Why Fallacies are False -- 17, Wishful Thinking

So in light of what happened in the 2024 election, two streams of thought are coming out.

Somebody on social media recently advocated qualification testing to let people vote. Qualification testing for the franchise has a terrible precedent. In the Jim Crow period, it was used to disenfranchise blacks. The recent proposal included IQ tests; IQ tests are known to have a cultural component. Giving multiple IQ tests throughout schooling tries to validate the results by pretending that the test evaluates a person’s educational history.

But there’s a problem with the concept of educational history, which I saw discussions of starting in 2016. People involved in science point out that up until about 6^th grade, kids love science. Then their interest crashes. “We need to educate people better in science.”

That’s an extension of the Enlightenment Era myth that all you have to do is expose people to information to educate them. Anybody who thinks that if you educate kids they’ll all turn out “intelligent”, is ignoring two things.

First: It’s the false dilemma of nature vs. nurture. It’s not genetics versus the school system. Those are not the only two influences on children. They also have their family structure and their neighborhood social structure. And about age 12, the structure radically changes its influence.

When a kid gets to age 12, the family starts pushing them to stop being a kid, to be practical, to ditch everything that isn’t necessary for their future. And we all know that some families actively discourage their kids from getting higher education, as well as some families pushing the false dilemma that you have to go to college or you won’t get a good job. I talked about that a long time ago. Knowing this, means that IQ as qualification testing is actually testing for acculturation, not for education.

Families tell their kids “You’re no good in math, you can’t be a scientist/engineer/whatever.” It's a false dilemma between brilliance and non-brilliance.

a/ I’m no good at calculations, but I understood enough math to teach you to calculate whether a logical argument also has a probability of being true. I also helped a niece, who is very good at math, understand the use of reciprocals when her high school textbook was too oriented toward verbal people.

b/ I know a CPA/CFP whose classmates complained about failing tests. He said, “Did you do all the problems in the book?” The answer was always “No.”

c/ I learned from an online course in matrix math, don’t get upset if you look at the problem and the answer doesn’t leap out at you. Go methodically through the steps to get the answer. (I was glad I used this site because, years later, it helped me follow Leonard Susskind’s physics lectures.)

It takes study to understand the concepts. It takes practice to be able to get the calculations right. It takes work to come up with the answer. It’s not brilliance vs. non-brilliance or nature vs. nurture. It’s encouragement and effort.

And then there are the natural human failings of memory, which may be responsible for people not recognizing a Conjunction Fallacy even if they’ve seen it before. Somebody I know once proposed that people should have to solve a quadratic equation to get to vote. Well, I studied quadratic equations, but that was in high school. Am I supposed to not be allowed to vote because I don’t remember how to do them 50 years later? But some kids’ families discourage them from taking the higher mathematics: “You’ll never use it in real life.” That’s a matter of encouragement, not of qualification.

If you can figure out a way to deal with a discouraging family environment without separating families, “we’d all love to see the plan.” Meanwhile, the stage is set for the next round of human culture. Not human development; we are not about to purify the human race as we get through the fallout of the MAGA period. History is not a progression – that’s another Enlightenment Era myth; it’s just change, the one true constant in the universe.

And now that I’ve dealt with MAGA I’ll point out the other misunderstanding people have about education. The Internet. If you have the Internet, you have access to everything you need for a good education in languages, science, literature, art, philosophy, even history.

And with the Internet, you no longer have to find a bunch of people interested in the same thing you are, pay for a class and books, and drive to the classroom or schedule time with an instructor in Zoom or Facetime. All you have to do is find a free book and make yourself read it.

And that’s how I got access to the material I used to write most of my blog posts. It includes The Fallacy Files which helped me distinguish useful information from bullshit.

But I went after that information myself. From what I see on social media, I’m in the minority. The way deep minority. I have a blog post about that.

There has been zero noticeable increase in educated people since the start of Project Gutenberg and, later, Internet Archive or Openstax or LiveLingua or any of the hundreds of other educational websites. I said in my very first post in this thread, that the majority of people who have the internet, refuse to make the effort of using it for self-education. If you know of a study with statistics on educational levels in this period, tell us all about it.