Showing posts with label political correctness makes you stupid. Show all posts
Showing posts with label political correctness makes you stupid. Show all posts

August 3, 2010

"Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the “R” Word to Push the Obama Agenda"

From my column in VDARE.com:
In  George Orwell’s novel 1984, the Ministry of Truth was hard at work on the creation of  Newspeak, a new language to intended replace English by 2050. Orwell explained:
“The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [English Socialism], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”

Fortunately, Orwell’s novel was not itself written in Newspeak, because it would be hideously boring: “Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all”.

Newspeak was carefully designed to make its speakers stupider:
“A heretical thought … should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.”

And, of course, thought—at least thought of any complexity—is indeed highly dependent upon words, especially published words.

Words are central to political battles, not only because they are necessary for rational thought, but also because they can obliterate rational thought. They can take on emotional associations from past victories and defeats, developing magical, incantatory powers.

For example, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the term “un-American” was highly useful to politicians who wielded it.

Yet, today, it is seldom used by conservatives. Now, “un-American” is mostly a term used by liberals, who brandish it less as a logical contention than as a symbol of their triumph in the culture war over what is remembered about Communists in the U.S.

Here are some recent examples from Google News:
“Not only would removing birthright citizenship be cruel, it would also be fundamentally un-American” -- Ezra Klein of the Washington Post

“Most Democrats hailed the decision, saying Arizona's SB 1070 was ‘un-American and unconstitutional…’” -- Politico

“New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says it would be un-American to investigate a mosque that is planned for construction near where the World Trade Center once stood” -- AP

“Rangel: Resigning now would be un-American” -- The Hill

But in the Newspeak reigning in America today, no word has more totemic power to suppress rigorous thinking than “racism.”

The intellectual sophistication of today’s conventional thinking about race is at the Newspeak level. To label your opponent a racist is to declare him, in Newspeak's useful term, a “doubleplusungoodthinker.” And what more needs to be said? As Orwell put it:
“But the special function of certain Newspeak words, of which oldthink was one, was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them. … In Newspeak it was seldom possible to follow a heretical thought further than the perception that it was heretical: beyond that point the necessary words were nonexistent.”

To accuse someone of “racism” is no longer to express any particular conception, but instead merely to declare your victim a loser and yourself a winner.

Contemporary uses of the word “racism” are explored in the crisply-written new book Racism, Schmacism: How Liberals Use the “R” Word to Push the Obama Agenda by James Edwards, the young host of the weekly radio talk show The Political Cesspool. 

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

August 2, 2010

Jim Manzi's new article

Jim Manzi, the marketing researcher turned social commentator (not the Jim Manzi who headed Lotus Development Corporation), has a book coming out. Here's a chapter  summarized in his City Journal article:
What Social Science Does—and Doesn’t—Know
Our scientific ignorance of the human condition remains profound.

Just like me, Jim is a marketing researcher turned pundit, so our thinking runs along the similar lines. As a test marketer, he wants to promote more rigorous experimentation in the social sciences, which is fine. 

However, being older, lazier, and stupider than Manzi, I've perhaps gotten a little farther toward grasping some simple underlying principles, since I'm not smart enough to get by without figuring them out. He writes:
Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs ...

Another way of putting the problem is that we have no reliable way to measure counterfactuals—that is, to know what would have happened had we not executed some policy—because so many other factors influence the outcome. This seemingly narrow problem is central to our continuing inability to transform social sciences into actual sciences. Unlike physics or biology, the social sciences have not demonstrated the capacity to produce a substantial body of useful, nonobvious, and reliable predictive rules about what they study—that is, human social behavior, including the impact of proposed government programs.

The missing ingredient is controlled experimentation, which is what allows science positively to settle certain kinds of debates. How do we know that our physical theories concerning the wing are true? In the end, not because of equations on blackboards or compelling speeches by famous physicists but because airplanes stay up. Social scientists may make claims as fascinating and counterintuitive as the proposition that a heavy piece of machinery can fly, but these claims are frequently untested by experiment ...

That all sounds plausible, but I've been a social science stats geek since 1972, when the high school debate topic that year was education, so I'm aware that Manzi's implications are misleading.

First, while experiments are great, correlation studies of naturally occurring data can be extremely useful. Second, a huge number of experiments have been done in the social sciences.

Third, the social sciences have come up with a vast amount of knowledge that is useful, reliable, and nonobvious, at least to our elites.

For example, a few years, Mayor Bloomberg and NYC schools supremo Joel Klein decided to fix the ramshackle admissions process to the gifted schools by imposing a standardized test on all applicants. Blogger Half Sigma immediately predicted that the percentage of Asians and whites admitted would rise at the expense of blacks and Hispanics, which would cause a sizable unexpected political problem for Bloomberg and Klein. All that has come to pass.

This inevitable outcome should have been obvious to Bloomberg and Klein from a century of social science data accumulation, but it clearly was not obvious to them.

No, the biggest problem with social science research is not methodological; it’s that we just don’t like the findings. The elites of America don’t like what the social sciences have uncovered about, say, crime, education, discrimination, immigration, and so forth.

What we’ve learned are things like:

- IQ matters
- Race matters
– Sex matters
– Class matters
– Heredity matters
– Character matters
– Discipline matters

And, judging by what I read every day, the attitude of the dominant people in America toward this knowledge is mostly fear and loathing. Those who explain how to use the knowledge uncovered by the social sciences are routinely vilified. Men of outstanding character, heroes of the human sciences such as Charles Murray and Arthur Jensen are subjected to massive campaigns of demonization.

In reality, after a century of experimentation and analysis, we know an awful lot about several major human conditions, such as IQ. What we don’t know about IQ is how to intervene to reliably narrow racial gaps in average educational achievement (other than hitting Asian and white kids on the head with a ballpeen hammer).

Much the same is true regarding many other topics. Manzi's article gets better as he gets toward his conclusion:
First, few programs can be shown to work in properly randomized and replicated trials. …

Second, within this universe of programs that are far more likely to fail than succeed, programs that try to change people are even more likely to fail than those that try to change incentives.

And third, there is no magic. Those rare programs that do work usually lead to improvements that are quite modest, compared with the size of the problems they are meant to address or the dreams of advocates.

Given all that, you can readily arrive at my oft-repeated point of view, which is that the one potential government policy that is likely to have reliable major long term effects on social problems, for good or for bad, is immigration. Since government policies can seldom change people, government policy should select immigrants who will likely benefit the current citizens of the nation and keep out those who likely won’t. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

This has been the philosophy of Canada’s immigration system for decades, and it has worked fairly well for them. Yet, advocates of a Canadian-style immigration policy philosophy for America are routinely subjected to Two-Minutes Hates in this country. Thus, social policy discourse in the U.S. makes much less progress than social science research.

July 7, 2010

Is Our Adults Getting Stupider?

See if you can figure out the answer to the mystery posed in the following blog item by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones. Neither Kevin, nor the physics professor he quotes at length, nor Kevin's first 29 commenters can figure it out. Put your solution in my comments below. Kevin blogs:
Is Our Kids Studying? -- Take 2

After I posted a couple of days ago on the subject of whether or not college students are studying less than they used to, I got a long email on the subject from Paul Camp, a physics professor at Spelman University. This is pretty far outside my wheelhouse of expertise, but his take was so interesting that I wanted to repost it here just so that everyone would have a chance to comment on it. Here's what he told me:
I've been engaged in a few conversations about this in the past couple of years. I can offer the following data that correlates with anecdotal evidence from other professors at a variety of institutions.

Since the early 1990's, I have pre and post tested all of my introductory mechanics classes using a research based diagnostic instrument, the Force and Motion Conceptual Evaluation.

My first job out of graduate school was at an unranked tier 4 institution in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Coastal Carolina "University" to be specific. It was the 13th grade. There were a few brilliant students — I've learned that for a variety of reasons you can find exceptional students anywhere — but for the most part the student body was composed of people who were there for financial reasons or because they thought it would be a cool idea to go to school at the beach. The first four pages of our brochure described the beach, not the college. We knew which side our bread was buttered on.

I pretty reliably got 50-60% normalized gains on the FMCE.

Normalized gain is the ratio of how much their scores increased compared to how much they could have increased — (post-pre)/(100-pre). 50-60% is actually pretty stupendous on this particular measure. It means they were typically getting 80-90% of the questions right.

I left that job in a huff. There's a very long story, but the short version is that I was ordered by my dean to give everyone a passing grade and I wouldn't do it. I spent 5.5 years in a research position at Georgia Tech before coming to Spelman.

Spelman is a top 75 liberal arts college, according to US News, and top 10 according to the Washington Monthly. My personal impression of the students is that the average is generally much higher than it was at Coastal. These are students who can think around a few corners. Also, since they are able to cross register in some considerably easier classes at other AUC institutions, I tend to get classes of students who are there because they choose to be there and are therefore more engaged and thoughtful about their efforts.

I think I'm at least as good an instructor as I used to be, and probably a lot better. I know quite a bit more about developmental psychology and cognitive science as a result of my job at Georgia Tech and I think that improves my instruction considerably.

And yet, in a good year I get about 20-30% normalized gains.

I don't really know what is different but something clearly is.

Right now, I'm blaming No Child Left Behind, but that is less because of data than of general suspicion of high stakes testing. In fact, I am also now quite skeptical of pre/post testing (I could send you a research paper on that if you're interested) but not enough that I can account for the difference in the data. ...
I can't really say that this is a correct account. I can say that many faculty I have spoken with have expressed similar observations without me prompting them, but the difference between me and them is that I have data. I know what I used to get at a crappy college with surfer students, and I know what I now get at a top tier college with highly engaged students, and it isn't consistent with ought to be happening, all other things being equal.

So that's my data point. I suppose I could always have had some kind of mental excursion and become a bad teacher without knowing it, but I don't think so and my students don't think so either, and neither do my peers in and out of the physics department. So I'm going to provisionally discount that explanation.

I left Coastal in 1998. I started at Spelman in 2004. You tell me what changed during that time frame.

Class, this mystery has baffled the best minds of Mother Jones magazine. Do you have any ideas how to solve this conundrum? Put them in the comments below.

June 7, 2010

Michael Chabon on Jewish IQ

My new VDARE.com column is a response to an essay by novelist Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, on Jewish intelligence. Here are a few excerpts from Chabon's eloquent Chosen, but not Special:
“GAZA Flotilla Drives Israel Into a Sea of Stupidity” declared the Israeli daily Haaretz on Monday, as though announcing the discovery of some hitherto unknown body of water. Citizens of other nations have long since resigned themselves, of course, to sailing those crowded waters, but for Israelis — and, indeed, for Jews everywhere — this felt like headline news.

Regardless of whether we chose in the end to condemn or to defend the botched raid on the Mavi Marmara, for Jews the first reaction was shock, confusion, as we tried to get our heads around what appeared to be an unprecedented display of blockheadedness. Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic cast his startled regard back along the length of Jewish history looking for a parallel example of arrant stupidity and found, instead, what Jews around the world have long been accustomed to find in contemplating ourselves and that history: an inborn, half-legendary agility of intellect, amounting almost to a magical power.

“There is a word in Yiddish, seichel, which means wisdom, but it also means more than that: It connotes ingenuity, creativity, subtlety, nuance,” Mr. Goldberg wrote. “Jews have always needed seichel to survive in this world; a person in possession of a yiddishe kop, a ‘Jewish head,’ is someone who has seichel, someone who looks for a clever way out of problems, someone who understands that the most direct way — blunt force, for instance — often represents the least elegant solution, a person who can foresee consequences of his actions.”

This is nonsense, of course — nonsense to which, I hasten to assure Mr. Goldberg, I have always avidly subscribed. In the aggregate, Jews may or may not be smarter than other groups, but the evidence in favor of granting some kind of inherent or culturally determined supernatural abilities of seichel to the yiddishe kop certainly cannot be found in our history, which is littered as thickly with the individual and collective acts of blockheads as that of any other nation or people or tribe.

... As a Jewish child I was regularly instructed, both subtly and openly, that Jews, the people of Maimonides, Albert Einstein, Jonas Salk and Meyer Lansky, were on the whole smarter, cleverer, more brilliant, more astute than other people. And, duly, I would look around the Passover table, say, at the members of my family, and remark on the presence of a number of highly intelligent, quick-witted, shrewd, well-educated people filled to bursting with information, explanations and opinions on a diverse range of topics. In my tractable and vainglorious eagerness to confirm the People of Einstein theory, my gaze would skip right over — God love them — any counterexamples present at that year’s Seder.

This is why, to a Jew, it always comes as a shock to encounter stupid Jews. Philip Roth derived a major theme of “Goodbye, Columbus” from the uncanny experience. The shock comes not because we have never encountered any stupid Jews before — Jews are stupid in roughly the same proportion as all the world’s people — but simply because from an early age we have been trained, implicitly and explicitly, to ignore them. ...

It was this endlessly repeated yet never remembered shock of encountering our own stupidity as a people — stupidity now enacted by the elite military arm of a nation whose history we have long written, in our accustomed way, by pushing to the endnotes all counterexamples to the myth of seichel — that one heard filtering through so much of the initial response among Jews to the raid on the Mavi Marmara.

This sense of widespread shock at Israel’s blockheadedness in the aftermath of the raid seemed not to be confined, in fact, to Jews. Even Israel’s sternest critics will concede that the Jewish state knows how to go about the business of survival in a hostile world with intelligence, ingenuity, creativity, flexibility and preternatural control over the levers of chance and diplomacy (not to mention the global economic system and the news media).

Indeed anti-Semites and the enemies of Israel have often been found among the most devout believers in the myth of seichel, of a special — O.K., a diabolical — Jewish intelligence.

For we Jews are not, it turns out, entirely comfortable living with the consequences of this myth, as becomes clear from the squirming and throat-clearing that take place among us whenever some non-Jew pipes up with his own observations about how clever and smart we are in our yiddishe kops. These include people like the political scientist Charles Murray, author of an influential essay titled “Jewish Genius,” or Kevin B. MacDonald, a psychology professor at California State University at Long Beach who argues that Jews essentially undertook a centuries-long program of self-breeding, selecting for traits of intelligence, guile and skill at calculation, as a kind of evolutionary adaptation to the buffetings of history and exile.

Such claims, in mouths of gentiles, are a disturbing echo of the charges of the pogrom-stokers, the genocidalists, the Father Coughlins, who come to sharpen their knives against the same grindstone of generalization on which we Jews have long polished the magnifying lenses of our self-regard. The man who praises you for your history of accomplishment may someday seek therein the grounds for your destruction.

This is, of course, the foundational ambiguity of Judaism and Jewish identity: the idea of chosenness, of exceptionalism, of the treasure that is a curse, the blessing that is a burden, of the setting apart that may presage redemption or extermination. To be chosen has been, all too often in our history, to be culled.

You can read my response here.

June 5, 2010

French Interior Minister found guilty of Gallic cynicism

From the BBC:

A French court has fined Interior Minister Brice Hortefeux for making racist comments about a young party activist of Algerian origin.
The court fined Mr Hortefeux 750 euros (£622) and ordered that he pay 2,000 euros to an anti-racism group.

... Mr Hortefeux was joking with a small group of activists from the ruling UMP party in south-west France. 
Immediately before Mr Hortefeux's controversial remark, one activist is heard saying: "Amin is a Catholic. He eats pork and drinks alcohol."

Mr Hortefeux then says: "Ah, well that won't do at all. He doesn't match the prototype."

A woman is then heard to say: "He is one of us... he is our little Arab."

The interior minister then says: "We always need one. It's when there are lots of them that there are problems."

The court ruled that his remark was "incontestably offensive, if not contemptuous".

The court did not issue a criminal conviction, judging that Mr Hortefeux had not intended the comments to be heard in public.

It found him guilty instead of the lesser offence of racial insult, AFP news agency reported.

What would such great French heroes as Voltaire and Captain Renault say?

May 22, 2010

More on Jonathan Katz

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Prof enjoys debate, rocking the boat
Bill McClellan

Had Washington University professor Jonathan Katz been nominated to the Civil Rights Commission, I would understand why some people might point to his writings and object to the nomination. In particular, I would understand why his 1999 essay defending homophobia might be a cause of concern.

But he wasn't asked to join the Civil Rights Commission. He was asked to join a group of scientists working on the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

What do his thoughts about sexuality have to do with that?

Nothing is the correct answer.

I should be upfront about this. I have known Katz for a long time — our kids went to grade school together — and I have always admired him. He is a man of strong opinions, and he does not care a whit if those opinions are popular.
I've written about him once. That was in 2002. Washington University had decreed that reporters needed official permission to conduct an interview on campus. According to the new guidelines, a reporter who wanted to conduct an interview on campus was required to notify the Public Affairs office, and a person from that office would have the right to monitor the interview.
 
So Katz called and asked if I wanted to break the rules. Of course, I said. I went to his office and interviewed him. He wanted to talk about his bosses.

"They're control freaks," he said. "This kind of policy is something you'd expect from a corporation. I have nothing against corporations, but a university is a fundamentally different thing."

He dismissed the notion of a closed campus.

"A university is a small town with public spaces open to all. There is supposed to be a free flow of ideas and people. If you don't have those things, you don't have a real university. I've done a fair amount of consulting for the defense industry, and I've seen more freedom of thought, freedom to disagree, in the defense establishment than I see here."

By the way, the door to his office was decorated with an American flag. That's unusual in the physics department. Heck, it's unusual anywhere in the university. Which is, I suspect, part of the reason he did it.

On the other hand, Katz represents something quintessentially American — a zest for engaging in the battle of ideas.

Over the years, he has often disagreed with stuff I've written. He lets me know.

His wife, Lily, is much the same. When my daughter was in fifth grade with one of the Katz kids, the class was studying Ireland. I asked a friend who had been in the Irish Republican Army to speak to the class. Lily did not share my sympathy for the IRA. But she was not against my friend speaking. She just disagreed with his views and wanted to air those differences.

There is a big difference between disagreeing with somebody and wanting to silence that person. Vigorous debate used to be considered the hallmark of a healthy democracy. We're losing our ability to engage in a debate.  

May 19, 2010

Oil spill "Dream Teamer" canned by Obama for not being PC

Glad to see the Obama Administration has its priorities straight in dealing with the oil spill crisis.

From an AP article in the LA Times:
A St. Louis scientist who was among a select group picked by the Obama administration to pursue a solution to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has been removed from the group because of writings on his website, the U.S. Energy Department confirmed Wednesday.

Washington University physics professor Jonathan Katz was one of five top scientists chosen by the Department of Energy and attended meetings in Houston last week.

Though considered a leading scientist, Katz's website postings often touch on social issues. Some of those writings have stirred anger in the past and include postings defending homophobia and questioning the value of racial diversity efforts. ...
"Dr. Chu has spoken with dozens of scientists and engineers as part of his work to help find solutions to stop the oil spill," a statement from the Energy Department said. "Some of Professor Katz's controversial writings have become a distraction from the critical work of addressing the oil spill. Professor Katz will no longer be involved in the Department's efforts." ...

In a website posting titled "In Defense of Homophobia," Katz wrote about the AIDS epidemic.

"The human body was not designed to share hypodermic needles, it was not designed to be promiscuous, and it was not designed to engage in homosexual acts," he wrote. "Engaging in such behavior is like riding a motorcycle on an icy road without a helmet. It may be possible to get away with it for a while, and a few misguided souls may get a thrill out of doing so, but sooner or later (probably sooner) the consequences will be catastrophic. Lethal diseases spread rapidly among people who do such things."

The stuffing down the Memory Hole of the primary cause of the AIDS epidemic in America in the 1980s -- the gay liberation in the 1970s -- is one of the most audacious accomplishments in the history of rewriting history. From what I hear now, you would think the AIDS epidemic broke out in Provo and Peoria, rather than in West Hollywood, Castro Street, and Greenwich Village.
In another posting, Katz questioned the value of diversity efforts.

"The diversity movement is racist at its core," he writes. "When dealing with people we should be concerned with intellect, talent, character and accomplishment. People aren't dogs or cattle; race matters only to racists."

A.J. Bockelman, director of PROMO, a St. Louis-bases advocacy group for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, applauded the decision to remove Katz.

"It's disappointing at a time like this that when all Americans need to come together and focus on relief efforts and recovery efforts in the Gulf, someone divisive was placed in a position of power," Bockelman said.

Isn't it great that we finally have a "pro-science" Democratic Administration?

May 2, 2010

The Rage of the Privileged Classes

Here's the opening of my new VDARE.com column:
Freud noted that human beings like to "project"  their own undesirable feelings onto others. The wisdom of that observation became clearer than ever last week as a mounting hysteria infected the elites of the English-speaking world. The rage of the privileged classes was on full display as they projected onto citizens their own vices: ignorance, resentment, and irrational anger.

- The signing of the Arizona immigration law, followed by the slow realization from opinion polls that it was broadly popular, elicited paroxysms of hatred for the American people from the Establishment.
For example, veteran New York Times columnist Frank Rich’s May 1 op-ed included a full helping of the standard code words that enraged members of the media traditionally use to denounce voters who aren’t obeying their rightful masters: "angry," "virus," "hysteria," "vicious," "bigoted," "apoplexy," "slimed," "snarling," "notorious," "incendiary," "rage" and so forth and so on.
- Meanwhile, in Britain, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called a cheeky voter "bigoted" after she dared question his immigration policy. 

- And in Massachusetts, , the dean of the Harvard Law School, Martha Minow, one of President Obama’s oldest confidantes, denounced one of her own students for writing an email expressing open-mindedness on the forbidden topic of race and IQ.

Bizarre as it may seem, the potential Supreme Court nominee publicly condemned a private message to a few acquaintances written six months ago—even though it had only been dug up and leaked to the Black Law Students Association by a romantic rival in a petty catfight!

In other words, citizens are winning the debates, so elites would rather demonize than discuss.

Yet, as comical as the last week has been, the power of elites to shut down freedom of speech, to ostracize, to impose dumb dogmas as loyalty tests, must never be underestimated.

Arizona’s SB1070 and immigration: by the end of a tumultuous week, Democratic Party leaders were in disarray as their efforts to turn the illegal immigration controversy into a racial struggle between Hispanics and whites had badly backfired.

The Democrats have long tried to goad Latino voters into viewing enforcement of the laws as a racial insult. But there has never been overwhelming evidence that the average Hispanic-American citizen really shares the Latino Democratic elites’ obsession with opening the border.

For example, in 2006 Arizona voters passed—over the usual bipartisan opposition of the states’ elites—Proposition 200, which required individuals to furnish proof of citizenship when applying for benefits or to vote. Latinos gave it 47 percent support. That’s far more than you would expect from elite assumptions that Hispanic voters' race makes them mindlessly biased in favor of illegal immigration.

Read the whole thing there and comment upon it here.

April 28, 2010

Harvard Law student crimethinks

A woman who is a third year Harvard Law School student and in line for federal clerkships, is in trouble for sending out the following email (From "Harvard Law School 3L's Racist Email Goes National" on Above the Law:
… I just hate leaving things where I feel I misstated my position.

I absolutely do not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. I could also obviously be convinced that by controlling for the right variables, we would see that they are, in fact, as intelligent as white people under the same circumstances. The fact is, some things are genetic. African Americans tend to have darker skin. Irish people are more likely to have red hair. (Now on to the more controversial:)

Women tend to perform less well in math due at least in part to prenatal levels of testosterone, which also account for variations in mathematics performance within genders. This suggests to me that some part of intelligence is genetic, just like identical twins raised apart tend to have very similar IQs and just like I think my babies will be geniuses and beautiful individuals whether I raise them or give them to an orphanage in Nigeria. I don’t think it is that controversial of an opinion to say I think it is at least possible that African Americans are less intelligent on a genetic level, and I didn’t mean to shy away from that opinion at dinner.

I also don’t think that there are no cultural differences or that cultural differences are not likely the most important sources of disparate test scores (statistically, the measurable ones like income do account for some raw differences). I would just like some scientific data to disprove the genetic position, and it is often hard given difficult to quantify cultural aspects. One example (courtesy of Randall Kennedy) is that some people, based on crime statistics, might think African Americans are genetically more likely to be violent, since income and other statistics cannot close the racial gap. In the slavery era, however, the stereotype was of a docile, childlike, African American, and they were, in fact, responsible for very little violence (which was why the handful of rebellions seriously shook white people up). Obviously group wide rates of violence could not fluctuate so dramatically in ten generations if the cause was genetic, and so although there are no quantifiable data currently available to “explain” away the racial discrepancy in violent crimes, it must be some nongenetic cultural shift. Of course, there are pro-genetic counterarguments, but if we assume we can control for all variables in the given time periods, the form of the argument is compelling.

In conclusion, I think it is bad science to disagree with a conclusion in your heart, and then try (unsuccessfully, so far at least) to find data that will confirm what you want to be true. Everyone wants someone to take 100 white infants and 100 African American ones and raise them in Disney utopia and prove once and for all that we are all equal on every dimension, or at least the really important ones like intelligence. I am merely not 100% convinced that this is the case.

Please don’t pull a Larry Summers on me,

Of course, the Black Law Students Associations are attempting to pull a Larry Summers on her and deny her a clerkship.

April 12, 2010

Not Clear on the Concept

Adam Liptak of the New York Times is confidently confused in the approved manner:

But Justice Stevens cuts a lone figure on the current court in one demographic category: He is the only Protestant.

His retirement, which was announced on Friday, makes possible something that would have been unimaginable a generation or two ago — a court without a single member of the nation’s majority religion.

“The practical reality of life in America is that religion plays much less of a role in everyday life than it did 50 or 100 years ago,” said Geoffrey R. Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago. Adding a Protestant to the court, he said, would not bring an important element to its discussions.

“These days,” said Lee Epstein, a law professor at Northwestern and an authority on the court, “we’ve moved to other sources of diversity,” including race, gender and ethnicity. ...

It is hard to imagine the court without a black justice, for instance, and it may well turn out that Justice Sonia Sotomayor is sitting in a new “Hispanic seat.” It would surprise no one if President Obama tried to increase the number of women on the court to three. Not so long ago, there was similar casual talk, but of a “Catholic seat” or a “Jewish seat” on the Supreme Court. Today, the court is made up of six Roman Catholics, two Jews and Justice Stevens.

It was not ever thus. Presidents once looked at two main factors in picking justices.

“Historically, religion was huge,” said Professor Epstein of Northwestern. “It was up there with geography as the key factor.”...

The short list of candidates to succeed Justice Stevens includes two Jews, Solicitor General Elena Kagan and Judge Merrick B. Garland of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and one Protestant, Judge Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago.

But it is unlikely that religious affiliation will play a meaningful role in the decision making. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that society is past worrying about a nominee’s religious affiliations.

Is it really that hard to grasp that in this context, terms like "Catholic," "Jew," and "Protestant" are primarily ethnic terms, not religious ones?

Does Justice Ginsburg, for example, keep kosher? Is that what it takes to be religiously Jewish? Who knows?

What everybody does know is that she is ethnically Jewish.

Henry Ford and General Patton believed that they were reincarnated, but that didn't make them ethnically Hindu (at least not in this lifetime). Everybody considers them ethnically Protestant, and rightfully so.

That's not a difficult distinction to comprehend. Obviously, there can be a gray area between ethnicity and religion (they're fuzzy sets), but to ignore the very existence of the concept of ethnicity is to act in a fundamentally obtuse manner.

Once you recognize that "Protestant" is an ethnic category as well as a religious one, however, then a potential lack of Protestant representation on the Supreme Court could be recognized as a question of the Supreme Court's ethnic diversity and ethnic representativeness, issues that are highly fashionable these days.

Sonia Sotomayor, for example, was repeatedly lauded for adding ethnic diversity.

So, why shouldn't a potential lack of Protestant ethnics on the Court be considered a question of ethnic diversity?

Of course, when people use the word "diverse" they actually mean, as Orwell might say: But some nominees are more diverse than others. Ethnic diversity for me but not for thee. But, when talking about the Supreme Court, it's hard to come up with a validation for this bias that sounds just.

So, we see a lot of Liptak's type of strategic muddleheadedness to confuse onlookers. It's another version of the old "Einstein was Jewish / Trotsky wasn't Jewish" muddle in which Einstein, a good guy, is Jewish because he was ethnically Jewish, but Trotsky, a bad guy, wasn't Jewish because he wasn't religiously Jewish. It's logically okay to make either argument (although not both), but, obviously, you need to note the distinction between ethnicity and religion and grasp that others might have logical reasons for not agreeing with your categorizations.

Is this really that hard?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 9, 2009

Political correctness strikes again

Peter Brimelow points to this Telegraph article:
Fort Hood gunman had told US military colleagues that infidels should have their throats cut

By Nick Allen in Fort Hood

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the gunman who killed 13 at America's Fort Hood military base, once gave a lecture to other doctors in which he said non-believers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats.

He also told colleagues at America's top military hospital that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell who should be set on fire. The outburst came during an hour-long talk Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, gave on the Koran in front of dozens of other doctors at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in Washington DC, where he worked for six years before arriving at Fort Hood in July.

Colleagues had expected a discussion on a medical issue but were instead given an extremist interpretation of the Koran, which Hasan appeared to believe.

It was the latest in a series of "red flags" about his state of mind that have emerged since the massacre at Fort Hood, America's largest military installation, on Thursday. ...

Fellow doctors have recounted how they were repeatedly harangued by Hasan about religion and that he openly claimed to be a "Muslim first and American second."

One Army doctor who knew him said a fear of appearing discriminatory against a Muslim soldier had stopped fellow officers from filing formal complaints. [Emphasis added]

Meanwhile, Dennis Mangan points to an NYT article that begins:

KILLEEN, Tex. — Leaders of the vibrant Muslim community here ...

Here's the UPI article, "Bush had called for laxer airport security" that I wrote on the evening of September 11, 2001 pointing out that George W. Bush had denounced airport security personnel for paying more attention to Arabs and Muslim fliers, and then had had Norman Mineta's Transportation Department start a program to stomp out airport profiling.

Also, we now know that the airport ticket agent who checked in Mohammed Atta on the morning of 9/11/2001 said to himself, as he told Oprah in 2005:
"I got an instant chill when I looked at [Atta]. I got this grip in my stomach and then, of course, I gave myself a political correct slap."

Michael Touhey told a reporter:

Then Tuohey went through an internal debate that still haunts him.

"I said to myself, 'If this guy doesn't look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.' Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it's not nice to say things like this," he said. "You've checked in hundreds of Arabs and Hindus and Sikhs, and you've never done that. I felt kind of embarrassed."

It wasn't just Atta's demeanor that caught Tuohey's attention.

"When I looked at their tickets, they had first-class, one-way tickets - $2,500 tickets. Very unusual," he said. "I guess they're not coming back. Maybe this is the end of their trip."

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 13, 2009

Lahn: "Let's celebrate human genetic diversity"

From Nature, October 8, 2009:
Let’s celebrate human genetic diversity

Science is finding evidence of genetic diversity among groups of people as well as among individuals. This discovery should be embraced, not feared, say Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein.

A growing body of data is revealing the nature of human genetic diversity at increasingly finer resolution. It is now recognized that despite the high degree of genetic similarities that bind humanity together as a species, considerable diversity exists at both individual and group levels (see box, page 728). The biological significance of these variations remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that genetically based biological variation exists at non-trivial levels not only among individuals but also among groups? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about human diversity. Here, we argue for the moral position that genetic diversity, from within or among groups, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘biological egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave historical injustices, including genocide that were committed with the support of pseudo scientific understandings of group diversity. The racial-hygiene theory promoted by German geneticists Fritz Lenz, Eugene Fischer and others during the Nazi era is one notorious example of such pseudoscience. Biological egalitarianism is the view that no or almost no meaningful genetically based biological differences exist among human groups, with the exception of a few superficial traits such as skin colour. Proponents of this view seem to hope that, by promoting biological sameness, discrimination against groups or individuals will become groundless.

We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if significant group diversity were established, discrimination might thereby be justified. We reject this position. Equality of opportunity and respect for human dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding human differences no matter how big or small. We also think that biological egalitarianism may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data.

Many people may acknowledge the possibility of genetic diversity at the group level, but see it as a threat to social cohesion. Some scholars have even called for a halt to research into the topic or sensitive aspects of it, because of potential misuse of the information. Others will ask: if information on group diversity can be misused, why not just focus on individual differences and ignore any group variation? We strongly affirm that society must guard vigilantly against any misuse of genetic information, but we also believe that the best defence is to take a positive attitude towards diversity, including that at the group level. We argue for our position from two perspectives: first, that the understanding of group diversity can benefit research and medicine, and second, that human genetic diversity as a whole, including group diversity, greatly enriches our species.

I think a third argument is even more important: all truths are connected to all other truths, so if you aren't allowed to think about a major truth, much of the rest of your thinking will be faulty.

For example, say Lahn was a physicist writing to undermine the ban on mentioning gravity in physics classes:
Let’s celebrate gravity!

Science is finding evidence of gravity. This discovery should be embraced, not feared, say Bruce T. Lahn and Lanny Ebenstein.

A growing body of data is revealing the existence of gravity. It is now recognized that despite the many situations in which gravity is not relevant, in many others it is important (see box, page 728). The physical significance of gravity remains to be explored fully. But enough evidence has come to the fore to warrant the question: what if scientific data ultimately demonstrate that gravity exists at non-trivial levels? In our view, the scientific community and society at large are ill-prepared for such a possibility. We need a moral response to this question that is robust irrespective of what research uncovers about gravity. Here, we argue for the moral position that gravity, from within or between planets, should be embraced and celebrated as one of humanity’s, not to mention the Solar System's, chief assets.

The current moral position is a sort of ‘mass egalitarianism’. This dominant position emerged in recent decades largely to correct grave astronomical injustices, such as the Moon's subordinate status relative to the Earth. Similarly, gravity has been used to drop rocks on enemies, to pour burning oil on the besiegers of castles, and to chop off heads with the guillotine. Also, gravity has been misunderstood by scientists in the past, such as Aristotle. Mass egalitarianism is the view that the Moon doesn't really go around the Earth because the Earth has more mass than the Moon, it just looks that way to ill-informed, hate-filled observers who haven't been adequately educated in modern sensitivities about mass equality. Proponents of this view hope that, by promoting a belief in mass sameness, the Moon will cease orbiting around the Earth and both will hover motionlessly relative to each other in complete equality.

We believe that this position, although well intentioned, is illogical and even dangerous, as it implies that if you stepped off the edge of the Grand Canyon, you'd just hover in the air. We reject this position. Equality of respect for planetary and subplanetary dignity should be humankind’s common aspirations, notwithstanding planetary differences in mass no matter how big or small. We also think that the nonexistence of gravity may not remain viable in light of the growing body of empirical data.

Indeed.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 25, 2009

Bouchard on Groupthink

Nicholas Wade on John Tierney's NYT blog writes:

“Academics, like teenagers, sometimes don’t have any sense regarding the degree to which they are conformists.”

So says Thomas Bouchard, the Minnesota psychologist known for his study of twins raised apart, in a retirement interview with Constance Holden in the journal Science.

Journalists, of course, are conformists too. So are most other professions. There’s a powerful human urge to belong inside the group, to think like the majority, to lick the boss’s shoes, and to win the group’s approval by trashing dissenters.

The strength of this urge to conform can silence even those who have good reason to think the majority is wrong. You’re an expert because all your peers recognize you as such. But if you start to get too far out of line with what your peers believe, they will look at you askance and start to withdraw the informal title of “expert” they have implicitly bestowed on you. Then you’ll bear the less comfortable label of “maverick,” which is only a few stops short of “scapegoat” or “pariah.” ...

The academic monocultures referred to by Dr. Bouchard are the kind of thing that sabotages scientific creativity....

What’s wrong with consensuses is not the establishment of a majority view, which is necessary and legitimate, but the silencing of skeptics. “We still have whole domains we can’t talk about,” Dr. Bouchard said, referring to the psychology of differences between races and sexes.

The 100 or so comments are pretty amusing since only one (mine) picks up what Bouchard and Wade are actually primarily talking about -- the crushing of James Watson, Larry Summers, and the like. Everybody else rushes off to talk about global warming or Kuhn v. Lakatos or whatever they haven't shoved down the memory hole.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 15, 2009

And so it begins ...

From a writer's perspective, the late Daniel Seligman's Keeping Up column in Fortune was a print forerunner of the blog in that it generally consisted of multiple items of variable length. The items presumably had to add up to a fixed number of word for each issue, but the individual postings didn't have to be of any length, and sometimes consisted merely of a quote from somebody else with a funny title.

This feature of blogging -- no minimum or maximum length per post -- helps many people overcome the writer's block associated with the feeling that you'll never be able to come up with enough words on a topic to justify a column or that you'll never be able to get your point across in few enough words to fit in a column.

More still timely Seligmania:
December 2, 1991

MORTGAGE MOONSHINE

Confess! According to Barney Frank, the irredeemably liberal Massachusetts Democrat -- with a solid 94% rating from Americans for Democratic Action -- that is what the bankers of America must now do. They should penitently acknowledge they done wrong, and not react to the news "in a wholly defensive, negative way."

As to what the bankers should confess to, opinions vary, but politicians with high ADA ratings seem unanimous in believing that their mortgage-lending departments must now plead guilty to racial discrimination. Evidence of their bias is said to lie in the recent Federal Reserve study showing that mortgage applications are disproportionately turned down when the applicant is black or Hispanic. Even when you control for income level, these groups did far worse than whites applying for mortgages. In the highest income category examined -- one in which the applicants had incomes at least 20% above the average for their metropolitan statistical area -- 21.4% of black applications were turned down, vs. 15.8% for Hispanics and only 8.5% for whites.

Among the Congresspersons screeching loudest about these data have been Bay Stater Joseph P. Kennedy II (ADA rating: 89%) and Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas (100%). "It matters not whether the discrimination is intentional," says Gonzalez, chairman of the House Banking Committee. "Discrimination by ignorance is just as . . . destructive as discrimination by design." Gonzalez and Kennedy introduced the legislation requiring the Fed to compile mortgage-rejection data with breakouts for race and income, which is possibly why they think the figures are so compelling.

The babble over the Fed study has been bizarre on two counts. First, you need a lot more than income data to establish whether mortgage applicants are creditworthy. At a minimum, you would also want data on their credit histories, employment records, and savings. (A 1983 survey by the Fed showed that on average white families have four times the assets of black families.) One hilarious undercurrent at the marathon October 21 press conference announcing the findings was the effort of Federal Reserve Governor John LaWare and others onstage to (a) keep reminding the assembled media folk of these critical omissions while (b) still earnestly trying to represent that the final report was somehow or other quite useful.

Weirder still has been the deafening silence in the media and Congress about another matter: the data on Asian-Americans, whose mortgage applications were also studied by the Fed. It turns out that rejection rates for Asian-Americans were lower than those for whites. Taking together applications at all income levels for mortgages to buy homes, we find that whites had rejection rates of 13.8%, Asian-Americans of 12.9%.

How does that fit into a discrimination-based explanation of the different rejection rates? We called Gonzalez's office demanding (politely) an answer to this question. His office said he is still studying the data. The young lady from Kennedy's office got back to us with a formal statement incorporating the thought that "Asians are repeatedly rejected for mortgage loans at higher rates than whites." We noted that the data said otherwise, at which point she began yalking about certain metropolitan areas where Asians did worse than whites. We were on the verge of pointing out that this implied the existence of still more areas in which they did better than whites but sensed that she might not be able to sell this thought to her boss, as it could only serve to depress him, not to mention his ADA rating.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 12, 2009

"Hate Stats"

To expand up Joe Guzzardi's coinage "hate facts," now we see that the Prime Minister of Britain is on verge of an aneurysm in his rage over the publication in easily-comprehensible form of a few statistics about immigration. From The Times of London:

Statistics chief Karen Dunnell inflames row over foreign workers
ONS highlights figures on jobs for immigrants for the first time

Graphic: imported labour

The UK’s official statistician weighed into the debate about foreign workers yesterday by highlighting the growing numbers of immigrants getting jobs while the British workforce declines.

On the day that figures showed the number of people unemployed at a 12-year high, the Office for National Statistics chose to reveal that the number of foreign workers increased by 175,000 to 2.4 million last year while the number of British workers fell by 234,000 to 27 million.

Karen Dunnell, the National Statistician, sought to focus public attention on the contrasting fortunes of foreign and British workers as the country slipped into recession. Her intervention came as construction workers took part in wildcat strikes at power stations in Nottinghamshire and Kent, angry about jobs going to foreigners.

The ONS, which is charged with collecting data and providing impartial analysis, said that it made the unprecedented release because of the “topicality of the issue”.

Whitehall sources told The Times that ministers were “fizzing” with anger, accusing the ONS of a political act designed to embarrass Gordon Brown over his “British jobs for British workers” soundbite.

MPs warned that the statistics were open to misinterpretation and risked inflaming tensions in many British workplaces.

In January, 73,800 people signed on for jobless benefits, bringing the claimant total to 1.23 million. The number of people out of work reached 1.97 million between October and December, the highest level since August 1997. Jobs were also lost at a record rate. Yesterday the cash-and-carry chain Makro said that 400 workers faced redundancy. The ONS has for years collected details on the origin of those working in Britain. The figures are usually included in the pages of data making up the monthly jobless totals, which yesterday ran to 24 tables. They are also included in quarterly population and migration figures, due out at the end of this month.

Yesterday was the first time that the ONS had highlighted the employment fortunes of foreigners in a separate press release, and the first time it had issued more than one release on unemployment. MPs said that the release, headed “UK-born and non-UK-born employment”, was misleading because many of those born outside the country had since become UK citizens.

The row is the latest dispute between the ONS and the Government over the release of official data. The ONS won independence from the Government last year after claims that ministers were manipulating figures for political advantage.

The figures showed that since the beginning of 1997, the year Labour came to power, the number of foreign-born workers has almost doubled. Over the same period, the number of British-born workers has risen by just 5 per cent to 25.58 million.

However, ministers believe that the figures are meaningless because they fail to distinguish between temporary workers, Europeans and those on indefinite leave to remain.

A senior government source said: “The fact that they highlighted this in this way, in a press release, looks like they are trying to embarrass the Government over the slogan ‘British Jobs for British workers’.”

Keith Vaz, the Labour chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said that he would raise concerns about the release of the figures with the Prime Minister today. “The danger is that such information could be misconstrued or misused by those who do not support the view that Britain should be a diverse and multicultural society,” he said.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

February 10, 2009

Politically Correcticizing Darwin

A featured review, "Charles Darwin, Abolitionist," by Christopher Benfey, a professor of English, in the Feb. 1, 2009 New York Times Sunday Book Review asserts:

Two arresting new books, timed to co­incide with Darwin’s 200th birthday, make the case that his epochal achievement in Victorian England can best be under­stood in relation to events — involving neither tortoises nor finches — on the other side of the Atlantic. Both books confront the touchy subject of Darwin and race head on; both conclude that Darwin, despite the pernicious spread of “social Darwinism” (the notion, popularized by Herbert Spencer, that human society progresses through the “survival of the fittest”), was no racist.

Adrian Desmond and James Moore published a highly regarded biography of Darwin in 1991. The argument of their new book, “Darwin’s Sacred Cause,” is bluntly stated in its subtitle: “How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution.” They set out to overturn the widespread view that Darwin was a “tough-minded scientist” who unflinchingly followed the trail of empirical research until it led to the stunning and unavoidable theory of evolution. This narrative, they claim, is precisely backward. “Darwin’s starting point,” they write, “was the abolitionist belief in blood kinship, a ‘common descent’ ” of all human beings. ...

This is getting American intellectual history confused. The polygenetic theory of human origins tended to appeal to Northern intellectuals, while Southerners didn't have much time for it since the Old Testament clearly lays out a monogenetic history of humanity going back to Adam and Eve, with the races being descended from Noah's various sons.

Darwin did spend a number of pages in The Descent of Man considering whether the races were different species before concluding that the different races were, indeed, just different races. If, however, DNA structure co-discoverer James Watson had mentioned in public some of the evidence that Darwin considers on this question, he wouldn't have been fired. He would have been burned at the stake.

(Here's my 1999 article from the National Post of Toronto: "Darwin's Enemies on the Left: Truth v. Equality.")

It's all muddled in Benfey's head because contemporary dogma insists that anyone who believes there are any difference on average between races is in favor of slavery (which then makes stamping out their ideas a moral necessity -- If Charles Murray, say, is not exposed to nonstop hatred and lies, the Slave Trade will automatically be re-initiated.)

Even Darwin’s courtship of Emma, whom he winningly called the “most interesting specimen in the whole series of vertebrate animals,” is cleverly interwoven with his developing thoughts on “sexual selection,” the aesthetic preference for certain traits, like skin color in humans or plumage in peacocks, that over time leads to those super­ficial variations we mistakenly think of as “racial.”

But what if Darwin’s evidence had led to conclusions that did not support his belief in the unitary origins of mankind? Would he have fudged the data? Desmond and Moore don’t really address the question. One is left with the impression that Darwin was amazingly lucky that his benevolent preconceptions turned out to fit the facts.

In his lively and wide-ranging “Angels and Ages,” Adam Gopnik suggests that when facts and values clash we might live in accordance with our beliefs anyway. “It might be true — there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true — that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science,” he muses. “We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity.” ...

Gopnik is as convinced as Desmond and Moore that Darwin was no kind of racist. “The one thing that you could not read into Darwin’s writings was racism,” he writes.

Have any of these people actually read Darwin's The Descent of Man? If Darwin were alive today, he'd be demonized like James Watson was in 2007. Let's try a few samples:

There is however no doubt that the various races when carefully compared and measured differ much from each other as in the texture of the hair, the relative proportions of all parts of the body, the capacity of the lungs the form, and capacity of the skull, and even in the convolutions of the brain. But it would be an endless task to specify the numerous points of difference The races differ also in constitution in acclimatisation and in liability to certain diseases Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct chiefly as it would appear in their emotional but partly in their intellectual faculties Every one who has had the opportunity of comparison must have been struck with the contrast between the taciturn, even morose, aborigines of S. America and the light-hearted talkative negroes. Link

Darwin was an IQ hawk before the invention of the IQ test:

The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said. Link

The influence of Darwin's younger half-cousin, the much denounced Sir Francis Galton, coiner of the term "eugenics" and author of the 1869 book Hereditary Genius, on Darwin's 1871 Descent of Man is evident just from the index of Darwin's book:

Galton Mr on hereditary genius 28 gregariousness and independence in animals 104 en the struggle between the social and personal impulses 125 on the effects of natural selection on civilised nations 133 on the sterility of sole daughters 135 on the degree of fertility of people of genius 136 on the early marriages of the poor 138 on the ancient Greeks 140 on the Middle Ages 141 on the progress of the United States 142 on South African notions of beauty 579 Gammarus use of the chelae of 268

Link

For example:

With man, we see similar facts in almost every family, and we now know through the admirable labours of Mr Galton that genius, which implies a wonderfully complex combination of high faculties, tends to be inherited, and on the other hand it is too certain that insanity and deteriorated mental powers likewise run in families... Link

And here's Darwin sounding like a cross between Galton, Malthus, and Gregory Clark of 2007's A Farewell to Alms:

We will now look to the intellectual faculties; if in each grade of society the members were divided into two equal bodies the one including the intellectually superior and the other the inferior there can be little doubt that the former would succeed best in all occupations and rear a greater number of children. Even in the lowest walks of life skill and ability must be of some advantage, though in many occupations owing to the great division of labour, a very small one Hence in civilised nations there will be some tendency to an increase both in the number and in the standard of the intellectually able. But I do not wish to assert that this tendency may not be more than counterbalanced in other ways, as by the multiplication of the reckless and improvident, but even to such as these ability must be some advantage. ... When in any nation the standard of intellect and the number of intellectual men have increased we may expect from the law of the deviation from an average that prodigies of genius will, as shewn by Mr Galton. appear somewhat more frequently than before Link

Darwin advanced a theory of group selection:

A tribe including many members who, from possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes; and this would be natural selection. At all times throughout the world tribes have supplanted other tribes and as morality is one important element in their success the standard of morality and the number of well endowed men will thus everywhere tend to rise and increase.

Or:

Natural Selection as affecting Civilised Nations -- I have hitherto only considered the advancement of man from a semi human condition to that of the modern savage But some remarks on the action of natural selection on civilised nations may be worth adding This subject has been ably discussed by ... W.K. Greg and previously by Mr Wallace and Mr Galton. Most of my remarks are taken from these three authors. With savages the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health We civilised men on the other hand do our utmost to check the process of elimination...

Here's a particularly amusing part of The Descent of Man:

"Or as Mr Greg puts the case: "The careless squalid unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits; the frugal foreseeing self respecting ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious, and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy marries late and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts, and in a dozen generations five sixths of the population would be Celts but five sixths of the property of the power of the intellect would belong to the one sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal struggle for existence, it would be the inferior and less favoured race that had prevailed and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults." There are however some checks to this downward tendency ... Link

And Darwin goes on to lay out some Greg Clark-style caveats, but with no apology to the poor Irish.

And how about this?

"The remarkable success of the English as colonists compared to other European nations has been ascribed to their daring and persistent energy, a result which is well illustrated by comparing the progress of the Canadians of English and French extraction; but who can say how the English gained their energy? There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States as well as the character of the people are the results of natural selection for the more energetic, restless, and courageous men from all parts of Europe have emigrated during the last ten or twelve generations to that great country and have there succeeded best. Looking to the distant future, I do not think that the Rev Mr Zincke takes an exaggerated view when he says: "All other series of events as that which resulted in the culture of mind in Greece and that which resulted in the empire of Rome only appear to have purpose and value when viewed in connection with, or rather as subsidiary to, the great stream of Anglo Saxon emigration to the west." Obscure as is the problem of the advance of civilisation, we can at least see that a nation which produced during a lengthened period the greatest number of highly intellectual, energetic, brave, patriotic, and benevolent men would generally prevail over less favoured nations." Link

USA! USA! USA!

On the other hand:

It even appears from what we see -- for instance in parts of S. America -- that a people which may be called civilised, such as the Spanish settlers, is liable to become indolent and to retrograde when the conditions of life are very easy. Link

Ay carumba ...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 31, 2009

They're just not making white supremacists like they used to

The New York Times Editorial Board is enraged at conservative activist Marcus Epstein, denouncing him as a "white supremacist." (See Mr. Epstein's picture at right, which, being a world-class investigative journalist, I was finally able to unearth on MarcusEpstein.com after about 15 seconds of Googling. Maybe if Carlos Slim had given the New York Times another $200 million, the Editors would have had the journalistic resources to find it themselves.)

His thought crime? He put together a press conference on the politics of immigration last week, in which conservative intellectuals and leaders dared to suggest that running more John McCains is not the road to GOP electoral triumph.

As part of its Two Minutes Hate, "The Nativists Are Restless," the NYT's editorial board fulminated:
It included Bay Buchanan, former adviser to Representative Tom Tancredo and sister of Pat, who founded the American Cause and wrote “State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America.” She was joined by James Pinkerton, an essayist and Fox News contributor who, as an aide to the first President Bush, took credit for the racist Willie Horton ads run against Michael Dukakis.

Actually, Jim Pinkerton always gives the credit to Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, for first bringing up Dukakis's Willie Horton problem during the 1988 campaign. He also gives credit to the Pulitzer Prize committee for awarding the Pulitzer to the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune for their 175 stories on Dukakis's prison furlough scandal.
So far, so foul. But even more telling was the presence of Peter Brimelow, a former Forbes editor and founder of Vdare.com, an extremist anti-immigration Web site. It is named for Virginia Dare, the first white baby born in the English colonies, which tells you most of what you need to know. The site is worth a visit. There you can read Mr. Brimelow’s and Mr. Buchanan’s musings about racial dilution and the perils facing white people, and gems like this from Mr. Epstein:
“Diversity can be good in moderation — if what is being brought in is desirable. Most Americans don’t mind a little ethnic food, some Asian math whizzes, or a few Mariachi dancers — as long as these trends do not overwhelm the dominant culture.”
Ahhhh-ooooo-gahhh! Crimethink Alert! Ahhhh-ooooo-gahhh! When it comes to immigration, only extremists call for moderation!

It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.

It is all around us.

Beyond parody ...

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 23, 2009

NYT: Science Proves Obama's Powers Are Miraculous

Now that the Dark Ages of American Science (January 20, 2001-January 19, 2009) are over and we are all basking in the bright light of reason, the New York Times reports that miracles are occurring due to beneficent psychic emanations from Obama's puissant aura:

Study Sees an Obama Effect as Lifting Black Test-Takers

Educators and policy makers, including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, have said in recent days that they hope President Obama’s example as a model student could inspire millions of American students, especially blacks, to higher academic performance.

Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama’s nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.

The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome anxieties about racial stereotypes that had been shown, in earlier research, to lower the test-taking proficiency of African-Americans, the researchers conclude in a report summarizing their results.

“Obama is obviously inspirational, but we wondered whether he would contribute to an improvement in something as important as black test-taking,” said Ray Friedman, a management professor at Vanderbilt University, one of the study’s three authors. “We were skeptical that we would find any effect, but our results surprised us.”

The study has not yet undergone peer review, and two academics who read it on Thursday said they would be interested to see if other researchers would be able to replicate its results.

Dr. Friedman and his fellow researchers, David M. Marx, a professor of social psychology at San Diego State University, and Sei Jin Ko, a visiting professor in management and organizations at Northwestern, have submitted their study for review to The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Dr. Friedman said.

“It’s a very small sample, but certainly a provocative study,” said Ronald F. Ferguson, a Harvard professor who studies the factors that have affected the achievement gap between white and nonwhite students, which shows up on nearly every standardized test. “There is a certainly a theoretical foundation and some empirical support for the proposition that Obama’s election could increase the sense of competence among African-Americans, and it could reduce the anxiety associated with taking difficult test questions.”

Researchers in the last decade assembled university students with identical SAT scores and administered tests to them, discovering that blacks performed significantly poorer when asked at the start to fill out a form identifying themselves by race. The researchers attributed those results to anxiety that caused them to tighten up during exams in which they risked confirming a racial stereotype.

In the study made public on Thursday, Dr. Friedman and his colleagues compiled a brief test, drawing 20 questions from the verbal sections of the Graduate Record Exam, and administering it four times to about 120 white and black test-takers during last year’s presidential campaign.

In total, 472 Americans — 84 blacks and 388 whites — took the exam. Both white and black test-takers ranged in age from 18 to 63, and their educational attainment ranged from high school dropout to Ph.D.

On the initial test last summer, whites on average correctly answered about 12 of 20 questions, compared with about 8.5 correct answers for blacks, Dr. Friedman said. But on the tests administered immediately after Mr. Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, and just after his election victory, black performance improved, rendering the white-black gap “statistically nonsignificant,” he said.

“It’s a nice piece of work,” said G. Gage Kingsbury, a testing expert who is a director at the Northwest Evaluation Association, who read the study on Thursday.

But Dr. Kingsbury wondered whether the Obama effect would extend beyond the election, or prove transitory. “I’d want to see another study replicating their results before I get too excited about it,” he said.

No, this isn't from The Onion.

Funny how Obama personally presiding over the giving away of $100,000,000 or so to improve Chicago school performance as chairman of the Annenberg Chicago Challenge didn't do a damn thing for the test scores of Chicago black students, but his ascent to supreme power, his wonders doth work.

I analyzed the ever-popular urban legend of Stereotype Threat in a 2004 VDARE.com piece called "Occam's Butterknife." Bottom line: it's really easy for "researchers" to depress black students' scores on tests of no importance to the students by giving them hints that they don't want them to work hard on the test.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

January 16, 2009

Why don't they call them "venereal diseases" anymore?

A professor at the Yale Medical School named Sydney Spiesel writes in Slate:

About this time every year, the CDC issues its annual statistical report about sexually transmitted diseases in the United States. The surveillance report for 2007 has just come out (it takes about a year to compile and process the statistics). It is long—almost 170 pages—and, as usual, disquieting. Our uncomfortable feelings about sexuality have caused STDs to be stigmatizing ...

Now, I'm not a doctor, but it's my impression that rather than our "uncomfortable feelings about sexuality" that "have caused STDs to be stigmatizing," it's more the oozing sores.

Later on the good doctor notes, without specifying any facts, "the very different case rates between ethnic groups." He doesn't explain what those differences are, but looking in the government report, I find that it looks like STD rates are quite similar to crime rates in their racial ratios. For example, the CDC says: "In 2007, the gonorrhea rate among black men was 26 times higher than that in white men," although that is anomalously high -- the usual black-white ratio for the various diseases is more like 8 to 1, with the Hispanic to white ratio typically in the 2 or 3 to 1 range, and Asians the same or healthier than whites.

In Slate, Spiesel asks plaintively:

Are the germs really ethnically and geographically prejudiced?

Haven't the germs heard about Obama yet? We live in an era of post-racial transcendence. Get with the times, germs!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Newspeak, updated

Across Difficult Country coins a useful addition to the Orwellian vocabulary:

The deranged babblings of an SPLC apparatchik inspired me to coin the word hatefact. Hatefacts are unquestionable facts about immigrants, blacks, women, homosexualists, et al., that the SPLC and those sharing its ideological inclinations deem “hate” or “hateful” to mention.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer