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Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning. Everybody This is Razib Khan with the unsupervised learning podcast, and I'm here today with Frederick deBoer who is the author of "The Cult of Smart" Freddie, could you introduce yourself?
Hi, yeah, I'm Frederick deBoer, Freddie deBore I run a substack at FrediedeBoer@substack.com. I have a PhD from Purdue University where I focused on writing and literacy assessment and standardized tests of college learning. And yeah, I like to think about education policy and write about education policy an awful lot. And I wrote a book about the consequences for hereditarianism. on education policy, or what shouldn't be consequences for it, that I published last year in 2020, called "The Cult of Smart."
Yeah, so you know, I've read your book. And I've also read Paige Harden's "Genetic Lottery", and I want to talk about both of them. Partly because, you know, I, to be honest, I don't like the term hereditarian left, because very few people are 100% hereditary, and and very few people are 100%. environmentalist. So I don't know if there's a better word, but it just it sounds weird that way. But in any case, you know, you two are often bracketed together. Because, you know, to be frank, like, you guys say things which a lot of people privately accept, but there's, it's a little bit taboo, my guess, in center to left circles, I don't know, I read "The Cult of Smart" and I read "The Genetic Lottery" and I have to say, you know, the way that they were both, you know, the way people spoke of them, at least at a non insidious way, is that they were going to be similar, but I actually think they're quite different just for the listeners. You know, I have written about Paige Harden's book, "The Genetic Lottery" And so you guys are familiar with that. And if you think "the genetic lottery" and "the cult of smart" are the same, I would invite you to read them because they are considerably different, even though they have a lot of the same bases, a lot of the same factual underpinnings. Paige is a psychologist, behavior geneticist, and Freddie, you know, he's an educationist, or, you know, he works in education. That's his background. And you can definitely see the the differences there. So I want to start off with a story before we let you speak, Freddie. So my family is from Asia, from Bangladesh. And when I moved to the United States, I didn't know English. Well, I mean, I did know some but a very low fluency levels. And they gave me a standardized test. And I scored in the bottom 5%, the fact that I didn't know the language and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff was obviously probably an issue. They weren't super stressed about it, my, my, my kindergarten teacher, you know, focused a little bit on me. And they redid the test at the end of the year. And then I scored the top 5%. And the lesson that I took and that my parents took was that I had worked hard. I don't really know if I worked hard. I mostly remember playing in kindergarten. But in any case, I did have a few linguistic shortcomings. So yeah, the native language that that I grew up speaking, before I was five does not have male or female pronouns. It just has a gender neutral pronoun. So I kept calling everybody he into first grade. So there were these little things, but I was 99% there, you know, in terms of in terms of schooling, and I was a pretty good student. And my mom told me specifically, you know, you have to work harder, you know, because Americans are super smart. And, you know, that's how you're going to do well. And I did pretty well. And so the conclusion I drew from that, is that I worked hard. You know, I'm a kid, this is what I'm taught, right? And in seventh grade, we were in this is before the math really started diverging. And kids that aren't as good as math, kind of start taking different classes. This was like one of the last math classes where there was like, more of a mixture. And we had group assignments, and I was expressing a lot of frustration with some of the other kids, particularly one kid in the group. And, you know, I was little bit agitated my teacher who I was friendly with, she pulled me aside after class because she knew that I had study hall. So she was just like, tell the teacher that. You know, she had to talk to me for a little while. And she's she said, Why are you so angry? And I just said, Well, I mean, I just I get frustrated when I'm in groups with lazy kids. And so she said, Are you sure that they're lazy? Or maybe you're smarter and I'm like, Well, no, I just work harder. That's why parents told me, I just like literally verbatim what I said. And she said, she asked me, she's like, Well, what does your dad do? And I'm like, Oh, he's a college professor. He's a chemist. He's a physical chemist. And then she asked me, What What is your mom doing? I'm like, Oh, she's a homemaker. But then she's like, well, what did your grandparents do? So Well, my grandfather was a doctor. And, you know, it went on like that for like, a couple of minutes. And she just kind of paused. She's like, do you think that maybe you have different abilities? And, you know, that was like, a shocking moment for me. Because this is seventh grade. And probably I had had those moments of frustration for all of elementary school. And,
you know, I just assumed they weren't trying hard. Because if it was easy for me, it must have been easy for them, especially since, you know, in the back of my mind, well, they were born here, they learned English, when they were little blah, blah, blah, it probably should be even easier for them. Right? So I bring up the story, because one of the things that I liked about "the cult of smart" and I liked about your book, is you have a lot of background in education, and you put some stories in there, where I can't personally relate to those kids, just because, you know, as they would say, it's not my lived experience, but I've had friends that have struggled, and that have had aspirations, you know, like, I'm thinking of like, you know, my best friend, and probably when I was like 14 and 15, the two of us had very similar interests. But to be entirely Frank, he just was average in his intellectual capabilities. And so he grasped for things where he kind of fell short. And it was kind of difficult for me to watch, because he saw me doing the same things very easily. And by that point, I had become more aware, and not in a scientific way, really. But, you know, I had become starting to more aware about genetics, partly because I'm not as athletic. I like there was a kid in high school who like I hung out with, and I knew that he didn't do anything different than me, but he was just incredibly athletic. And then I found out his dad was like, you know, captain of the football team, but there was just all these things where I was like, okay, genetics matters for athletics. And then I started thinking, well, maybe it matters for other things, too. And then I started my my friend, and I know how hard he tried. And ultimately, I mean, he's doing fine, you know, he's not on the street or anything like that. But he looks like to be totally Frank, he's just was never going to become the astronomer he wanted to be. He couldn't do the math. And he's not an astronomer, today. He has a fine job. But it was just, you know, something to observe. And that really made me reflect a little bit about, you know, the luck that I had to be frank. Because I would rather be a good student than a good athlete. So I think I lucked out that way. But I mean, that's the story that I want to tell. Like, I mean, have you I'm sure you've heard of a lot of stories like this, right.
Yeah. I mean, I often will tell people, if you think back to their elementary school days in regards to these issues, because one thing that I think is generically true, you know, most people, when they were an elementary school age, they looked around at their different students, and they knew that there were smart kids and kids who were not as smart, right? Like, there was a, when you're in that age, you don't even have a political consciousness. And you're just sort of operating in this sort of milieu of just kids being around each other and observing each other. It's not like, controversial or mysterious to say, a some kids get the material a lot better than others do. And that's consistent and attends to a product cost for domains. And so I asked you to, like, go back to that mindset. You know, you know, were you completely wrong? Was that an observation that you had about kids being in school, some being smarter than others? Is that like something that you would now look back at and say they were completely wrong? And, you know, so I often the way they often frame a lot of this is like, Look, I have an observation that is just true, then I have a supposition that's drawn from that opposi ... from that observation. That is not I'm not as certain about that, but I'm still pretty certain. And then there's an explanation for that supposition, which again, I think it's very likely true, but that I'm even less certain that the observation is that it is just generically true across all domains of education that people simply do not move in the relative educational distribution very often. Okay, so if you take any kind of a metric for how students are performing in school, and you look at their place within sort of within that hierarchy, right, we write standardized tests or grades or other things. You will find that over the course of life, and this is true, not just in the short term, but in the long term. Students sort themselves into an ability band and they stay there. Okay. Of course, there's individual exceptions. Some kids parents get a divorce and their academics go down the drain some kids find themselves in a better home situation their academics improve. But at scale, kids generally sort themselves out very early. You can do you know, simply, if you had the data of any elementary school, you can use a simple Spearman rank, correlation coefficient, rank difference correlation coefficient, and just sort of look at, like how they're moving ordinarily, around in the distribution, and they're just not moving that much, right. You simply do not see, in an average school, a situation where the worst performing kids in one year are suddenly the best performing kids in the second year. And in fact, prior performance is such a good predictor of future performance in an academic setting, like education, researchers don't even talk about it as being a variable, right? Like it's just a fact of life. And yet, there's a resistance to sort of thinking about what that could mean, I think it's important to sort of say the, this is like the intensity of the effect when talking about here, this this sorting mechanism, data gathered after kindergarten, the summer after kindergarten, is is a strong predictor, we have several studies of this type, the strong predictor of performance in college. Okay, so you're talking about where kids are five or six years old data that we gather about them, remains predictive when they are 18, 19 20, 21 years old. Okay. So that indicates that there is some sort of stable property going through a forward as they move along the environment changes during that period. You know, it would be remarkable if the environment was so stable, and environmentalists were right and environment that dominates, it would be remarkable, if they if there was that little movement over time, but there is very little time. Another way to put this is that third grade reading group, for example, is a really good predictor of who's going to go to college and graduate. And this is interesting, because it's a very harshly - or you know not very finely gradiated predictor, right. Like, typically, we're talking about three levels like low, medium, high, right, or bronze, silver, gold, whatever you want to call it. So your prediction only has like three levels. And yet with really, some would say depressingly
powerful, predictive ability, that will tell you who's going to do well in school going forward and who's not. And again, this persists into like young adulthood. Another another study shows that, you know, you give 13 year olds SAT's, SAT tests, the results of those tests do tell you how well they're going to do in high school with remarkable fidelity. They also tell you things like for example, who's going to hold a patent someday, who will publish a book, they tell you things like who's going to have someday earned a doctorate, right. And the average American doctor is conferred after the person turns 30, right. So in other words, you're talking of a gap of, you know, 17 plus years, and yet, those predictive abilities of the test remain strong. And now it's just wild, right, if if this is an environmental - environmentally dominated thing, then you have to account for the fact that like, these kids are not just going to different school environments, but then they're graduating out and some of them are going to the Marines, some of them are going right into work, some are going to college, and on and on. And yet, this these tests remain strong predictors. So that's the first observation that that students sort of just sort themselves into these ability bands is just true. And you can look that in all manner of data wherever you'd like. The corollary that sort of comes from that is, which I am quite sure of, but not quite as certain that the observation is true is that it suggests that there's some such thing as an intrinsic academic ability, right, that there is something internal - endogenous to students that is dictating the lion's share of their performance in their academic work, right? That there is some such thing as, you know, a differential of like, academic ability between people. And then the explanation for the third part, which I'm least certain about, but pretty sure about is that it's genetic. And I think it's genetic, both because of the kinship studies and the whole field of behavioral genetics, but also because it's the most parsimonious explanation, right. It's just it's the simplest explanation for why there would be such a thing as an intrinsic academic.... the problem is, is the simple observation that some people are sumativly more intelligent than others, has itself become something that's not said in polite society. So it used to be that like, ascribing the intelligence to genes was controversial, but people didn't really you know, get on you if you just said some people are smarter than others, which is something people have been saying for 1000s of years. But and yet that in and of itself if you say on Twitter on Twitter, you know, some people are smarter than others, you're gonna get a lot of pushback, and it really clouds everything.
Well, depends on who you're talking about, though, if you say someone wearing MAGA hat is dumb, or is not very smart, it actually is. Okay. So I think I think you're generally correct. But some of these rules, there are exceptions for out groups that we don't like. Do you have any? Can I ask you? Do you have any siblings ready?
I do. I have two brothers and a sister.
So I have, you know, I have a couple brothers and a sister. And one thing that is interesting, to me, is variance within siblings, which like you cite the research. And there's been extensive research since that research that you cite that you look at genetic variants within siblings. And then you compare them to outcomes and things like height, or educational attainment, and they tend to track roughly on at least on a population level, this genetic variance. And so what do you think of like, what do people tell you? If you point out - Well, do you think the difference in sibling outcomes in, you know, mathematical ability, so for example, my brothers are better at math than I am, I'm okay to be frank. But, you know, one of my brothers is, like, let's say he's like, works in mathematical science. Like, literally, that's where his doctorate is. So we're talking like many, many sigmas out there. And I try hard to do math. Like To be frank beyond multivariable, or linear algebra. And it's difficult for me, and I think you've talked about similar like we have, most people have math walls, like there's a few select, and like, we're talking like very, very few words, like whatever they try, they can learn it. And it's not like a lifetime's , you know, task. It's like maybe a month, you know, but but like, what do you what do what are people's intuitions about why this happens, like, are some siblings lazy? Do they just know what to think about it?
Right, so I, I mean, I think one thing to mention, I'm sure most of your listeners already know, this, but like, you know, I think people need to understand that like, you know, previously, the, you know, assumption is that, you know, with a lot of caveats, right. Identical twins share about, you know, about 100% of their DNA, with some, you know, opportunities for mutations and people talking about the maternal environment, whatever. fraternal siblings, you know, fraternal twins, regular siblings, were estimated to share 20-50% and half siblings 25%. But, you know, what we've been able to do recently is we've been able to actually, like, determine a real percentage of genetic genetic similarity between any two people. And so that tells us that, in fact, you know, two siblings might might be 50%, but they might be, you know, one's 40%, one bit one pair, or 60%. And in fact, like, when you look at those things, though, the ones who are more genetically similar, are more similar in various variables. And I think that that's something that like, I just think people don't know about a lot of people. And I've had to sort of bring that up on a lot of podcasts and things I. But the other thing is like, Look, you know, I don't know, I don't see much of the reference to the shared and the unshared environment anymore. In the old kins of kinship studies, the, the twin studies, you know, the people in behavioral genetics used to sort of chop things up between, okay, here's sort of like the genetic heritability, you know, the portion of any observed outcome, which they attribute to genetics. And then there's, they would divide the environment to the shared and the unshared environment. The shared bite environment was like the family, the parents, the economic condition, which of people within the same family, but then there's also the unshared portion, which is unshared environment, which is a really clumsy term for sort of, like, all the stuff that we don't know, right? Like, just like the, the ebb and flow of a human life, because, you know, of course, the environment and the course of your life is going to impact all manner of things that will sort of apply to your, to your outcomes, your academic outcomes. But this this portion, we don't really know what's going on in there. Eric Turkheimer has referred to the gloomy prospect, which is just that like the gloomy prospect is the idea that like that portion, the sort of uncontrolled sort of portion of variance that's out there that we know is, in some sense, environmental, but is not the sort of easier to investigate family characteristics. But that's always going to remain a mystery, right? That that's going to be the portion of the puzzle that we're never going to be able to solve because, you know, it could be things like a traumatic car accident or a you know, a bad breakup or happening to get inspired on a trip to Florence that you almost didn't take, right. It's not you know, it there's no... again, there's no contradiction between accepting a case for a strong hereditaranism and academic outcomes. In other words, the belief that more than half of the outcomes in any given educational variable are likely able to be ascribed to genetic variation. And also to observe that to people who have a great deal of shared DNA are also different. Because, again, as you said at the beginning, nobody's a strict hereditarian. Many people are... few people are sort of explicitly pure environmentalists, there's many people who sort of act like pure environmentalists, but nobody's... sort of very few people sort of say that. So yeah, I think that siblings vary a great deal. And certainly, there's a lot of variation in my family. But at the same time, I'm, you know, this is not bragging this is just to establish, you know, I think me and all three of my siblings all got an 800, the verbal section of the SAT, all scored above a 1500. You know, we all have our academic gifts that happens them you know, I'm I was absolutely terrible student in high school, and there's a lot going on in my life. At that point, we all sort of have our sort of things that we that we do. But also, you know, me My family is my, you know, I have alcoholism on both sides of my family tree, all over it. And so I have had to be very careful with alcohol. My father had a mood disorder. Some people say he hadn't been diagnosed psychotic disorder, I have a psychotic disorder, like, there's just so many things and, and, you know, and it also just looked at, like the sort of shared socialism between my in my family, so I come from a long line of socialists.
And, of course, I don't think in a simplistic sense, that, like, being a socialist, right, is sort of written into my genes, right? That like the, you know, absent being born in a context in which socialism was celebrated, you know, I definitely would have become a socialist, if the environment had been very different, but I do think that like, you know, you can sort of ascribe some of these broad personality traits, like, you could use the five factor model or something like that. And you could say, sort of like, okay, who, you know, based on these different personality traits, what are people likely to sort of sort into in terms of political identities? And I think that those things, those broader things, conscientiousness, you know, like, let's say, like receptivity to difference, openness, willingness to share openness, yeah. All that stuff, like, factor model or not, or however you want to define it. You know, those things I think are heritable. And they make it more likely that you are going to be someone who will absorb the same shared politics of your parents, right.
Mm hmm. Yeah, I have, you know, I want to like, I'll kind of, you know, I'll stop with the personal stories, but like, related to that. So my family is not particularly political, I would say, but, uh, you know, I have one of my siblings. He is basically a generation younger than me, so I didn't really grow up with him. And when he was 18, starting college, he just started talking about, he's getting into Paleo-libertarianism, which is a very obscure ideology. But the weird thing is when I was 18, I also was a Paleolibertarian, and I told him, just put that crap aside, have a relationship, and you'll wise up because I basically didn't want him to waste like, three or four years being obsessed with like, I don't know, like Murray Rothbard, or something like that. But I just thought that was really strange, because I didn't grow up with this kid. I mean, frankly, I didn't really talk to him too much. I was busy being away from the family and living my young adulthood that was extended, and all this stuff. And like, he stumbled onto the same obscure political ideology as I did. And I, you know, probably there's some things about our personality that are attracted to that, whatever. But I mean, his life course is a little different. Like, he took my advice, and he just has not been focused on politics really, since then. And it's, you know, personal self improvement. And that's what I frankly recommend for most people, but that's just to show how I think like genetics and environment and experience can actually like help you so you can learn from people. You can learn from experiences in your own family, and you can see that, um, so I want to talk to you about um, you read "Genetic Lottery", you were you were aware of the New Yorker was going to do a profile of Paige Harden. You You described it in the comments of my substack as a hit piece, but it turned out to be more of a hagiography, don't you think?
Yeah. So I didn't... I probably shouldn't have characterize it in any way. I I will say this. I don't think the piece was designed to malign the job - I think it was it was quite positive. I think that, as she is no doubt aware, you know, this whole thing is at risk for her right? On the one hand, you know, having a big deal book come out and being profiled by the New Yorker is like the dream of any academic. She's already a tenured professor at UT Austin, which is a great school and a fabulous place. And I do think there's going to be lots of great opportunities for her to come come out of this. And it's very deserving, because I admire her a great deal. And I tell people all the time, like, you know, she does actual hard work, like I just get to, I get to do the fun part, which is talking about, like, the moral and ethical and political and educational consequences, but she has to actually do the research. You know, which is a much bigger deal. But as she is surely aware, like, you know, like, you know, what, I have no idea , if she wants to stay at UT the rest of her career or whatever, it's not my business. But, you know, writing a book of this, this magnitude, getting that profile, having your profile be raised in the way it is becoming sort of a celebrity academic, typically, like you would get hired, you would get poached, right? Like, very often a professor is going to get picked up from a big state school, even one with a great reputation like UT. And like, you know, a Brown or a Princeton or someone or something, Stanford will come and grab her right? The problem is, is, you know, the, all this attention also puts a target on her in a certain sense, where, you know, it's just gonna take one, you know, Assistant Dean or whatever, noticing that her name is on a hiring list, going public with that, getting the faculty to freak out and start having like a big imbroglio that, you know, results in them pulling their offer, right, like, so many people are so unreasonable about just as a line of inquiry at all. I mean, all you had to deal with stick that article into the search bar at Twitter. And of course, you found an immense number of people calling her a Nazi and eugenicist and all this other bullshit. And you're in academia, that's, that's very sort of threatening, right. So I think she's going to have a ton of great opportunity coming out of this, and it's very deserving. But it's like, we should all be clear that like, she was in a very comfortable position. And she could have just quietly published her papers, and enjoyed a really comfortable life in UT Austin, a great place to be, and not rock the boat, right. And in rocking the boat, she has exposed yourself to some legitimate professional danger. I mean, I, you know, you just wrote I think yesterday. You know, like all these geneticists who don't work in the genetics of human behavior, who hate when this stuff gets any kind of publicity, not because they think that genes don't influence behavior, because they're too smart for that, but because they know that like, it just brings a lot of heat to the, to what they do, right. Like, if you're doing any kind of human genetics, sooner or later, someone is going to try to pin you down and get your, your your thoughts on how genes affect cognition and behavior. And so they don't want someone like Paige to be bringing this stuff to the mainstream, they want to just quietly do their work in your labs. So you know, I like to book a great deal. You know, Paige is interested in some things that I'm not interested in - I mean, one of the things that people always misunderstand about my book is, you know, they think that my project is, let's take kids at an early age and genetically test them and figure out what your likely academic outcomes are going to be, and somehow use that to change how they move through some school system. And I have just have no interest in that that's, you know, you know, my, my fundamental commitment to this stuff is born out of the fact that the entire field of education policy and research is dedicated to a really stupid, in my opinion, blank slate thinking that the concept that some students might have hire, better than intrinsic ability than others is considered deeply offensive and most of these places. And as I wrote about not that long ago, you know, it leads to things like No Child Left Behind, which is easily the most disastrous piece of education legislation in this country's history it was immensely wasteful, caused a lot of headaches, and billions of dollars of wasted dollars. And it's all stemmed from people not accepting the fact that not all kids have the same natural endowment to succeed in school. But I think Paige is very well defended. And I think that she does a really good job of articulating the case that,
you know, believing in the heritability of things like academic ability makes the case for left wing case stronger rather than weaker. The problem is, is so many people are just so quick to shout eugenics that like, it's difficult for that argument to get out there.
Yeah, so one thing that I will say is, you're a socialist. And Paige is a, you know, she's moderately liberal. Um, she's left wing but definitely not a socialist, maybe she's not even left wing, she's just pretty liberal is the way I would say it. And so I think that shows in the books like she's still very much meritocratic, I would say, you are not?
No. I mean, I think that, you know, a lot of people allow their responses, like, you know, okay, I was going along with, like, if you check like, the Goodreads reviews, or the Amazon reviews, whatever, if I was going along with this, and this all seemed reasonable, and then all of a sudden, he's got this socialist agenda that comes out of nowhere. And I used to be like my bed, like in terms of how they laid it out. But I will say, the whole project was conceived in the basis that if it's true, that we are that our genomes influence our academic abilities, in our academic abilities have become incredibly important for who succeeds economically and who does not. And to me that undermines the moral justification for the whole system, right. So you know, we don't, there's never been a society where there was a large enough police force, where the, you know, the authority could just hold down the... you know, everybody in the population if they all decided to rise up. But that's not how that's not how societies function societies don't work. Because, you know, the Army or whoever is forcing us to go along with it, societies work because most people buy into the basic deal of the society, right. And the societies that break down, like the Soviet Union tend to be break down, because there is a significant portion of the population that does not, does not feel that way. And so what underlies the whole American project right now, is the idea that, you know, if you believe in yourself, and you work hard, you can achieve anything, right, like, baked into the American dream, is the idea that like, you know, if you work hard, you're not constrained by anything, that the what rules is, you know, your effort. And if you if you work, and you put time in and you're willing to suffer and struggle for a while, eventually you're going to become rich, right? I mean, that that is really baked into the national philosophy. But all of that presumes that like you are, you have the tools necessary to excel in that way, right. And we don't all have that - like, I can tell you right now, like, there is no if, you know, if you go back and you redo my life 10,000 times, there's no version of me, that ends up as a research physicist, right? Because that level of math is genuinely like beyond me, right? Like, I do not have, in my opinion, the cognitive tools necessary to do the kind of like raw, abstract mathematical reasoning that that kind of a job entails. And that is that you can apply that idea in a broader scale and say, you know, not everyone can go on to become a beautiful white collar worker, with a you know, 105 iq, who knows how to play the game in the office and has at least minimum cognitive skills to be able to navigate the software and the various... and do a spreadsheet, etc, right? That the what is consistently marketable on the job market, are things that are related to our genetic heritage, or genetic endowment. And not everybody has those gifts. And that's very clear to me, because I, you know, I have been an educator for my entire adult life in one form or another. And so for me, like the the the core of it is that once you recognize that people are born without the same abilities, right, telling them that you can be anything becomes something cruel, rather than something encouraging, right? And it also says, it says to them, like, hey, this whole system, this whole society that you're operating in, it's operated - It's based on a lie, right? Like, when people talk about equality of opportunity, often now they're talking about equality of opportunity, from a sort of conservative standpoint, they might be liberals, like a John Chait liberal, but they tend to talk about equality of opportunity, like to shore off pressure from their web, to push off pressure from my socialists. But what you have to ask yourself is, you know, equal to what degree because if you emerge into life, and you already are bound to pursue a certain path, because you were gifted or not gifted with certain academic traits, then equality of opportunity is meaningless, right? Like if you could be there in heaven when God is making you as a baby. And he says, I'm going to make this one, you know, top out at an 80 IQ. And then someone said, Now go out into the world, you're free to be whatever you want. You would say, Well hold on a second, right? Like it doesn't feel like I'm free, because you've given me these genes that constrain my ability. And so and that's at the heart The whole thing, right, recognizing that if some people are suffering and people are suffering in our economy, because they don't have the intellectual gifts they need to flourish in that economy, it creates a greater moral justification for a more redistributive state in one way or the other.
Well, you know, I want to so in the, in the profile, The New Yorker, I talked about Paiges, family background, and just just the listeners know, I know Paige personally, I've known her since 2016. You know, living in Austin, Texas, and also, you know, you know, I've hung out with her kids, okay. Like, I know, I know her without, well, I know her family background. And you know, the New Yorker kind of hinted at it, but I think her family background, and just the diversity of people she's known, met, experienced in her life has affected her perceptions of, shall we say, human variation, you know, how people are different. And, you know, I want to tell a quick anecdote about this, where I think one of the issues that's going on is a lot of people in so, you know, in our particular, you know, social class stratum of kind of egg heady nerds, we don't interact with like, so you just sit 80 IQ. You know, we don't interact with people that are very different than us. So in the late 1960s, Art Jensen at Berkeley was at the center of this huge controversy, and Theodosius Dobzhansky the evolutionary biologist who, you know, coined the phrase like nothing in biology makes sense, except in light of evolution, visited into the office to have a discussion. And he saw some of the tests, that Jensen's group and education, education school, I guess we're giving. And he looked at Jensen, and he just said, Oh, I didn't know that you were studying that you gave tests to mentally disabled people. And Jensen was explaining like, No, no, these are tests for normal people. And he's like, and he looked at the questions He's like, this is obviously for someone who's mentally disabled, there's no way that a normal person would find this difficult and Jensen - like he never really could convince Dobzhansky that this was, for us an assumed population of like normal intelligence, because Dobzhansky was one of the preeminent evolutionary biologists of his time, most of the people he interacted with were academics at really high levels. And he no doubt did very little teaching, probably no grading. And even if he encountered, you know, people more modest faculties, their universities, students at at least a semi selective University. And so I mean, what do you think about the hypothesis that a lot of our discussion is distorted by the fact that the people who have public discussions are a certain type of people, and they lack contact with other types of people, shall we say?
Yeah, I mean, look like I, it's interesting. I mean, one of the weird things is that, you know, you have, we have a set of developmental and cognitive disabilities, that are tied to genetics. Now, sometimes these are not heritable in the traditional sense. So you know, Down syndrome is not passed down from parent to child in the typical way that we think of right, it's the result of the extra chromosome, the copying problem, but still, we have this subset of people who have these serious cognitive difficulties, that you know, that range, right, some kids with down syndrome, can live independently and hold down a job, etc, etc. But there are also people who, you know, who are completely nonverbal. So, you know, for context, like I work for a year and a half in a school for kids with severe emotional disturbance. There's also a wing of that school that was a more traditional special ed school that had some severely disabled kids. People don't object to saying that someone with - generally they don't - that someone with down syndrome, right, has a lower ceiling intellectually, then many people who do not, right?in other words. I think that, you know, people with Down syndrome can accomplish all kinds of things in their lives are worth living, and I'm disturbed by the rate at which those fetuses are aborted. But I don't think it's controversial to say that like, it is unlikely that you're going to have someone with down syndrome become a you know, a math professor, right? For whatever reason, right? That notion that you can be born in a body and with a brain that sets you back academically and intellectually and in many other ways. That notion with specifically with people with these severe cognitive and developmental disabilities, that is very walled off from the rest of the conversation. I think that working with those kids was one of the things that exposed me to the realization that like, look like it's no, this is not a lack of intelligence in the way that I'm thinking about largely in the book and that, you know, there are different things going on genetically with these kids. But there is a certain sense in which, you know, it should remind everybody, that cognition is embodied, right? I mean, one of the things, so one of the things that really frustrated me about the reception to Paiges, the article about Paige is that, you know, when many things in our debate now, half the people are saying no one is saying, and then half the other half are saying exactly the thing that the other half are saying, No one is saying, right, so with defined the police, you know, when that fight was happening, there was a ton of people who would say, on social media or - or whatever, no one is actually saying abolish the police. What they're saying is like, draw down their resources and redirect them, Blablabla. Which, okay. But then there was other people who very much were saying that, and in fact, they published an editorial in the New York Times saying no, we literally mean abolish the police. And it was so frustrating, because like, the people saying, no one we're saying the reason that they say that is because they just they don't want to have to engage with that side of the argument. Right? It's, it's frustrating for them to engage, they just wall it off. But it was the same way with Paige's article where you had people who think who think that, you know, simply saying that, you know, genes influence cognition and behavior is in and of itself eugenicist, which it is not by any rational definition of what eugenics is. So you had those people, and then you have a bunch of other people saying, No one thinks that the genes don't influence behavior and cognition and like, no, I they do, there's people saying it right now. And I in particular know because for the past year, you know, I've been hearing from them and email, and they're not happy with about my book, right? And so, but you have, like, you have people who say, you know, who genuinely don't believe that the genes, the genes influence anything, right, in terms of behavior and cognition. And it just, that would just be astonishing, right? Like,
our behavior and our in our cognition arise from our brains, our brains are organs are tissues, right, as organs and tissues, they are usually built via the blueprint of DNA, right? I mean, you'd have to be some kind of old school duelist, who thinks that like the mind resides in some sort of astral plane, to think that there's just no connection between like, people will accept that every part of our physical selves is influenced by DNA, but they simply won't accept that the mind is anyway straight sort of far from the conversation. But the point is, to refer your question, but the point is, yeah, I think that it is a lack of exposure to people who really struggle. Again, like I've been teaching college for over 10 years now. I mostly taught freshmen classes. And the thing about freshmen classes is you interact with a lot of students who are inevitably going to drop out, right, like the professors who you know, are big deal professors, tenured professors who, you know, dominate the academic conversation on Twitter, essentially, never teach classes with freshmen, right, like many of them never do. They never to treat... teach classes with the kind of freshmen who were going to drop out eventually, I was sort of at the the sharps, the, you know, the pointy end of the stick in the sense that, like, I was one of the people that, you know, so many students tons and tons and tons of college students show up to college, and they last one semester then they dropped out. And so you interact with kids like that. And, you know, it's impossible to do that day after day, semester after semester, and not conclude that some students are more gifted than others, you can certainly say that that's purely environmental. But to me, it always sort of underlying the sense that some people are just dealing with a better hand than other people. And the problem is, is though, is, like I said, with them, people just sort of walling off this idea. I think that even if they interacted with people who were not, you know, high achieving academic types like them, I think that they'd still find a way to sort of deny the salience of it, because they've so sort of walled off the idea in their minds, right, they, they know people are born, whose genes make them severely cognitively deprived, and make them essentially incapable of doing academic tasks, tasks, but they walk that off, they know that the brain is a part of the body, and they know that the body is built with DNA. And they know the mind comes out of the - of the brain, but they don't know, you know, but they just they don't connect that to their own live experience. Like the ability of people to create these mental silos on this issue is really impressive.
Yeah, there's so much to talk about already. But I want to I want to talk about so I listened to a lot of your podcast about "The Cult of Smart". So I stopped listening because like Freddie like, you know, I am ideologically on political issues very different than you. But I did laugh a couple of times reading this book - reading your book because I'm just like, Yeah, I don't, I pretty much agree with all of the factual assertions you're making. So we start with actually very similar premises. And one of the socialist podcasts that I think you were introduced, it was really weird, because the the host obviously liked you but gave a really ominous sounding introduction, that, you know, the listeners might get, I don't know what was gonna happen to them, but like, their heads would explode, they would run screaming from the room. You're a good guy, your heart is in the right place. And this is not an evil book. I don't know. It was like, super weird. Like, like, after experiencing this, I mean, I don't know, like, what is the How are you feeling? Because like, obviously, you didn't know how it would come about. But basically, it's like your book, in large parts of the left, like, obviously, like kind of like the woke, maybe the more you know, economically centrist left, I get it. But even the socialists the materialists. There was like a terror when they had you on the podcast, like I could hear it and some people's voices. But this one guy actually had like a five minute preamble. And it was like, Wait, is this like the Catholic Church? And like, they're gonna talk about somebody who's like, wrote a book on the Banned Books list, but this is for the elect? I don't know. Anyway, what do you think about that?
Yeah. So I mean, first of all, it's not unusual at all, for me to, you know, be on the left, and at the same time to be a stranger to many people on the left. That is, that is not an unusual feeling for me. So that was just par for the course. I do want to say real quick, you know, you mentioned the facts in the book. And I because I know a lot of the people who listened to your podcast, are big time science people, you know, the number one complaint about the book. I mean, besides from people who just fundamentally reject a premise is that, you know, it doesn't go into the science inenough that that that depth to mean, it's sort of a glib treatment of the science, it doesn't show mastery, whatever. Um, I had six additional Microsoft Word pages. So that is more than six pages in an actual book, about the about the science that got cut. And I have the email and I've shared in the past where the guy in charge at St. Martin's at at the imprint at St. Martin said, nobody's gonna want to read all the science stuff. This is a general interest book, and they cut it. And because it was my first book, ...
Yeah, I want to say Freddie , I checked the footnotes in there. They're good footnotes, like you're like, it's like, I know, the papers you're citing. So I went and checked, like a lot of those footnotes. So for people like even if Freddie doesn't outline everything, if you go check the footnotes, it's all there.
Yeah. And so anyway, I was an inexperienced author, and I didn't know what I was doing. And so I rolled over on it, and I didn't fight. And I sincerely regret it, because of how many people have noted that, obviously, still up to me, you know, the my covers, my name is on the cover, so I'm responsible for it. But I did read more than it appears in terms of the science in researching the book. I just think that, you know, it's weird, because one thing I always point out is, like, you know, we as socialists are the ones who are always asserting the, you know, the importance of chance in life outcomes, right? Like, we're the ones who are always saying, hey, look, some people get a bad guy role. And we have to create structures in society to take care of them. Because, you know, right, you know, there's a lot of randomness in life. There's a lot of luck. But, and they will go along with that, on everything except for this question right there. In other words, saying, like, no one determines their, their own genome, we have no hand at all. It seems to have huge impacts on who we are as people and in our, you know, and for that reason, in our economic outcomes, but they just can't take that leap. Again, like the word eugenics, like I, you know, I have a rule that I have recently instituted in my email, which is that like, if I get if I get an email or a comment or on my blog, who said who uses the word eugenics I require them to define it for me before I answer their question. And the reason why is because it's used so loosely, and it's used, you know, anything happened to do with genes and human behavior is treated as eugenics but the eugenics movement was a movement to change the genome and to do so with mass sterilization or with selective breeding stuff like that, then I have no interest in that. There's nothing like that in Paige's book, right. Like, that's just I just made up but it's just there's a sense of danger that pervades this whole this whole topic that compels ordinarily kind of rational people to be really irrational about it. Yeah, I
mean, so But are you gloomy, then about the prospect of a Uh, you know, perhaps hereditarily informed socialism, let's say, like within the next 10 years, because you know, history is long and you know, who knows which way it'll go. But, you know, what do you think a like? Do you think that just because basically, from what I see, it's it's denialism is you know, that's the the word that was, you know, coined to explain, but basically people just don't want to engage. They do they drive, they dodge that whatever, like, they don't want to think about it.
Right. Yeah. And I think that there's essentially zero chance of hereditarian and, you know, and again, like, not hereditarian and strictly hereditarian, but like, you know, that there is a strong influence of DNA on on the genomes on our academic outcomes, I think it's essentially zero chance of that becoming any kind of a mass left thing. I think that there is the chance for us to sort of be an insurgent wing of the larger left wing project. And some of us will have more opportunity to say that in mainstream places, and some of us will have the less. I mean, one of the great things about, you know, you know, this, about this book, for Paige is that, you know, she is a very strong advocate for this position, right. And the way that I can't be because, you know, I got a lot of stuff. And she's a, she's a tenured professor who is respected in her field, she is articulate, and she is pretty steadfast in maintaining these liberal and progressive positions in the face of this. So I think people like that will have a chance to make a difference. Do I think that like, there's going to become a time when, you know, the sort of mainstream left wing person out there, like DSA member is going to walk around feeling comfortably about the influence of DNA on on human outcomes. I think that that's if it ever happens is a long, long way off.
Yeah, so it's really weird. So when I read your book, when I read some of your stuff, the references like what the publications, the companys in the genetic space that you name drop. I'm like, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine, who's in the biotech sector is like, this guy knows all of this stuff, you know, and I don't ever get a sense that most like, say socialist left wing people, cultural fakers, like what is it like for you to like know, what genomic prediction is compared to like, you know, the activists that you I mean, those are your people, those are your, your tribe? They don't they have no idea about any of this stuff. Like, what is that? Like?
Yeah, I mean, you have to place this in the context of I was in the midst of a messy divorce from the academic field that I had been sort of unhappily in for a long time when this happened. I mean, I, I went into a field, you know, I was always interested in, in writing, I thought, what I always see as my best skill. My grandfather was a professor of education. He was in what would now be known as my field, he was the one point the president of the National Conference of Teachers of English. And he did all kinds of research, he did a lot of empirical research. Like he, for example, he, in one of his studies, he strapped a bunch of kids to polygraph machines while they were writing, not to see if they were lying, which is to measure stress response, etc, to see what kind of thing so he was doing that kind of research. He was blacklisted because he was a commie like me. But, you know, I was attracted to the idea of a field that is dedicated to the teaching of writing skills. And I think that that matters. And it was also a market calculation, because that little field of mine has vastly better hiring numbers, at least in many programs than like in English department or philosophy department. And so I went into it for that reason. And I found that the field was nothing like I had been advertised had been advertised to me, it was totally hostile by this point to empirical research, like there was, you know, there's a journal that was sort of researching the teaching of English, that had been a empirical journal with, you know, the normal sort of, you know, you have Ns and you have P values, and etc, etc. And, you know, I learned that that had been taken over by successive editorial boards that had essentially purged it of any quantitative work. I would go to conferences and try to try to present quantitative work and people would be extremely hostile. And, you know, a lot of the stuff that was getting published was just nonsense to me. Clearly, it was just like, not quality work. And that people were kind of hiding out in this field. So I was deeply unhappy. And I was a grad student. At this point, I was still finishing my dissertation. I was writing a dissertation about a standard Test. And during you know, I was planning on doing some kinds of quantitative analyses of outcomes. So it was pretty divorced from what was going on with my peers. And so I was just, you know, I had been teaching for years, who was eminently clear to me that something's wrong in our education policy. I had all this time sort of to, you know, figure out what I was as an intellect. And so I just started gravitating towards this genetics research, because it just seemed to explain to me, things that I had experienced over and over again, as an educator, and also, like, so many problems with our education system, which as I said before, is predicated on Blank Slate thinking, right? Um, you know, I don't want to go into a whole thing about school quality or whatever, I mean I could, but you know, the, if you go to an education department, there are people who might sort of obliquely reference, you know, student ability, but it's never defined, and they're very scared of any talk of a hereditary, you know, sort of a genetic, - , a source for that sort of thing. And so, like, no one was sort of connecting the dots to say, well, maybe
No Child Left Behind was a spectacular failure, because it was sort of asking for, essentially, more or less 100% compliance with standards that many students couldn't meet. And the thinking was, if we just sort of force schools, we can make them sort of teach these kids up to standard. But in fact, reality to me was some kids lack the underlying cognitive skills necessary to be able to, for example, pass algebra two, which if you're not aware, you know, for people listening, like, you know, you know, in his book them "The Math Myth", , Andrew Hacker shows data that shows that, at one point in my 2010, or 11, the in Arizona, something like 68% of the students were failing algebra two, right? And so like, you look at that, and say, how could people think we can bring all these kids up to the standard? Well, they think that because they think that every child's a blank slate, and if we can convince them, you know, that actually different children have different levels of underlying ability, we should reorient our schools to being you know, places where every student can find their best opportunity to flourish. Rather than trying to force all of them into this college pipeline, it would be a more humane and efficient thing to do. And so all those pieces sort of fell into place. And yeah, and I'm a reader by by nature, I mean, I, you know, I read voraciously and always have and so, I started picking things up, you know, just mostly, you know, just tons of PDFs. I think that I think Eric Turkheimer... I'm trying to think of the the name but it was the was the ferocious the three laws of behavior.
Yeah, that's from like, the late 90s, early 2000s. Like that, kinda kind of, like started off the field. I mean, I, you know, I get some of this sense, like, partly from your substack, people should check out the substack. I'm a subscriber, like, it's great. You know, I do think maybe you should pace yourself a little Freddie, I don't want you to get burned out. He's got something else to say. But in any case, you know, this book, "The cult of smart", I do have to emphasize it's, it's really, really heavy on education. For the listeners who know all the genetic stuff, it's fine that you don't go into detail, because that's just kind of like a assumption. You don't have to convince me for my listeners, I think a lot of them you wouldn't have to convince the educator and stuff is different. I'm old enough to remember the 1990s. You know, I remember like seeing things about how well actually the way we solve the schools increase expectations, because kids always meet the expectations. So there are all these silver bullet solutions, during that period and into the 2000s. And even today, and you know, you mentioned No Child Left Behind, I still think the Iraq War was probably George W. Bush's, like, biggest fuckup. But No Child Left Behind, which was a left right, kind of coalition with Kennedy, the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Ted Kennedy. I think it has been a disaster. I have kids I have elementary school kids and there's no child left behind is over and done. But I think it's knock on effects have been a disaster educationally all across this country. I mean, people don't know what No Child Left Behind this anymore that are younger, but I could just see like it's a contingent effects on schools trying to kind of rebuild, reconstruct themselves. And this was like a huge national experiment. And so I'm, you know, I'm more conservative and so like, this was social engineering on a radical level, and yet it was enacted by a, quote, conservative president, you know, I it's like, it's mind boggling to me, and I think when people read your book, I think they will get a sense that I mean, I don't know, I think I'm already kind of like on the same page as you there. But, you know, I have friends who actually do educational research and they privately are like, you know, most interventions don't work. You know, we just, we just like, make all these promises. But that's because that's what the donors, you know, I want to hear. And so I think there's a lot of stuff about the education in there where there's no silver bullets, like we're not going to radically transform everybody into an A student. Right.
Right. Yeah, I mean, I I do want to say this is important is that like, the current state states that we're in, where now there's just a blanket opposition to standardized testing of any kind. And this, this has become a very common liberal position now, that is in to some degree, a consequence of like, you know, Black Lives Matter, and that sort of convulsion. But what set the stage for all that was no child left behind. And what was eminently predictable. In fact, I and other people predicted it, is that, you know, the constant testing, and the immense amount of money poured into creating standards was going to lead to a backlash. And the backlash sort of functions on a few levels. I mean, I think one thing that's sort of under... undersold, is that what I think, you know, there's a narrative about the backlash. And it's, you know, students were burned out, teachers were teaching to the test, nobody wanted to test anymore, the opt out movement rose up, that is all true. Education Realist, who's a blogger who's a doesn't reveal His name is anonymous, because he's an actual public school teacher, he's written a lot about the fact that like, a big part of it that people don't talk about is that it just, it just proved to be immensely expensive for the states of this testing, you know, Pearson is charging, like $35, a test or something like that, a student that is. And so the opt out, sort of gave the states the pretext that they needed to, to do what they wanted to do anyway, because it was so expensive. But um, yeah, another thing is, like, you know, you have a lot of parents who are sort of bougie and affluent, and they always assume that their kids a genius, and they go to these expensive pre K is, you know, that preschools that tell and they, you know, the parents tell the parents what they want this teachers tell the parents what they want to hear, which is that your kids a genius, and public school teachers are not in the habit of telling parents that their kids aren't particularly intellectually gifted. And then they go, and they take these tests, and they say, Oh, no, wait, my kids at the 75th percentile, right, I thought he was a 95th percentile kid. And I think, like, I honestly think a serious part of this backlash is just from parents who don't really hate standardized tests, they just hate the fact that the standardized tests are revealing that their kids are not a genius. But one way or the other. Now, you know, journalists and academics say things about standardized testing that are not true all the time. Right, like so, you know, a classic one is, you know, standardized tests, just, you know, show who's good at taking the tests. But I've already said that that's not true, right. Like, the the predictive validity of a modern, standardized test in terms of being able to tell us what students are going to be able to do later on in life in a given academic domain is remarkable. I mean, the, you know, the correlations that we're seeing, and the ability of these tests to tell us how students are going to do down the line is really remarkable. They are there they are, and have always been predictive. The, you know, the complaints about the influence of parents income on tests is both inflated. In other words, the influence is not nearly nearly as large as people think it is. But it's also completely under theorized, right? They don't they don't explain why that's bad. I mean, if we have every reason to think that people who are richer have the ability to become smarter within an environment for a variety of reasons. So if the test is telling us that the richer kids are doing better than the test is doing its job, right. It's measuring the construct accurately. And so yeah, so we're living in this post, No Child Left Behind the era. And it's so funny for me, because it's like, you know, it's a classic example of how I can never be satisfied because
this sort of neoliberal school reform movement is wounded right now, is still very well funded. And so I would never count it out. But I'm sort of all this testing opt out. And the notion that all standardized tests are inherently racist no matter what, which is very widely promulgated in liberal circles, you know, we're going from No Child Left Behind, which is you test everybody all the time to now let's test nobody. Right? Which is also stupid, right? I mean, I've always been an advocate for, you know, we, there are many things that we don't know how to do well in education research. But, you know, designing these tests is one of the things that we do know how to do well. And what we also know how to do well is to infer a populations characteristics from a representative sample, right? We know how to give a test to a demographically stratified sub sample of any given states or district or whatever, student population, have them take that test, and then extrapolate out from those results, because those extrapolations we know, are extremely accurate, right? So you don't have to test everyone all the time as No Child Left Behind. But you also don't have to never test them. Right. Like you can integrate all this into a in a like, you know, humane and intelligent way. But unfortunately, you know, because the, you know, tests are racist argument is perceived to be strong, and it doesn't allow for exceptions. That's the, you know, the road we're traveling down.
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, in, in graduate schools, there's an issue of getting rid of the GRE grexit. I think we both agree that that's dumb. But in any case, I had a friend, a prominent academic. And he's, he was opposed to it, but he knew that it was futile that the department was going to get rid of it. And I was like, why are you worried? And he said, No, like, I have an extremely good publication record, and my lab is well known, I will get the best students. And I'm like, Well, how do you know that they're best? He's like, Well, you know, I mean, the recommendations will make it clear that this is a real recommendation, because my colleagues won't want to recommend people to me that are bad. But also, he said, Oh, I'm just gonna look at undergraduate schools. So basically, you know, whereas before, he would give someone from a, you know, a lower tier state school, a look, if their standardized test indicated that they were kind of a diamond in the rough, he just is not going to look at that anymore. Like it's got to be, it's got to be like one of the top flagships or preferably private universities, private schools, selected private schools. So this is the kind of thing that's going to happen when you get rid of standardized tests, it's not going to be an egalitarian utopia.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the, you know, we shouldn't have to go on a huge tangent, but we won't, but look like, you know, one of the things that people want to replace standardized test with is like holistic admissions, which means you take a look at the whole individual, which is an absolute bizarre way to try to achieve greater equality, because rich students are always going to have greater opportunity to do the things that people consider holistically good, right. So you know, a kid who has the wherewithal to go to Peru for a summer and build houses for UNICEF or whatever. That is not an opportunity that is afforded to most students, right. Another thing is, like, unless you are an excellent basketball or football player, generally, it's considered better to be, you know, pretty good in a rare sport than to be really good in a in the typical one. In other words, like, if you, obviously, if you're getting heavily recruited by an athletic department, that's one thing, but if you're applying to Yale, and you're not like a world class athlete, it's better to be, you know, okay, at fencing than to be, you know, pretty good at cross country running, right. But this again, you know, the people who get into these, you know, weird sports, he's unusual sports, are people who have the money to do it. So that just is like a totally absurd sort of solution for all men, you know, rich parents are always going to find a way to game a holistic system, and they're going to have the money to be able to do it, it's much harder to game the test, right? The other thing is, like, you know, oh, just look at a high school GPA. Well, um, you know, there are abundant problems with that, that people never even want to talk about, like, for example, you know, different GPAs mean different things in different schools and contexts, right. There are schools where the valedictorian has like a 3.7 GPA. And there are schools where all of the top 20 kids have like a 4.5. Right? What makes the way that this sort of functions is that a lot of people don't know about this is a lot of elite schools have these complicated systems for translating GPAs from different schools, and they will actually have a profile for individual high schools. And they'll use that to sort of calculate what sort of weighted GPA is that they use in their determinations. So if you're saying well guess we're just going to treat take GPA, and then we're saying okay, if we just take GPA, hey, this poor black kid from Detroit or inner city school, he's got a Three, eight, right? And this other kid this this rich white kid, she's got a three eight, well, you know, hey, they you know, they're they're sort of at an even playing field, but that's not going to endure when that person is compared to their peers, right, which is exactly what these elite schools are doing. And by the way, those those formulas, those calculations, there's many schools that don't even acknowledge that they have them, although it's public knowledge that they have them. And they're complete blackbox. Right, but we have no transparency, about how that's happening. And so one of the things that's happening when you get rid of the test is like, you're removing quantitative transparency, the ability to know what's going on in various dynamics. So I always say to people, you know, how do you know that there is an income effect in SAT scores? Right? How is it that you know that people from lower income band score lower? And they say, well, you look at the scores in which I say, Aha, right? You can't do that with holistic admissions, that there's no way that you can sort of figure out the cause, you know, a correlation coefficient that tells you the likelihood of impacting a completely non quantitative indicator, like holistic admissions. Right. So we're just removing information from the system. And the assumption is that that's going to result in greater equality and justice, when in fact, it seems to me it's going to do the exact opposite.
Yeah, I mean, we're on the same page. So I want to close out. Final question. And, you know, kind of like a, you know, less in the weeds question, the whole woke movement or whatever, the awokening, you know, you've been pretty much a kind of a communist the whole time. I've known you online, I'm pretty far left guy. But how do I say this? Ah, they, you know, there are people who are like, basically Neo liberal shills five years ago, who are accusing you of being like a fascist, like, What's going on here? Like, how is this gonna end?
Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I look, I people can investigate my writing I've said, I've written an awful lot about about this look like there is a dimension of self interest to any political movement. But in the sort of social justice movement, or woke movement, whatever you want to call it. I think the sort of the the jockeying for position has overwhelmed any sense of basic political strategy. And so people who don't have any particular legitimate attachment to these politics, are getting on board publicly, because they don't want to deal with the consequences of being perceived not to be on board. Look, my criticisms of social justice politics is not like, there's not it's not despite being a communist, it's because I am a communist, right, like, I believe that politics is about the material world and rearranging the material world to be a more just place. And we'll politics are absolutely obsessed with symbol, language. Everything is, you know, you look at like, just these all these language codes, you know, the way that you talk about people in the way that you refer to them, is supposed to carry this almost mythic power, right like that, you know, if you name someone the wrong way, that that's this terrible stain on them. But meanwhile, while the woke people are like, working overtime, to, you know, establish this new linguistic world order. People are still suffering and nobody cares, right? Like, I live not that far from Brownsville, New York, which is probably the poorest place in New York City. And if you go and you wander around there, there's more sort of Black Lives Matter murals. But otherwise, the last five to 10 years of social justice, politics has not changed that place at all right, like go to the ghettos, and people are still just suffering. And so there's a major disconnect. I think, and I have been saying publicly that I think that the the fad for wokeness is going to wear off. I don't know if that's going to be in a year or 10 years. But you know, remember 20 years ago, we were all of us living in this totally inflamed United States. That was super, super dedicated to patriotism, and nationalism and militarism. And that, you know, was not looking to be a very progressive and enlightened nation, but it was a wounded and, you know, an aggressive nation. And I think if people think that, like, we can't just end up back there in 10 years from now, they're crazy, right? Things change. And this will change too. It's just very unpleasant while it goes on.
All right. So thank you for your time Freddie. The book is "The Cult of Smart" everyone should check it out. This has been a really good conversation. Yeah, I like your substack is great. You know, as I said to listeners, I subscribe. There's a wide variety of diversity of things out there. The quantity and quality are quite high. So check that out. Thank you for your time Freddie
