Originally Posted by aquinas
Originally Posted by HowlerKarma
We're in big, big trouble when we refuse to even ADMIT that some people are actually smarter or more capable than others, or that some people's efforts just aren't good enough to be considered "adequate" much less "exemplary."

I attended a session led by the head of a social innovation fund earlier this week and watched her proudly endorse a man who argues that there is no such thing as innate math ability. He was her organization's golden calf. They needed to step back two feet to be able to register the irony of an organization whose mandate it is to pick winners claiming that ability is uniformly distributed. Yikes.

"This human characteristic is uniformly distributed in the population..."

...said no one ever.
Neither of you should be surprised by unwillingness to acknowledge differences in cognitive abilities, because the instruments that measure individual differences in those abilities also reveal substantial group differences in those abilities. A society that does not want to admit that there may be group differences will not be able to think clearly about individual differences, unless by a happy coincidence all groups do about the same on the tests used to measure those differences. They do not.