The post is here. I express my (possibly unfounded) worries about polygenic scores for outcomes like educational attainment.
I can’t help thinking that the “genes” for educational attainment, after you control for the genes for intelligence, might not be causal factors. I worry about culture as a confounding factor. For example, suppose that Asian parents successfully encourage their children to do well in school, and this accounts for all of the educational attainment of Asians over and above what you would expect based on their intelligence. Then you would find that genes that are associated with Asian-ness help to “explain” school attainment, even though the causal factor is actually cultural. (Note that if you are one of those people who insists that IQ itself is culturally determined, then this would lead you to question the interpretation of polygenic scores for IQ. I myself am willing to believe that psychometricians have figured out a way to measure IQ so that it picks up genetic causes rather than cultural causes. But I really don’t believe that one can do that with educational attainment or with income.)
On French: “His point is that although Critical Race Theory’s excesses are worth fighting, excesses in the other direction are also a danger.”
“Worth fighting”? French has become infamous for advocating the “do absolutely nothing meaningful, let the woke progressives do whatever they want” approach. To such an extent that many high status progressives now have that “strange new respect” for him – e.g., a new perch at The Atlantic and something that even Sullivan probably couldn’t get these days – and recognize him as at worst harmless to any of their methods or aims and at best positively helpful in convincing other people on the right to appease, acquiesce, accept their fate, and lie back and think of ‘murica.
He is a great representative of establishment conservatism’s performative ‘opposition’ that has zero genuine willingness to do anything which might actually stand in the way of the left getting what they want.
For example, French is pretty much always strategically quiet on what anyone should do to ‘fight’ some woke cancellation outrage of the day. Are none of those worth fighting? If they are worth fighting, then how exactly? The fact that he never quite says how is one among several reasons that it’s reasonable to not quite take French at his word about these matters.
You can tell this because, while French may complain about the way these new laws are drafted, he always presents the matter as a false choice between them and nothing instead of showing how one can do better or be more specific and less ‘dangerous’. The language of these laws are expressed in an abstract, generalized – and thus vague – form by legal necessity (as French obviously already knows).
Furthermore, to pass any muster whatsoever, they must also necessarily dance around the actual facts of our present context, which is that ‘CRT’ is a catch-all euphemism for the indoctrination of anti-white sentiment, and indeed specifically intended to humiliate and chill opposition and to stoke the racial resentments calculated to ease the path to the pent-up demand among progressives for a whole slew of endless new racially-conscious measures to pay off their clients and level outcomes via coerced redistribution.
If French has some better idea besides “just let them have it, and your taxes too” on how parents who object to all that being shoved down the throats of their kids in the public schools of a purported democracy, then it would be great to see his alternative proposal and draft. But you never will.
Speaking of Sullivan, phenomenal column at the link below:
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And if the culture war is fought explicitly on the terms laid out by the Kendi left and the Youngkin right, and the culture war is what determines political outcomes, then the GOP will always win. Most Americans, black and white, simply don’t share the critique of America as essentially a force for oppression, or want its constitution and laws and free enterprise “dismantled” in order to enforced racial “equity.” They understand the evil of racism, they know how shameful the past has been, but they’re still down with Youngkin’s Obama-‘08 impression over McAuliffe’s condescending denials and the left’s increasingly hysterical race extremism.
Look at recent polling. A big survey from the Manhattan Institute of the 20 biggest metropolitan areas found that the public, 54-29, wants to remove CRT concepts such as “white privilege” or “systemic racism” from K-12 education. That includes black parents by a margin of 54-38. And that’s in big cities. A new Harris poll asked, “Do you think the schools should promote the idea that people are victims and oppressors based on their race or should they teach children to ignore race in all decisions to judge people by their character?” Americans favored the latter 63-37.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-woke-meet-their-match-parents-d7b
Andrew mentions something that I think was a big issue. Nearly every single person working for any large institution had to go through some kind of woke Maoist struggle session in the last six months or so. For me is was late summer this year.
In 2020 nearly all woke concepts polling showed “I don’t have an opinion” or “I haven’t heard of that” as the #1 response. As 2021 comes to a close that stance has increasingly vanished…and been replaced mostly by rejection of woke as people get to know it.
Youngkin is a sweater vest republican, but make no mistake he didn’t shy away from challenging woke like a Romney or Bush would. He directly called out BLM and other woke concepts.
Post Ws, not Ls. The end.
In our local school board race from Tuesday, the non-woke candidate won 65/35. This was after NBC News and others literally invested *millions* in free media coverage to malign us via podcasts, documentaries and national TV coverage. At one time, the podcast below was the #1 in the U.S.
BTW – I’m not scared of the anti-CRT bogeyman. There aren’t any books on creationism or flat earth over here in our TX libraries. Likewise, I’m completely ok if CRT books, which have zero scientific basis don’t make the cut either. We are talking about k-12 after all.
Study the CRT stuff on your own dime.
https://www.nbcnews.com/southlake-podcast
Speaking of Sullivan, phenomenal column at the link below…
Reminder that Sullivan declared he’s in the David French “Don’t Ban CRT, Expose It” camp.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/dont-ban-crt-expose-it-2d9
As Richard Hanania summarized: “Instead of banning CRT, Sullivan recommends you quit your job and become a full time activist for the rest of your life and make sure they don’t teach it. Also, leave the public schools your tax dollars [to] pay for [it] and somehow become able to afford private school while jobless.”
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1405953419643285508
I like Sullivan. I agree with him 50% of the time and then he challenges me for the rest of it.
Bottom line: I’ve read TX HB3979 (aka the anti-crt bill) Nothing there to be concerned about and absolutely doesn’t require that both sides of the Holocaust be taught.
Here are the relevant clauses from the TX bill. Decide for yourself:
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no teacher shall be compelled by a policy of any
state agency, school district, campus, open-enrollment charter
school, or school administration to discuss current events or
widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy
or social affairs;
(2) teachers who choose to discuss current events or
widely debated and currently controversial issues of public policy
or social affairs shall, to the best of their ability, strive to
explore such issues from diverse and contending perspectives
without giving deference to any one perspective;
Yeah, Handle, Ms. Weiss should know better, than to give a whole page over to such BS from such a fraud as French, but it’s a bit heartening to read so many of her page’s Commenters being so articulate in exposing his deceit.
Handle is my favorite commenter here, but I don’t think we need any more multi-paragraph critiques of French at this point. He has a proven track record of giving aid and comfort to the enemy and there’s little reason to read his stuff ever again. For his sake, hopefully woke neoliberals find him interesting for the rest of his career.
As for me, there are bona fide leftists who have far more interesting things to say than anything we can expect from French in 2021.
In terms of polygenic scores, I believe the current push is to sequence lots of families/siblings, so we can show certain genes increase EA and not worry about any confounds. The problem you discuss is what the geneticists call stratification/population structure, and the geneticists do worry about it as it relates to polygenic scores: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_structure_(genetics).
Exactly – analyses are commonly done now using within sibling-pair variation. See, e.g., Belsky et al (2018):
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/E7275.short
Educational attainment PGS predicts social mobility within sibling pairs. Very likely an IQ PGS based on a robust test would do better in predicting social mobility, income, etc., but we don’t have studies with remotely comparable sample sizes.
And on population structure, this is why most analyses are within-race. PGS predictions don’t travel as well across races, because of different patterns in linkage disequilibrium. That said, it’s not that they don’t predict at all, which indicates the same alleles are doing the same thing in different populations. It’s just that not all significant hits in a GWAS are the causal SNPs, as opposed to SNPs near the causal ones, and these patterns of nearness are different across races. In any case, stratification is why there aren’t, so far as I am aware, studies yet claiming to explain inter-racial gaps in educational attainment via educational attainment PGSs. (Well, that and the fact that no one dares. Admixture studies can be done, of course, also preferably within families. Consider a partially admixed population – e.g., African Americans have about 20% Euro ancestry on average. There is random variation in this number, even within sibling pairs).
But given the within-sibling PGS results, and twin and adoption studies showing minimal common environment effects, strong IQ-education correlation, and heritability estimates for IQ, my money is not on cultural explanations.
Genetics is the moral foundation of the neosupralapsanarianism movement denying the existence of free will. It doesn’t really matter much as the neosupralapsanarians are going to force us members of the lower orders into a termite mound caste system existence through pure force, under the guise of anti-racism, climate change, social justice, or some other scam, one way or another. That is all.
–“For example, suppose that Asian parents successfully encourage their children to do well in school, and this accounts for all of the educational attainment of Asians over and above what you would expect based on their intelligence. Then you would find that genes that are associated with Asian-ness help to “explain” school attainment, even though the causal factor is actually cultural.”–
My first thought went to twin studies. If Asian culture matters substantially, then Asian twins raised by non-Asian parents should have some consistent outcome differences with regards to their twins.