I'm generally pretty sympathetic to Robert's perspective and I agree that conservatives dropped the ball when it comes to investing in cultural institutions, but the fact remains that any system for certifying competence or identifying aptitude is going to be imperfect and that all talents are in fact mutually correlated. There's some variation, but you will almost never find someone with a verbal IQ of 130 and spatial IQ of 70, or vice versa.
Testing someone on their math ability in order to determine entry to a course where math is used extensively is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, if you're not going to do the auto-didact thing and learn online. Or just go to a trade school.
But a 'spatial IQ' of '100' may prevent one from making use of the 'verbal IQ' of '130' and that's the issue at hand.
'Merit' is *in the system* not in the person. You might argue that 'merit' is *in the result* but that's putting the cart before the horse.
Every phantasm of liberal thinking needs to be put on the rack and interrogated to destruction or proof-of-worth.
Including 'merit'.
A system for identifying, cultivating and employing talent *of all kinds* (and not just those needed for the perpetuation of liberal technocracy) should be the choice we promote.
Not trying to keep 'IQ' or 'merit' alive just to have *all* talent exploited in the interests of liberal technocracy.
My comment about g-factor correlations isn't really intended to suggest that you can't or shouldn't specialise training & education to focus on particular gifts and interests, but more to suggest that "a talent system would have value for everyone not just the technocracy" isn't really realisable. As you go down the IQ scale the likelihood of talent decreases across all domains (and the correlation among domains actually gets stronger- it's the inverse of spearman's law of diminishing returns.) It's tragic, but there's at least a small percentage of the population that you really can't train to do anything outside of simple menial labour. I don't want the welfare state dismantled and we don't have to be gratuitously cruel, but we need to have realistic expectations here.
My other point is that Robert's example of math requirements being used to gauge suitability for instruction in data analysis and statistics seems pretty reasonable to me- it's hard to come up with a more reliable proxy for aptitude for the subject other than knowledge of data science itself, and that requirement would defeat the purpose.
I am a math professor who has taught several data science courses. IMHO, having students on different tracks depending on ability and interest is just fine so long as reasoning skills are duly emphasized in each of the courses in a given track. In the game of life, I don't necessarily need you to tell me what the antiderivative of a given function is, but I do need you, as the rest of society does, to be able to smell a rat when you're being told that a given data set is telling you X but the accompanying explanation, if one is given, can't withstand scrutiny. You don't have to be a math whiz to do the latter, just someone who can both use the knowledge imparted to them and demonstrate the courage to call BS whenever you're being lied to.
'Merit' is just more 'color-blind' liberalism.
What matters is identifying, cultivating and deploying talent(s).
That's what the 'university system' should be about, instead of 'credentialing the credentialable'.
A 'talent' system would have value for *everyone* not just the technocracy.
I'm generally pretty sympathetic to Robert's perspective and I agree that conservatives dropped the ball when it comes to investing in cultural institutions, but the fact remains that any system for certifying competence or identifying aptitude is going to be imperfect and that all talents are in fact mutually correlated. There's some variation, but you will almost never find someone with a verbal IQ of 130 and spatial IQ of 70, or vice versa.
Testing someone on their math ability in order to determine entry to a course where math is used extensively is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, if you're not going to do the auto-didact thing and learn online. Or just go to a trade school.
But a 'spatial IQ' of '100' may prevent one from making use of the 'verbal IQ' of '130' and that's the issue at hand.
'Merit' is *in the system* not in the person. You might argue that 'merit' is *in the result* but that's putting the cart before the horse.
Every phantasm of liberal thinking needs to be put on the rack and interrogated to destruction or proof-of-worth.
Including 'merit'.
A system for identifying, cultivating and employing talent *of all kinds* (and not just those needed for the perpetuation of liberal technocracy) should be the choice we promote.
Not trying to keep 'IQ' or 'merit' alive just to have *all* talent exploited in the interests of liberal technocracy.
My comment about g-factor correlations isn't really intended to suggest that you can't or shouldn't specialise training & education to focus on particular gifts and interests, but more to suggest that "a talent system would have value for everyone not just the technocracy" isn't really realisable. As you go down the IQ scale the likelihood of talent decreases across all domains (and the correlation among domains actually gets stronger- it's the inverse of spearman's law of diminishing returns.) It's tragic, but there's at least a small percentage of the population that you really can't train to do anything outside of simple menial labour. I don't want the welfare state dismantled and we don't have to be gratuitously cruel, but we need to have realistic expectations here.
My other point is that Robert's example of math requirements being used to gauge suitability for instruction in data analysis and statistics seems pretty reasonable to me- it's hard to come up with a more reliable proxy for aptitude for the subject other than knowledge of data science itself, and that requirement would defeat the purpose.
Then they can do simple menial labor. That's their talent.
I am a math professor who has taught several data science courses. IMHO, having students on different tracks depending on ability and interest is just fine so long as reasoning skills are duly emphasized in each of the courses in a given track. In the game of life, I don't necessarily need you to tell me what the antiderivative of a given function is, but I do need you, as the rest of society does, to be able to smell a rat when you're being told that a given data set is telling you X but the accompanying explanation, if one is given, can't withstand scrutiny. You don't have to be a math whiz to do the latter, just someone who can both use the knowledge imparted to them and demonstrate the courage to call BS whenever you're being lied to.
Evidently, based on data, you didn't really play all of the available cards at your disposal in order to gain entry at some prestigious university
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