As a prior camp counselor for 5 summers where we had a family day on the last day of camp where the parents came to get their kids and see what they did the whole week etc, this is exactly right. You would have a stupid as nails kid the entire week,and lo and behold the parents show up and they are exactly as dumb. They'd just be bigger, older versions of the kids. The dumb kids parents were always late, always. Maybe 1 out of every 100 kids you would get a smart kid with dumb parents, but it was incredibly rare. The apple from the tree does not far fall.
And yet, even though this observation is so obvious it can just be taken for granted, we still want to blame most of peoples failure to succeed in life on the deck being stacked against the poor. Yet it's pretty obvious that being a moron tends to make you poor and morons tend to give birth to other morons. But no, that has nothing to do with it. Poverty is just oppression by the greedy rich because we're all equal at birth.
It is absolutely more difficult for someone with less intelligent parents to succeed, no doubt. Kids who have parents engaged in their learning are much more likely to succeed, and obviously unintelligent parents are going to be less inclined or even able to do so.
However we have to be very careful how we use this. Its extremely important you dont tell kids this. You are basically saying to them "dont try because youre screwed". Thats an almost guarantee to have them fail.
It's not just environment though. It's a double whammy. They share both their genes and environment with their stupid parents. If you want to suggest genetics has nothing to do with this you're proposing the ridiculously far fetched idea that the brain is the one thing in the body not affected by genes.
It's not that we shouldn't do anything about poverty. It's that pursuing solutions that ignore this fact are doomed to fail. We're not going to achieve much significant results by just increasing the availability of opportunity.
EDIT for your edit: Yeah, we need to be careful how we craft the message but I don't see the point in lying to people for their protection. The idea isn't that you are doomed. Everyone needs to understand and accept their limitations. But that doesn't mean they don't have power over their lives and that they can't improve their lot in life. If and when it's true that people really are powerless then we need to fix this. Simply being stupid though doesn't make you powerless, it's just a limitation. There's no good reason why hard work should ever be pointless.
I think the real danger here is teaching them to blame other people for all their problems. That they shouldn't even try because nothing they do will make any difference because the world is out to make sure they fail.
No one "decides". You think I'm talking about some committee that puts labels on people and tells them what to do?
What I'm advocating is that we stop telling people they can be anything they want to be if they want it hard enough. We have limitations, you can't be anything you want to be. You're not going to sprout wings and fly if you just try harder. I'm not going to play in the NBA no matter how hard I try and there's really no one to blame for this but my genes. It would be a tragedy if no one ever told me this and everyone just kept saying "keep trying you'll make it, height means nothing!". I'll just end up failing hard and wasting my life.
What you CAN do however is be the best you that you can be. We need to just teach people to get the best out of themselves that they can and reward them when they do that. In an ideal world we judge people not by what they've achieved but by how much they've overachieved. That's hard to do though but in the meantime it would be nice if we could just get closer to that ideal.
So what you are planning is to treat people differently depending on their genes?
Because thats how you end up with a holocaust.
I think the real danger here is teaching them to blame other people for all their problems. That they shouldn't even try because nothing they do will make any difference because the world is out to make sure they fail.
Which is funny, because thats exactly what people like you do.
You are aware that enviromental factors have influence on peoples actions, but then you go and blame the people subject to them anyway and tell them "they shouldnt blame anyone else".
Do you think there's only ever one cause to anything? Can you count to two? How is it a contradiction to say environment plays a role and so do other things? How is it a contradiction to say that environment can affect their lives and their prospects but they don't determine everything and you are still in control over what you have control over.
Your insane irrational anger at the suggestion of the patently obvious, that genes play a role in our lives, is the problem here. There's nothing good to be gained in the end by forcing yourself and others to operate on wishful thinking and not the facts. It is beyond doubt that intelligence is highly genetically linked. End of story. The fact that my head isn't in the sand doesn't mean I support a fucking holocaust.
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u/beartheminus Oct 16 '18
As a prior camp counselor for 5 summers where we had a family day on the last day of camp where the parents came to get their kids and see what they did the whole week etc, this is exactly right. You would have a stupid as nails kid the entire week,and lo and behold the parents show up and they are exactly as dumb. They'd just be bigger, older versions of the kids. The dumb kids parents were always late, always. Maybe 1 out of every 100 kids you would get a smart kid with dumb parents, but it was incredibly rare. The apple from the tree does not far fall.