Prof. Hsu's blog links to this extraordinary Norwegian documentary. The reporter interviews among others the former Minister of Education who maintains that education can stretch the inborn capabilities of the students (and illustrates the idea with two rubber bands) and that Norway's educational system has failed because still there are non-equalitarian outcomes in the student body. That is the insistent subject of our very own fishwrap HaAretz: the failure of Israel's titanic educational system and the society in general to erase life outcome differences. Today, it publishes a long, statistics+graphs filled article accusing the IDF of discrimination because the soldiers sent to electronics and computer courses come from middle class backgrounds instead of African slums. The message is that this is a disaster and the cause is (1) the right wing government, (2) the "White" establishment, and (3) an obscure racist conspiracy. The video is extraordinary in that it explains convincingly that the impact of parental background (and child environment) on academic and life achievements is zero (ZERO!) and that
genes are all.
This is in Norway, now. The video also impresses me for other reasons. Everything in Norway is so well ordered, clean, relaxed and reasonable. All over one can see the wealth, the security, the comfort. How different from Israel.
19 comments:
The Norwegians picked a good neighborhood, and they have access to oil from the North Sea. Israel is in a bad neighborhood. Instead of Swedes and Danes, you have Egyptians and Palestinians for neighbors.
The Norwegian government and academy has the same attitude toward the concept of inherited attributes as the Israeli Left - hostile. Nearly all of the Norwegian social scientists that Eia interviews attribute everything to culture and environment. However, genes are not all - you didn't watch the Judith Rich Harris (author of The Nurture Assumption) segment closely. There is an environmental component to life outcomes, which Harris thinks comes largely from peer group interaction. Actually, parents can influence that by living middle class or upper middle class lives and giving their children access to peers from similar non-dysfunctional backgrounds. The flipside of environmental influence on intelligence is seen among the poorest and most backwards, like Indian slum dwellers. Nutritional deficiencies and severe mistreatment can negatively affect intelligence and life outcome.
Plomin specifically estimates a genetic contribution of 50-70%, and there is support for that estimate in recent studies such as this one from the October, 2011 issue of Molecular Psychiatry:
Genome-wide association studies establish that human intelligence is highly heritable and polygenic.
Note from the abstract that the authors consider their estimates of genetic contribution to intelligence to be lower bounds. Still, no resarcher currently endorses your statement that "genes are all." So the impetus for my comments is not that I reject biological influence on intelligence - I fall pretty strongly on the hereditarian side. Rather, I take issue with your hyperbole. You are an engineer, someone capable of great intellectual precision. Why not apply that standard to your posts?
Why does everything have to be all or nothing? Clearly a man is a combination of nature and nuture. Einstein's ancestors had the same genetic raw material that he did, but nurture and circumstances of the time were such that they confined their genius to money lending and the study of Gemara. On the other hand, had Mr. and Mrs. Einstein adopted a little pygmy baby or the offspring of some Ukrainian peasants, the patent office is probably as far as young Albert would have gotten. How much does each one "count" - I think it's hard, given the lack of ability to do controlled experiments on humans, to come to an exact number, so 50/50 is as good as any. This is really a great blessing, unless you are a Pol Pot Year Zero leftist. Those of us who are born with gifted children (and the children themselves) must understand that these talents must be tended and nurtured with lots of love and hard work and will not grow by themselves, any more than wild grape seeds sown on a vacant lot will form themselves into a Chateau Lafite. Those whom G-d has not so gifted must understand their limitations and feel no guilt or shame for not flying like an eagle when they have hatched from penguins, but rather to be the best penguins that they can be.
K
What I see going on in the US is that children in the ghettoes are born with three strikes against them and so their chances of success are close to nil. Their genetic endowment is modest, their parent(s) (usually mother only) are ill equipped to raise them, and they are surrounded by peers from equally dysfunctional families. In the past, such children were often raised in orphanages to get around #2, but not only were these institutions themselves often flawed and abusive, but they had little success because #1 and #3 remained in place. Is there any solution for those born with this many strikes against them? Probably not, but it's hard to think of a way that we could be doing even worse than we are now by pretending that the problems don't exist at all. If the institutions of society remain in total denial of the diagnosis, there is no chance at all for a cure.
Note that you don't need a society consisting only of 115+ IQ people to have a civilization, but you do need a society where people are not living in denial of reality.
K
I accept that no one of the interviewees said that genes are all. That opinion is all mine.
I attribute the fact that no one said ZERO to the well known effect in science. Researchers never contradict the accepted dogma nor its teachers, maximum they offer small gradual modifications and qualifications. In the issue of genes/parents/schools/environment etc. effect - slowly the dogma of fifty fifty is being qualified and getting nearer to the point of Zero parental impact.
Of course, as said in the video, we are talking about the 97% Norwegian children that have no malnutrition, domestic violence, etc. problems.
As a water engineer my opinion has no impact on the real world (the academy or the educational establishment), and on the other hand, I am not important enough to someone to take the trouble of sacking me from my humble position or whatever. Anyway, at my matusalemian age, I am on my way out.
BTW, the point of my note is the notorious fishwrap HaAretz that dares to attack the IDF, accusing it of racism. If here is an institution that takes very seriously the task of nation-building and integrating everybody in one fighting force is the IDF. They search for talent and will not waste it even if it comes in black or green or has two blue antennae. The integrate Down-people, quadriplegics, drug addicts, jailbirds, homosexuals, foreign adventurers, Christians, Israeli Arab Muslims, everybody. But not everybody is sent to expensive computer courses.
As said by K, a healthy society needs all kinds of people. My favourite saying is from an old analphabet worker I had and when there was pressure from above to reduce personnel, he said to me: "J, remember that in a caravan you need also asses and camels."
In my opinion, Tacitus always had an understanding of the Jews, they are the creation of the Egyptian prince Moses, he was a great man and a founder of a people. Machiavelli and Rousseau also talk about his achievement. Everything else about their origins is irrelevant, they are born in the genius of Moses.
About the topic of this thread, modern technological civilization is doomed, it will be conquered by the sexual vitality of the brown and black races. Sorry, civilization.
You're not that old. From other things you've posted in the past, I estimate that you're in your early to mid 60's now. If you avoid senility or other health problems, you could keep working for another 10 years.
You have no data to support your contention that genes are everything. And there is no "accepted dogma" of 50-50 for the relationship between genetic and environmental contribution to intelligence. All of the whole-genome data that we have (as opposed to inferences from twin studies) is very recent. And parental impact is difficult to separate out completely from environmental impact, which is not gong to zero (the peer impact is important, and parents do influence that). Your claim is just bad science, and you are setting yourself up to be proven wrong.
Tacitus always had an understanding of the Jews, they are the creation of the Egyptian prince Moses
Moses may never have existed, and if he did, he wasn't really an Egyptian prince. We know from whole-genome population genetics that Jewish populations are not that similar to Egyptians. The most successful Jewish population, the Ashkenazim, are the least similar to them. And modern-day Jewish religion and culture is quite different from the religion and culture of the early Hebrews, whether they left Egypt or never lived there in the first place. Tacitus, Machiavelli and Rousseau may have had insights, but on this subject they were talking out of their asses. Rousseau also sympathized with (but did not originate or fully endorse, contrary to popular myth) the concept of the "noble savage," the baggage of which has been immensely destructive to Western culture.
Jews are descendants of the Amorites that invaded the Egypt and are know as Hyksos.
The ram/sheperd was the symbol of the Amorites and names like Yacob, Yahu are quite common among them.
That is speculation. West Semitic languages are all fairly similar, so the Hyksos could have spoken a very similar language to ancient Hebrew (which is itself basically identical to Canaanite) and even split from the same stock without being directly ancestral to the ancient Jews.
Norway is doomed.
Anon.
The documentary is from 2010. Supposedly, it had an impact and some of the blank slatist gender researchers were defunded. If so, maybe Norway isn't doomed. Even if it isn't, Norway isn't as far gone as Sweden.
If so, it is a pity. They are admirable.
Anyone know why are there are so few Jews in Norway? An advanced, rich, Western nation. I can't work it out
Of course there was Quisling and WW2, but even after the war barely any Jews moved to the place. Seems odd.
"There is no "accepted dogma" of 50-50 for the relationship between genetic and environmental contribution to intelligence."
(a) I did not mention intelligence, I said academic and life outcome.
(b) The accepted wisdom a generation ago was the "Blank slate", today it is about fifty-fifty, and the consensus is moving towards predominance of inheritance. I am an engineer and there is a phenomenon of fake precision, so our range is tens of percent and it would be ridiculous to talk precisely say 50.00000012% and 49.99999 % etc. You understand me.
I know it is dangerous to say that most education is pointless - except made of basic technical education like reading and writing and driving and swimming and so. But that is my opinion.
Places that have Jews are the exceptions. Norway was (until they found oil) a poor country that exported people, so they had few immigrants, Jewish or otherwise. After WWII, most Jews were not interested in starting new Jewish communities in Europe - America, Israel, anywhere but Europe were the preferred destinations for the survivors.
K
There is no definite record of medieval Jewish settlement in any of the Scandinavian countries, which differentiates them from England and France, which had Jews but expelled them. Jews and Catholics were formally forbidden to settle in Danish territory (Denmark ruled Norway) after 1536 due to the laws of the Reformation. In the 17th century, a small number of wealthy Sephardic Jews were allowed by the Danish kings to settle in Denmark proper, and Ashknenazim followed in small numbers later. However, the Danish kings did not permit Jewish settlement in Norway, which was poor and backward at the time. Things get complicated after Norway separated from Denmark, but Jews were not officially allowed to settle permanently there until the mid-19th century.
J, what the data currently shows is that extreme parental nurturing does not guarantee either high IQ or good life outcome. The contribution of education to life outcome is a different beast from parental nurturing and is barely discussed except in relation to the possibility that genetics contributes strongly to scholastic aptitude. Education clearly can influence life outcome, especially through peer group and connections, which is why it is valuable to attend elite colleges. The course of study can be valuable as well, especially if it leads to a job. The work of Plomin and Harris doesn't say that all edudcation is useless. It says that their maximal ability is determined mostly by genetics and that their interests may also be thusly determined.
Holocaust survivors preferred to leave Europe, sure. Many didn't though and decided to settle in France, Sweden, etc.
Norway still seems to be an outlier. Finland with a small Jewish community sent an entire soccer team to the last Maccabiah games, Norway didn't manage to send a single person.
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