There are two words spelled “desert”, one of which is pronounced like “dessert”. Your “just deserts” are what you “deserve” (which may or may not involve dessert, depending on whether you ate all of your vegetables)
Though etymologically the two words pronounced "dessert" are the same. The reason sweet dishes at the end of a meal are called that way isn't that no people live in them.
The same root of 'serve' with a different prefix: one is de-sert and the other is dis-sert, both filtered through French (apparently a desert is what you deserve but a dessert is a "disservice", i.e. what you have when the food service is removed).
Actually, desert (as in what you deserve) and dessert (as in the thing that you eat after all of the courses have been cleared from the table) link up etymologically in the French "deservir" which denoted descent. The former word dates back to the late Latin servir while the latter shows up in mid 16th century France. Even today, both can still be sweet!
Desert is off on its own although it was spelled "desart" in the 18th century, which we should maybe return to using so as to lessen an already crowded field?
(Note: I had to delete my original post because I misspelled the final desert as dessert!)
Even the <i>phrase</i> "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "guy who missed some HTML cursive or whatever"
When I had my son apply to a charter high school founded by teachers at his middle school, I was told that admission was by lottery only, but the parents had to show up in person to find out if their child was picked at random.
When I showed up to find out if my son's name was on the list, the person holding the list was his old middle school math teacher. I nervously asked if he'd been picked in the lottery? His teacher said, without looking at the list: "Of course he did." I asked if he could check the list just to make sure. The charter school teacher said: "Don't worry about it. He's in."
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that the hoops to get into charter schools were mostly regulatory and likely in place to "defend" public school systems and teachers (not nominally but effectively).
Not really. We already know that All Good Things are Correlated. IQ is correlated with everything positive. Bigger support networks, better mental health, more involved parenting, fewer divorces, better home environments, lower lead intake, lower trauma incidence, etc. And all that stuff is in turn correlated with all the rest of that stuff.
This isn't evidence that IQ is heritable (let alone genetic); it's evidence that the tangled ball of all-positive-characteristics is heritable. Which absolutely noone argues with. The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
This is trivially false. The heritability of behavior is extremely controversial amongst the political left (except sexuality, despite the fact that the heritability of sexual orientation is lower than most other aspects of behavior).
>The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
We have heritability studies for IQ specifically, and its very high. You're acting like its some great mystery - it's not. Twin and sibling studies demonstrate that the impact of shared environment explains almost none of the concordance in IQ between identical twins.
My impression came mostly from this podcast, which described basically trying to filter based on parents' dedication. (Which presumably correlates with parents' ability to supervise kids doing homework and other stuff that helps with academics.) https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
An example was appointments for the child to be fitted for a uniform as a requirement for entering the lottery.
By the way, I used to be a true believer in the social science theory that the amount of money spent by a school per pupil has no influence on anything. However, seeing what a very well-run private school administration can do with a whole lot of money to spend has made me more skeptical.
I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack.
I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better.
Do you have a good sense of why it started out so heavily selected? Was it just that smarter kids were more interested in going there, or did they have some kind of filter mechanism?
Are we opposed to using votes to mean "this is correct" on ACX? I'm not sure if I should indicate that this conforms to my own research on the topic by posting a small comment or clicking the heart button.
So you have to have a certain amount of investment in order to figure out what's a "good" school to get into and how to apply to it. You also have to be willing to invest a certain amount of ongoing effort into your kid's school -- a charter school will usually not be as convenient as sending your kid to the literally closest public school. Your kid may not actually want to go to the charter school, if their friends from a lower school level/the neighbors are going to the close-by public school, so you have to override them.
None of these are gigantic burdens, but you put them together and you get a pretty strong effect where the kids who go to the district's best charter schools are the ones whose parents are conscientious and invested in education.
The experience described above about attending charter schools only noted that the initial class was not representative of the overall school population. It did not, however, know if it was representative of the losing lottery applicants.
At the charter school where I had my son apply, they had a lot of hoops to jump through to winnow down to the more education-oriented parents: e.g., applications had to be dropped off in person and you had to come in person to find out if your child had been chosen.
Also, the more education-oriented parents were aware that this charter high school was being started by the best teachers at the middle school. The more apathetic parents likely didn't agree that these were the best teachers or didn't know or didn't care.
It's at least partially selecting for people who have more free time. If someone is a single parent working two full time jobs to pay rent, they probably don't have the time and definitely don't have the energy to do those type of things. Perhaps that's not the average case, but certainly the people who have the most money to start with are going to be the people who have the most ability to get their kids through those processes.
There's also a self-perpetuating character to this. Once the school has a reputation for being a "school for smart kids," parents whose kids might qualify just don't bother to apply because they think that they won't be accepted.
A lot of charter school advocates also underestimate the importance of logistics. If you have two full-time working parents in inflexible jobs, sending a kid across town to a charter school is often not feasible. Getting a kid to an inconveniently located school requires resources.
There is obvious bias in who applies, but that’s why they study charter lotteries that are oversubscribed and compare the winners to the losers. The winners do better.
If the comment above is accurate, a precondition for being a winner is that your parents attend the drawing in person. That's a nonrandom sample, and probably also implies that other nonrandom interventions are happening both before and during the lottery.
And to complete the thought: the losers go back to public school, and their classmates will be kids whose parents didn't participate in the lottery. Thus, in general, a performance difference between charter and non-charter can potentially be explained by differences in the composition of classmates rather than differences in the schools themselves. (man, science is hard.)
You know, to be perfectly honest, I do sometimes wonder to what extent the students themselves help or hinder a learning environment. The focus is always on the teachers but to be honest I found in high school especially a huuuuuge amount of time was taken up by those completely unmotivated and also this had the more pernicious and hidden effect of limiting the kind of activities and teaching strategies that the teacher could do in the first place (a cool activity but one that requires effort isn’t possible if there’s too much apathy)
Judith Rich Harris' emphasis on the impact of peer culture is sadly neglected, for the most part, in education debates. She points out that children adopt the language of their peers rather than their parents, whether or not their friends smoke is a better predictor of smoking then parents smoking, etc. Peer culture is immensely important in learning.
This is neglected? Seems to me like it drives trillions of dollars of economic activity - that concern is exactly what "good school districts" mean in practice.
De facto, yes, but the public policy debate rarely discusses the importance of peers and peer culture. If peer attitudes and behaviors were regarded as more important for student outcomes than, say, curriculum, teacher training and credentials, expenditures, etc. then we'd be having a very different public conversation on educational policy and its relationship to outcomes. Poor parents who can't afford "good school districts" might be even more aggressive than they currently are on behalf of school choice.
The late Ed Lazear had a fascinating simple model of classroom interruptions and ability that fits the stylized facts about class size and achievement and a few others.
That was interesting just for the idea on the title page, that one reason it's hard to find correlations between class size and success is that the size of class consistent with good learning depends on the level of discipline among the students.
There are others, such as refusal to backfill. Everything can be gamed. It is in the best interest of charter schools to manipulate the lotteries, very much including their financial best interest. And in many cases they are more or less operating on the honor system. To not assume fraud would be profoundly foolish.
The deeper question is this: if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim, why would the schools that we know cheated have cheated at all? Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?
Because of choice. You are forced to go to public schools, so all the school administrators need to do to keep their jobs is to show good numbers and they're good. In wealthy areas, the parents have a much more vested interest, but otherwise, your customers—students and parents who can't move to wealthy areas—are always forced to go back. Therefore, there isn't as much incentive to perform as great as charter schools where there is the threat of closure.
That's not actually an answer to the question Freddie asked.
The actual answer is that the incentive for charter schools to cheat exists regardless of whether they really are better, at least within the range that seems plausible. Even if they really do give better outcomes than normal public schools on the margin, gaming the system to make the difference look bigger can only help them.
Yes, pretty obviously this. For example, someone might write a book saying "shut down all charter schools because, while they do get better results, this is all just an illusion". So it's nice if the gap is big enough to make that person look wrong, even if you have to cheat a little.
More generally, you might both believe in your secret sauce and be a little uncertain of how soon - if ever - it will be able to deliver results. So you cheat.
Even if you have magic teaching dust it doesn't follow that it works uniformly or that you wouldn't still prefer more enthusiastic kids and parents over kids with behavioral issues and bad parents.
The real question is how much gain happens because in a group of motivated students, the social prestige revolves more around academic success. That is, how much do the outcomes show that it's beneficial for high-performers to get clumped together so that they can focus on learning rather than socialization. What if spreading the high and low- performance/study discipline students into a homogenous distribution might hinder the former without changing much for the latter?
I think "focus on learning rather than socialization" is an understatement of the problem as it manifests in a lot of schools. In the schools which are pulling down the average of our national scores, it's often the case that few students feel like it's socially acceptable among their peers to care about learning at all.
It's not either/or. Many cheaters in gaming and sports were excellent players who wanted an extra boost. Even if charter school magic is real, selection effects are presumably just as or even more powerful. As long as oversight is lax, why report 10% higher test scores when you can report 25% higher test scores?
I'm much more of a capitalist than you are, but even I think there's a good reason for governments to do truth-in-advertising regulations. I agree that fraud here is bad, but I think there's vastly more reasonable fixes than banning charters.
By definition, they select for people who are not satisfied with the public schools and have enough initiative to make an effort. That is a pretty significant filter, by itself. But I wouldn't call it cheating or "rigging" their results.
This essay went an interesting direction in the end. I guess I see a few types of concerns:
1) Signalling: How do we make sure the right competency signals exist in a post-school world. If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests.
2) How will we ensure basic competencies? I don't think the current model does a great job, but I get the feeling that many home-schooled children are products of self-selection.
3) How do we wish to warehouse children until they're adults?
I get the impression that the US likely does a terrible job at all of this relative to other nations. However, I am still interested in the sorts of responses.
(Also that tie-in with intelligence & worth is an interesting one, and one that is really hard to unpack in a good way. I get the feeling that IQ differences matter less after certain thresholds relative to personality dimensions. )
1. You’re going to want participation in group activities for that one. Chess club, softball league, or whatever.
2. GED or SAT tests.
3. We don’t. Instead we just let them run around outside all day every day if that’s what they’re into, or let them sit inside and read or play computer games, or let them get part time jobs for spending money, or whatever. Basically their lives will be like summer vacation all year long.
I just realized I was thinking in terms of my childhood in small town Americana, and that it might be somewhat more necessary to warehouse your children if you live in a place like San Francisco, where people feel obligated to maintain up to date maps of human sidewalk feces.
First, I won't accept that without evidence. Second, preemptive incarceration is not an acceptable crime prevention tool in any other context, and I don't think it should be acceptable for children either.
I suspect you are broadly correct. Children are not adults.
Or to put it another way: when my high-IQ wife was young and let roam free without supervision, she & her friends played with explosives.(no joke!)
I mean, no matter where we start on this. Society has already come to the conclusion children are not to be trusted alone. So some sort of warehousing makes sense, even if the current school system isn't appropriate.
Children were able to be raised for thousands of years without anything like "warehouses". Typically the slightly older children would look after the slightly younger ones. "It takes a village" was the expression taken up by Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't imply it takes a warehouse.
They were also more fungible thousands of years ago too. Did you not notice in the Book of Job that it was considered adequate for God to replace Job's dead children with a new set of living children?
Child warehouses are a modern necessity in the same sense as accounting, tax systems, or the internet. I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but not wildly so. We can talk about a more Montessori-based childcare system, or a million other things, but risk-tolerance has gone down over the last thousand years, and this drives a lot about child care & management. Most of the rest of the system has also adapted to remove this as a reasonable possibility.
I think risk-tolerance is inconsistent. Parents will subject their children to certain risks on their own, and schools may acceptably subject them to certain risks, while other ones will get them sued.
For thousands of years, children only needed to be illiterate hunter gatherers And they wil form gangs and hunt by instinct. Its just that in in the context of a modern society, a hunting gang is a criminal gang.
I played with lots of explosives and fire as a kid, despite being "smart" in the formal-education and IQ senses. I turned out fine. Kids are a lot more resilient and less abjectly stupid than we give them credit for. I am of the opinion that kids need a chance to play with dangerous stuff and subvert authority in porwntially harmful ways -whether it's building a rickety clubhouse out of scrap wood or riding around dirt roads on the roof of a joyride van. It teaches them self-reliance, the natural consequences of their actions, and the extent of their power over the world.
I wouldn't be surprised if you did turn out fine, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the death rate, or rate at which children are maimed would be higher under those circumstances. It gets really hard doing that utilitarian calculus where "Johnny loses a foot", and most heuristics would tell us that Johnny losing a foot outweighs most non-quantifiable outcomes.
Well, I set our garage on fire when I was only four, before schooling was an issue. I put it out with the garden hose before it did more than char a bit of the wood.
I can think of half a dozen friends who played with explosives, and I remember no stories of injuries in a high school with 800 students per class level. My father played with explosives throughout his high school and college years.
I remember coming home after hearing the kid in front of me say you should smoosh the matchheads in a pipe bomb tightly to make sure you have a good bang. He had street cred from a bandaged hand and a bandaged eye after a couple weeks off from school.
And my parents were sharing academic gossip. Someone had wanted to give a lecture to my school about anorexia risks to the prettiest, most popular girls. Principal said no, given the results of a previous year's lecture about the risks to the boldest young fellows from making homemade fireworks and even pipe bombs.
Hong Kong used to have no anorexia. Then Hong Kong media did a series about the risk to the prettiest, most popular girls from anorexia. Since then Hong Kong has anorexia. 'Crazy Like Us', Ethan Watters.
You raise an interesting question-- it used to be pretty common for kids (smart kids?) to play with explosives, but I haven't seen mention anywhere of injuries or deaths resulting from that. Does it just not get mentioned because it would interfere with light-hearted stories about playing with explosives, or were injuries actually very rare?
I actually know quite a few tales of incidents when kids played with explosives. It still happens a lot every year in Germany, not only among kids, at the end of the year, because of our obsession with personal fireworks on new years eve.
I've personally produced quite some impressive fireworks several decades ago when I was younger. Some left overs served me well end of 2020, because selling fireworks was forbidden due to the Corona crisis. But I was more into flames then explosions, so my mishaps didn't turn into a catastrophe back then.
I suspect injuries are somewhat rare, but I also have heard about stories where somebody is maimed from an explosive. In that social circle, I believe there was one maiming??? But I'd have to consult my wife, as it isn't my story, and I may be mixing up her life with somebody else's childhood explosive-maiming story.
1) If you want to signal your capabilities, then in a system where public funding is gone, you can buy whatever products to complete that demonstrate it - and you will only do what is actually profitable for you to do.
"If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests."
I failed at school but do well on standardized tests. I believe I would be more accurately described as a 'high-IQ neurotic.' I better indication of high-IQ sociopathy is achievement of an MBA or appointment as CEO.
Hi J'myle, in context the comment is just to rebut the idea that IQ and pass rates in education measure similar things.
In the case of sociopathy, the idea is that a sociopath can do well on a cognitive test, but may lack conscientiousness and/or executive function sufficient to succeed in formal education.
An MBA or CEO appointment really doesn't do much to separate things out, as non-psychopaths have attained both statuses, and attaining a status isn't a good sign that one oughtn't attain a status.
In any case, there are multiple reasons why a person can have high IQ and fail schooling. Many of them will relate to things like conscientiousness and/or executive function.
Working hard is a talent, same as looks or smarts. If it turned out that educational outcomes were more correlated with executive function than IQ, I don't think DeBoer would be any happier.
I understand his objection to be with any kind of false equivalency between traits and worth. If we traded the cult of smarts for the cult of hard graft, it wouldn't be a better world for DeBoer (as far as I understand Scott's explanation of what Scott thinks DeBoer thinks, anyway...)
I find it hard to believe that actions, like consistent work / working hard (however you would like to define it), could be considered as inherent as genotype or phenotype. Environment certainly has an impact on ones ability to 'work hard'.
Yeah I completely agree environment likely as a huge impact on the choices one makes, such as whether to work hard or goof off.
It's not clear to me why it would matter to our judgement of someone's intrinsic worth whether their traits are the product of genes or of circumstance, though.
Imagine it's the night before a big exam, and both Alice, Bob and Claire get a message from their friends asking them to come out for a drink.
Alice is genetically high scrupulosity and is prone to worrying, so she turns down the offer in favour of some last minute studying and a good night's sleep. She does well on the exam.
Bob has ADHD and finds it hard to follow through on things. He finds procrastination pretty tempting and wants to say yes. However, he came from a stable and understanding family who have instilled values around the importance of education and of working hard to get ahead. He turns down the offer and does well on the exam.
Claire has no particular natural traits that make her a sticker or a quitter. She tends to make time for the things she cares about, but her parents have never really seen the point of education and have never supported her schooling. Her mother often tells her that having kids is the end of freedom, and to have fun while she's young. Claire decides that she'd rather die unqualified and happy than a lonely and boring A student, so she goes out and parties until 3am. She flunks the exam and ends up in a miserable and unfulfilling job.
Alice, Bob and Claire are equally smart. Alice and Bob have advantages to their ability to work hard and meet commitments - Alice has genetically influenced personality traits, and Bob has the advantage of a good work ethic instilled at home. Claire has none of these things and as a result isn't much of a hard worker.
I'm with Scott that the Alices and Bobs of this world make better lawyers and doctors than Claire would. If I were interviewing for a job I'd want to hire them instead of Claire. But it doesn't seem to me that Claire 'deserves' to live in a small house, struggle to feed her kids, and work a boring job to make ends meet - even though from one perspective it looks like she 'wasted' her intelligence, she was never set up for success. It still feels like Alice and Bob are lucky in their personalities, and Claire is unlucky, just as if they were smarter than her.
DeBoer presumably thinks the solution here is a Marxist revolution and a complete decoupling of occupation from wealth. I'd disagree - I think incenticising achievement is the best way to get it, and I'm willing to accept wealth inequity to get a more functional society. However, I do think society has a duty of care to people like Claire and that progressive taxation and a social net is a good way to balance out some of Alice and Bob's good fortune at being high functioning people to offset Claire's bad luck at being a washout.
Do we have to assume that Claire is also incapable of learning that there's a connection between conscientiousness and getting more material goods or a more interesting job, if she finds that those are important to her?
Thanks for this comment. That's certainly one way to end up with a Claire - either she might not acknowledge that others work harder, or she might attribute their success to being more naturally talented.
Alternatively she might just be very akrasic - "I know I need to study and every time this happens I promise myself I'll try harder, but in the moment I always have a ready excuse that lets me off the hook". You could model this as a lack of willpower, unusually sharp future discounting, lack of reflective self-awareness - but in any case there's definitely a kind of person who is bad at doing things they know they need to do. (I suppose I said Claire is generally OK at sticking with things she really cares about, so perhaps we should call this new archetype 'Dave').
People like Claire and Dave seem to exist, one way or another, and it's hard to imagine there's something other than nature and nurture that makes them behave the way they do.
I do not believe this is true. I have not worked particularly hard in my life. As a result, I am paid about half as much as my equally talented peers that graduated from the same law school. Meanwhile I still keep in touch with people from my high school that were untalented, but hard workers. I make approximately twice as much as them. This situation does not seem unique. No matter how hard they work, they can never do the job I have. Meanwhile, when I am at my job, I take breaks to read articles like this and post comments like this.
I think there are likely thresholds where hard-work takes precedence over IQ, and IQ takes precedence over hard work. If you're high-IQ enough, then diligence (or other factors) likely explains outcomes more. However, until you're there, IQ is generally very important, if not more important.
I could be wrong though & would be happy to hear from others. If I had to guess, this threshold situation is partially a result of how our signalling systems work. Or to put it another way: once you're all smart enough to pass the bar exam, the bigger question is who does more "stuff".
Yes, both are important and not always in equal measures. Musk is a billionaire because he is both a genius and a workaholic. If he was 10% less genius but 10% more workaholic, or vice versa, hard to say.
When I was reading the book, I found the term "meritocracy" to be one of the worst issues. I think the problem with it is ultimately that people-like-Scott and people-like-DeBoer use it in different ways. Scott defines "meritocracy is when people who are good at a thing do that thing - teachers should be people who are good at teaching, construction workers should be people who are good at construction work, surgeons should be people who are good at surgery, and so on." Fairly obviously good, and that's how even all communist countries have worked. DeBoer defines it more like "meritocracy is when people who are good at things have a good life while people who are bad at things have a bad life." This seems bad, given the assumption that everyone should have a good life and you can't really improve on how good you are at different skills.
Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle. I suspect that's what DeBoer wants, but his conflation of terminology helps no one.
We really really just need to get rid of "meritocracy" and its cognates and replace them with "selecting/screening for ability" or similar and then debate the tradeoffs and uses of that. I usually dislike language policing, but this term replacement would be an unalloyed good: it not only makes thought and expression clearer but deprives opponents of ability-based selection of a rhetorical weapon they can use to unfairly smear supporters of such selection as elitists.
To be specific: saying "ability-based selection" instead of "meritocracy" makes it clear that the point of selection, screening, sorting, whatever you want to call it is *not* to set the worthier above the less-worthy. Rather it is to put the more-able-in-some-dimension in an organizational/institutional environment that lets them make the most productive use of that dimension of their ability. Any rational set of social institutions, be it libertarian or socialist or social-democratic or whatever, should want to do this. And if we can agree on that then we can get onto harder and more useful questions, like how to tradeoff the inevitable biases and unfairnesses of real-world selection processes against the utility of even imperfect sorting by ability.
I've watched some Star Trek, but not all that much. Do we ever get to see the lives of people who don't have prestigious jobs like, starship officer, to see how the demanding-but-unglamourous jobs get done?
Honestly, the closest I see is DS9, however, that has a lot of capitalist intermixings as seen with the role Quark plays in the entire system. Quark literally represents their economy. The only unglamorous character I believe I've seen is Rom, and... yeah... he isn't a particularly helpful example.
Rom eventually enlists in the Bajoran Militia and becomes a Maintenance Engineer FC because he’s an engineering genius. He has one of the most beautiful character arcs in DS9.
Honestly the whole thing is very poorly thought-out in Trek, and the latest episodes of Discovery have seen a bit of subversion of it.
However...
Picard's brother was a winemaker. He was presented in TNG as living more or less exactly the life that a winemaker in France would have been living in the mid-20th century. He was critical of Picard for seeking prestige in space rather than living up to his family's expectations of winemaking. The two had a fist fight. Later, his character was revealed to have died in a fire.
Sisko's father was a restauranteur. He made jambalaya in New Orleans. He too was presented in more or less the way a modern New Orleans restaurant owner would have been presented.
So the idea seems to be that regular 20th/21st century occupations still exist on Earth, but people do them out of habit or personal interest in wine/jambalaya/etc. more than out of the necessity to earn a living.
It's never explained why the Picards can own a vineyard and a chateau or what the criteria are to be allowed to operate a cajun restaurant in a dense city, absent the ability to actually sell anything that you make. The series Picard critiques this implicitly when a black woman character who lives in a trailer and has a drug problem essentially accuses Picard of white privilege because he gets to live in a big chateau with his Romulan servants and his antique furniture and she's stuck in a trailer growing space marijuana for her vape stick. Needless to say, the fan base was... let's say, divided... on this particular critique and the way in which it was made.
But the emerging consensus in canon seems to be that the "postcapitalist utopia" is more propaganda than anything else and structural equalities still exist despite Picard's protestations in TNG that they had moved beyond materialism. DS9 did a good job of interrogating Trek's utopianism and Picard and Disco are cranking that interrogation up to 11, with mixed effects.
Parents who want better, and have the time, and the awareness of the bureaucracy, and possibly the contacts with the school system . . .
To a first approximation, the well-off (or at least better off) white-collar parents.
I think Scott used "I turned out okay!" facetiously.
The Montessori school where my kids go has had fire alarms set off from young children making toast.
Only if one believes that dessert is the only possible basis for deciding tax rates.
As a professional teacher, if I had to say what I think the job of a teacher is, it's "be Harry Nyquist".
There are two words spelled “desert”, one of which is pronounced like “dessert”. Your “just deserts” are what you “deserve” (which may or may not involve dessert, depending on whether you ate all of your vegetables)
Oops. You're right. --I guess I got my just deserts. WIll delete.
Though etymologically the two words pronounced "dessert" are the same. The reason sweet dishes at the end of a meal are called that way isn't that no people live in them.
The same root of 'serve' with a different prefix: one is de-sert and the other is dis-sert, both filtered through French (apparently a desert is what you deserve but a dessert is a "disservice", i.e. what you have when the food service is removed).
Oh, I just assumed that dessert (in the food sense) was called that because it's something you should deserve (as a calque of Latin "merenda")
Amateur pedantic here!
Actually, desert (as in what you deserve) and dessert (as in the thing that you eat after all of the courses have been cleared from the table) link up etymologically in the French "deservir" which denoted descent. The former word dates back to the late Latin servir while the latter shows up in mid 16th century France. Even today, both can still be sweet!
Desert is off on its own although it was spelled "desart" in the 18th century, which we should maybe return to using so as to lessen an already crowded field?
(Note: I had to delete my original post because I misspelled the final desert as dessert!)
Even the <i>phrase</i> "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "kid who always lost at Little League".
You missed some HTML cursive or whatever.
Thanks, fixed.
Even the phrase "high school dropout" has an aura of personal failure about it, in a way totally absent from "guy who missed some HTML cursive or whatever"
😂
Charter schools admissions is by lottery
. There is no entrance test. There is no selection. Read or listen to Thomas Sowell on charter schools.
This is true in principle but not always in practice. See eg https://www.edweek.org/leadership/charter-schools-more-likely-to-ignore-special-education-applicants-study-finds/2018/12 . My guess is DeBoer thinks they do a lot of this kind of shady thing. But I agree I should correct the article to mention that this is hard and would have to be done subtly if at all.
When I had my son apply to a charter high school founded by teachers at his middle school, I was told that admission was by lottery only, but the parents had to show up in person to find out if their child was picked at random.
When I showed up to find out if my son's name was on the list, the person holding the list was his old middle school math teacher. I nervously asked if he'd been picked in the lottery? His teacher said, without looking at the list: "Of course he did." I asked if he could check the list just to make sure. The charter school teacher said: "Don't worry about it. He's in."
I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that the hoops to get into charter schools were mostly regulatory and likely in place to "defend" public school systems and teachers (not nominally but effectively).
That seems like another point in favour of the 'intelligence is genetic' hypothesis!
Not really. We already know that All Good Things are Correlated. IQ is correlated with everything positive. Bigger support networks, better mental health, more involved parenting, fewer divorces, better home environments, lower lead intake, lower trauma incidence, etc. And all that stuff is in turn correlated with all the rest of that stuff.
This isn't evidence that IQ is heritable (let alone genetic); it's evidence that the tangled ball of all-positive-characteristics is heritable. Which absolutely noone argues with. The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
Hence the use of adoption and twin studies, which is how we know a significant part of sexual orientation is genetic.
>Which absolutely noone argues with.
This is trivially false. The heritability of behavior is extremely controversial amongst the political left (except sexuality, despite the fact that the heritability of sexual orientation is lower than most other aspects of behavior).
>The disagreements are about which part of the giant-ball-of-goodness is driving the heritability (wealth? IQ? Social contacts? Concientiousness? Agreeableness/Pro-social instincts?) and whether that driver is genetic.
We have heritability studies for IQ specifically, and its very high. You're acting like its some great mystery - it's not. Twin and sibling studies demonstrate that the impact of shared environment explains almost none of the concordance in IQ between identical twins.
My impression came mostly from this podcast, which described basically trying to filter based on parents' dedication. (Which presumably correlates with parents' ability to supervise kids doing homework and other stuff that helps with academics.) https://www.econtalk.org/robert-pondiscio-on-how-the-other-half-learns/
An example was appointments for the child to be fitted for a uniform as a requirement for entering the lottery.
How did you and your son find the school experience?
He wound up getting a scholarship offer to an expensive private school, which turned out to be a good experience.
By the way, I used to be a true believer in the social science theory that the amount of money spent by a school per pupil has no influence on anything. However, seeing what a very well-run private school administration can do with a whole lot of money to spend has made me more skeptical.
I attended a charter school all 4 years quite recently. Admissions was entirely by lottery, open to everyone in the district. I can tell you that even in freshman year, the student body was not even remotely close to representative of normal kids; it was basically an entire school of the kids who would normally be in gifted / accelerated programs. And by graduation, it was even more refined to super talented & smart people, because the students who left to go back to their local normal schools were mostly from the rear of the pack.
I think that I got a lot better of an education there than I would have at my local school, and I would attribute more of that to the quality of my classmates than to the teachers or curriculum , though both of which were also better.
Do you have a good sense of why it started out so heavily selected? Was it just that smarter kids were more interested in going there, or did they have some kind of filter mechanism?
Whose parents were involved enough, interested enough in education, valued education enough. Simple as that, I think.
Are we opposed to using votes to mean "this is correct" on ACX? I'm not sure if I should indicate that this conforms to my own research on the topic by posting a small comment or clicking the heart button.
We are opposed to using votes at all. Scott mentioned them as one of the default Substack features he wants to get rid of.
in what ways? im not discounting your experience but this doesnt really help overcome my priors
So you have to have a certain amount of investment in order to figure out what's a "good" school to get into and how to apply to it. You also have to be willing to invest a certain amount of ongoing effort into your kid's school -- a charter school will usually not be as convenient as sending your kid to the literally closest public school. Your kid may not actually want to go to the charter school, if their friends from a lower school level/the neighbors are going to the close-by public school, so you have to override them.
None of these are gigantic burdens, but you put them together and you get a pretty strong effect where the kids who go to the district's best charter schools are the ones whose parents are conscientious and invested in education.
The experience described above about attending charter schools only noted that the initial class was not representative of the overall school population. It did not, however, know if it was representative of the losing lottery applicants.
At the charter school where I had my son apply, they had a lot of hoops to jump through to winnow down to the more education-oriented parents: e.g., applications had to be dropped off in person and you had to come in person to find out if your child had been chosen.
Also, the more education-oriented parents were aware that this charter high school was being started by the best teachers at the middle school. The more apathetic parents likely didn't agree that these were the best teachers or didn't know or didn't care.
It's at least partially selecting for people who have more free time. If someone is a single parent working two full time jobs to pay rent, they probably don't have the time and definitely don't have the energy to do those type of things. Perhaps that's not the average case, but certainly the people who have the most money to start with are going to be the people who have the most ability to get their kids through those processes.
There's also a self-perpetuating character to this. Once the school has a reputation for being a "school for smart kids," parents whose kids might qualify just don't bother to apply because they think that they won't be accepted.
A lot of charter school advocates also underestimate the importance of logistics. If you have two full-time working parents in inflexible jobs, sending a kid across town to a charter school is often not feasible. Getting a kid to an inconveniently located school requires resources.
There is obvious bias in who applies, but that’s why they study charter lotteries that are oversubscribed and compare the winners to the losers. The winners do better.
If the comment above is accurate, a precondition for being a winner is that your parents attend the drawing in person. That's a nonrandom sample, and probably also implies that other nonrandom interventions are happening both before and during the lottery.
Different schools have different processes. I think the ones studied are genuine lotteries.
And to complete the thought: the losers go back to public school, and their classmates will be kids whose parents didn't participate in the lottery. Thus, in general, a performance difference between charter and non-charter can potentially be explained by differences in the composition of classmates rather than differences in the schools themselves. (man, science is hard.)
You know, to be perfectly honest, I do sometimes wonder to what extent the students themselves help or hinder a learning environment. The focus is always on the teachers but to be honest I found in high school especially a huuuuuge amount of time was taken up by those completely unmotivated and also this had the more pernicious and hidden effect of limiting the kind of activities and teaching strategies that the teacher could do in the first place (a cool activity but one that requires effort isn’t possible if there’s too much apathy)
Judith Rich Harris' emphasis on the impact of peer culture is sadly neglected, for the most part, in education debates. She points out that children adopt the language of their peers rather than their parents, whether or not their friends smoke is a better predictor of smoking then parents smoking, etc. Peer culture is immensely important in learning.
This is neglected? Seems to me like it drives trillions of dollars of economic activity - that concern is exactly what "good school districts" mean in practice.
De facto, yes, but the public policy debate rarely discusses the importance of peers and peer culture. If peer attitudes and behaviors were regarded as more important for student outcomes than, say, curriculum, teacher training and credentials, expenditures, etc. then we'd be having a very different public conversation on educational policy and its relationship to outcomes. Poor parents who can't afford "good school districts" might be even more aggressive than they currently are on behalf of school choice.
The late Ed Lazear had a fascinating simple model of classroom interruptions and ability that fits the stylized facts about class size and achievement and a few others.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2696418?seq=1
That was interesting just for the idea on the title page, that one reason it's hard to find correlations between class size and success is that the size of class consistent with good learning depends on the level of discipline among the students.
There are, in fact, many ways that lotteries can be gamed. Here's a taste: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-charters-admissions/special-report-class-struggle-how-charter-schools-get-students-they-want-idUSBRE91E0HF20130215
There are others, such as refusal to backfill. Everything can be gamed. It is in the best interest of charter schools to manipulate the lotteries, very much including their financial best interest. And in many cases they are more or less operating on the honor system. To not assume fraud would be profoundly foolish.
The deeper question is this: if the charter advantage is as powerful as proponents claim, why would the schools that we know cheated have cheated at all? Why would they have felt the need, if the magic charter school dust was all it took?
Because of choice. You are forced to go to public schools, so all the school administrators need to do to keep their jobs is to show good numbers and they're good. In wealthy areas, the parents have a much more vested interest, but otherwise, your customers—students and parents who can't move to wealthy areas—are always forced to go back. Therefore, there isn't as much incentive to perform as great as charter schools where there is the threat of closure.
That's not actually an answer to the question Freddie asked.
The actual answer is that the incentive for charter schools to cheat exists regardless of whether they really are better, at least within the range that seems plausible. Even if they really do give better outcomes than normal public schools on the margin, gaming the system to make the difference look bigger can only help them.
Yes, pretty obviously this. For example, someone might write a book saying "shut down all charter schools because, while they do get better results, this is all just an illusion". So it's nice if the gap is big enough to make that person look wrong, even if you have to cheat a little.
More generally, you might both believe in your secret sauce and be a little uncertain of how soon - if ever - it will be able to deliver results. So you cheat.
Even if you have magic teaching dust it doesn't follow that it works uniformly or that you wouldn't still prefer more enthusiastic kids and parents over kids with behavioral issues and bad parents.
The real question is how much gain happens because in a group of motivated students, the social prestige revolves more around academic success. That is, how much do the outcomes show that it's beneficial for high-performers to get clumped together so that they can focus on learning rather than socialization. What if spreading the high and low- performance/study discipline students into a homogenous distribution might hinder the former without changing much for the latter?
I think "focus on learning rather than socialization" is an understatement of the problem as it manifests in a lot of schools. In the schools which are pulling down the average of our national scores, it's often the case that few students feel like it's socially acceptable among their peers to care about learning at all.
It's not either/or. Many cheaters in gaming and sports were excellent players who wanted an extra boost. Even if charter school magic is real, selection effects are presumably just as or even more powerful. As long as oversight is lax, why report 10% higher test scores when you can report 25% higher test scores?
I'm much more of a capitalist than you are, but even I think there's a good reason for governments to do truth-in-advertising regulations. I agree that fraud here is bad, but I think there's vastly more reasonable fixes than banning charters.
By definition, they select for people who are not satisfied with the public schools and have enough initiative to make an effort. That is a pretty significant filter, by itself. But I wouldn't call it cheating or "rigging" their results.
There's a lot of cheating and rigged results in public schools already, come charters go charters.
Scott - I am so glad you are back. Thank you.
This essay went an interesting direction in the end. I guess I see a few types of concerns:
1) Signalling: How do we make sure the right competency signals exist in a post-school world. If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests.
2) How will we ensure basic competencies? I don't think the current model does a great job, but I get the feeling that many home-schooled children are products of self-selection.
3) How do we wish to warehouse children until they're adults?
I get the impression that the US likely does a terrible job at all of this relative to other nations. However, I am still interested in the sorts of responses.
(Also that tie-in with intelligence & worth is an interesting one, and one that is really hard to unpack in a good way. I get the feeling that IQ differences matter less after certain thresholds relative to personality dimensions. )
1. You’re going to want participation in group activities for that one. Chess club, softball league, or whatever.
2. GED or SAT tests.
3. We don’t. Instead we just let them run around outside all day every day if that’s what they’re into, or let them sit inside and read or play computer games, or let them get part time jobs for spending money, or whatever. Basically their lives will be like summer vacation all year long.
I just realized I was thinking in terms of my childhood in small town Americana, and that it might be somewhat more necessary to warehouse your children if you live in a place like San Francisco, where people feel obligated to maintain up to date maps of human sidewalk feces.
Are you aware what low IQ trends tend to when left to run around outside all day? They form gangs and commit crime.
*teens not trends
First, I won't accept that without evidence. Second, preemptive incarceration is not an acceptable crime prevention tool in any other context, and I don't think it should be acceptable for children either.
I suspect you are broadly correct. Children are not adults.
Or to put it another way: when my high-IQ wife was young and let roam free without supervision, she & her friends played with explosives.(no joke!)
I mean, no matter where we start on this. Society has already come to the conclusion children are not to be trusted alone. So some sort of warehousing makes sense, even if the current school system isn't appropriate.
Young as in elementary school age.
Children were able to be raised for thousands of years without anything like "warehouses". Typically the slightly older children would look after the slightly younger ones. "It takes a village" was the expression taken up by Hillary Clinton, but that doesn't imply it takes a warehouse.
They were also more fungible thousands of years ago too. Did you not notice in the Book of Job that it was considered adequate for God to replace Job's dead children with a new set of living children?
Child warehouses are a modern necessity in the same sense as accounting, tax systems, or the internet. I'm a bit tongue in cheek, but not wildly so. We can talk about a more Montessori-based childcare system, or a million other things, but risk-tolerance has gone down over the last thousand years, and this drives a lot about child care & management. Most of the rest of the system has also adapted to remove this as a reasonable possibility.
I think risk-tolerance is inconsistent. Parents will subject their children to certain risks on their own, and schools may acceptably subject them to certain risks, while other ones will get them sued.
"over the last thousand years" is way missing the mark. 50 years ago children played outside unsupervised all day long in the Summer, no problem.
For thousands of years, children only needed to be illiterate hunter gatherers And they wil form gangs and hunt by instinct. Its just that in in the context of a modern society, a hunting gang is a criminal gang.
It still takes skills to be a hunter-gatherer, and there was a lot of knowledge in low-tech agricultural societies.
I played with lots of explosives and fire as a kid, despite being "smart" in the formal-education and IQ senses. I turned out fine. Kids are a lot more resilient and less abjectly stupid than we give them credit for. I am of the opinion that kids need a chance to play with dangerous stuff and subvert authority in porwntially harmful ways -whether it's building a rickety clubhouse out of scrap wood or riding around dirt roads on the roof of a joyride van. It teaches them self-reliance, the natural consequences of their actions, and the extent of their power over the world.
Sounds like survivor bias.
I wouldn't be surprised if you did turn out fine, but I also wouldn't be surprised if the death rate, or rate at which children are maimed would be higher under those circumstances. It gets really hard doing that utilitarian calculus where "Johnny loses a foot", and most heuristics would tell us that Johnny losing a foot outweighs most non-quantifiable outcomes.
There's a joke among unschooling parents that sooner or later most unschooled kids will set something on fire in the backyard.
Well, I set our garage on fire when I was only four, before schooling was an issue. I put it out with the garden hose before it did more than char a bit of the wood.
I can think of half a dozen friends who played with explosives, and I remember no stories of injuries in a high school with 800 students per class level. My father played with explosives throughout his high school and college years.
I remember coming home after hearing the kid in front of me say you should smoosh the matchheads in a pipe bomb tightly to make sure you have a good bang. He had street cred from a bandaged hand and a bandaged eye after a couple weeks off from school.
And my parents were sharing academic gossip. Someone had wanted to give a lecture to my school about anorexia risks to the prettiest, most popular girls. Principal said no, given the results of a previous year's lecture about the risks to the boldest young fellows from making homemade fireworks and even pipe bombs.
Hong Kong used to have no anorexia. Then Hong Kong media did a series about the risk to the prettiest, most popular girls from anorexia. Since then Hong Kong has anorexia. 'Crazy Like Us', Ethan Watters.
You raise an interesting question-- it used to be pretty common for kids (smart kids?) to play with explosives, but I haven't seen mention anywhere of injuries or deaths resulting from that. Does it just not get mentioned because it would interfere with light-hearted stories about playing with explosives, or were injuries actually very rare?
I actually know quite a few tales of incidents when kids played with explosives. It still happens a lot every year in Germany, not only among kids, at the end of the year, because of our obsession with personal fireworks on new years eve.
I've personally produced quite some impressive fireworks several decades ago when I was younger. Some left overs served me well end of 2020, because selling fireworks was forbidden due to the Corona crisis. But I was more into flames then explosions, so my mishaps didn't turn into a catastrophe back then.
I suspect injuries are somewhat rare, but I also have heard about stories where somebody is maimed from an explosive. In that social circle, I believe there was one maiming??? But I'd have to consult my wife, as it isn't my story, and I may be mixing up her life with somebody else's childhood explosive-maiming story.
Low IQ teens with limited alternative options to generate income form gangs. And even the low IQ part might be inaccurate or irrelevant.
1) If you want to signal your capabilities, then in a system where public funding is gone, you can buy whatever products to complete that demonstrate it - and you will only do what is actually profitable for you to do.
You would need to rely on a Udacity or Coursera like system, and these would rely on buyers.
Probably not MOOCs as the pass rate is generally low.
Non-sense - in the absence of public school, you’d just go to private school. That’s the product which you’re buying.
Ah, my apologies. I was originally writing about the radical critique of schools, not like a voucher system.
I don't think school does a good idea of protecting us from high-IQ sociopaths.
"If I'm a high-IQ sociopath, then I will (presumably) fail school but may pass IQ tests."
I failed at school but do well on standardized tests. I believe I would be more accurately described as a 'high-IQ neurotic.' I better indication of high-IQ sociopathy is achievement of an MBA or appointment as CEO.
Hi J'myle, in context the comment is just to rebut the idea that IQ and pass rates in education measure similar things.
In the case of sociopathy, the idea is that a sociopath can do well on a cognitive test, but may lack conscientiousness and/or executive function sufficient to succeed in formal education.
An MBA or CEO appointment really doesn't do much to separate things out, as non-psychopaths have attained both statuses, and attaining a status isn't a good sign that one oughtn't attain a status.
In any case, there are multiple reasons why a person can have high IQ and fail schooling. Many of them will relate to things like conscientiousness and/or executive function.
DeBoer has never heard the saying "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard"
What is hard work to a workaholic?
I get paid well because I love to sit down and solve a complex software puzzle. It’s not work to me at all. I’d do it and have done it for free.
Working hard is a talent, same as looks or smarts. If it turned out that educational outcomes were more correlated with executive function than IQ, I don't think DeBoer would be any happier.
I understand his objection to be with any kind of false equivalency between traits and worth. If we traded the cult of smarts for the cult of hard graft, it wouldn't be a better world for DeBoer (as far as I understand Scott's explanation of what Scott thinks DeBoer thinks, anyway...)
I find it hard to believe that actions, like consistent work / working hard (however you would like to define it), could be considered as inherent as genotype or phenotype. Environment certainly has an impact on ones ability to 'work hard'.
Yeah I completely agree environment likely as a huge impact on the choices one makes, such as whether to work hard or goof off.
It's not clear to me why it would matter to our judgement of someone's intrinsic worth whether their traits are the product of genes or of circumstance, though.
Imagine it's the night before a big exam, and both Alice, Bob and Claire get a message from their friends asking them to come out for a drink.
Alice is genetically high scrupulosity and is prone to worrying, so she turns down the offer in favour of some last minute studying and a good night's sleep. She does well on the exam.
Bob has ADHD and finds it hard to follow through on things. He finds procrastination pretty tempting and wants to say yes. However, he came from a stable and understanding family who have instilled values around the importance of education and of working hard to get ahead. He turns down the offer and does well on the exam.
Claire has no particular natural traits that make her a sticker or a quitter. She tends to make time for the things she cares about, but her parents have never really seen the point of education and have never supported her schooling. Her mother often tells her that having kids is the end of freedom, and to have fun while she's young. Claire decides that she'd rather die unqualified and happy than a lonely and boring A student, so she goes out and parties until 3am. She flunks the exam and ends up in a miserable and unfulfilling job.
Alice, Bob and Claire are equally smart. Alice and Bob have advantages to their ability to work hard and meet commitments - Alice has genetically influenced personality traits, and Bob has the advantage of a good work ethic instilled at home. Claire has none of these things and as a result isn't much of a hard worker.
I'm with Scott that the Alices and Bobs of this world make better lawyers and doctors than Claire would. If I were interviewing for a job I'd want to hire them instead of Claire. But it doesn't seem to me that Claire 'deserves' to live in a small house, struggle to feed her kids, and work a boring job to make ends meet - even though from one perspective it looks like she 'wasted' her intelligence, she was never set up for success. It still feels like Alice and Bob are lucky in their personalities, and Claire is unlucky, just as if they were smarter than her.
DeBoer presumably thinks the solution here is a Marxist revolution and a complete decoupling of occupation from wealth. I'd disagree - I think incenticising achievement is the best way to get it, and I'm willing to accept wealth inequity to get a more functional society. However, I do think society has a duty of care to people like Claire and that progressive taxation and a social net is a good way to balance out some of Alice and Bob's good fortune at being high functioning people to offset Claire's bad luck at being a washout.
Do we have to assume that Claire is also incapable of learning that there's a connection between conscientiousness and getting more material goods or a more interesting job, if she finds that those are important to her?
Thanks for this comment. That's certainly one way to end up with a Claire - either she might not acknowledge that others work harder, or she might attribute their success to being more naturally talented.
Alternatively she might just be very akrasic - "I know I need to study and every time this happens I promise myself I'll try harder, but in the moment I always have a ready excuse that lets me off the hook". You could model this as a lack of willpower, unusually sharp future discounting, lack of reflective self-awareness - but in any case there's definitely a kind of person who is bad at doing things they know they need to do. (I suppose I said Claire is generally OK at sticking with things she really cares about, so perhaps we should call this new archetype 'Dave').
People like Claire and Dave seem to exist, one way or another, and it's hard to imagine there's something other than nature and nurture that makes them behave the way they do.
I do not believe this is true. I have not worked particularly hard in my life. As a result, I am paid about half as much as my equally talented peers that graduated from the same law school. Meanwhile I still keep in touch with people from my high school that were untalented, but hard workers. I make approximately twice as much as them. This situation does not seem unique. No matter how hard they work, they can never do the job I have. Meanwhile, when I am at my job, I take breaks to read articles like this and post comments like this.
I think there are likely thresholds where hard-work takes precedence over IQ, and IQ takes precedence over hard work. If you're high-IQ enough, then diligence (or other factors) likely explains outcomes more. However, until you're there, IQ is generally very important, if not more important.
I could be wrong though & would be happy to hear from others. If I had to guess, this threshold situation is partially a result of how our signalling systems work. Or to put it another way: once you're all smart enough to pass the bar exam, the bigger question is who does more "stuff".
Yes, both are important and not always in equal measures. Musk is a billionaire because he is both a genius and a workaholic. If he was 10% less genius but 10% more workaholic, or vice versa, hard to say.
When I was reading the book, I found the term "meritocracy" to be one of the worst issues. I think the problem with it is ultimately that people-like-Scott and people-like-DeBoer use it in different ways. Scott defines "meritocracy is when people who are good at a thing do that thing - teachers should be people who are good at teaching, construction workers should be people who are good at construction work, surgeons should be people who are good at surgery, and so on." Fairly obviously good, and that's how even all communist countries have worked. DeBoer defines it more like "meritocracy is when people who are good at things have a good life while people who are bad at things have a bad life." This seems bad, given the assumption that everyone should have a good life and you can't really improve on how good you are at different skills.
Notably, you can achieve the first "meritocracy" while avoiding the second "meritocracy"! Perhaps it's not possible given human psychology, but at least theoretically you could have people assigned to jobs that they are good at while still letting everyone have the same lifestyle. I suspect that's what DeBoer wants, but his conflation of terminology helps no one.
We really really just need to get rid of "meritocracy" and its cognates and replace them with "selecting/screening for ability" or similar and then debate the tradeoffs and uses of that. I usually dislike language policing, but this term replacement would be an unalloyed good: it not only makes thought and expression clearer but deprives opponents of ability-based selection of a rhetorical weapon they can use to unfairly smear supporters of such selection as elitists.
To be specific: saying "ability-based selection" instead of "meritocracy" makes it clear that the point of selection, screening, sorting, whatever you want to call it is *not* to set the worthier above the less-worthy. Rather it is to put the more-able-in-some-dimension in an organizational/institutional environment that lets them make the most productive use of that dimension of their ability. Any rational set of social institutions, be it libertarian or socialist or social-democratic or whatever, should want to do this. And if we can agree on that then we can get onto harder and more useful questions, like how to tradeoff the inevitable biases and unfairnesses of real-world selection processes against the utility of even imperfect sorting by ability.
Sounds like tabooing words https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WBdvyyHLdxZSAMmoz/taboo-your-words
That possibility sounds like the Star Trek economy of people working demanding jobs due to prestige: https://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/star-trek-as-fantasy.html
I've watched some Star Trek, but not all that much. Do we ever get to see the lives of people who don't have prestigious jobs like, starship officer, to see how the demanding-but-unglamourous jobs get done?
I've watched even less than you.
Honestly, the closest I see is DS9, however, that has a lot of capitalist intermixings as seen with the role Quark plays in the entire system. Quark literally represents their economy. The only unglamorous character I believe I've seen is Rom, and... yeah... he isn't a particularly helpful example.
Rom eventually enlists in the Bajoran Militia and becomes a Maintenance Engineer FC because he’s an engineering genius. He has one of the most beautiful character arcs in DS9.
I hate Rom's character, but you can suffice to say that Rom isn't a good starting point for any model of economics.
Honestly the whole thing is very poorly thought-out in Trek, and the latest episodes of Discovery have seen a bit of subversion of it.
However...
Picard's brother was a winemaker. He was presented in TNG as living more or less exactly the life that a winemaker in France would have been living in the mid-20th century. He was critical of Picard for seeking prestige in space rather than living up to his family's expectations of winemaking. The two had a fist fight. Later, his character was revealed to have died in a fire.
Sisko's father was a restauranteur. He made jambalaya in New Orleans. He too was presented in more or less the way a modern New Orleans restaurant owner would have been presented.
So the idea seems to be that regular 20th/21st century occupations still exist on Earth, but people do them out of habit or personal interest in wine/jambalaya/etc. more than out of the necessity to earn a living.
It's never explained why the Picards can own a vineyard and a chateau or what the criteria are to be allowed to operate a cajun restaurant in a dense city, absent the ability to actually sell anything that you make. The series Picard critiques this implicitly when a black woman character who lives in a trailer and has a drug problem essentially accuses Picard of white privilege because he gets to live in a big chateau with his Romulan servants and his antique furniture and she's stuck in a trailer growing space marijuana for her vape stick. Needless to say, the fan base was... let's say, divided... on this particular critique and the way in which it was made.
But the emerging consensus in canon seems to be that the "postcapitalist utopia" is more propaganda than anything else and structural equalities still exist despite Picard's protestations in TNG that they had moved beyond materialism. DS9 did a good job of interrogating Trek's utopianism and Picard and Disco are cranking that interrogation up to 11, with mixed effects.