| With a discussion centered on ability, but no attempt to define this nebulous concept, it seems impossible for this argument to be "true" in any strong sense. To begin with, this discussion is almost totally void of even the mention of education (the word not appearing once), acting like all children are objects in in the global school array, with a method called "getIntrinsicScore" that gets called a few times in their life before the are casted into adult objects. However, a simple recollection of your time in school will tell you that not everyone was treated equally by the teacher and the other students, and also that school was a pretty big deal in your life at the time. So to talk about the correlations in test scores of children and neglecting to mention the influence of the school is not very informed. But since the influence of a school on the test scores of a child is not particularly well understood (witness the debate on "how to fix the schools"), it is really hard to make any firm claims if you include it. It is also remarkable how the text underlies that the gap in scores appears with age, but does not attempt to explain this observation while advocating a static theory of "ability". The author states outright that there a property fixed at birth that determines your "ability", and then always talks like "ability" and test-score are perfectly correlated. (For effect I will here do the semantic simplification the "ability" and "test-score" are perfectly interchangeable,because if the implied perfect correlation.) So, the thesis is that the test-scores are fixed at birth, but the author also accepts as empirical fact that the difference of test-scores appears first around puberty. This is a curious behavior for something that is "fixed". It is highly worrying that this is not addressed at all in the exposition of the theory. |