.
A commenter on the PISA post below writes:
Well, the question I ask myself is what percent of the American population doesn`t really deep down believe that HBD is probably a substantial factor in all these sorts of things…
Ten percent? Five percent? One percent? Zero percent?
The floor is open for people`s guesses…
Back before I started participating 18 years ago in Internet discussions with anonymous participants, I would have agreed with these low estimates. All these years later, however … I dunno. Maybe there is a Silent But Sensible Majority out there somewhere. Maybe.
To pick a random example of the quality of contemporary thought, here is an online discussion on Hacker News / Ycombinator about Tino`s recent blog post at Super-Economy showing the PISA results when you adjust for demographics. Reading through it, it`s hard to take away the impression that there are a lot of people out there who are well informed and hold reasonable views. Instead, you just see a lot of people getting intellectually snarled up in their own underwear.
My approach has always been based around my sense that I`m not smart enough to juggle in my head complex wrong ideas. I need to find the simplest answers that work (but, as Einstein said, no simpler).
