A good restatement of what many have long known. I went to college in the early 70s and it took two decades to unlearn the paradigm. Raising both biological and foster children and working in acute mental health helped, but really, reading CS Lewis and the insistence on not deceiving oneself was the greatest influence.
I really enjoyed C.S. Lewis's sort-of autobiograhy, 'Surprised by Joy'. Then somewhere around four-fifths of the way through the book he was finally won over to Christianity in a way I found impossible to follow. I think I even went back a chapter to see if I'd missed anything. One minute he was still talking about why he wasn't convinced by Christianity and the next he had been totally won over. Nothing wrong with that I suppose but being an atheist, it looked to me like wishful thinking (i.e. self-deception) had got the better of him.
I would agree, except that I find children don't absorb it - perhaps too abstract - until they have done some living.
My solution to just about everything is to read more CS Lewis. I couldn't get going on "Till We Have Faces" until I did it along with the Pints podcast, but now think it's his best.
Much of 'social science' is used to push an ideology, a liberal narrative.
"A crisis occurs when inconsistencies between theory and empirical observations accumulate so much that it is no longer possible to explain or dismiss incongruent findings within the paradigm."
First, this article is mostly spot on, so the following criticism is minor, but:
It is likely sub-optimal to base the analysis on referencing Thomas Kuhn's work here. I've never seen physical scientists acclaim Kuhn's work much and it isn't really how science operates (Kuhn seems to be pointed to mostly by non-scientists, though perhaps it has more validity in the social sciences than the physical sciences, I'm not sure).
At a trite level (that some scientific advances are bigger than others and have more knock-on consequences; that in some time periods more progress is made in a field than in other time periods) it is indeed true, but just states the obvious (nobody ever thought that science advances at an exactly steady pace, in military-medium lockstep, or that progress was merely a matter of "accumulation of facts").
But the Kuhnian claims that go beyond the trite (that there are clear distinctions between periods of "normal" science and periods of "paradigm shift"; that theories under different paradigms are incommensurable, etc) are pretty much wrong and not that helpful.
Hence, the current dominance of the SES model is not so much about a Kuhnian "this is how science works" but is much more about the influence of politics and ideology on science.
Thus, it is not really the case (as a Kuhnian analysis would have it) that the "genes + IQ" model is a new-fangled paradigm that is now being developed because tensions are building up in the prior SES paradigm that is now in crisis.
Rather, the "genes + IQ" model is decades old, just as old as the SES model. That it hasn't caught on is a matter of wilful ignorance from social scientists (a fingers-in-ears, "la la la, I can't hear you") along with active suppression (genes? *gasp*! *eugenics*!).
I feel like the problem also with view is that some people push it to say...no need to change at all and leads to a sort of a determinism."IQ differences among races...well it always been like that.No any program to lower poverty is stupid.Any form of wellfare is dumb because it all genetics"forgetting that enviroment shapes us biologically as much as genetics or at least ameliorates or worsenes it
I was at a Jerome Bruner public lecture and he did his thing on social scaffolding of cognition and parenting etc. At this point in time Psychology was starting to get behind the SES driver idea. At the end of the lecture Q&A someone at the back asked 'is it possible for mothers to constrain development?' . Bruner actually caught himself falling backwards and was speechless. Back in the day SES approaches did take the trouble to provide a lot of interesting arguments in both sociology and psychology. What I find now is SES as a normative category which doesn't require any arguments, which is frightening. 'Critical theorists' are so self certain. Many of them have little to do with empirical research except for their own anecdotes. This also worries me.
Rob Henderson, in his book "Troubled" pointed out how few foster children attend college (less than 5%). If IQ was the only real factor and not SES, then that would not be true.
If one looks at the work on Armstrong and Hamilton in looking at class that female college students, economic class played a significant role is academic and later career success.
I’m willing to bet that Armstrong and Hamilton didn’t even consider genetic confounding. That is, successful high-SES parents passing on genes for being successful and gaining a high SES, and this being the dominant factor in the future career success of the children. (But feel free to surprise me and tell me that, yes they did control for genetic confounding; but if they didn’t then their research is pretty worthless.)
“Parental networking, affluence and counselling” (what is called “shared environment” in studies) has less effect on outcomes than genes. We’ve known this for decades. The only reason some people think the former is all important is that they completely overlook the role of genes.
And serious discussion is done in written form. If you think I’m wrong, please point me at proper evidence, not YouTube videos.
I assumed that you had never read the book or probably even read the book. If one wants to read, feel free to find the book. The videos of talks at universities done by the authors is just a quick way to catch their main hypothesis.
And once again, one is not discussing genetics or genes but using other measures as a proxy for "good genes." That is why it is a self-sealing idea. Success means good genes and good genes means success. There is no way to measure that, let alone disprove it.
I have been very interested lately in learning about the rise of polarisation in modern culture and perhaps the less discussed left-right commonalities, so thank you for adding some more to the picture here.
The unquestioning nature of academia and perhaps the entire education sector of the issue of socioeconomic status is certainly an idea I have been trying to grapple with and learn more about lately. The idea that ideology can act as a kind of armour against scientific scrutiny, particularly through its subscription to the socioeconomic status paradigm, is a very interesting one.
I would be interested to hear your perspective on some of the many polarised debates in education circles (education being more my area of focus at the moment), particularly in regards to radically political issues being discussed in primary schools or universities, for example. Many thanks again
The white-black gap in academic achievement is always blamed, by those on the right, on IQ and genetics. However, those same people on the right will blame the huge gap between male and female students on the mean old girls who are teachers instead of the biology of male/female development.
Men score slightly higher on IQ tests than women, and whites score higher than blacks. You would expect the academic achievement gaps to reflect these differences.
If IQ explained success, then why, in 2025, are female the majority of valdictorians, majority of college students, and majority of students in medical, law, dental, and vet school?
One should also look up the writing on opportunity hoarding. The affluence of the parents explains their children's ability to remain in the upper class.
STEM-capable women tend to head to “empathetic’’ fields such as medicine and vet school, while men tend to head to “thing”-oriented fields like engineering and computing. Also, styles of assessment in education today tend to suit girls more than boys. And, if there is an IQ gap, it is only of 2 or 3 IQ points, so not that big, and is likely less than that among teenagers. And no-one claims that IQ is the *only* causal factor.
Lastly, that children of successful parents also tend to be successful is exactly what you’d expect on a passing-on-genes model. (Thus you can’t just assume that it’s the affluence that is causal.)
"Lastly, that children of successful parents also tend to be successful is exactly what you’d expect on a passing-on-genes model. (Thus you can’t just assume that it’s the affluence that is causal.)"
One seems to promote a "self-sealing" thesis. Successful people have the right genes and thus, any success of their children are due to their genes. Such a theory cannot be disproved. However, once again, blaming the mean old girl teachers is not a good look.
It is like claiming that boys are more competitive than girls even though in a state like Texas where high school students are ranked on grades, the top 10% of high school students are over 70% female. When it comes to getting into college, boys do not seem to be driven by the competition.
Sure it can be disproved! For example, if babies born to low-SES mothers, but adopted at birth into affluent families, then tend to do as well as natural children of affluent families, then what I said is disproven. Of, if twins being DZ rather than MZ has no effect on the similarity of their outcomes, then what I said is disproven. There have been fifty years of studies into this stuff!
The adopt studies do not prove that. As the book Troubled showed, foster children suffer massively from being foster children and underperform children raised by their biological parents. If genes = success, foster children would perform at the same level as other children.
And there are so few twins separate at birth or just after that the data is meaningless.
When a person becomes obsessed with genetics explains all idea, they are usually doing it to prove their own superiority, to claim that certain groups are inferior, or to justify massive cuts to education spending.
Science had not found the gene combination that cause many common cancers. To claim that one could sequence everyone's DNA to find the people with the highest IQ is laughable.
"If IQ explained success, then why, in 2025, are female the majority of valdictorians, majority of college students, and majority of students in medical, law, dental, and vet school?"
A preponderance of females major in less rigorous courses.
The claim of majoring in less rigorous majors does not explain that women are 55% of medical students in the U.S. and more than 60% of medical students in Germany are female. In the U.S., women are the majority of biology majors, 40% of math majors, and over 55% of chemistry majors. The hard majors for males is not engineering and physics.
"The claim of majoring in less rigorous majors does not explain that women are 55% of medical students in the U.S. and more than 60% of medical students in Germany are female. In the U.S., women are the majority of biology majors, 40% of math majors, and over 55% of chemistry majors."
By rigorous courses, I meant STEM. Medicine is not STEM. An undefined undergraduate degree in biology is not STEM. The figure for female chemistry majors refers to undergraduate degrees; when graduate degrees in chemistry are considered, males surpass females.
Perhaps these weak paradigms become popular because they were a way to smuggle moral convictions into empirical claims. As the world became more secular, there was suddenly a deluge of "scientific" claims that filled that gap for moral guidance that religion used to offer. Marxism being the most obvious example. Before people were "all equal before God" and so we were taught treat people equally, but now we are presented with claims that inequality is caused entirely by social factors (thus, implicitly proving innate equality). The effect is the same - moral condemnation of inequality.
When I hear the word ideology, I think political ideas. I think these paradigms are more like deep moral beliefs/desires that people can't logically justify without religion, so they cheat and use social science to justify them. This seemed to accelerate rapidly after WW2 when there was a "moral emergency" to make sure that something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again.
For me, the more a scientific paradigm includes some sort of moral judgement about society, the more likely it is to be false.
A good restatement of what many have long known. I went to college in the early 70s and it took two decades to unlearn the paradigm. Raising both biological and foster children and working in acute mental health helped, but really, reading CS Lewis and the insistence on not deceiving oneself was the greatest influence.
I really enjoyed C.S. Lewis's sort-of autobiograhy, 'Surprised by Joy'. Then somewhere around four-fifths of the way through the book he was finally won over to Christianity in a way I found impossible to follow. I think I even went back a chapter to see if I'd missed anything. One minute he was still talking about why he wasn't convinced by Christianity and the next he had been totally won over. Nothing wrong with that I suppose but being an atheist, it looked to me like wishful thinking (i.e. self-deception) had got the better of him.
The Screwtape Letters should be the first book taught in any school and every language by age 12, and from every pulpit of every faith.
Especially when Screwtape explains to Wormwood the highest achievement of their art is to get someone for nothing.
I would agree, except that I find children don't absorb it - perhaps too abstract - until they have done some living.
My solution to just about everything is to read more CS Lewis. I couldn't get going on "Till We Have Faces" until I did it along with the Pints podcast, but now think it's his best.
That’s ok they will absorb some
Especially that such MEN exist who use it as Template
"Why flawed social science persists."
Much of 'social science' is used to push an ideology, a liberal narrative.
"A crisis occurs when inconsistencies between theory and empirical observations accumulate so much that it is no longer possible to explain or dismiss incongruent findings within the paradigm."
This is also known as a 'hair-on-fire' event. LOL
First, this article is mostly spot on, so the following criticism is minor, but:
It is likely sub-optimal to base the analysis on referencing Thomas Kuhn's work here. I've never seen physical scientists acclaim Kuhn's work much and it isn't really how science operates (Kuhn seems to be pointed to mostly by non-scientists, though perhaps it has more validity in the social sciences than the physical sciences, I'm not sure).
At a trite level (that some scientific advances are bigger than others and have more knock-on consequences; that in some time periods more progress is made in a field than in other time periods) it is indeed true, but just states the obvious (nobody ever thought that science advances at an exactly steady pace, in military-medium lockstep, or that progress was merely a matter of "accumulation of facts").
But the Kuhnian claims that go beyond the trite (that there are clear distinctions between periods of "normal" science and periods of "paradigm shift"; that theories under different paradigms are incommensurable, etc) are pretty much wrong and not that helpful.
Hence, the current dominance of the SES model is not so much about a Kuhnian "this is how science works" but is much more about the influence of politics and ideology on science.
Thus, it is not really the case (as a Kuhnian analysis would have it) that the "genes + IQ" model is a new-fangled paradigm that is now being developed because tensions are building up in the prior SES paradigm that is now in crisis.
Rather, the "genes + IQ" model is decades old, just as old as the SES model. That it hasn't caught on is a matter of wilful ignorance from social scientists (a fingers-in-ears, "la la la, I can't hear you") along with active suppression (genes? *gasp*! *eugenics*!).
I feel like the problem also with view is that some people push it to say...no need to change at all and leads to a sort of a determinism."IQ differences among races...well it always been like that.No any program to lower poverty is stupid.Any form of wellfare is dumb because it all genetics"forgetting that enviroment shapes us biologically as much as genetics or at least ameliorates or worsenes it
To paraphrase Peter, Paul, and Mary, “Brother, can you paradigm?”
I was at a Jerome Bruner public lecture and he did his thing on social scaffolding of cognition and parenting etc. At this point in time Psychology was starting to get behind the SES driver idea. At the end of the lecture Q&A someone at the back asked 'is it possible for mothers to constrain development?' . Bruner actually caught himself falling backwards and was speechless. Back in the day SES approaches did take the trouble to provide a lot of interesting arguments in both sociology and psychology. What I find now is SES as a normative category which doesn't require any arguments, which is frightening. 'Critical theorists' are so self certain. Many of them have little to do with empirical research except for their own anecdotes. This also worries me.
Rob Henderson, in his book "Troubled" pointed out how few foster children attend college (less than 5%). If IQ was the only real factor and not SES, then that would not be true.
If one looks at the work on Armstrong and Hamilton in looking at class that female college students, economic class played a significant role is academic and later career success.
I’m willing to bet that Armstrong and Hamilton didn’t even consider genetic confounding. That is, successful high-SES parents passing on genes for being successful and gaining a high SES, and this being the dominant factor in the future career success of the children. (But feel free to surprise me and tell me that, yes they did control for genetic confounding; but if they didn’t then their research is pretty worthless.)
Try doing some research
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AucEd5YYYGo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFaa5KeSu0o
Parental networking, affluence, and counselling is not explained by genetics.
“Parental networking, affluence and counselling” (what is called “shared environment” in studies) has less effect on outcomes than genes. We’ve known this for decades. The only reason some people think the former is all important is that they completely overlook the role of genes.
And serious discussion is done in written form. If you think I’m wrong, please point me at proper evidence, not YouTube videos.
I assumed that you had never read the book or probably even read the book. If one wants to read, feel free to find the book. The videos of talks at universities done by the authors is just a quick way to catch their main hypothesis.
And once again, one is not discussing genetics or genes but using other measures as a proxy for "good genes." That is why it is a self-sealing idea. Success means good genes and good genes means success. There is no way to measure that, let alone disprove it.
Yes, you can measure and prove/disprove it. This is exactly what twin studies and adoption studies do.
Twin studies control for genetics entirely. Monozygotic twins share 100% of their DNA.
But twin studies based upon twins being adopted by different families steal have a huge number of confounders.
Excellent analysis.
I have been very interested lately in learning about the rise of polarisation in modern culture and perhaps the less discussed left-right commonalities, so thank you for adding some more to the picture here.
The unquestioning nature of academia and perhaps the entire education sector of the issue of socioeconomic status is certainly an idea I have been trying to grapple with and learn more about lately. The idea that ideology can act as a kind of armour against scientific scrutiny, particularly through its subscription to the socioeconomic status paradigm, is a very interesting one.
I would be interested to hear your perspective on some of the many polarised debates in education circles (education being more my area of focus at the moment), particularly in regards to radically political issues being discussed in primary schools or universities, for example. Many thanks again
The white-black gap in academic achievement is always blamed, by those on the right, on IQ and genetics. However, those same people on the right will blame the huge gap between male and female students on the mean old girls who are teachers instead of the biology of male/female development.
Men score slightly higher on IQ tests than women, and whites score higher than blacks. You would expect the academic achievement gaps to reflect these differences.
—NC
If IQ explained success, then why, in 2025, are female the majority of valdictorians, majority of college students, and majority of students in medical, law, dental, and vet school?
One should also look up the writing on opportunity hoarding. The affluence of the parents explains their children's ability to remain in the upper class.
STEM-capable women tend to head to “empathetic’’ fields such as medicine and vet school, while men tend to head to “thing”-oriented fields like engineering and computing. Also, styles of assessment in education today tend to suit girls more than boys. And, if there is an IQ gap, it is only of 2 or 3 IQ points, so not that big, and is likely less than that among teenagers. And no-one claims that IQ is the *only* causal factor.
Lastly, that children of successful parents also tend to be successful is exactly what you’d expect on a passing-on-genes model. (Thus you can’t just assume that it’s the affluence that is causal.)
"Lastly, that children of successful parents also tend to be successful is exactly what you’d expect on a passing-on-genes model. (Thus you can’t just assume that it’s the affluence that is causal.)"
Exactly so!
One seems to promote a "self-sealing" thesis. Successful people have the right genes and thus, any success of their children are due to their genes. Such a theory cannot be disproved. However, once again, blaming the mean old girl teachers is not a good look.
It is like claiming that boys are more competitive than girls even though in a state like Texas where high school students are ranked on grades, the top 10% of high school students are over 70% female. When it comes to getting into college, boys do not seem to be driven by the competition.
Sure it can be disproved! For example, if babies born to low-SES mothers, but adopted at birth into affluent families, then tend to do as well as natural children of affluent families, then what I said is disproven. Of, if twins being DZ rather than MZ has no effect on the similarity of their outcomes, then what I said is disproven. There have been fifty years of studies into this stuff!
The adopt studies do not prove that. As the book Troubled showed, foster children suffer massively from being foster children and underperform children raised by their biological parents. If genes = success, foster children would perform at the same level as other children.
And there are so few twins separate at birth or just after that the data is meaningless.
When a person becomes obsessed with genetics explains all idea, they are usually doing it to prove their own superiority, to claim that certain groups are inferior, or to justify massive cuts to education spending.
Science had not found the gene combination that cause many common cancers. To claim that one could sequence everyone's DNA to find the people with the highest IQ is laughable.
"If IQ explained success, then why, in 2025, are female the majority of valdictorians, majority of college students, and majority of students in medical, law, dental, and vet school?"
A preponderance of females major in less rigorous courses.
The claim of majoring in less rigorous majors does not explain that women are 55% of medical students in the U.S. and more than 60% of medical students in Germany are female. In the U.S., women are the majority of biology majors, 40% of math majors, and over 55% of chemistry majors. The hard majors for males is not engineering and physics.
"The claim of majoring in less rigorous majors does not explain that women are 55% of medical students in the U.S. and more than 60% of medical students in Germany are female. In the U.S., women are the majority of biology majors, 40% of math majors, and over 55% of chemistry majors."
By rigorous courses, I meant STEM. Medicine is not STEM. An undefined undergraduate degree in biology is not STEM. The figure for female chemistry majors refers to undergraduate degrees; when graduate degrees in chemistry are considered, males surpass females.
Here is something to ponder:
https://www.yalescientific.org/2020/11/by-the-numbers-women-in-stem-what-do-the-statistics-reveal-about-ongoing-gender-disparities/
"The hard majors for males is not engineering and physics."
I'm not sure what you mean. The fact is, engineering and physics are not as hard for males as they are for females.
Perhaps these weak paradigms become popular because they were a way to smuggle moral convictions into empirical claims. As the world became more secular, there was suddenly a deluge of "scientific" claims that filled that gap for moral guidance that religion used to offer. Marxism being the most obvious example. Before people were "all equal before God" and so we were taught treat people equally, but now we are presented with claims that inequality is caused entirely by social factors (thus, implicitly proving innate equality). The effect is the same - moral condemnation of inequality.
When I hear the word ideology, I think political ideas. I think these paradigms are more like deep moral beliefs/desires that people can't logically justify without religion, so they cheat and use social science to justify them. This seemed to accelerate rapidly after WW2 when there was a "moral emergency" to make sure that something like the Holocaust wouldn't happen again.
For me, the more a scientific paradigm includes some sort of moral judgement about society, the more likely it is to be false.
It is possible to have some study linked related to behavioru and genes?I know about the IQ ones
Sure, here's a list of genes which are documented to influence people's behaviors. https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/race#behavioral-differences
SES justifies many a White Lotus choice and indeed all the shades of the rainbow, 🌈 < including that rainbow (see CPAC) those choices lead to…
And indeed SES amorality led to every revolution and revolt that comes to mind from at least Maccabees forward.
Without SES Lotuses we’d not have MAGA and we wouldn’t had Lenin and the various follow on acts.
So yes SES is very real, and very BAD.
SES strivers are the BADDIES.