is a dumb rationalization and sounds like a parody of the hereditarian position. Those same genes apparently led her to have children with an alcoholic circus unicyclist.
I’ve actually had some success explaining this to people who would never go full hereditarian.
If you believe:
1) Intelligence is, on average, financially rewarded
2) Intelligence is somewhat heritable
Then you wouldn’t expect intelligence to be equally distributed across income bands. Both of those positions are trivially true (and an understatement in the case of the second).
Wouldn’t the Janitor’s son get a much bigger boost from the peer networks at elite schools? As a white trash kid in a fairly selective college, the biggest thing I learned was the habits and preferences of the professional class. I loved that you brought about the noblesse oblige aspect with JFK, for a genes first society to work you need the genetic winners to have compassion for the others and understand their duty toward them.
I would disagree that you need to have compassion for them as much as you need to develop a system that provides incentives for improving their lives.
Bezos made Amazon to make money, not out of compassion. In order to make money, though, he had to create value and in the process improve the lives of the common man. That’s a very desirable outcome.
This piece -- especially the part about the janitor's kid -- strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize/rationalize hatred of poor people. It explains why you think the right's delusions about the 2020 election and vaccines are somehow worse than the left's delusions about things as fundamental as gender and racial differences: The latter lies tend to be spread by wealthier people, ergo they can't be as bad as the lies spread by poorer people (even though they're obviously more harmful).
Acknowledging genetic differences is important because it helps us understand the world, not because it's a post-hoc justification to hold down people we might find distasteful, like a working-class kid who happens to be in the 99th percentile of intelligence but doesn't share your cultural sensibilities.
>This piece -- especially the part about the janitor's kid -- strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize/rationalize hatred of poor people.
You're responding to a guy--who among other things--thinks its great that people are dying of opioid overdoses since it will improve the gene pool (that not how evolution works, but that's neither here nor there). He also thinks we should be ruled by an oligarchy of the most successful business men and has written tweets commending Jeffrey Epstein for his ability to blackmail Bill Gates.
One thing that's clear from his oeuvre is that he thinks that power, wealth, and status are the primary indicators of moral worth and that poverty, addiction, and poor mental health are indicators of moral failure. He's framed himself as a libertarian, but most serious libertarian thinkers (ie. think Frank Knight, not Caplan) don't argue markets are just (rather that they're the most efficient at satisfying human desires). He's philosophically closer to Ayn Rand and Moldbug or a parody of Nietzsche.
Nobody here is hating on poor people. The kid of every janitor that scores 1600 on his SAT can go to college and he is smart
Enough for 99% of jobs. All else being equal (which it never is) it's very hard to argue the kid of two doctor parents isn't more likely to successfully become a doctor than the kid whose parents only have HS diplomas. The doctor parents can literally help the kid academically and professionally. That is simply reality, I don't see a compelling societal interest in "correcting" for this.
But is the question only about whether we give a boost or preference to the child guaranteed to success? Or that we, society, give a boost or leg up to the child who deserves and needs our help.
The opposite is true for the Einstein kid...if we do not prefer him for admissions to Harvard for pre-med, he will likely still become a great successful doctor. While the other student needs more people telling him, "Ya got what it takes kiddo. Grab the golden ring." No?
Preference is about whom we as society think will benefit most from our help. No?
To me, that blue collar kid with high grades and test scores is exactly that child.
It's not about deciding to weigh the scale (further) in favor or the doctor's kid or the disadvantaged kid, it's about whether to interfere at all. Absent a compelling societal interest in interfering, I'd say we don't. Which means if a school wants to favor the poor kid, that's fine but I don't think the school should be required to do so.
As a society we generally benefit when the best people are in the best jobs for them. At the margin, one kid will get into med school and the other won't. Society is best served when the kid who gets in graduates and saves a lot of lives.
No one is really being held down. I don't have figures on hand, but the returns to elite education are rarely worth it insofar as money in concerned. There are just a few fields where the name of the college is a requirement for entry, but at the same, those may not be the highest paying (take journalism for example.)
A smart kid from poor parents can still take out loans and get a STEM degree from any regular state school and become rich, or even any old degree and still find a way in. No affirmative action required.
>There are just a few fields where the name of the college is a requirement for entry, but at the same, those may not be the highest paying (take journalism for example.)
This isn't true. Take a look at who's hired in finance and management consulting. When you compare it more merit-based fields (STEM until recently) the elite school bias is apparent.
Hanania has contempt for white parochial ignoramuses (rightly so?), but some might argue this is balanced out by his support for opening the borders to millions of non-white parochial ignoramuses in the name of cosmopolitanism. And although he thinks we should fear the future political externalities of the Trumpies based on their current vaccine opposition, he also argues we shouldn’t fear the future political externalities of non-whites based on their current externalities (which also includes the immense cost of a continued loss homeland for whites that is never even counted for PC reasons) because who knows what the future will bring. I’m not sure this all makes sense.
The "fairest" way to dole out admissions would probably be what the East Asian countries do. Make the standardized test significantly harder then rank everyone across the country from 1 to X. Admissions is purely based on rank.
Would that make society as a whole better though? I'm not sure.
Of course from that aspect it would be beneficial. But you'd also induce a lot more stress and potentially turbocharge youth depression rates (nearly 25-30% adolescent depression rate in South Korea, Japan has highest youth suicide rate, etc.).
Right, and to elaborate on that, China, Korea, and other Asian countries have had Confucism and the state exams/meritocracy it demands for a long time - it clearly wasn't enough of a panacea to stop the Cultural Revolution 🤷♂️
Wasn't this the idea behind the SATs, and wasn't it thrown aside then the results on the standardized test were significantly different between racial/ethnic groups?
My problem with this is that studying for a test like this is not really an optimal way to spend your time. If you want to study, great! But you’d be better off pushing to more advanced topics rather than ensuring you never make a mistake on the elementary problems that are on these tests.
Also, will note that lots of Asians move to USA to have their children avoid the cram school misery that is youth in those countries.
"In other words, he’s a gene denier." This is universal. Mentioning genetic factors when talking about humans, individuals or groups, in anything except, possibly, medical issues, is the ultimate taboo. We are even supposed to pretend that men and women are interchangeable, which should be well over the border of insanity, but acquiescing to this absurdity is mandatory nonetheless. I suppose the idea is that mentioning genetic influence on personal behavior, group or individual, threatens civil peace since we have a racially divided society and everyone is obliged to maintain a pretense of literal, biological and not just legal equality. Some people even actually believe it, and become angry when that view is threatened by obvious facts and evidence. There are not many people who will say these things forthrightly and in their own name, in public. Respect for your willingness to do so.
This is what happens when you prioritize being contrarian over all else. If you are comparing two candidates who applied to a college, one who graduated from a prep school like Philip Exeter or Andover and another who graduated from a local public high school. Given the difference in opportunities in these two schools, the graduate from Andover would have better resume - more foreign language classes, enrichment volunteer trips, can excel at niche sports with low competition like Lacrosse but in a public high school, the student might have stellar GPA, good ACT and SAT score but not these extra curricular and niche sport achievements.
Maybe like Asia, we need to have standardized entrance exams to determine admissions, it is fair and is less bureaucratic as candidates can be ranked by entrance exam scores.
This is a non-solution, because it just lets the downward spiral of poverty to continue indefinitely, unless you are pinning all your hopes on genetic engineering to fix this. Actually, your view on poverty is incredibly trivial: my grandfather survived during the Great Depression by scraping leftovers off of the dirty pots and pans of prison kitchens, and today, I am a software developer. Heredity is not as simple as you're selling it.
It also makes all your mewling about women when it comes to abortion seem very dishonest, since it is clear you don't actually have compassion, so why invoke such arguments?
It doesn't matter to discriminate against the wealthy: they're gonna find a way anyways, it's not particularly important for them to get into an elite institution.
And the wealthy should have a sense of noblesse oblige anyway: there weren't really any major issues with the pre-Reagan tax rates, Kennedy certainly didn't complain he was paying too much.
My family was poorer than yours. People with the right qualities have been overcoming poverty as long as there have been free markets. You don’t need government programs or experts, the myth that you do is the problem.
I would even argue that it’s the best short-term outcome for society vs the best long-term outcome. The short-term outcome might be that the candidates admitted to the medical program will become successful doctors at a higher rate than if some candidates from lower socioeconomic classes were admitted, which results in more doctors and a better return on education investment.But the long term outcome for society is that it becomes effectively a caste system, where the socioeconomic class you’re born into is almost always the one you end up in and there are very few opportunities to better yourself. This goes against our American ideals of individual rights and equal opportunity, rather than judging a person on or holding them responsible for the actions of their relatives. It’s also why Communist revolutions happen.
Richard Hanania writes “Knowledge about your parents and grandparents can help predict things about you, even when we have individualized information. If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor. This might make the argument for class-based preferences that if anything go in the opposite direction, favoring the wealthy. The counterargument that it’s more impressive for a poor person to accomplish something isn’t obviously absurd, but it ignores the predictive power of heredity.”
Here is where you err. The predictive power of heredity works because it is unlikely the janitor’s son will have as high a SAT score as Einstein’s son.
But there are exceptions. Every so often an intelligent person would emerge from ordinary stock. For example, Johannes Bach, son of a baker and miller was a piper who began the musical tradition of the Bach family that culminated in his great grandson Johann S. Bach, the famous musician and composer. He had four children who became professional musicians, one of whom is considered top drawer, but after that, the talent seems to have dried up. My point is there was an initial person who stood out and founded the dynasty. Such a person would likely be analogous to the janitor’s son with the 800 SATs.
Another example are those children of talented parents who are lower economic status because of happenstance. I worked with a number of chemical technicians with a high school education who were very bright. I used to have one review my papers for grammar as he noted he’d been good in English in high school and he was (Our techs are co-authors on all our tech reports as they did the lab work, and sometimes made critical observations providing leads). Other techs had kids in the gifted program at school who went on to become PhDs like me. These guys were bright like me and could have taken the college path, but didn’t for various reasons. Some got their high school girlfriends pregnant, married them & got a job. Others were not into school or had bad home lives and went into the service, after which they got married and raised kids who then went to college. Here the parents were talented but not in a position to pursue college, but their children are.
This is the point I came here to make, only you've expressed it better. The predictive power of heredity tells you that a janitor's son probably won't be as intelligent as Einstein's- but if he is, all bets are off. Heredity isn't telling you anything about his particular potential
I have never been more convinced that the time is right for founding a few new universities in the US that reject holistic admissions. Admission would be based on a published formula that weighs standardized test scores and high school grades in a transparent way. You would publish the admission cutoffs reached in the prior years. You could possibly consider some bonus points for strong performance on certain competitions like the AMC. No personal essays of any kind, no extracurricular analysis, no sports or legacy preferences and no interviews. Don’t even ask about race or sex. You could consider using high achievement in extracurricular or sports to offer some scholarships but it should not impact admissions.
I do think a school like this with the right backers could attract applicants. For one thing, it is way easier and less stressful to apply. All kinds of high IQ but unpolished kids who are feeling defeated by the current admission preferences, especially white and asian boys, could be lured in. Ideally you would brand it as being a tough program that will push you to your intellectual limits (kind of like the appeal of SEAL training).
Starting from scratch you could also change many other things about colleges that our currently warped in designing a new school. Plus, with the cratering of commercial real estate prices in cities around the nation, you might be able to pick up a campus on the cheap these days (to say nothing of the dozens of small colleges that are going bankrupt each year).
and you can only penalize someone so much for that fact the rest of their student body is below average in smarts. The student’s own own standardized test scores will tell you a lot, which is why they should weigh for a lot in any admission algorithm. But studies have found that school marks do add something over and above an SAT score.
Ultimately no grade adjustments can be perfect, but they don’t have to be. They just need to be objective, defensible and consistently applied across applicants. “Holistic” admissions don’t do anything to solve the grade comparison issue either, they just make the problem worse. How do you compare what it means to be in the chess club at school A vs. B? What is an essay that has been heavily vetted and edited (if not entirely written) by others going to tell you?
If you want to there are objective ways to make consistent numerical adjustments to school grades to consider inflation and cross school differences. I went to school in Canada and the undergrad admission system there is (or at least was circa 1999) usually not holistic at all for admissions (and for the few programs where it was holistic it is much less subjective then US elite schools). So from that experience I can tell you that schools would either (a) just take grades at face value, or (b) adjust grades based on average published performance of students at that school on standardized tests, or (c) adjust grades based on performance of students from that school at the uni in some required first year course (e.g., I know that U Waterloo math/eng programs were making adjustments based on how students from each high school did on first year calculus. To combat grade inflation, Waterloo asked me to get the school to send my class rank for each course on my transcript to supplement my grades (they were the only school that did this) and asked about performance on a number of math competitions.
Put in the US context, you can fight within school grade inflation by asking the school to supply class rankings in lieu of writing a reference letter. You could also encourage things like SAT subject tests, AP exams, etc., in various ways. You do school adjustments by comparing the school average performance on standardized tests to the state average. All US states have at least one mandatory test that all high school students have to take as part of their progress measurements. Some use Fair Balanced, some actually use SAT/ACT in grade 11, and others have something homebrewed. Regardless, school level results are published by states along with all sorts of other metrics about the school. From this data you can devise a reasonable adjustment factor for any US student. I wouldn’t go to heavy in adjusting grades for school. In the end of the day, the top student at the school can’t be any better ranked than that and
I wonder if there are historical examples of this sort of thing that could lend some insight. I guess the closest thing would be Ottoman Janissaries, where the state "saved" them from Christian (read: bad, underclass, and poor) parents to train them to be ultimate warrior fanatics.
It is strange, the desire to help "the least of us" is so deeply Christian but the people promoting societal leveling are such embarrassing moral cowards that they refuse to do with their own money what they demand institutions and others do with theirs. There's nothing stopping the wealthiest progressives from establishing massive privately run direct wealth transfer programs with their fortunes, but no, the state and institutions have to do the dirty work of their ideology.
Isn't it weird how denying evolution is low-status, but denying genetics is high-status?
"A conservative is someone who believes Darwinism only applies to humans, a liberal is someone who believes Darwinism applies to everything except humans" said someone once.
the conservative part doesn't make sense
i.e. someone who is in favor of natural selection in the economic sphere (i.e. free markets), but denies it in favor of creationism in nature
Nope. Conservatives are just as much genetics (and developmental biology) deniers, especially when it comes to retributivist attitudes toward crime. To view violent reactivity as primarily a mental disorder of certain adolescent males, would threaten their narrative of virtue-charged individual free will.
Evolution deniers say that evolution doesn't exist. No one is saying that genes don't exist, they simply aren't taking into account the extent to which they decide our destiny. It would be folly to believe we currently have a perfect understanding of either.
I love that observation.....had no noticed and it's very true.
The gist of evolution is easier to understand than the gist of genetics, so it's easier to retain your bona fides as an intelligent person while denying evolution. Plus, the implications are far less political for the former than for the latter, partly because evolution can be theoretically stopped at the human neck, so evolutionary biology doesn't necessarily have any implications for human behavior/society.
Are there still evolution deniers around? All the young evangelicals I know accept evolution as a fact, just that they believe that God guides the process.
My guess is the young evangelicals that you know are highly selected. It has declined among younger generations, but as a Christian conservative Millennial, I'd say it's still common enough my peers. I'd split them into two groups:
1. The intellectually incurious who haven't thought much about the topic, the arguments for evolution never really stuck with them while the stories from Genesis are straightforward and clean. (Calvin argued almost 500 years ago that Genesis 1 was written for this group: "He who would study astronomy and other recondite arts, look elsewhere.")
2. The intellectually-inclined who are suspicious of any argument for liberalizing one's understanding of Scripture, given the very visible decline (numerical, moral, and spiritual) of the churches that led the way in doing so, and so have constructed elaborate arguments for why their reading is correct.
I disagree with those in group #2 about Genesis 1-11, but I sympathize with their position. And on some level, I don't think there's really anything wrong with adhering to a literal reading of Genesis 1-11, if one is so inclined. Most people believe any number of scientifically incorrect things, and yet, for ideological reasons, this is the only one that's considered a heresy.
Interesting. As for group #2, do they truly believe that the world is only around 6,00 years old, or do they maintain that it is because of fear that giving any inch to the liberal forces will lead to the loss of the culture war?
And also, I'm surprised at how many people reading Hanania's newsletter are plugged into CN/integralist/post-liberal circles. What's the appeal of an atheist libertarian to someone that likes Deneen/Ahmari/Vermuele?
Ah, I wrote a longer comment but it somehow got swallowed up.
I'm not going to impugn anyone's motives. There are a range of positions, from those who try to align most closely with the most obvious reading of the text and will always subordinate the science to that reading (which does suggest a recent creation of the world), to those who will always align with the science and are prepared to dismiss the text entirely. With those in between searching for some reconciliation of the two.
As for Hanania, I'd say most of his audience shares common enemies. I'm not Catholic or an integralist, but integralism is a wacky sci-fi idea while Woke is a clear and present danger. I disagree with Hanania on abortion, but I'm much more interested in containing Woke than I am in trying and failing to push out a national abortion ban.
Another factor that we should not neglect is the influence of values, culture, and interests on individual wealth outcomes. I can identify several points in my career where if I had made a different choice I would have made more money, and I was aware of that at the time I made those choices. I knew it when I chose to study history. I knew it when I retired early to try to be a novelist. I knew at at several other career junctures along the way, like the time I was offered an opportunity to move into sales support from technical communication or the time I was offered an opportunity to move into consulting, or the time I had the opportunity to develop a highly lucrative training business. If I had turned towards money instead of away from it at some or all of those junctures, I would be a lot wealthier than I am today.
But I consistently turned the other way, towards the things that interested me, and also towards an easier life that let me work fewer hours and travel less so I could be at home more an work on my other interests more. And I could be spending my time now on almost anything other than the ludicrously unlucrative ambition of being a novelist. But that is what I am doing, knowing full well that it is costing me more than it is making me, and likely always will.
From a purely financial standpoint, therefore, I have not come close to realizing my full potential given the particular set of opportunities and advantages I started out with. And I made the choice not to do so with full knowledge that that was what I was doing. And that is true of most people. Given sufficient resources to live comfortably (by whatever standard we measure that, which is largely a matter of the expectations we grew up with) most of us will choose leisure and interests over spending every waking hour grubbing for cash.
In short, while it is certainly true that we don't all start life with the same resources and the same advantages, and therefore with the same theoretical earning potential, most of us don't come close to maximizing the resources and advantages we do have in that cause because we choose to live differently.
That choice to live differently is no doubt individual in part and cultural in part, and it undoubtedly has consequences for our children. My choices and values were undoubtedly influenced by my parents' values and choices, and by the environment I grew up in as a consequence of those choices. And why should I complain of that? Who says that having the greatest possible amount of money in the bank is the best of life choices? That is a particular cultural and personal value shared by very few human beings.
To argue that those who started with greater advantages might owe something to those who started with few advantages has some merit, though it lies in the realm of charity rather than justice. But to argue that those who chose to devote all their advantages to the pursuit of money owe something to those who chose to devote their advantages to other pursuits is absurd. If Jeff Bezos owes me money because I devoted my time to writing novels rather than to building an ecommerce giant, should it not follow that I owe Jeff a share of the things I devoted my resources to: the time spend with my wife and kids, the time spent reading great books and talking about them, the time spent dreaming up characters and settings and plots. Does it follow that the people who chose to go fishing rather than building an business empire owe Bill Gates a brace of trout and the joy of a lazy day in a boat on a lake?
Of course not.
Yes, this makes sense. On balance, money is more fungible than other things. Some of us maximize for sub-monetary pursuits because we get back in time what we lose in money. Others maximize money (Musk reportedly works 100 hours weeks and has for most of his life).
Seems odd for some to jump to the conclusion that monetary advantage should be redistributed and ignore the choices many make that cost them money. It's not more just, it's just easier to track and redistribute!
From everything I've read about Musk, I suspect he'd be doing exactly what he's doing irrespective of financial payoffs.
This reply is soooooooo beautiful. I WILL read your novel when you publish it.
I don't think this applies so much to the truly poor. They aren't choosing to become novelists or turning away from consulting. They are gas station attendants and cashiers. They're not making choices to maximize their earnings, but the comparison stops there. The things constraining them are not the things constraining you and it's not really fair to treat all constaints as the same.
Oh, absolutely. There are people who are so limited in the resources and capacities available to them are simply unable to care for themselves, let alone anyone else. There are people who could not raise to the level of cashier or gas station attendant even with the best will in the world. They can no more be blamed for their poverty than the blind can be blamed for not seeing or the lame for not walking.
And yes, we have an obligation to aid those people. We have an obligation in charity, but also a selfish motive to assist them, since none of us wants to live in an armed compound surrounded by a slum.
Figuring out how to do this has never been easy, because as soon as you start giving aid to the helpless, you create a motive for the lazy to pose as the helpless, which eventually leads to them learning helplessness. Figuring out how to assist the genuinely needy without creating a class of parasites and teaching helplessness to those who could help themselves is a genuinely hard problem that we are never going to find a perfect solution for.
But this obligation to raise up the lowest in no way translates into either an obligation or a justification for tearing down the highest. Ask them to contribute more than the rest of us to raising up the lowest, by all means. Most of them are willing to do that anyway, either out of charity or because they don't want beggars on their doorsteps.
But I can think of few measures more calculated to harden their hearts against the entire social project than denying their children places in universities that the deserve on academic merit. Instead, try hitting them up for contributions to improved elementary education in poorer communities. You will find that a project that appeals to them greatly, both on the grounds of charity and the grounds of expediency.
Or we might phrase it that because you have these needs, you need to figure out what contribution you can make to society in exchange for the things you need. Or, at least, you need to figure out what contribution you can make to someone or some organization in exchange for the things you need.
Society is simply all of us together. You are part of society to everyone else, so if society has an obligation to individuals, you have a share of that obligation. So if society has an obligation to supply your needs, then you (as part of society) have an obligation to provide part of the needs of everyone else in society. It follows that it is your obligation to figure out what part of societies needs you can supply in order to merit society providing you with the things you need. Free markets, it turns out, are the most efficient way for all parties to figure out how to fulfil that obligation.
And if you then create goods over and above both what you need to satisfy your own needs, and to fulfill your obligation to society, why should the excess not be yours to keep? Your option, of course is simply to stop working once your needs and obligations are met. If you do that, no one has a claim on you. So why, if you do continue working, and thus produce a surplus, does anyone have a claim on that surplus?
Few other thoughts:
1. People just naturally love underdog stories. Even conservatives. I think it's hardwired for people to cheer on those from scrappy backgrounds.
2. Some may argue that it's societally beneficial to engineer class mobility. I mean that's largely the same argument as race-based affirmative action. But I think where they went wrong with that one was just the sheer degree of weight put on race. Most normies thought that affirmative action was a bit of a "tie goes to the runner" type adjustment. If all else equal, then the favored races get in. I think even today, most don't know that it was worth ~400 points of SAT.
This is true, race based affirmative action is so bad in part because of how extreme the preferences are. Hopefully the class stuff will never get nearly that bad.
There's something to be said for the value of stories. I can agree with fudging the numbers slightly, maybe 30 or 40 SAT points just to push a few underdogs barely above the line. That seems fun. The fear is that the class-in-itself matures into a class-for-itself and advocates to bolster the systems that got them there in magnitude.
What starts as a small for-fun SAT bump metastasizes into the hundreds of points that you mention, new fake 'studies' classes, and skin-wearing CEI (Class, Equity, Inclusion) experts that will take the lead on marching us forward into a dystopia.
"If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor."
People would make the argument that the Janitor's son's achievement is better as he won't have had access to tutors, help from his father and his father's friends etc and that given the same conditions in college the probability favours him achieving more.
Exactly - the SAT can be gamed like anything else. If you can figure it out without 1x1 tutoring I'd see that as remarkably more impressive. I truly don't understand the argument of this piece.
Yeah I wish Richard had expanded on why he doesn't find this reasoning persuasive. He did call it "not obviously absurd", and I'd like to know why "ignoring the power of heredity" is so bad when it's for someone who truly is obviously, anomalously talented
Not to mention that Einstein himself came from fairly modest family stock.
Bezos might not be the best example to illustrate a connection between good genes and family wealth. According to Wikipedia, his genetic father was an alcoholic circus unicyclist and his stepfather made the money.
Sounds like his mom had the right genes for picking the man who would give her son a leg up.
This is a dumb rationalization and sounds like a parody of the hereditarian position. Those same genes apparently led her to have children with an alcoholic circus unicyclist.
I guess Richard has changed his position on free will. Every decision we make is based on genetics apparently.
And a son who wanted to sell books out of the garage.
Riding a circus unicycle while drunk is an honest signal of genetic fitness.
A unicyclist, you say! Well, that explains Amazon's stock price.
I’ve actually had some success explaining this to people who would never go full hereditarian.
If you believe:
1) Intelligence is, on average, financially rewarded
2) Intelligence is somewhat heritable
Then you wouldn’t expect intelligence to be equally distributed across income bands. Both of those positions are trivially true (and an understatement in the case of the second).
Wouldn’t the Janitor’s son get a much bigger boost from the peer networks at elite schools? As a white trash kid in a fairly selective college, the biggest thing I learned was the habits and preferences of the professional class. I loved that you brought about the noblesse oblige aspect with JFK, for a genes first society to work you need the genetic winners to have compassion for the others and understand their duty toward them.
I would disagree that you need to have compassion for them as much as you need to develop a system that provides incentives for improving their lives.
Bezos made Amazon to make money, not out of compassion. In order to make money, though, he had to create value and in the process improve the lives of the common man. That’s a very desirable outcome.
This piece -- especially the part about the janitor's kid -- strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize/rationalize hatred of poor people. It explains why you think the right's delusions about the 2020 election and vaccines are somehow worse than the left's delusions about things as fundamental as gender and racial differences: The latter lies tend to be spread by wealthier people, ergo they can't be as bad as the lies spread by poorer people (even though they're obviously more harmful).
Acknowledging genetic differences is important because it helps us understand the world, not because it's a post-hoc justification to hold down people we might find distasteful, like a working-class kid who happens to be in the 99th percentile of intelligence but doesn't share your cultural sensibilities.
>This piece -- especially the part about the janitor's kid -- strikes me as an attempt to intellectualize/rationalize hatred of poor people.
You're responding to a guy--who among other things--thinks its great that people are dying of opioid overdoses since it will improve the gene pool (that not how evolution works, but that's neither here nor there). He also thinks we should be ruled by an oligarchy of the most successful business men and has written tweets commending Jeffrey Epstein for his ability to blackmail Bill Gates.
One thing that's clear from his oeuvre is that he thinks that power, wealth, and status are the primary indicators of moral worth and that poverty, addiction, and poor mental health are indicators of moral failure. He's framed himself as a libertarian, but most serious libertarian thinkers (ie. think Frank Knight, not Caplan) don't argue markets are just (rather that they're the most efficient at satisfying human desires). He's philosophically closer to Ayn Rand and Moldbug or a parody of Nietzsche.
Nobody here is hating on poor people. The kid of every janitor that scores 1600 on his SAT can go to college and he is smart
Enough for 99% of jobs. All else being equal (which it never is) it's very hard to argue the kid of two doctor parents isn't more likely to successfully become a doctor than the kid whose parents only have HS diplomas. The doctor parents can literally help the kid academically and professionally. That is simply reality, I don't see a compelling societal interest in "correcting" for this.
But is the question only about whether we give a boost or preference to the child guaranteed to success? Or that we, society, give a boost or leg up to the child who deserves and needs our help.
The opposite is true for the Einstein kid...if we do not prefer him for admissions to Harvard for pre-med, he will likely still become a great successful doctor. While the other student needs more people telling him, "Ya got what it takes kiddo. Grab the golden ring." No?
Preference is about whom we as society think will benefit most from our help. No?
To me, that blue collar kid with high grades and test scores is exactly that child.
It's not about deciding to weigh the scale (further) in favor or the doctor's kid or the disadvantaged kid, it's about whether to interfere at all. Absent a compelling societal interest in interfering, I'd say we don't. Which means if a school wants to favor the poor kid, that's fine but I don't think the school should be required to do so.
As a society we generally benefit when the best people are in the best jobs for them. At the margin, one kid will get into med school and the other won't. Society is best served when the kid who gets in graduates and saves a lot of lives.
No one is really being held down. I don't have figures on hand, but the returns to elite education are rarely worth it insofar as money in concerned. There are just a few fields where the name of the college is a requirement for entry, but at the same, those may not be the highest paying (take journalism for example.)
A smart kid from poor parents can still take out loans and get a STEM degree from any regular state school and become rich, or even any old degree and still find a way in. No affirmative action required.
>There are just a few fields where the name of the college is a requirement for entry, but at the same, those may not be the highest paying (take journalism for example.)
This isn't true. Take a look at who's hired in finance and management consulting. When you compare it more merit-based fields (STEM until recently) the elite school bias is apparent.
Hanania has contempt for white parochial ignoramuses (rightly so?), but some might argue this is balanced out by his support for opening the borders to millions of non-white parochial ignoramuses in the name of cosmopolitanism. And although he thinks we should fear the future political externalities of the Trumpies based on their current vaccine opposition, he also argues we shouldn’t fear the future political externalities of non-whites based on their current externalities (which also includes the immense cost of a continued loss homeland for whites that is never even counted for PC reasons) because who knows what the future will bring. I’m not sure this all makes sense.
The "fairest" way to dole out admissions would probably be what the East Asian countries do. Make the standardized test significantly harder then rank everyone across the country from 1 to X. Admissions is purely based on rank.
Would that make society as a whole better though? I'm not sure.
It would make society better. No one will ever question if someone else “deserved” to get it or not, because everyone only has one way in, the test.
There would be no more DEI, no legacy preferences, no “my parents donated a million dollars to the school” preferences, etc. Just pure merit.
Of course from that aspect it would be beneficial. But you'd also induce a lot more stress and potentially turbocharge youth depression rates (nearly 25-30% adolescent depression rate in South Korea, Japan has highest youth suicide rate, etc.).
Not only asian countries use tests exclusively. Admission to the best schools in France is through tests also.
Right, and to elaborate on that, China, Korea, and other Asian countries have had Confucism and the state exams/meritocracy it demands for a long time - it clearly wasn't enough of a panacea to stop the Cultural Revolution 🤷♂️
Wasn't this the idea behind the SATs, and wasn't it thrown aside then the results on the standardized test were significantly different between racial/ethnic groups?
The difficulty cap on SAT is too low to be a true nation-wide indicator of intelligence. Asians have decimated it.
My problem with this is that studying for a test like this is not really an optimal way to spend your time. If you want to study, great! But you’d be better off pushing to more advanced topics rather than ensuring you never make a mistake on the elementary problems that are on these tests.
Also, will note that lots of Asians move to USA to have their children avoid the cram school misery that is youth in those countries.
Exactly. It's a difficult problem to solve.
"In other words, he’s a gene denier." This is universal. Mentioning genetic factors when talking about humans, individuals or groups, in anything except, possibly, medical issues, is the ultimate taboo. We are even supposed to pretend that men and women are interchangeable, which should be well over the border of insanity, but acquiescing to this absurdity is mandatory nonetheless. I suppose the idea is that mentioning genetic influence on personal behavior, group or individual, threatens civil peace since we have a racially divided society and everyone is obliged to maintain a pretense of literal, biological and not just legal equality. Some people even actually believe it, and become angry when that view is threatened by obvious facts and evidence. There are not many people who will say these things forthrightly and in their own name, in public. Respect for your willingness to do so.
This is what happens when you prioritize being contrarian over all else. If you are comparing two candidates who applied to a college, one who graduated from a prep school like Philip Exeter or Andover and another who graduated from a local public high school. Given the difference in opportunities in these two schools, the graduate from Andover would have better resume - more foreign language classes, enrichment volunteer trips, can excel at niche sports with low competition like Lacrosse but in a public high school, the student might have stellar GPA, good ACT and SAT score but not these extra curricular and niche sport achievements.
Maybe like Asia, we need to have standardized entrance exams to determine admissions, it is fair and is less bureaucratic as candidates can be ranked by entrance exam scores.
This is a non-solution, because it just lets the downward spiral of poverty to continue indefinitely, unless you are pinning all your hopes on genetic engineering to fix this. Actually, your view on poverty is incredibly trivial: my grandfather survived during the Great Depression by scraping leftovers off of the dirty pots and pans of prison kitchens, and today, I am a software developer. Heredity is not as simple as you're selling it.
It also makes all your mewling about women when it comes to abortion seem very dishonest, since it is clear you don't actually have compassion, so why invoke such arguments?
It doesn't matter to discriminate against the wealthy: they're gonna find a way anyways, it's not particularly important for them to get into an elite institution.
And the wealthy should have a sense of noblesse oblige anyway: there weren't really any major issues with the pre-Reagan tax rates, Kennedy certainly didn't complain he was paying too much.
My family was poorer than yours. People with the right qualities have been overcoming poverty as long as there have been free markets. You don’t need government programs or experts, the myth that you do is the problem.
How do you know how rich his family was?
The argument starts from a faulty premise: that the singular goal of college admissions policy is to drive the best result for society.
But, like it or not, fairness matters to voters on the left and right.
Race-based policies are broadly unpopular because they offend most folk’s basic sense of fairness. Class-based policies are aligned with it.
You perfectly expressed what I wanted to say!
I would even argue that it’s the best short-term outcome for society vs the best long-term outcome. The short-term outcome might be that the candidates admitted to the medical program will become successful doctors at a higher rate than if some candidates from lower socioeconomic classes were admitted, which results in more doctors and a better return on education investment.But the long term outcome for society is that it becomes effectively a caste system, where the socioeconomic class you’re born into is almost always the one you end up in and there are very few opportunities to better yourself. This goes against our American ideals of individual rights and equal opportunity, rather than judging a person on or holding them responsible for the actions of their relatives. It’s also why Communist revolutions happen.
Richard Hanania writes “Knowledge about your parents and grandparents can help predict things about you, even when we have individualized information. If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor. This might make the argument for class-based preferences that if anything go in the opposite direction, favoring the wealthy. The counterargument that it’s more impressive for a poor person to accomplish something isn’t obviously absurd, but it ignores the predictive power of heredity.”
Here is where you err. The predictive power of heredity works because it is unlikely the janitor’s son will have as high a SAT score as Einstein’s son.
But there are exceptions. Every so often an intelligent person would emerge from ordinary stock. For example, Johannes Bach, son of a baker and miller was a piper who began the musical tradition of the Bach family that culminated in his great grandson Johann S. Bach, the famous musician and composer. He had four children who became professional musicians, one of whom is considered top drawer, but after that, the talent seems to have dried up. My point is there was an initial person who stood out and founded the dynasty. Such a person would likely be analogous to the janitor’s son with the 800 SATs.
Another example are those children of talented parents who are lower economic status because of happenstance. I worked with a number of chemical technicians with a high school education who were very bright. I used to have one review my papers for grammar as he noted he’d been good in English in high school and he was (Our techs are co-authors on all our tech reports as they did the lab work, and sometimes made critical observations providing leads). Other techs had kids in the gifted program at school who went on to become PhDs like me. These guys were bright like me and could have taken the college path, but didn’t for various reasons. Some got their high school girlfriends pregnant, married them & got a job. Others were not into school or had bad home lives and went into the service, after which they got married and raised kids who then went to college. Here the parents were talented but not in a position to pursue college, but their children are.
This is the point I came here to make, only you've expressed it better. The predictive power of heredity tells you that a janitor's son probably won't be as intelligent as Einstein's- but if he is, all bets are off. Heredity isn't telling you anything about his particular potential
I have never been more convinced that the time is right for founding a few new universities in the US that reject holistic admissions. Admission would be based on a published formula that weighs standardized test scores and high school grades in a transparent way. You would publish the admission cutoffs reached in the prior years. You could possibly consider some bonus points for strong performance on certain competitions like the AMC. No personal essays of any kind, no extracurricular analysis, no sports or legacy preferences and no interviews. Don’t even ask about race or sex. You could consider using high achievement in extracurricular or sports to offer some scholarships but it should not impact admissions.
I do think a school like this with the right backers could attract applicants. For one thing, it is way easier and less stressful to apply. All kinds of high IQ but unpolished kids who are feeling defeated by the current admission preferences, especially white and asian boys, could be lured in. Ideally you would brand it as being a tough program that will push you to your intellectual limits (kind of like the appeal of SEAL training).
Starting from scratch you could also change many other things about colleges that our currently warped in designing a new school. Plus, with the cratering of commercial real estate prices in cities around the nation, you might be able to pick up a campus on the cheap these days (to say nothing of the dozens of small colleges that are going bankrupt each year).
How do you compare grades from different high schools? How do you deal with grade inflation?
and you can only penalize someone so much for that fact the rest of their student body is below average in smarts. The student’s own own standardized test scores will tell you a lot, which is why they should weigh for a lot in any admission algorithm. But studies have found that school marks do add something over and above an SAT score.
Ultimately no grade adjustments can be perfect, but they don’t have to be. They just need to be objective, defensible and consistently applied across applicants. “Holistic” admissions don’t do anything to solve the grade comparison issue either, they just make the problem worse. How do you compare what it means to be in the chess club at school A vs. B? What is an essay that has been heavily vetted and edited (if not entirely written) by others going to tell you?
If you want to there are objective ways to make consistent numerical adjustments to school grades to consider inflation and cross school differences. I went to school in Canada and the undergrad admission system there is (or at least was circa 1999) usually not holistic at all for admissions (and for the few programs where it was holistic it is much less subjective then US elite schools). So from that experience I can tell you that schools would either (a) just take grades at face value, or (b) adjust grades based on average published performance of students at that school on standardized tests, or (c) adjust grades based on performance of students from that school at the uni in some required first year course (e.g., I know that U Waterloo math/eng programs were making adjustments based on how students from each high school did on first year calculus. To combat grade inflation, Waterloo asked me to get the school to send my class rank for each course on my transcript to supplement my grades (they were the only school that did this) and asked about performance on a number of math competitions.
Put in the US context, you can fight within school grade inflation by asking the school to supply class rankings in lieu of writing a reference letter. You could also encourage things like SAT subject tests, AP exams, etc., in various ways. You do school adjustments by comparing the school average performance on standardized tests to the state average. All US states have at least one mandatory test that all high school students have to take as part of their progress measurements. Some use Fair Balanced, some actually use SAT/ACT in grade 11, and others have something homebrewed. Regardless, school level results are published by states along with all sorts of other metrics about the school. From this data you can devise a reasonable adjustment factor for any US student. I wouldn’t go to heavy in adjusting grades for school. In the end of the day, the top student at the school can’t be any better ranked than that and
I wonder if there are historical examples of this sort of thing that could lend some insight. I guess the closest thing would be Ottoman Janissaries, where the state "saved" them from Christian (read: bad, underclass, and poor) parents to train them to be ultimate warrior fanatics.
It is strange, the desire to help "the least of us" is so deeply Christian but the people promoting societal leveling are such embarrassing moral cowards that they refuse to do with their own money what they demand institutions and others do with theirs. There's nothing stopping the wealthiest progressives from establishing massive privately run direct wealth transfer programs with their fortunes, but no, the state and institutions have to do the dirty work of their ideology.