I have some thoughts, yeah.

So there is extremely solid evidence of cognitive differences.

This is uncomfortable to liberals, but who cares. That’s nothing to do with is it true or not.

There was a guy called Charles Spearman about 100 years ago who gave groups tests on various cognitive abilities:

• General knowledge. What’s the capital of Bolivia?

• Visualising: which of these shapes can be made from these shapes?

• Give people 100 arithmetic questions like 13×37 to answer in three minutes. The questions are easy, but how many can you get in three minutes? It’s a test of speed.

• Vocabulary: do you know what ‘bellicose’ means?

It turns out there is a correlation between a person’s scores on these categories. Someone who scores high will score high across the board. Someone who scores low will score low across the board. Of course the correlation is not 100%, people have comparative strengths/weaknesses.

There’s no negative correlation, which would be a trade-off, e.g. being sharp verbally reduces your visual intelligence. Cross-culturally, girls and boys score the same.

This finding is extremely well replicated and solid. It is true cross-culturally: find a classroom of kids in Kerry, Caracas, Korea, and there’ll be bright/sharp kids in the class, and not-so-bright ones. That’s a robust finding regardless of how it fits anyone’s political views.

So yeah, we can test cognitive ability pretty well, there is a real phenomenon there.

I think traditionally this type of non-research position paper is called a “white paper”, and that seems incredibly apt.

I think this is another left-puncher who has completely and utterly failed to engage with the argument against him. You can’t just make up a guy to get mad at. Go read The Mismeasure of Man or whatever and then try to say that shit about g again.

Just completely ignores how our political systems shape academia and science. Even just ignoring the highly pertinent facts that funding is the most influential aspect of research and that western academia is rife with shoddy work and outright fraud, the framework through which you approach any science is going to color every aspect of your research and your findings. For example, from the literature, you could 100% make the statement that “ABA has been shown to be the most effective treatment for autism in an overwhelming amount of studies.” This is true because this research is coming from a liberal capitalist framework that views neurodivergence as a disease to be eliminated because it conflicts with our society and our systems. ABA definitely accomplishes that goal the best of all the different “treatments.” Obviously, the counterargument would be that ABA does a horrible job of actually improving the lives of people with autism, which is ostensibly a self-proclaimed goal of liberalism (and also a good opportunity to bring in the “the purpose of a system is what it does” statement to point out this contradiction).

You can see this when the author talks about “the SAT is actually a great predictor of future success.” Well, yes, because the point of it is to identify people who will succeed in the current system; a system of greed, corruption, anti-intellectualism, abuse, etc. Obviously, we argue against this because we want to change what it’s measuring and what is being rewarded. It also doesn’t examine the degree to which these scores function as the ends unto themselves, i.e. you are successful because you have a good SAT score, not because of the underlying intelligence or ability it is supposed to measure. Also does not take into account the degree to which these scores are a product of your wealth, race, parents’ educational attainment, etc. If we wanted to measure actual educational attainment and ability, not simply those who succeed in liberal capitalist society, we would find that the SAT and similar assessments do a very poor job of that.

Sorry for the rant lol, and there’s a million other ways to take this apart (I could talk about other “unmeritocratic” processes like grant funding as well), but I hope this makes sense.

This person writes like a reactionary 16 year old that gets dunked on so hard on Twitter that they go have straw men shower arguments in their head and then save them for eternity on their little blog.