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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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14 Dec, 6 tweets, 2 min read
Instead of canceling math because we think Americans don't have the IQ to handle it, how about we copy the math education systems of countries who do it better than we do?

usatoday.com/story/news/edu…
The frustrating thing about these math education debates is that the people trying to cancel math (yes, this is a loose figure of speech) seem to believe deeply and instinctively that American kids are dum-dums who can't learn math, so we should give up...
...But trying to convince these education policy people that IQ isn't the most important thing when it comes to math education (which is true) isn't super effective, because they already seem to spend all their time trying and failing to convince *themselves* of this very thing.
IQism is so deeply ingrained in American consciousness that even school-of-ed curricula that spend years trying to drum it out of teachers and ed policy people basically fail. All these folks still seem to believe (wrongly) that American kids innately can't learn math.
This makes American education policy debates incredibly frustrating for me, because I'm sitting here yelling "American kids CAN learn math", and the ed policy people are like "Yes, we agree, but we still have to cancel it because [reasons]".
Anyway, I stand by what @mileskimball and I wrote years ago. American kids CAN learn math, and they should learn math, and attempts to teach kids less math are deeply rooted in IQist fallacies.

(end)

theatlantic.com/education/arch…

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13 Dec
This guy isn't a tankie, but this kind of thinking -- we all have to just let (insert communist empire here) conquer whatever they want, because anything else equals full-scale nuclear annihilation -- pretty quickly leads to tankie conclusions.
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13 Dec
Ideology is an intellectual muscle suit that people can strap on to feel smarter than they really are.
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Another small sign of tankie ideas slipping into the mainstream socialist movement in America:
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11 Dec
My video interview with @ThePlumLineGS is out! We talk about the threat of election subversion/denial in 2024, and what can be done to prevent it.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/video-interv…
Key takeaways Image
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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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29% of Americans are either Hispanic, Asian, or Middle Eastern -- more than double the percentage of Black Americans and about half the percentage of White Americans who are neither Hispanic nor Middle Eastern.
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