An unfortunate yet unsurprising report to those familiar with the literature on cognitive ability. I too donated to similar programs. I hope better computer skills make some sort of earning impact, though the prevalence of smart phones probably makes a bigger difference.
I'm surprised about how popular these racist explanations about why the program failed, and not exploring the fact that the hardware, software and training for teachers might have been lacking
If they were good at what they set out to do, the program would've been successful and desired in Western countries (perhaps with upgraded models). But it wasn't.
I'd say the lack of ability to self-reflect on the shortcomings of the HW/SW/Infra and the willingness of the program's creators to embrace such explanations is much more telling about the probable cause of failure.
I'm sure most of these supposedly cognitively inferior Peruvian kids are on their laptops right now, playing League or Overwatch, with most of them having smartphones.
In broader strokes, and with the benefit of hindsight, I think the story of Africa is worth exploring, after a century of Western selfless efforts of trying to civilize and develop the continent, very little progress has been made. Then the Chinese moved in with far less noble intentions and a profit motive, and succeeded beyond imagination at civilization-building.
Again, any evidence? What exactly is 'cognitive ability'? A hallmark of the lack of substantive argument is vague terms that can mean anything the speaker likes, and by not defining the term they prevent any substantive critique - nobody really knows what they're talking about (and usually, not the speaker either).
I highly doubt it's all or nothing. While there are likely variations in anything, they can be quite insignificant. For example, everyone, with tiny exceptions, can learn to speak & understand language, and write & read - highly sophisticated cognitive abilities. And they can improve those abilities through education.
These baseless generalities don't show much 'cognitive ability'.
That'd be very amusing, since I'm not white. But no, it just happens to be fairly well documented that some people run faster hardware than others for a wide variety of nature and nurture reasons.
They also run better or worse neural networks on that hardware, which can be educated, but there's no replacement for displacement.
The point was not about your skin colour but your ideology - "some people are just better because nature".
To put your example in different terms - I don't have the physique of an olympic athlete, so I'll never be that fast or strong, but going to the gym absolutely improves on what I have already. I don't have to just live with whatever nature handed to me.
The fact that you can somewhat improve your muscles doesn't change that some people need to put much less effort in or can recover fast enough to be able to put more effort in.
Same for brains. Except we don't know a way to improve a healthy brain's performance (*in a general way, ergo a way that transfers to other tasks).
Plenty of white supremecists and their supporters are not white. Plenty are, and say they aren't.
> it just happens to be fairly well documented that some people run faster hardware than others for a wide variety of nature and nurture reasons.
Vague statements like that are unfalsifiable. Of course there are variations in performance - that's absolutely undeniable; mostly likely I type faster or slower than you do. The questions are, how big are those variations and how much are they dependent on what the person is conceived with biologically. If you want to claim anything, you need to be much more specific about those issues.
Good on you for admitting it, but this popular way of being intentionally wrong just because some baddies have stuck their flag in the hill of truth is anti-scientific. Everyone's trying to protect their personal image at the expense of honesty. I'm constantly encountering people who have wrong beliefs about this stuff because the scientific conclusions are so well hidden from mainstream writing on the topic. Even the person replying to you seems shocked to hear that intelligence is innate. Blank-slatism and everybody's-a-winner has infected popular understanding of intelligence.
Except that raw unadjusted IQ scores for even the "hardest" and supposedly most culturally unbiased test (Raven's Progressive Matrices) have consistently shown a secular gain of about one standard deviation over 30-to-40 years, due to the so-called Flynn Effect; with much of it concentrated at the low end. The whole notion that these tests simply measure some kind of purely "innate" ability is highly implausible to say the least; even more so when you compare across different cultural subgroups and even totally different countries.
Not to mention that any test of “innate” ability should not be affected by training or practice, but all known tests of supposed innate ability are. Even Binet (yes, the guy who intended the IQ test) found substantial practice effects; these effects were replicated by Gibson (1969).
It's obviously both genetic and environmental. You can limit people with a detrimental environment (extreme example - inflicting brain damage) but cant improve them beyond their their natural ceiling. And yes, tests don't purely measure that innate ceiling.
> It's obviously both genetic and environmental. You can limit people with a detrimental environment (extreme example - inflicting brain damage) but cant improve them beyond their their natural ceiling.
The question besides the obvious is how close to their ceiling the average human is (or even the 90th percentile). Because the entire discourse about “ceiling” implies that people are somewhat limited by their ceiling. But if 90% of the people are plateauing at 30% of their ceiling because of environmental factors, it makes little sense to talk about the ceiling at all.
