Must consume more utility, rawr.

Was your comment meant for me or someone else? I don't follow.

Given that this is just a discussion between random strangers on an internet forum, I personally find both statistics and clear anecdotes, which GP provided, valuable in creating the richest perspective.

This isn't Proceedings of Hacker News or parliament: we're writing ephemeral internet words and trying to enrich each other.

Cited data on broad human population shows correlation at best, not causation.

I posited a cause based on the lived experiences people shared with me.

You're free to disagree with my conclusion, or to suggest an alternative cause. None of the cited data has actually done either of those things.

Ethnicity is way too coarse-grained to answer questions about culture and family wealth/connections. That’s lumping together a kid from an old-money family in New Haven with a kid from a trailer park in Virginia.

Learned helplessness is poverty+some other things, though. Otherwise no one in poverty would ever leave it. Just talking about causal direction elides reality.

Nationally, seems to be mostly demographic change plus covid. For white 13 year olds, NAEP reading and math scores dipped a point from 2012-2020. Then they dipped 5-6 points from 2020-2023: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/

Interesting! Yeah, this is a significant decline across the board. I'm curious what it is in the US in particular that's driving such sharp declines. Because many places in the world did things like shut down schools during COVID, have internet/social media, ongoing obesity epidemics, major immigration from low education sources, demographic/fertility issues, and so on. Yet somehow looking at the latest PISA (2022) [1], the US now sits between Malta and Slovakia in math. And if these scores are any indicator, we're probably looking at a further decline in the next PISA results, which should be released this year.

[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...

I find this sort of claim really common (the commenter you responded to).

Skin color is unfortunately correlated to socioeconomic outcomes in the United States. Once poverty is controlled for, at least in my analysis, most of this difference is ameliorated (though mild correlation persists).

Most people in this vein, at least in my experience, will describe after a long conversation that they think there can only be two sources of correlation - genetic ("nature", which I disagree is a primary cause of socioeconomic outcomes) and a weird subset of nurture that fails to take into account intergenerational impact (history), instead focusing solely on state (assertion of Markovian process to life).

In my view, nuture breaks out into those components -- history defines the resources you have access to in your broader community, and state defines your immediate challenges. It's hard to get resources to change your life if you have a bad state, but it is possible. Americans love an underdog story and the bad-state good-history fits it well. Bad-history leads to a lot of additional issues -- systemic type issues. Americans have seen this in both hostile urban planning to a full community and to hostile resource reallocation to rural areas (towns shutting down with no way to recover) in favor of suburbia. From my studies, I think Strongtown lands the description of the issues (Youtube channel).

I'm not epistemically arrogant enough to assume I am 100% right here -- much of this is from 20 years of research experience but there is always more to understand at a population level and how that relates to the individual level.

I am epistemically arrogant enough to require people to hold to their ideals -- if someone wants to ensure equality of opportunity, that has to both be for the state (Little Jimmy and Jane come from a poor family) as well as history (and none of Little Jane's community has been to college and nor do they understand the college application or financial assistance process; further, most are unbanked and most of the male population can't get gainful employment due prison sentences connected to overpolicing and/or desperation behaviors [a catch-22 for communities wanting to build a brighter future while also exercising punitive justice]).

I’m not sure if the gender of teachers is so much a factor as class identity.

Young French author Édouard Louis has written about his experience growing up in an extremely anti-intellectual working class milieu in France. It’s a country where school teachers are traditionally men, and discipline is stricter than in America or the Northern European countries. But that seems to go together with a class separation where the working class boys don’t see the male teachers as role models but more as representatives of the distant authority.

I'd like to see what a "full-spectrum crackdown" on anti-intellectualism in the US would look like, given that most of its population struggles to discern fact from fiction in the news cycle, healthcare and legal proceedings. The introduction of generative AI has only made that worse, pushing more distrust of any information that didn't come from a source counted among "one of us." Our problem stems from an intentionally poorly educated populace that still heavily relies on idolatry, allowing whatever demagogue with the means to rise and essentially manipulate the masses.

I'm pretty sure, at this point, this was intentional, individuals and orgs with the resources to create finely tuned systemic problems having been at it since the country's inception.

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> Firstly, there's only one sentient primate race: Homo Sapiens.

Nope, species, not race - or arguable sub-species.

As your link says race is a social construct, so it is whatever society says it means. It means different things in different societies. This is something I experience personally so I am very aware of it: https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/racism-culture-different

> However, when genetic variation is compared both between and within those groups, we see more variation within those once isolated groups than we do between those groups

Which is why genetic similarity does not work well as a way defining race, and why the concept of race has no biological basis. This is covered by the wikipedia link in my previous comment too.

> What's more, even within such groups genetic variation is only around 0.5-1.5%.

Yes, but that is just normal for a species. We share a lot of DNA (98%?) with chimpanzees and something like 70% with fish! its not really meaningful. However, its not the main argument, because the variation within vs (lack of) between groups is really the killer argument.

This is not a place to spread your religious beliefs, let alone try to evangelize them or your various mystical rationalizations akin to proving god through muddling and intentionally misleading sophistry. You are doing nothing more than trying to prove how many angels can dance on the head of a pin; post modern version.

You people swapped one religion's mysticism for another.