Standardized tests don’t care about your family wealth, if you behave poorly, or whether you do your homework. They are the ultimate tool of meritocracy.
“At some point, Henderson realized that he needed more structure – which the never-ending cycles of foster care families and adoptive parents simply could not provide.”
Some time back I read an article on the troubling situation of foster “care”. We seem to think here in the USA that such care has existed forever. Such is not true. We used to have orphanages as late as the 1950’s when the sociologists began to promote so glowingly the “alternative” of the foster care. Basic thesis in the article as I remember was exactly as described above. Foster care was often a money generating racket with *less* stability and family “bonding” than an orphanage used to provide.
Emil, this is an excellent synopsis of Rob Henderson's book. Mr. Henderson may not have realized it then, but his intellect and strong character served him well during his abysmal childhood. Those with a lesser constitution would have failed to fare well under those circumstances.
"Standardized tests are the ultimate tool of meritocracy."
Indeed, that is true, and I am an adamant supporter of standardized testing and meritocracy.
"there was such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism, despite on-going communist terrors in multiple countries"??
That our governments would commit despite on-going capitalist terrors is axiomatic. Capitalism has never hidden its brutal side and no-one is surprised. But a professedly communist government that did the same would lose legitimacy immediately.
I've only fully investigated one communist country (China's) record on-going communist terrors and found zero evidence that they occurred and abundant evidence that the atrocity stories are just that.
I have half-investigated on-going Russian and Cambodian communist terror stories and have yet to find evidence of any worse behavior than the United States government has, from time to time, exhibited.
I'm guessing that you don't like China while simultaneously knowing nothing about the country and unable to disprove my claims for it. Why not use data and publicly accessible information and refute my claims with contrary evidence? Or are you a Western troll, struggling to maintain your cognitive dissonance by lashing out at anyone who suggests that things might be different than TV and mass media have portrayed them? Generally, such people use ad hominem attacks for one of four reasons:
1. You believe that an argument is a simple competition in which winning or dominating is the goal.
2. You believe that the absolutely correct position is known to you but do not wish to reveal it.
3. You believe that argument is entirely about social positioning: that the only meaningful outcome concerns which person looks best in the eyes of onlookers.
4. You mistakenly assess your cognitive ability as greater than it is and, by inference, greater than mine (the Dunning–Kruger effect).
You’re or an idiotic moron or an evil people. I came from Cuba, a communist country. In the best of cases you’re another son of the bitch with luxuries belief. And I don’t apologise for calling you a son of a bitch. If you defend the horror of the communist you are a monster. This by the way, doesn’t imply to deny that USA particularly now is a bloody shit, a danger to mankind. But go with this rubbish of your defense of communism to other people. I know by my own life, not just books. The horror. That’s communism.
I only had one test in Junior school aged 10 for a countywide "mastermind" school league where I came top & was chosen as the candidate. Also having undiagnosed aspergers & adhd I subsequently froze on stage in the competition. Lol.
I didn't go to school to sit exams later on.
As for reading to your child, I read to my son at bedtime every night for years. All the books no one read to me as a child. Creating beautiful memories for both of us. I still tell him Iove him every day at nearly 20 years of age.
The only people I know of who thoroughly investigated Pol Pot were Chomsky and Hermann, and they found nothing to substantiate the atrocity stories. The stories were a smokescreen for the real atrocity, our dropping more bombs on Cambodia, a non-combatant, than we had dropped on Germany in WWII
I felt this book was very insightful too. As someone who spent her career working with children, this is a missing piece of the puzzle we never talked about.
"Standardized tests don’t care about your family wealth, if you behave poorly, or whether you do your homework; they just care about how well you can perform"
Are you intentionally not engaging with the critiques of standardized tests, or do you just not understand them? Compare: "At the Olympics, it doesn't matter how much you practice, whether you have a good coach, your genetic disposition, or whether you eat healthily; all that matters is how you perform". Do you see the problem here? In econometrics we would tell you to check for endogeneity.
Yes, it's true that the end result is all that matters and different means can lead to the same end, and so the precise combinations and techniques and endowments doesn't matter if you win, but we know that all of these things are *strongly* predictive of performance, and access to them is highly dependent on the circumstances of one's birth and early life opportunities. To say they are the "ultimate tool of meritocracy" is to to disregard essentially the entire field of sociology. Why not just go all the way and say that money is the ultimate tool of meritocracy? It's perfectly quantifiable, anyone can earn it, and the more you have merit the more of it you can earn!
Standardized tests: As someone born in the UK, and being old, I took the ultimate in standardized test, the 11+. Failing, selected for secondary school, my parents' disappointment was palpable. But, I was just slow in my exponential development. It wasn't long before I surpassed all the kids selected for grammar school.
From my perspective, the standardized test put me in the best environment for me at the time. I started to understand big fish, small pond, and took my talents to bigger and bigger ponds to become a happy, slightly bigger fish in a huge pond, the US.
My point, that testing even when it "fails" to identify gifted children can help them anyway.
Being against abortion is a luxury belief. Limiting access to abortion imposes high costs on poor women both in terms of having to raise unplanned children and in terms of having their freedom of movement restricted.
Rich women can merely fly somewhere where abortion is available.
You mean like when the state pays for the medical care? Or when the state pays for their kids education? Or when the state pays for their school lunch? Or when the state subsidizes their apartment?
There is certainly a high cost to the state. I can’t quite reconcile that with people living on a dollar a day having eight kids.
The real luxury belief is rich liberal women who will never need an abortion supporting it “just in case”. Even though all of them are on birth control what “might” happen is the dude they fucked at the club got them pregnant at 30 even though both have six figure salaries? What might happen!?!?!?
Yes, high costs. Consider a young woman who is saving to go to community college to get a better job, who is raped on the way home from work and becomes pregnant. Without access to abortion, she can't get that better job.
The fear of rape resulting in pregnancy, meanwhile, means that women in this situation avoid going out as much as possible. They are effectively trapped in their own homes. That is a very high cost.
In some parts of society, every woman has either been raped herself, or knows one or more other women who have been raped.
This is not something you can hand-wave away.
You have deficits in intelligence, education, and empathy. Please get off the internet.
it depends, rich peple tend to have kids at older ages compare to low income populations,specially in hispanic and black groups, and they tend to use better o
contraception like IUD for women which is far better than a condom and pills, so they dont need to use aborrion as their main contraceptive method like a lot of uneducated poor women do
“At some point, Henderson realized that he needed more structure – which the never-ending cycles of foster care families and adoptive parents simply could not provide.”
Some time back I read an article on the troubling situation of foster “care”. We seem to think here in the USA that such care has existed forever. Such is not true. We used to have orphanages as late as the 1950’s when the sociologists began to promote so glowingly the “alternative” of the foster care. Basic thesis in the article as I remember was exactly as described above. Foster care was often a money generating racket with *less* stability and family “bonding” than an orphanage used to provide.
Emil, this is an excellent synopsis of Rob Henderson's book. Mr. Henderson may not have realized it then, but his intellect and strong character served him well during his abysmal childhood. Those with a lesser constitution would have failed to fare well under those circumstances.
"Standardized tests are the ultimate tool of meritocracy."
Indeed, that is true, and I am an adamant supporter of standardized testing and meritocracy.
For you IQ race realists at Aporia, note he did poorly on childhood IQ tests.
"there was such a thing as left-wing authoritarianism, despite on-going communist terrors in multiple countries"??
That our governments would commit despite on-going capitalist terrors is axiomatic. Capitalism has never hidden its brutal side and no-one is surprised. But a professedly communist government that did the same would lose legitimacy immediately.
I've only fully investigated one communist country (China's) record on-going communist terrors and found zero evidence that they occurred and abundant evidence that the atrocity stories are just that.
I have half-investigated on-going Russian and Cambodian communist terror stories and have yet to find evidence of any worse behavior than the United States government has, from time to time, exhibited.
How much is the PRC paying you to write this BS?
I'm guessing that you don't like China while simultaneously knowing nothing about the country and unable to disprove my claims for it. Why not use data and publicly accessible information and refute my claims with contrary evidence? Or are you a Western troll, struggling to maintain your cognitive dissonance by lashing out at anyone who suggests that things might be different than TV and mass media have portrayed them? Generally, such people use ad hominem attacks for one of four reasons:
1. You believe that an argument is a simple competition in which winning or dominating is the goal.
2. You believe that the absolutely correct position is known to you but do not wish to reveal it.
3. You believe that argument is entirely about social positioning: that the only meaningful outcome concerns which person looks best in the eyes of onlookers.
4. You mistakenly assess your cognitive ability as greater than it is and, by inference, greater than mine (the Dunning–Kruger effect).
Which fits you best?
You’re or an idiotic moron or an evil people. I came from Cuba, a communist country. In the best of cases you’re another son of the bitch with luxuries belief. And I don’t apologise for calling you a son of a bitch. If you defend the horror of the communist you are a monster. This by the way, doesn’t imply to deny that USA particularly now is a bloody shit, a danger to mankind. But go with this rubbish of your defense of communism to other people. I know by my own life, not just books. The horror. That’s communism.
OK. Let's focus on Cuban Communist atrocities.
Give me your best example and I'll run it by the Cuban Culture Ministry. Let's see what they have to say.
> Why not use data and publicly accessible information and refute my claims with contrary evidence?
All the public data refutes your claims. The fact that you still make them suggests you aren't interested in evidence.
Why not select the best-sourced, best-footnoted public data and share it with us?
So are you really going to deny all the accounts of the horrors of Maoism and Stalinism?
Are you really going to affirm all the accounts of the horrors without having a single authoritative source for your beliefs?
Do you seriously expect us to believe what our government/media say about their enemies?
I tend to agree about present China and Russia, but Pol Pot of Cambodia was an evil son of a bitch. That legacy can never be erased.
I only had one test in Junior school aged 10 for a countywide "mastermind" school league where I came top & was chosen as the candidate. Also having undiagnosed aspergers & adhd I subsequently froze on stage in the competition. Lol.
I didn't go to school to sit exams later on.
As for reading to your child, I read to my son at bedtime every night for years. All the books no one read to me as a child. Creating beautiful memories for both of us. I still tell him Iove him every day at nearly 20 years of age.
The only people I know of who thoroughly investigated Pol Pot were Chomsky and Hermann, and they found nothing to substantiate the atrocity stories. The stories were a smokescreen for the real atrocity, our dropping more bombs on Cambodia, a non-combatant, than we had dropped on Germany in WWII
I felt this book was very insightful too. As someone who spent her career working with children, this is a missing piece of the puzzle we never talked about.
"Standardized tests don’t care about your family wealth, if you behave poorly, or whether you do your homework; they just care about how well you can perform"
Are you intentionally not engaging with the critiques of standardized tests, or do you just not understand them? Compare: "At the Olympics, it doesn't matter how much you practice, whether you have a good coach, your genetic disposition, or whether you eat healthily; all that matters is how you perform". Do you see the problem here? In econometrics we would tell you to check for endogeneity.
Yes, it's true that the end result is all that matters and different means can lead to the same end, and so the precise combinations and techniques and endowments doesn't matter if you win, but we know that all of these things are *strongly* predictive of performance, and access to them is highly dependent on the circumstances of one's birth and early life opportunities. To say they are the "ultimate tool of meritocracy" is to to disregard essentially the entire field of sociology. Why not just go all the way and say that money is the ultimate tool of meritocracy? It's perfectly quantifiable, anyone can earn it, and the more you have merit the more of it you can earn!
All people are intelligent. This top fraction is legacy of thousand year( atleast) structure of the society.
Standardized tests: As someone born in the UK, and being old, I took the ultimate in standardized test, the 11+. Failing, selected for secondary school, my parents' disappointment was palpable. But, I was just slow in my exponential development. It wasn't long before I surpassed all the kids selected for grammar school.
From my perspective, the standardized test put me in the best environment for me at the time. I started to understand big fish, small pond, and took my talents to bigger and bigger ponds to become a happy, slightly bigger fish in a huge pond, the US.
My point, that testing even when it "fails" to identify gifted children can help them anyway.
Is abortion a luxury belief?
Being against abortion is a luxury belief. Limiting access to abortion imposes high costs on poor women both in terms of having to raise unplanned children and in terms of having their freedom of movement restricted.
Rich women can merely fly somewhere where abortion is available.
“High costs on poor women”?
You mean like when the state pays for the medical care? Or when the state pays for their kids education? Or when the state pays for their school lunch? Or when the state subsidizes their apartment?
There is certainly a high cost to the state. I can’t quite reconcile that with people living on a dollar a day having eight kids.
The real luxury belief is rich liberal women who will never need an abortion supporting it “just in case”. Even though all of them are on birth control what “might” happen is the dude they fucked at the club got them pregnant at 30 even though both have six figure salaries? What might happen!?!?!?
Better have murder as an option.
Yes, high costs. Consider a young woman who is saving to go to community college to get a better job, who is raped on the way home from work and becomes pregnant. Without access to abortion, she can't get that better job.
The fear of rape resulting in pregnancy, meanwhile, means that women in this situation avoid going out as much as possible. They are effectively trapped in their own homes. That is a very high cost.
In some parts of society, every woman has either been raped herself, or knows one or more other women who have been raped.
This is not something you can hand-wave away.
You have deficits in intelligence, education, and empathy. Please get off the internet.
it depends, rich peple tend to have kids at older ages compare to low income populations,specially in hispanic and black groups, and they tend to use better o
contraception like IUD for women which is far better than a condom and pills, so they dont need to use aborrion as their main contraceptive method like a lot of uneducated poor women do