Why Academics Leftists and Elitists Need to Treat Ordinary Americans With Respect

We’ve gone on two of the student led tours of Harvard. Had good kids lead both. Someone asked the last guy about all the recent protests and how it impacted the feel of the school. He said he hadn’t had time to pay attention to it, but he had a *real* major. I was amused.
I believe him…my experience at business school was the same (not Harvard, but a school with a similarly ridiculous political culture).
 
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An actual smart person doesn't spend a lot of time on what spoiled rich kids do. He/she has better thangs to do. Like mastering their subject matter.
 
Why should anyone feel disrespected because an analysis of ancient DNA of Europeans and contemporary DNA of Europeans shows natural selection favoring greater intelligence.

It is a great technical feat for Reich and his team to have shown this. It confirms that intelligent people are more likely to be successful in propagating their genes. Not a huge surprise, but a technically very impressive achievement.

Btw I highly recommend Reich's book:

 
Why should anyone feel disrespected because an analysis of ancient DNA of Europeans and contemporary DNA of Europeans shows natural selection favoring greater intelligence.

It is a great technical feat for Reich and his team to have shown this. It confirms that intelligent people are more likely to be successful in propagating their genes. Not a huge surprise, but a technically very impressive achievement.

Btw I highly recommend Reich's book:


I would argue that intelligent people were more likely to propagate their genes. The welfare state has reversed that.
 
I would argue that intelligent people were more likely to propagate their genes. The welfare state has reversed that.
There is a paragraph in Reich's paper about very recent trends. In general, natural selection works on a timescale of thousands of years, which makes it challenging to say much about recent trends. Reich cites this paper, which looks at recent trends in one country (Iceland).

 
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Reporter: “The president posted on True Social that the voting underway in California is ‘rigged.’ What evidence does he have of that?”
Leavitt: “There’s fraud in California’s elections. It’s just a fact.”
Reporter: “What’s the evidence of that, though?”
Leavitt: “It is just a fact…If you want to deny that, I’m happy to provide you all of the evidence.”
 
https://marginalrevolution.com/marg...-sound-alarm-on-declining-student-skills.html

The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills—a warning that has been sounded before, but this time it’s coming from within the building.

At our campus, the picture is truly troubling. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate they do not meet middle school standards grew nearly thirtyfold, despite almost all of these students having taken beyond the minimum UCOP required math curriculum, and many with high grades. In the 2025 incoming class, this group constitutes roughly one-eighth of our entire entering cohort. A similarly large share of students must take additional writing courses to reach the level expected of high school graduates, though this is a figure that has not varied much over the same time span.
The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8.

Alarmingly, the instructors running the 2023-2024 Math 2 courses observed a marked change in the skill gaps compared to prior years. While Math 2 was designed in 2016 to remediate missing high school math knowledge, now most students had knowledge gaps that went back much further, to middle and even elementary school. To address the large number of underprepared students, the Mathematics Department redesigned Math 2 for Fall 2024 to focus entirely on elementary and middle school Common Core math subjects (grades 1-8), and introduced a new course, Math 3B, so as to cover missing high-school common core math subjects (Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II or Math I, II, III; grades 9-11).
The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”

——————

Not great.

According to Grok, UCSD’s undergraduate acceptance rate is around 25%. Pretty selective. And they’re still having this issue.
 

A whole lot of people sharing this are misinterpreting the data, I think. What’s buried in the replies of posts sharing this is that this Math 2 assessment that is supposed to be showing the collapse of aptitude was actually a test the students were told ahead of time would not count toward their grade. This is probably more of a change in attitude amongst the newer UCSD students. I personally think that change itself is a big problem in itself, but I’m afraid we’re going to instead chase our own tails on why students can’t math anymore instead of the bigger question of how we inspire the apathetic COVID lockdown generation.
 
https://marginalrevolution.com/marg...-sound-alarm-on-declining-student-skills.html

The UC San Diego Senate Report on Admissions documents a sharp decline in students’ math and reading skills—a warning that has been sounded before, but this time it’s coming from within the building.


The math department created a remedial course, only to be so stunned by how little the students knew that the class had to be redesigned to cover material normally taught in grades 1 through 8.


The report attributes the decline to several factors: the pandemic, the elimination of standardized testing—which has forced UCSD to rely on increasingly inflated and therefore useless high school grades—and political pressure from state lawmakers to admit more “low-income students and students from underrepresented minority groups.”


——————

Not great.

According to Grok, UCSD’s undergraduate acceptance rate is around 25%. Pretty selective. And they’re still having this issue.
They’re telling you in the last quote that they became much less selective. Somewhat promising is the fact that we’ve arrived at a point where any of the UC schools is willing to mention racial preferences in admissions as a problem.
 

A whole lot of people sharing this are misinterpreting the data, I think. What’s buried in the replies of posts sharing this is that this Math 2 assessment that is supposed to be showing the collapse of aptitude was actually a test the students were told ahead of time would not count toward their grade. This is probably more of a change in attitude amongst the newer UCSD students. I personally think that change itself is a big problem in itself, but I’m afraid we’re going to instead chase our own tails on why students can’t math anymore instead of the bigger question of how we inspire the apathetic COVID lockdown generation.
Maybe my kids are just a hair too young for it, but I haven’t seen that apathy. The kids who give off loser vibes seem to be in a loser place, the kids who give off responsible vibes seem to be doing okay. Maybe I’m just not in the right places to see it.
 
Maybe my kids are just a hair too young for it, but I haven’t seen that apathy. The kids who give off loser vibes seem to be in a loser place, the kids who give off responsible vibes seem to be doing okay. Maybe I’m just not in the right places to see it.
The population in question here is still a reasonably small percentage of kids, and I’d imagine from my interactions with you that you’re an attentive and involved father that has put your children in a solid position to succeed in life. I don’t think this is some universal rule of the next generation, but I think the several years of e-learning put a lot more kids behind the 8 ball socially. I think they’ll largely figure it out but it might explain the trends.
 
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There were parents that still had their kids on schedule even though school was out and there were kids that didn’t read, or write or anything for 20 months

We got back to school and the teachers were only focusing on bringing the lagging kids up, they couldn’t teach the top half of class
 
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My youngest did her virtual learning about 15 feet away from where I worked at my desk in the basement. She had a great teacher who did her best to keep kids engaged, but there were a few that were lost causes. They were doing stuff like playing video games during class or just leaving the camera on and walking away. Daughter said they were the same way in the classroom though. It was pretty discouraging to hear and the teacher left the classroom the next year. That daughter hated virtual and went back in person the moment she could.

Older daughter liked virtual so much that she did it all through middle school. A pair of no account teachers ruined it for her the last year and she went back into the classroom for high school. I’m not confident that she would have made it into the STEM/magnet program in high school if she had done middle school in person.

It’s funny how differently it impacted people.
 
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