[contrarian_5]

very frequent topic here on HN. i remember a comment about a persons experience with the public schools in the soviet union when it collapsed. all the smart people pulled their kids out and did something else. its the same as everything else because if you want it to be done right then you have to do it yourself. there is no fixing public schools... they are run by the majority and they always will be. the problem isnt the schools, its the majority. after WW2 all the dumbest people fucked like rabbits with no financial or existential limitations to stop them, medicine increasingly spared idiots from the consequences of their actions. this initial seed of stupidity brought the next tooth of the ratchet into place: the popularization and normalization of eliminating all consequences from ones own actions. we just keep getting dumber. we were supposed to be re-galvanized by a major depression and a pandemic in the past 20 years but we postponed it all with technology and massive economic manipulation. eventually the chickens are going to come home to roost... in the meantime dont let the public schools rot out the inside of your kids head.

[newacct583]

What has happened to this site? We have a topic on the front page of the site for 15 hours now, with almost 400 comments, and the top comment is a nakedly eugenicist screed about "the dumbest people" having too many babies.

I mean, even skipping the moral horror here, it's not even true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect

But HN... wants it to be true? What the actual fuck, people?

[contrarian_5]

ive been here since 2014. i didnt bring up eugenics, but if you want to broach that topic then fine. intelligence, as well as all other traits or characteristics, of not just humans but all organisms, is subject to natural selection. if you deny this, you deny natural selection and this would make you a science denier. whether we should act on this fact, or the morality of doing so, is completely up to you. but you will not deny science on hackernews.

oh and you saw my comment at the top because the ranking algorithm takes the youthfulness of the comment into account. its rather embarrassing that you dont know this.

[Tade0]

The established science is that at least half of our intelligence is a product of the environment.

Otherwise we wouldn't have so-called feral children - people who never acquired language and thus their intellectual growth was hindered.

[Tade0]

I went to a public school in a post-communist country in the second half of the 90s.

Back then private schools were generally regarded as lower quality because of the incentive to keep the parents happy with their "educational product".