October 19, 2009

Quarterback statistics

When evaluating groups of quarterbacks, I tend to use the NFL's much maligned "passer rating" statistics. It synthesizes a "quarterback's completion percentage, passing yardage, touchdowns and interceptions" into one number.

There are a lot of problems with it:

- Almost nobody knows how to calculate it. Wikipedia has the formulas here. Hence, nobody knows what a good number is. The NFL average is typically in the low to mid-80s. A rule of thumb is that 100 is excellent.

- Because it includes touchdown passes v. interceptions, which are inherently small sample sizes, it's not terribly stable from year to year. For example, according to passer rating, the sixth best single season of all time was Milt Plum's in 1960 when he threw 21 touchdowns v. only 5 interceptions. Plum was a good quarterback, but that year's passer rating was anomalous. Luck plays a sizable role in a single season's touchdowns and interceptions. Nonetheless, when you aggregate over multiple seasons or across multiple players, the larger sample sizes make the emphasis on touchdown passes and interceptions more reliable. After all, there is a pretty high correlation between them and winning.

- Passer Ratings is a "Pedro Martinez statistic" in that it doesn't give credit for durability. A brilliant but fragile pitcher like Pedro Martinez looks very good in sophisticated statistics like ERA but not quite so great in simple counting statistics like career wins. Similarly, guys who played forever like Dan Marino, Brett Favre, and John Elway don't look quite as good as the guys with shorter careers like Steve Young and Jeff Garcia. (Garcia is an interesting case in that he was a career journeyman -- his statistics might be inflated because he would get plugged in when the situation was ripe for his particular talents and benched when they weren't.) Similarly, Daunte Culpepper, is ranked 11th all-time in career passer rating, but has only managed to start about 9 games per season on average.

On the other hand, passer rating has advantages over simpler qb statistics like yards passing. If you rush for 150 yards per game, you are probably better than somebody who rushes for 100 yards per game, because rushing is debilitating, so there are diminishing marginal returns. On the other hand if you pass for 300 yards per game, you aren't necessarily better than somebody who passes for 200 yards per game. Throwing a football isn't that tiring. Also, although it's less true in today's passing-oriented offenses, but in the past, the big yardages were typically wracked up by quarterbacks who fell behind early and had to mount desperate comeback attempts, often unsuccessful.

Then there are the problems with all current quarterback statistics:

- Quarterbacks are much more dependent on their receivers, running backs, and offensive lines than, say, baseball pitchers are on their teammates, so San Francisco quarterbacks throwing to Jerry Rice, for example, will rate better than guys throwing to people who weren't Jerry Rice.

- There's no home field adjustment like in modern baseball statistics. This goes to the heart of the long-running Peyton Manning vs. Tom Brady dispute. Manning usually has better passer ratings, but he plays his eight home games per season indoors, while Brady plays outdoors in suburban Boston.

Nonetheless, I think history has largely vindicated passer rating. Why? Notice that 12 of the top 15 quarterbacks of all time in career passer rating are currently active. This suggests that it measures pretty accurately the direction that improvements in offensive play are taking football in order to win games.

Other statistics have been invented. For example, Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt looks like a pretty good single number stat based on yards per attempt: It dispenses with completion percentage and augments yards per attempt by adding 20 yards per touchdown pass and subtracting 45 yards per interception. It also subtracts yards lost when sacked.

This has the advantage of making the statistical differences more comprehensible than passer rating. For example, over his career, Peyton Manning's team has averaged a 7.13 yard gain everytime he passed (or was sacked), while his younger brother Eli Manning only averages 5.39 yards. So, if both brothers drop back to throw 30 passes per game, Peyton's team will gain 214 yards and Eli's team only 162 yards. I would guess that Peyton's extra 52 yards is worth somewhere between a field goal and a touchdown more points per game, plus it keeps the other team's offense off the field a little more.

Yet, the results for ANY/A are pretty much the same as for passer rating, though. Steve Young drops from #1 to #3 for career, and Peyton Manning moves up to #1 with 7.13 yards per attempt. (Young doesn't get credit for his rushing yardage, which seems a shame, but that's a tricky thing to account for because a lot of quarterbacks rush mostly on 3rd and 1 quarterback sneaks. If they average 2 yards per carry, they're doing fine, but including that would lower their overall yards per play average. I mean, you don't want to penalize the QBs who are good at sneaks worse than the ones who are no good at sneaks and thus never attempt them. On the other hand, it would be nice to find a way to credit quarterbacks who were genuine rushing threats like Young and Michael Vick.)

The top of the ANY/A list continues to be dominated by active players, with Young, Joe Montana, and Dan Marino the only old-timers in the Top 10.

Among the 29 active quarterbacks on the all-time Adjusted Net Yards per Pass Attempt career list, Culpepper is the highest ranking black quarterback at 12th with an average of 5.97 yards per attempt, Donovan McNabb is at 15th, David Garrard at 16th, Byron Leftwich at 20th, Jason Campbell at 21st, and Michael Vick at 26th (4.91). Some of these guys were good to very good runners, especially when they were younger, so they were probably a little more effective overall than this ranking suggests.

Overall, not too bad, but not at all "the future of football," as was widely hyped as recently as a few years ago.

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

Rush Limbaugh and black quarterbacks

In all the brouhaha over Rush Limbaugh being prevented from buying part of an NFL team, has anybody noticed that his endlessly denounced remark -- the one he actually said in 2003, not the libelous made-up ones we've been hearing lately -- about the media overrating black quarterbacks for political reasons has been largely vindicated?

Six years later, 2009 is turning out to be a bust for black quarterbacks in the NFL. Not a single one is having a good season.

Seven of the 36 most active quarterbacks are black. David Garrard is probably doing best so far: on Sunday, he got Jacksonville back to .500, but he's only #20 in passer rating.

On Sunday, Jason Campbell got benched at halftime by the Redskins. Former #1 draft pick JaMarcus Russell did win a game for Oakland, by beating Donovan McNabb 13-9. Seneca Wallace is back on the bench in Seattle. In Tampa Bay, Byron Leftwich has been replaced by young Josh Johnson, who is 32nd in passer rating.

With 140 yards rushing in six games, Garrard is the only black quarterback with at least 100 yards on the ground 30% of the way into the season.

Meanwhile, white quarterbacks are having a great year, with seven with passer ratings over 100, versus only one at the end of last year, although presumably top end ratings will come down as sample sizes increase and the weather worsens.

You could argue that black quarterbacks did better 20 years ago in 1989, when Warren Moon finished 4th in passer rating and Randall Cunningham 14th.

Overall, it looks like the first half of this decade, 2000-2004, was the peak for black quarterbacks in the NFL, while 2005-2009 has marked a surprising regression.

I have to admit that I wasn't expecting that. I thought they'd gradually get better. Back in 2003, during the first Limbaugh-NFL brouhaha, I wrote in VDARE.com about the emergence of black quarterbacks:

It's been a slow process, however, with frustration on all sides. Football teams are like armies—it takes them a lot of trial and error to figure out how to use a new kind of weapon effectively.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hollywood has already produced a good dramatization of the complicated opportunities and difficulties posed by black quarterbacks: Oliver Stone's 1999 football movie Any Given Sunday. It's not Stone at his best (or worst), but it's a perceptive and fair depiction of the black quarterback issue by a man who gave up all hope of being politically correct years ago.

Dennis Quaid plays the white drop-back quarterback who gets too banged up to play. In desperation, old-school coach Al Pacino replaces him with a young black QB (an undersized Jamie Foxx) who has a chip on his shoulder because, throughout his career, coaches have tried to convert him to other positions.

Foxx doesn't like studying the playbook. He just makes things up as he goes along, with often wonderful (but sometimes disastrous) results. This delights the sportswriters, who declare him "the future of football." It drives Pacino crazy.

Eventually, Pacino and Foxx begin to respect each other's strengths. They reach a compromise. Foxx finally bears down and learns the playbook. Pacino gives him more freedom on the field to make things happen. Together, they win The Big Game.

This Hollywood happy ending will probably eventually come true in NFL, too. Lots of talented men are working hard to make it a reality.

Meanwhile, expect no toleration for those so rude as to point out that the emperor has no cleats.

Well, six years later, my latter prediction is certainly valid, but not my former one.

What happened?

Well, I don't watch enough football to have much of an opinion, but here's a hypothesis. When my older kid played football in a league for 9 and 10 year olds, the coach came out into the huddle and called plays and the teams usually took about two minutes between plays to get themselves organized. Football is just really complicated. The best team in the league just simplified matters by putting their best athlete, a black kid, at quarterback and letting him do whatever he wanted with the ball.

Similarly, whenever my younger kid got roped into playing Madden, a game he never paid much attention to, he'd always pick Michael Vick as his quarterback and just have him run around with the ball, because that was a lot easier than trying to have a quarterback throw to receivers running routes.

From that perspective, all this "future of football" stuff about quarterbacks who can run is backwards: having one player Do It All isn't the future of football, it's the past. You can't stop a great athlete in PeeWee Football, but you can in the NFL. They apply a lot of brainpower to the problem of stopping one man.

No, the future of football is like the present in the NFL, just more so: having all eleven players execute in tandem ever more sophisticated schemes.

Part of the problem is that getting a mobile black quarterback became a quick fix for having a lousy offense. Is your offensive line so porous that a 30 year old white guy would get killed? Put a fast young black guy in at quarterback and let him outrun the defenders. At minimum, it will excite your fans.

After a few years of this, maybe you've finally fixed your offensive line, but now your fast black quarterback is banged up and isn't quite as fast anymore, but he's been confirmed in his instinct to take off with the ball and run rather than to step up into the pocket.

This happens at lower levels, too. If you are a high school or college coach, why try to train a fast black quarterback to be an NFL pocket passer when you can win now by just letting him freelance?

In contrast, the white sideline dads of America with tall, strong sons have given up on basketball, and they don't trust their coaches to take the long view of their sons' potential. So, they are paying out of their own pockets to hire personal quarterbacking tutors. (When USC played Notre Dame this weekend, Matt Barkley of USC said he'd know Jimmy Clausen of Notre Dame for years because they have the same off-season quarterback coach, Steve Clarkson.)

So, the quarterback trends of the last half decade are a triumph of Nurture over Nature., and thus should be celebrated by liberals everywhere. (Of course, it doesn't hurt to have Nature and Nurture together on your side, like the two Super Bowl-winning Manning brothers enjoy.)

October 18, 2009

My new VDARE.com column on Asian voters

From my new column in VDARE.com, once again on last week's Asian voter theme:
I’m continuing to think about how the Republican Party—or, more accurately a generic patriotic party that reflects traditional American values—can win national elections if current immigration policy is not altered and the racial balance of the U.S. continues to be shifted by the federal government. ...

Overall, though, the trend toward East Asians voting Democrat stems largely from Democrats winning in the struggle to be chic among elite whites. East Asians tend to be rather conformist. They take quickly to mouthing a society’s dominant platitudes, which in America are increasingly liberal.

I’m reminded of something that surprised me in the late 1990s. My wife worked with a Korean immigrant lady named (unsurprisingly) Ms. Kim. The poor woman’s husband had died in a car crash a few years before, leaving her with two small children to raise.

I was startled to learn that Ms. Kim referred to herself as a "single mother" rather than as a "widow," which seemed to me to be the more accurate and more respectable term.

But that just showed what an out-of-date fuddy-duddy I was. As a relative newcomer to America in the Age of Oprah, Ms. Kim had noticed what I hadn’t: that it’s now uncool for modern American widows to attempt to distinguish themselves from unwed mothers. That would be insensitive and discriminatory.

This doesn’t mean that, in her heart, Ms. Kim agreed with contemporary American mores. After all she grew up in a culture that stigmatizes illegitimacy as strongly as any in the developed world. In 2007, only 1.6 percent of babies were born out of wedlock in South Korea, versus a staggering 39.7 percent in the U.S. (That’s 72 percent illegitimacy among blacks, 51 percent among Hispanics, 28 percent among whites, and 17 percent among Asians).

But East Asians are used to hypocrisy. If the rich and respectable in America demand certain pro forma declarations, well, that’s a small price to be paid to not be excluded from polite society.

Granted, American hypocrisy is bizarrely inverted—rather than pretending to be better than she is, fashionable Americans want the Widow Kim to pretend to be worse than she is. But if that’s what the socially-influential whites in America say they want to hear, well, lip service is cheap.

Hu’s Rule, invented by journalist Arthur Hu in the 1990s, is that Asians tend to be slightly more conservative than their white neighbors—but they tend to choose liberal white neighbors.

Read the whole thing here and comment upon it below.

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

You don't say!

Steven D. Levitt's and Stephen Dubner's new surefire bestseller ¡SuperFreakonomics! is being widely anathematized for exhibiting signs of heretical doubts about Global Warming or Climate Change or whatever it's called these days.

In his defense, Dubner blogs on the New York Times in Global Warming in SuperFreakonomics: The Anatomy of a Smear:
Yes, it’s an ancient cliché: a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. But it’s still accurate.

Gosh, Steve and Steve, you don't say!

Funny how Levitt became a global celebrity for theorizing in 1999 that legalizing abortion cut crime, even though juvenile homicide rates for teens born in the half decade following legalization were several times higher than for teens born in the half decade preceding legalization, as I pointed out in our debate in Slate in August 1999.

A half dozen years later, he made that theory the centerpiece of Steve's and Steve's Freakonomics despite having no plausible refutation other than it was all based on very complicated statistics that little me wouldn't understand. Then, late in 2005, Boston Fed economists Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz tried to replicate Levitt's findings and found he had simply made two technical mistakes in his programming that made a hash of his results.

By then, however, Steve and Steve's lie had traveled all the way round the world and their permanent celebrity status was assured.

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

Number of Mexicans wanting to move to America down ...

... to a mere 39 million in the latest Zogby poll of Mexicans in Mexico. During the housing bubble, a couple of Pew Polls found 40 to 45 million more Mexicans wanting to move here.

Inductivist has all the details, such as:
- Of Mexicans with a member of their immediate household in the United States,65 percent said a legalization program would make people they know more likely to go to America illegally.

- An overwhelming majority (69 percent) of people in Mexico thought that the primary loyalty of Mexican-Americans should be to Mexico. Just 20 percent said it should be to the United States. The rest were unsure.

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

City of God and Olympics

From the Guardian:
Two weeks after Rio de Janeiro celebrated winning the 2016 Olympic Games, the Brazilian city was tonight bracing itself for a further night of violence after an intense gun battle erupted in one of the city's favelas and a police helicopter was shot down, killing two officers.

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

October 17, 2009

Pandora

A few years ago, I tried out Pandora, the "Music Genome Project" for Internet radio. You tell them a song you like, and they stream over the Internet to you other songs that share similar musical elements, as rated by their staff of professional musicians for about 250 factors. It's not a recommendation system where people who share your tastes tell you what they like, it's based on the actual musical content of the songs.

I found it worked pretty well. But one response was off: I put in Revolution Rock by the Clash, which isn't a rock song at all, but a lazy, joyous reggae ramble. Pandora came back with the punk Career Opportunities by the Clash, which suggests that one of their employees had cut corners and categorized Revolution Rock by title rather than by music. I sent in an email pointing this out, and got a detailed apology from Pandora's CEO, suggesting to me that maybe the boss had too much time on his hands to write to his customers (who weren't paying him, anyway).

So, I'm glad that they've survived financially. Now, there's a long article in the NYT Magazine, "The Song Decoders" by Rob Walker, about how Pandora works:
[CEO Paul] Westergren maintains “a personal aversion” to collaborative filtering or anything like it. “It’s still a popularity contest,” he complains, meaning that for any song to get recommended on a socially driven site, it has to be somewhat known already, by your friends or by other consumers. Westergren is similarly unimpressed by hipster blogs or other theoretically grass-roots influencers of musical taste, for their tendency to turn on artists who commit the crime of being too popular; in his view that’s just snobbery, based on social jockeying that has nothing to do with music. In various conversations, he defended Coldplay and Rob Thomas, among others, as victims of cool-taste prejudice. (When I ran Bob Lefsetz’s dismissal of Pandora by him [for responding to a Jackson Browne song with a Journey song], he laughed it off, and transitioned to arguing that Journey is, actually, a great band.)

He likes to tell a story about a Pandora user who wrote in to complain that he started a station based on the music of Sarah McLachlan, and the service served up a Celine Dion song. “I wrote back and said, ‘Was the music just wrong?’ Because we sometimes have data errors,” he recounts. “He said, ‘Well, no, it was the right sort of thing — but it was Celine Dion.’ I said, ‘Well, was it the set, did it not flow in the set?’ He said, ‘No, it kind of worked — but it’s Celine Dion.’ We had a couple more back-and-forths, and finally his last e-mail to me was: ‘Oh, my God, I like Celine Dion.’ ”

This anecdote almost always gets a laugh. “Pandora,” he pointed out, “doesn’t understand why that’s funny.”

When I started up Pandora again for the first time in years, it remembered all the songs I had entered years before and set up "radio stations" based on each one. Here are some examples of what it came up with in response to my suggestions from the 1975-1990 era. Keep in mind that Pandora doesn't seem to play songs in order of similarity to the source song. It just picks a bunch of songs that are kind of like the one you chose and then it shuffles them. So, each time you return, it offers you somewhat different songs.

Something I hadn't expected was that Pandora performs a sort of factor analysis on your musical tastes. Listening to these songs that I picked out a few years ago plus other ones similar to them, I would say I have post-British Empire upper middle class public schoolboy tastes in music. This may seem odd, but my tastes in songs would seem most natural for a Scottish or northern English lad at a southern English boarding school for toffs, or maybe at Sandhurst, the military academy. I'm not saying that's what people of my generation like that actually liked, just that it would make sense.

Very strange, but it also fits a lot of my taste in authors as well (Waugh, Orwell, Wodehouse, etc.). I now remember how much I liked David Niven's autobiography, who was a Sandhurst grad. And the autobiography of Churchill, another public schoolboy / Sandhurst man.

So, it's no surprise that The Clash were always my favorites. After all, Joe Strummer, despite his appalling teeth, was an upper middle class public schoolboy whose dad, a friend of Kim Philby's, was a diplomat (i.e., spy) for the fading British Empire.

- Steve's Pick: Death or Glory - The Clash ("But I believe in this and it's been tested by research" -- What better lyrics to try out Pandora upon?)
- Pandora's #1 response: Queen Bitch - David Bowie
A very Lou Reed-like electric guitar riff rocker. I guess it points out the influence of Reed on The Clash as well as on Bowie. Still, the Bowie song is missing the inspiring masculine militarism of Death or Glory. Ultimately, David Bowie and Joe Strummer are different personalities and will appeal to different listeners.
- Pandora #2: Career Opportunities - The Clash
Well, that wasn't too much of a stretch! But it does raise the issue that Career Opportunities isn't quite as good as Death or Glory. The Clash had already done a bunch of songs like Career Opportunities, and they weren't putting more basic punk rock songs like that on their London Calling album. Death or Glory, as the title suggests, was intended to top their earlier stuff, or go down in flames.

- Steve: Story of My Life - Social Distortion (Scots-Irish-American roots rock anthem, both self-pitying and uplifting, much like Death or Glory)
- Pandora #1: Death or Glory - Social Distortion
I guess I should have seen this one coming!
- Pandora #2. Sunday Morning Coming Down - Me First & the Gimme Gimmes
A Scots-Irish rock cover of the fine Kris Kristoffersen song made famous by Johnny Cash -- I'd never heard of the band but I liked it a lot.

- S: The Great Curve - Talking Heads (from their Afrobeat groove era when they had 9 musicians)
- P1: Waiting for the Roar - Fastway
Pretty good AC-DCish metal, but not at all like Remain in Light-era Talking Heads.
- P2: Misfit Love - Queens of the Stone Age
This is a grunge groove song that has some similar elements to the Talking Heads song, but is much heavier and less lilting.

- S: In Between Days - The Cure
- P1: A Night Like This - The Cure
For English heterosexual foppish romanticism, you can't beat The Cure. On the other hand, once again, while A Night Like This resembles In Between Days, it isn't as good.
- P7: I Melt With You - Modern English
This has always struck me as the closest predecessor to In Between Days. Perhaps Pandora isn't set up so that the closest match is the first song played?

- S: Heroes - David Bowie (with Brian Eno)
- P1: Space Oddity - David Bowie
I suppose there's some underlying chord structure similarity, but the gestalt is radically different between the acoustic guitar Space Oddity and the shimmering Wall of Synths of Heroes, but then Heroes is a pretty unique artifact. Offhand, I can't think of any songs that Heroes is like. (Holidays in the Sun is also about the Berlin Wall, but not very close musically).
- P2: Bad Girls - Don Felder (of The Eagles)
Nah ...
- P4: More Than This - Roxy Music
Great languid song, although I'd probably put it on my In Between Days Fop Rock station (see above). One thing you learn as you see songs show up on one of your stations that you think are more like the source song for a different station is how related all your songs are. For example, on my Veronica station below, Pandora played a song I had never heard before, Shut Your Eyes by the Shout Out Louds, which sounds just like a more straight-ahead, less shimmering version of In Between Days.

- S: Revolution Rock - Clash (joyous reggae)
- P: Too Late to Turn Back Now - Don Carlos (happy reggae cover of the soul song by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose)
Good choice. This is the kind of thing I would never find by myself.

- S: Genius of Love - Tom-Tom Club (offshoot of Talking Heads)
A fun dance song
- P1: Mystereality - Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark
Nah
- P2: Space Is Deep - Hawkwind
Nah

- S: Veronica - Elvis Costello (w/Paul McCartney)
- P: Takin' Me Back - Cheap Trick
I was a big Cheap Trick fan in the 1970s, so this is a pretty good call. Most of the recommendations on this channel are conventional rock songs, but lack the expertise that McCartney brought to Costello in 1988. (I've always thought that the dyspeptic Costello was McCartney's best possible replacement for John Lennon in terms of pushing McCartney to repress his kitschy side. If McCartney had teamed up with Costello in 1978 right after Costello's first album, who knows how good they could have been together.)

I think that's a basic problem that you can't get around in Pandora: if you like a song not so much because of the style but because it's an expert execution of a style, then Pandora isn't as good as a recommendation site.

Overall, I think the above examples are a little unfair to Pandora, since there isn't a notable dropoff in correlations as the songs go on. Possibly they randomly mix the order of the songs in terms of similarity so that listeners don't get progressively more displeased as they go.

It would be interesting to use Pandora's remarkable database for scholarly purposes. For example, T.S. Eliot pointed out that an artist creates his own "school" of predecessors that nobody noticed had anything in common before. For example, I've always felt that the ancestors of the punk rock of 1976 included from the 1968 to 1973 era: Communication Breakdown by Led Zeppelin, Paranoid by Black Sabbath, and Saturday Night's All Right for Fighting by Elton John, three songs that sounded like they have more in common after you'd heard the Ramones, Sex Pistols, and Clash than before. This giant proprietary database would presumably allow those kind of academic hypotheses to be tested objectively.

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

Which 20th century thinker would have been a 17th century polymath?

The farther back you go in time for about 350 years, the easier it was to have been a polymath. In the 18th Century, Franklin, Kant, and Goethe could make sizable scientific contributions in their spare time. In the 17th Century, polymathic geniuses were thick on the ground, such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal.

What 20th Century figure would have cut the widest swathe in the late 17th Century? Off hand, I'd guess John von Neumann, the mathematician-physicist who played such a large role in the Cold War despite dying at only 53 in 1957. Considering he made a deathbed conversion to Catholicism, I could imagine him converting earlier in the old Austrian empire and rising to be Prime Minister as well as a towering figure of Newtownian proportions in the sciences.

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

October 16, 2009

Most successful man in history?

I'm reading H.W. Brands's biography of Benjamin Franklin, The First American. Franklin's life has a comic aspect (in both the Shakespearean sense of turning out happily and in the absurdist sense of the improbability of it all) in that he's successful at practically all the multitudinous projects he turns his hand to. Franklin figured out as an adolescent that he was superior to practically everybody he met, so he'd better be as funny, modest, and nice to people as possible or they'd get mad at him for being better than them.

I'm up to age 75 in the book, and Franklin still has yet to negotiate the treaty that ends the War of Independence on very good terms for the new United States, invent bifocals, and sponsor the key compromise that made the Constitution politically possible.

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

Latest NAEP math results

Charles Murray blogs:
The narrowing of the black-white gap extends from children born in 1961 through children born in 1973, and it was substantial—from 1.2 standard deviations to about .8. Then the trend goes flat, with a few spikes, for children born over the next 26 years.


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

October 15, 2009

Can't Miss TV!

UK "science" documentary will prove all races are exactly equal in intelligence by having a cast of young, sexy, multicultural British TV personalities act shocked whenever fuddy-duddy old white guy psychometricians like Lynn and Rushton says there are differences in IQ. According to the infinitely reliable Daily Mail:

Channel 4 to screen controversial documentary that asks whether IQ is linked to race
By Paul Revoir and Niall Firth


Channel 4 is facing a race controversy after deciding to give a platform to scientists who claim that white people are more intelligent than those who are black.

A documentary, fronted by former BBC News correspondent Rageh Omaar, will interview professors who claim brain power is linked to racial grouping.

It will include claims that the most intelligent people in the world are North-East Asians from parts of China, Japan and North and South Korea.

Taboo: TV presenter Rageh Omaar will discuss James Watson's infamous assertion that black people are less intelligent than other races

The Australian Aborigines will be said to have the lowest average IQ.

The broadcaster has decided to air the comments, which will be abhorrent to many of its viewers, as part of a series of programmes about race and science, aimed at busting 'science's last taboo'.

Bosses at the channel claim the season will strongly challenge these opinions and 'explode' the myth that science can support ideas of racial superiority.

But the decision to air the issue at all could prove incendiary and is in danger of throwing the channel into another race row.

The broadcaster was inundated with complaints in 2007 after it aired the alleged racist bullying of Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother.

To promote the series, Channel 4 has altered photos of Baroness Thatcher, The Beatles, England's 1966 World Cup winning football team and U.S. President Barack Obama to change their racial appearances.

In Race and Intelligence: Science's Last Taboo, Omaar talks to academics who believe that aspects of the human brain are linked to race.

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

October 14, 2009

"Facial Profiling"

Slate has an article pooh-poohing old systems of trying to classify personalities by physical type and then worriedly reporting on new studies showing that maybe there is a correlation between say a heavy brow ridge and aggressiveness after all.
Facial Profiling
Can you tell if a man is dangerous by the shape of his mug?
By Dave Johns

What the article leaves out is how fully the arts have always participated in "facial profiling." It was never just some pseudo-scientific fad.

Back when images were expensive but words were cheap, novelists used to devote an extraordinary number of words to describing the looks of their characters, precisely with the assumption that the reader could pick up hints about the character's character. For example, Dashiell Hammett, a Communist, spent two full pages on a minute description of detective Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon: blond, 6'-3", and so forth -- pretty much the exact opposite of Humphrey Bogart. (Robert Heinlein was more forward looking: he never described what his characters looked like, allowing readers to assume wrongly what Johnnie's race is in Starship Troopers. Let's just say that Heinlein's Johnnie looked even less like Casper von Diehn's Johnnie in the movie than Hammett's Sam Spade looked like Bogey.)

Personally, I could never make head nor tail out of what somebody was supposed to look like from these old novelist's descriptions of facial features; evidently, however, readers in the old days could. By the way, European diplomatic correspondence in the monarchical age devoted a lot of time to just this problem, with ambassadors providing lengthy verbal descriptions of the looks of princes and princesses that the monarch back home might want to marry his offspring to in dynastic alliances.

Similarly, a quick way for researchers to generate new but plausible hypotheses to test about the relationship between physical features and personalities would be to interview Hollywood casting directors. These middle aged ladies have an encyclopedic knowledge of what audiences assume about the correlation between looks and personality/behavior.

At the leading man level, it's pretty obvious that Russell Crowe, with his sizable brow ridge, looks more like a gladiator than Johnny Depp. It wasn't as obvious that Depp, with his '70s rock star cheekbones, would make a good pirate, but once you come up with the idea of an effete pirate with the personality of a Rolling Stone, then it all fit together.

Of course, with stars it's fun to see them play against type -- Crowe as a mathematician -- but with minor roles, casting directors need to find faces that won't confuse the audience as to what this minor character's function in the plot is supposed to be.

Another way to generate hypotheses about looks, facial expressions, and personalities is to see what talented mimics like Tracey Ullman and Wayne Brady do with their faces when given a personality type to embody.

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

Baseball v. Football

My Wednesday Taki column is up. I reflect on some differences between the two sports at center stage in October: baseball and football.

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

Elinor Ostrom's Economics "Nobel" Prize

Political scientist Elinor Ostrom became the first woman winner in the four decades of the Economics quasi-Nobel Prize. I wasn't familiar with her name, but her field of of study is a good one, so she's probably a good pick. She works on the question of the various ways people arrange to avoid "the tragedy of the commons" of over-exploitation of common resources, such as fisheries.

As I noted in VDARE.com in 2005, Jared Diamond offers a succinct explanation of the possible solutions in his bestseller Collapse:

In another important section, Diamond illustrates how ethnic diversity makes environmental cooperation more difficult. He praises the Dutch as the most cooperative nation on earth and attributes their awareness of and willingness to tackle problems to their shared memory of the 1953 flood that drowned 2,000 Netherlanders living below sea level. (Unfortunately, he doesn't mention whether Holland's rapidly growing immigrant Muslim population remembers when the dikes failed 52 years ago.)

Diamond notes that there are three possible solutions to what Garrett Hardin called "the tragedy of the commons," or the tendency for individuals to over-consume resources and under-invest in responsibilities held in common, leading to ecological collapse.

  • Government diktat.
  • Privatization and property rights -- but that's impractical with some resources, such as fish.
  • "The remaining solution to the tragedy of the commons is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and to design, obey, and enforce prudent harvesting quotas themselves. That is likely to happen only if a whole series of conditions is met: the consumers form a homogeneous group; they have learned to trust and communicate with each other; they expect to share a common future and to pass on the resource to their heirs; they are capable of and permitted to organize and police themselves; and the boundaries of the resource and of its pool of consumers are well defined." [My emphasis]

A classic supporting case that that Diamond doesn't bring up: American shrimp fishermen in Texas were universally denounced as racists in the late 1970s when they resisted the government's efforts to encourage Vietnamese refugees to become shrimpers in their waters. French director Louis Malle made a movie, Alamo Bay, denouncing ugly Americans fighting hardworking immigrants.

What got lost in all the tsk-tsking is that fishing communities always resist newcomers, especially hardworking ones, because of the sizable chance that the outsiders who don't know the local rules or don't care about them will ruin the ecological balance and wipe out the stocks of fish.

The evidence Diamond assembles indicates, although of course he never dares to state it bluntly, that the fundamental requirement for dealing effectively with environmental danger is: start with a population that's limited in number, cohesive, educated, and affluent.

Needless to say, mass immigration from the Third World works against all those characteristics.

(To his credit, Diamond's bestseller is clearly unenthusiastic about Latin American immigration into his own LA. To his discredit, you have to be a pretty acute reader to notice his heretical leanings.)

A quick Google search finds Nobel Laureate Ostrom also cautiously expressing Doubts About Diversity in her book The Drama of the Commons.
... Alesina et al. (1999) find that ethnic diversity is associated with lower public goods funding across the U.S. municipalities because different ethnic groups have different preferences over the type of public good ... In the kind of rural societies considered in this chapter ... the effectiveness of social sanctions weakens as they cross ethnic reference groups. In this vein, Miguel (2000) constructs a theoretical model where the defining characteristics of ethnic groups are the ability to impose social sanctions within the community against deviant individuals and the ability to coordinate on efficient equilibria in settings of multiple equilibria. With data from the activities of primary school committees in rural western Kenya, Miguel then shows that higher levels of ethnic diversity are associated with significantly lower parent participation in parent meetings, worse attendance at school committee meetings, and sharply lower teacher attendance and motivation.

If social groups (not solely ethnic groups) are defined as those whose boundaries coincide with the effective monitoring and enforcement of shared social norms ... this is one way of understanding the notion cited earlier of cultural homogeneity, a variant of what many authors have called social capital or social cohesion. ... Irrigation organizations that cross village boundaries can rely less on social sanctions and norms to enforce cooperative behavior ...

There are basically two ways to get people to play nice with a common resource such as shrimp or irrigation water: violence or ostracism. The latter works most effectively regarding marriage -- if you don't play by the rules, nobody respectable will let your kid marry his daughter. But when newcomers who don't ever want their children to marry your children arrive and start exploiting your irrigation system or fishery (or whatever), then the old non-violent traditions break down, and people start turning to violence or its threat, whether anarchic or government-based (e.g., socialism and property rights are based on the threat of the government's monopoly on violence).

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

October 12, 2009

David Brooks' lonely struggle against the Sailerite conventional wisdom

In the pages of the New York Times, David Brooks once more bravely explore pathways beyond Sailerism's complete stranglehold on the mass media.

In "The Young and the Neuro," Brooks reports on the conference of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society’s, where all the scientists were "so damned young, hip and attractive." Brooks then proceeds to recount the usual grab bag of studies about how different parts of the brain activate when shown pictures of people of different races or whatever, and sums up:
I suspect that the work will take us beyond the obsession with I.Q. and other conscious capacities and give us a firmer understanding of motivation, equilibrium, sensitivity and other unconscious capacities.

Isn't it a shame how Linda Gottfredson makes $50k per speech to corporate executives while poor Malcolm Gladwell barely ekes out a living? *

Unfortunately, Brooks' column about brain scans isn't very persuasive because there aren't any pictures of brains in it. As every editor knows, a picture of a brain in an article about brains makes the article convincing. A 2006 study in Cognition showed that "assertions about psychology — even implausible ones like “watching television improved math skills” — seem much more believable to laypeople when accompanied by images from brain scans."

(You know what would be the perfect "social cognitive neuroscience" experiment? Do brain scans on people while they are being shown pictures of brain scans. The part of the brain that lights up could be renamed the Credulity Lobe.)

For example, here is a scan of David Brooks' brain during his daily reading of iSteve. As you can see, the experience is stimulating both the Man-I-Wish-I-Could-Say-Interesting-Stuff-Like-That and the But-I-Can't-Or-I'll-Lose-My-Job-So-I'll-Say-the-Opposite sectors of his brain.

You just can't argue with Science.

-------------------
* By the way, Malcolm's new article on football and concussions is pretty good.

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

Mr. and Mrs. Obama and Health Care Reform

Many on the left are displeased by both the effectiveness and content of Barack Obama's leadership on health care finance reform. Where's the Canadian-style single payer system? Is the public option in or out?

What's almost never mentioned is that a large private medical institution, the University of Chicago Hospitals, invested heavily in influencing Obama's mindset on this issue by employing his wife, back when he was the ranking Democrat on the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services committee, as their diversity outreach coordinator at a six figure salary. When Obama moved up to the U.S. Senate, his wife's compensation was bumped all the way up to $317k. When she became First Lady and could no longer serve, the U of C Hospitals simply eliminated this previously crucial position.

Funny how you never hear much about that from the left ...

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

October 11, 2009

Who are "Asians?"

My new VDARE.com column laments the Reagan Administration decision to reclassify Indian immigrants from Caucasian to Asian so that they could qualify for low interest minority business development loans from the SBA.

It was particularly shortsighted of the Reagan Administration to declare South Asians officially nonwhite. South Asians tend (especially compared to East Asians) to be extraverted, loquacious in English, interested in politics and argument, and intellectually venturesome. There are already far more South Asian than East Asian pundits in America. Policies that incline these Indians to the left like this could turn out to be disastrous.

There are some grounds for hope. One of the main reasons for anti-white feelings among East Asian men is that white men are much more likely to marry East Asian women than East Asian men are to marry white women, leaving a lot of cranky East Asian bachelors left over. This is less of a problem for South Asian men, who keep their womenfolk on tighter leashes. Arranged marriages are still common among South Asians in America.

Because the GOP is inevitably destined to be considered the white party, it would be best to have the Indians, as Lyndon Johnson memorably said of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, “inside the tent p-----g out than outside p-----g in.”

Read the whole thing there and comment up on it below.