Nature v. Nurture solved!

From The New Republic:

The Two Year Window
The new science of babies and brains—and how it could revolutionize the fight against poverty.
Jonathan Cohn

The End of Nature v. Nurture?
The New Science of Babies and Brains

A decade ago, a neuroscientist named Charles Nelson traveled to Bucharest to visit Romania’s infamous orphanages. There, he saw a child whose brain had swelled to the size of a basketball because of an untreated infection and a malnourished one-year-old no bigger than a newborn. But what has stayed with him ever since was the eerie quiet of the infant wards. “It would be dead silent, all of [the babies] sitting on their backs and staring at the ceiling,” says Nelson, who is now at Harvard. “Why cry when nobody is going to pay attention to you?” 

Nelson had traveled to Romania to take part in a cutting-edge experiment. It was ten years after the fall of the Communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu, whose scheme for increasing the country’s population through bans on birth control and abortion had filled state-run institutions with children their parents couldn’t support. Images from the orphanages had prompted an outpouring of international aid and a rush from parents around the world to adopt the children. But ten years later, the new government remained convinced that the institutions were a good idea—and was still warehousing at least 60,000 kids, some of them born after the old regime’s fall, in facilities where many received almost no meaningful human interaction. With backing from the MacArthur Foundation, and help from a sympathetic Romanian official, Nelson and colleagues from Harvard, Tulane, and the University of Maryland prevailed upon the government to allow them to remove some of the children from the orphanages and place them with foster families. Then, the researchers would observe how they fared over time in comparison with the children still in the orphanages. They would also track a third set of children, who were with their original parents, as a control group.

Back in 2007, I reported on Dr. Nelson's study. He found that the poor kids who continued to get warehoused in these cheerless Romanian orphanages averaged IQs of 73, while those who got to move in with foster parents averaged 81. A control group of non-orphans averaged 109. 

As I said in 2007, an 8 point boost for getting out of a bleak Romanian orphanage and into a family setting seems a quite plausible nurture effect to me. But, what in the world accounts for the 28 point gap between the fostered kids and the control group of non-orphans?

I found an earlier report by Nelson noting a big ethnic difference:

"Of the 136 institutionalized children included in the study, 78 are of Romanian ethnicity (57.4%), 36 are Rroma Gypsy (26.5%), 1 is Turkish (0.7%), 1 is of subcontinent Indian extraction (0.7%), and the remaining 20 (14.7%) could not be classified. ...

The control group with the 109 average IQ is much different in ethnicity:

"Of the 72 who consented to participate, 66 children (91.7%) were Romanian, 4 children (5.6%) were Rroma, 1 child was Spanish, and 1 child was Turkish."

In summary, major selection effects seem to be driving part of the almost two-standard deviation IQ gap between the foster care and biological family groups.

Before America goes out and more or less kidnaps black babies away from poor black mothers in order to raise their IQs -- the upcoming Borrowed Generations national apology of 2056 -- some more pointed research is needed.

If there really is a critical 2-year-window where children who don't get talked at enough are doomed for life, that would imply certain falsifiable hypotheses:

- For example, some poor black mothers are taciturn and others are loquacious. Do the loquacious ones have children who grow up to have higher IQs relative to their mothers IQs? If so, how much?

- If what really matters to a person's adult IQ is having a middle-class upbringing as a small child with a mother who constantly is nudging you to look at this thing or that thing, wouldn't it be cheaper to encourage blacks to point out stuff to their kids rather than to take their kids away from them for 14 hours per day? If it's all culture, why not improve the culture of the black mothers? That doesn't strike me as impossible to do. If, say, Oprah and Beyonce teamed up to push for a decade to get mothers to talk more to their babies, I wouldn't be surprised if they could move the needle.

- Many middle class white women turn most of the baby-raising over to low IQ servants, many of whom don't speak English and don't have middle class urges to point out every damn thing under the sun to the babies they are caring for. Are these middle class white women damaging the IQs of their own children? Should they leave the workforce and raise their own kids? But if white women stop hiring Honduran illegal immigrants to raise their own babies for them, then who is going to raise the babies of poor black women for them?

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

Occupy Wall Street Raided

I should try to get the NYPD to raid my garage and throw out for me all the decades of junk piled up in there.

Anyway, Occupy Wall Street reminds me of another current phenomenon, food trucks and other businesses that have set themselves up rent-free in the public streets.

For example, in recent years, there's always a big yellow sign advertising "Thai Massages" (I presume that's a euphemism) mounted on a trailer parked in the right hand turn lane at a busy nearby corner. It's a great location for advertising a massage parlor because the pimp doesn't have to rent the land the sign occupies. Less obnoxiously, there's now often a miniature barber shop in a trailer parked in front of a prosperous local strip mall where monthly rents are substantial.

Similarly, downtown Manhattan is, for most people, one of the most expensive places in the world to live, but a couple of hundred people have been camping rent free there for two months.

Why this 200-person free campout is the biggest deal since the Fall of the Bastille, however, is another question entirely.

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

Republicans and ideology

From my new VDARE column:

In his November 9th New York Times column cleverly entitled The Cain Scrutiny, Ross Douthat calls attention to the arresting spectacle of white conservatives rising up to defend the honor of Herman Cain and black manhood against allegations by blonde tramps that the Republican Presidential candidate's sexual advances were unwanted: "We should remember this moment, because it’s a perfect encapsulation of how race’s role in American politics has changed over the last 75 years." 

Indeed.

Read the whole thing there.

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

The Obama Touch

I wanted to call attention to this article from last month's LA Times because it provides an interesting example of the Obama Administration's preferred mode of operation: the fix-is-in. Barack Obama doesn't particularly like confrontation. What he likes is exemplified by this pseudo-confrontation over "civil rights," where both sides, the feds and the L.A. school district, were already in agreement that the taxpayers should pony up a lot more money for blacks and the children of illegal aliens, but neither side wanted to scare taxpayers by yet putting a dollar value on their deal, the bill for which will come later:

LAUSD agrees to revise how English learners, blacks are taught 

Officials say the accord, which settles a federal civil rights probe, could be a national model. The district is not accused of intentional bias, and deciding how to make changes will be done locally. 

October 11, 2011|By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times 

The Los Angeles Unified School District has agreed to sweeping revisions in the way it teaches students learning English, as well as black youngsters, settling a federal civil rights investigation that examined whether the district was denying the students a quality education. 

The settlement closes what was the Obama administration's first civil rights investigation launched by the Department of Education, and officials said Tuesday that it would serve as a model for other school districts around the country. 

"What happens in L.A. really does set trends for across the nation. More and more school districts are dealing with this challenge," said Russlynn Ali, the assistant secretary of education for civil rights. 

The agreement poses a potential financial problem for the school district, which has faced multimillion-dollar budget cuts and layoffs over the last few years. 

The Education Department launched the probe last year, at first to determine if students who entered school speaking limited English, most of whom are Latino, were receiving adequate instruction. The nation's second-largest school system has more students learning English, about 195,000, than any other in the United States — about 29% of the district's overall enrollment. Later, at the urging of local activists, investigators widened the probe to include black students, who make up about 10% of the district's enrollment. 

Federal authorities do not accuse the district of intentional discrimination. But the settlement requires a top-to-bottom revision of the district's Master Plan for English Learners, which is already well underway. The goal is to let the district develop the details, under continuing oversight from the Office for Civil Rights, a branch of the Education Department. 

Under the settlement, the district for the first time will focus on the academic progress of students judged to have adequately learned English. Many of these students subsequently flounder academically.

The reporter is messing up the issue, which almost nobody understands: there are a lot of young people in L.A. who are from Spanish-speaking homes, but who, with Ron Unz's 1998 initiative stifling bilingual education, now speak English like Moon-Unit Zappa. But many of these English speakers remain officially classified as English Learners because they can't pass written tests. Year after year goes by, and these kids who have passed the spoken English test continue to fail the written English test, just as they continue to fail their math and science tests.

How come? Because they aren't very bright.

But you can't say that, so everybody pretends that they must be victims of discrimination who are having their civil rights violated.

The district will also concentrate efforts on students who have reached high school without mastering the English skills necessary to enroll in a college-preparatory curriculum and who may be at risk of dropping out. 

L.A. Unified also agreed to provide students learning English and black students with more effective teachers. Improved teaching would result from "ongoing and sustained" training, among other potential efforts, Ali said. 

The decision on how to improve instruction will be a local one. The district will be judged in large measure by student performance data. The ultimate sanction for not living up to the agreement would be withholding or withdrawing federal funds, Ali said. 

L.A. Unified was selected for the investigation in large measure because it is an epicenter for the challenge of educating students whose native language is not English. For years, district officials insisted that L.A. Unified performed as well as or better than nearly all other school systems with this population. 

Federal officials did not challenge this record. Instead, they emphasized that past efforts simply haven't succeeded as well as they must. District officials, in fact, have echoed this rhetoric. Former board member Yolie Flores consistently criticized the district's performance with English learners. 

Under federal law, discrimination can exist even when it is not intentional, based on the levels of opportunity afforded students through even well-meaning policies and practices.

So, this seemingly confrontational but actually conspiratorial process has resulted in an agreement that everybody participating wanted. Of course, no representatives of the taxpayers were invited to the talks. But, the taxpayers haven't been told yet how much this binding agreement will cost them ultimately, so almost zero attention has been focused on this scam among the general public.

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

Was "Bad Teacher" first Post-Obama hit movie?

Last summer's comedy Bad Teacher, with Cameron Diaz as a bad teacher, finished up in domestic theaters with exactly $100 million in box office revenue (plus another $115 million abroad), which is a lot for a comedy with a $20 million budget. A friend argues that Bad Teacher represents perhaps the first distinctly Post-Obama hit movie, a scalding reaction to the sanctimoniousness that propelled Obama to the White House. Perhaps.

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

Stereotype Threat v. Stereotype Pet

The Stanford sociology department is sponsoring a speech on an exciting conceptual breakthrough: "Stereotype Promise."

Jennifer Lee
Professor of Sociology, University of California, Irvine
Visiting Scholar, Russell Sage Foundation 

The Tiger Mother and Asian American Exceptionalism?
Framing Success and “Stereotype Promise” among LA’s Second Generation 

*Jointly sponsored with the Department of Sociology and the Center for Comparative Studies on Race and Ethnicity
Thursday, December 1, 2011
Colloquium with Q&A 12:30-1:45
email suemartin@stanford.edu for more information 

"Why do second-generation Asians exhibit exceptional academic outcomes, even when controlling for socioeconomic factors like parental education, occupation, and income? ... Moreover, the external validation and reinforcement of the frame by teachers can generate a “stereotype promise” among Asians—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby boosting one’s performance. As a result, Asian students—regardless of ethnicity, class, and gender—gain an advantage over their non-Asian peers in the context of U.S. schools."

I don't think "stereotype promise" reminds people enough of "stereotype threat." "Threat" and "promise" are kind of antonyms, but it's not self-evident that they are being used as opposites. Therefore, Professor Lee's assertion that that Asians outperform others because teachers are biased in favor of apple-polishing Asian students should be renamed "stereotype pet."

Is it true? I don't know, but it's definitely more memorable as Stereotype Threat / Pet.

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

Bad Rachel: How neocons really feel

A reader notices that an old acquaintance from decades ago now has her own blog: Bad Rachel. A fairly representative post is here.

Rachel Abrams of the Weekly Standard is the daughter of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, and half-sister of John Podhoretz.

Her husband Elliott Abrams was, according to his biography at the Council of Foreign Relations where he now hangs his hat, "Former senior director for democracy and human rights, senior director for the Near East, and deputy national security adviser handling Middle East affairs in the George W. Bush administration."

In other words, Rachel Abrams is a diplomat's wife. A diplomat assigned, presumably, to bringing peace and reconciliation to the Middle East.

Mrs. Abrams, however, gives us the less diplomatic version of the family feud.

I always wondered about Bush putting Elliott Abrams in charge of Middle Eastern diplomacy. Do you think it was at all possible that people in other countries thought that Mr. Abrams, during his Bush Administration career in charge of Middle Eastern diplomacy, was something less than a completely fair-minded neutral facilitator? Perhaps something Mrs. Abrams said at diplomatic cocktail parties might have given the rest of the world reason to doubt the good faith of Mr. Abrams

Of course, if other diplomats ever did doubt the objectivity of Mr. and Mrs. Abrams, that would just prove they're hateful bigots and probably should get cruise-missiled. (We're looking at you, Luxembourg.)

By the way, a commenter has asserted that Midge Decter is the original for fussbudget Lucy van Pelt in Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts cartoons. Is there any truth to that?

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

Try this fun Google search!

Type this into Google:

rape football -paterno

I get 43,100,000 hits, and that is without any references to Penn St.'s disgraced coach. Now, some of those are pro football players, some high school, and some foreign soccer players. But, anybody who follows college football knows that players (although not coaches) get formally accused of sexual assault. A lot. And then, usually, the story goes away. 

The prototypical case is of the kind that makes up the central mystery in Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full: black player, white woman. There's not much of a media market for those kind of dog bites man stories, which is why so much publicity was given to the Duke lacrosse team hoax. (Similarly, "manager rapes aspiring boy band singer" or "movie producer rapes aspiring child star" are dog bites man stories that don't get much traction in the press.) 

College football is a great game. I hadn't been to a college football game since watching Plaxico Burress stomp all over Northwestern in the 1990s, but a neighbor gave me a couple of his season tickets to last Saturday's UCLA 29 - Arizona St. 28 upset at the Rose Bowl, and it was a terrific spectator sport experience.  

I heartily commend to aggressive rich men with a need to win that they try manipulating college football as a fine substitute for manipulating the U.S. government into bombing their relatives' tribal enemies for them. 

On the other hand, the Penn State scandal, much as it's a man bites dog story, provides an opportunity for intelligent conservatives to reflect upon how much energy and money they pour into college football and other zero sum sports, a little bit of which could go a long way in the real world.

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

Living Forever

Here's a fun article in New York Magazine by Jesse Green, What Do a Bunch of Old Jews Know About Living Forever?, about a medical research project in New York on Ashkenazis over the age of 95, including a quartet of four wealthy siblings, the Kahns, all over 100. One Kahn still comes into work everyday as chairman of his financial firm to check up on his 69-year-old son, the CEO, to make sure, presumably, that the youngster's callowness doesn't trip him up.

For these studies, Barzilai has assembled a cohort of some 540 people over the age of 95 who, like the Kahns, reached that milestone having never experienced the so-called big four: cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and cognitive decline. He theorized that these “SuperAgers,” as he calls them, must have something that protects them from all four conditions. Otherwise, when they didn’t have a heart attack, say, at 78, they’d have succumbed quickly to the next thing on their body’s inscrutable list. So instead of looking, as most genetic studies do, for pieces of DNA that correlate with the likelihood of getting diseases, Barzilai looked for the opposite: genes that correlate with the likelihood of not getting them—and thus with longevity. 

The top correlate for longevity is one that requires no blood test to discover: having a SuperAger in your family already. ... Barzilai has so far identified, or corroborated, at least seven associative markers. The most significant is the Cholesterol Ester Transfer Protein gene, or CETP, which in one unusual form correlates with slower memory decline, lower risk for dementia, and strongly increased protection against heart disease. (Among other things, it increases the amount and size of “good” cholesterol.) Only about 9 percent of control subjects have two copies (one from each parent) of the protective form of CETP, while 24 percent of the centenarians do, including all four Kahn siblings. 

There’s evidence, as well, that small stature among the SuperAgers (Irving is now about five foot two) may reflect the influence of a protective factor seen throughout nature; ponies live longer than horses. ... 

But the Einstein project is fascinating for a major reason beyond its science: Its main test group consists entirely of Ashkenazim—that is, Jews who descend, as more than 80 percent of American Jews do, from communities in the Pale of Settlement of Eastern Europe. In longevity news, the spotlight frequently passes from one group to another: Georgian yogurt eaters, Japanese pensioners, the Pennsylvania Dutch. But 540 Jews in a New York–based study of extreme old age is too delicious. The mind cramps with the possibility of jokes. 

... Barzilai centered his studies on Ashkenazim not because they live longer or produce more centenarians than other ethnic groups. They don’t. It’s that their unusual development as a homogeneous community makes them easier to study at the level of DNA. Genetic research done by Barzilai’s Einstein colleague Gil Atzmon suggests that Ashkenazim branched off from other Jews around the time of the destruction of the First Temple, 2,500 years ago. They flourished during the Roman Empire but then went through a “severe bottleneck” as they dispersed, reducing a population of several million to just 400 families who left Northern Italy around the year 1000 for Central and eventually Eastern Europe. Though their numbers increased dramatically once there, to some 18 million before the Holocaust, studies suggest that 40 percent of today’s Ashkenazim descend from just four Jewish mothers. How proud those mothers would be to know that the reason their mishpocheh has remained far more genetically alike than a random population—Barzilai says by a factor of at least 30—is that until recently their sons almost never married outside the clan.

As I've pointed out, "white guilt" is guilt over being too ethnocentric, "Jewish guilt" is is guilt over being not ethnocentric enough.

That likeness means that small genetic differences—as small as one “letter” of DNA code—are more easily spotted on Ashkenazi genes than on those of, say, Presbyterians. Icelanders are good, too: They are all descendants, Barzilai says, of five Viking men and four Irish women. But they are a tiny population, with proportionately fewer centenarians, and aren’t so easy to find in New York. Ashkenazim are plentiful. And because they are also fairly similar in their educational and economic status, some of the variables that can muddy the picture are already controlled. 

Others are controlled more explicitly. An Einstein study published in August asked whether the SuperAgers, over the course of their lives, had better health habits than the general population. 

The answer was no; their habits were, if anything, worse. They smoked as much or more than others and were no better about diet or exercise.

My father is 94. He never smoked, drank only moderately, and comes from a high energy family that needs to be moving all the time. His nephew, my hippie cousin, for example, was an organic farmer for decades, and now that he has a desk job, he spends about 25 hours a week at the gym. When my cousin came for a visit to his parents in Arcadia, CA, at the age of 51, he hiked to the top of Mt. Wilson, a 5,000 foot ascent, every day for two weeks. It's unfortunate that social scientists don't seem to have a reliable quick test of energy the way they have tests of intelligence, since it's obvious that energy differs widely among individuals and is important in influencing life outcomes.

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

High-stakes Stereotype Threat

Stereotype threat -- the argument that the reason blacks or other Groups of Concern score worse on tests is because of stereotypes that they score worse on tests -- has been a wildly popular concept since the 1990s. It has proven fairly easy in psych lab experiments to get college student volunteers of the chosen varieties to not score well on zero-stakes tests by hinting to them that they are expected not to do well. To fulfill their professors' desires for a publishable result, all they have to do is slack off instead of work hard on the meaningless test, and college students are good at slacking off. 

On the other hand, it would be unethical to try to drive down the scores of members of Groups of Concern on high-stakes tests, so there is very little experimental data on whether stereotype threat actually exists on high-stakes tests, which is what everybody cares about. So, Walters, Lee, and Trapani did a study in for ETS in 2004 looking at various factors that had been alleged in experimental studies to cause Stereotype Threat using real data from the high-stakes GRE. This is about as close as anybody can come ethically to studying Stereotype Threat on a high-stakes test.

The study investigated the applicability of previous experimental research on stereotype threat to operational Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) General Test testing centers. The goal was to document any relationships between features of the testing environment that might cue stereotype threat as well as any impact on GRE test scores among African American, Hispanic, Asian American, and female test-takers. Among such features were the gender and ethnicity of test proctors and more general factors, such as the size, activity level, and social atmosphere of test centers. Our analyses revealed several relationships among environmental factors and several variations in test performance for all groups. However, we found no direct support for stereotype threat and, in fact, found some effects for proctor ethnicity that ran counter to a stereotype-threat explanation.

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

Isaacson's "Steve Jobs" v. Remnick's "The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama"

I didn't have a chance in my long review of Steve Jobs to compliment Walter Isaacson on the fine job he did. One obvious comparison is to another recent 600-page biography by another major figure in establishment journalism, David Remnick's 2010 biography of the President, The Bridge. 

First, Isaacson's book is a lot more interesting. Partly that's due to the nature of the subject: Jobs just did a lot more things than Obama up through the same age. By the age when Obama was elected President, Jobs had overseen bringing out the Apple I, Apple II, Mac, Next, iMac, OS X, and iPod. So, Remnick had to pad his book out with long Black History Month digressions about stuff that happened in Alabama or Chicago while Barack Obama was toddling on the beach in Honolulu. Isaacson, in contrast, barely has room to introduce you to colorful Silicon Valley characters like Nolan Bushnell, Jobs's boss at Atari on Pong.

Remnick's book consists of Obama not doing stuff while people he met praise him; Isaacson's book consists of Jobs doing stuff while people who work for him or against him complain about him. Which one sounds like a better read?

The other difference is that Remnick toadies up to the most powerful man in the world, which is prudent but dull. Isaacson is impressively even-handed.

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

College coaches

From the New York Times, a 2007 story about a coaching sex scandal at Penn State, where most of the article is devoted to worrying about whether bigots will get the wrong message from the news:

April 19, 2007 

In Recruiting Season, Mistrust Is Raised at L.S.U. 

By JERÉ LONGMAN 

Now that the women’s college basketball season has ended, many coaches are on the road recruiting through mid-May. And, some said in recent interviews, they could face fallout from last month’s resignation of Pokey Chatman from Louisiana State, following charges of what the university described yesterday for the first time as inappropriate sexual relationships between her and former players. 

“This is everyone’s worst nightmare,” Mary Jo Kane, director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, said during widespread discussion of the Chatman case during the N.C.A.A. tournament. 

At its heart, L.S.U. officials said, the Chatman case is about abuse of trust or power. Yet some coaches, administrators and academics say they fear that the accusations against Chatman will inflame homophobia; reinforce stereotypes of lesbians as sexual predators; lead to more so-called negative recruiting, or attempts to steer players away from coaches suspected of being gay; increase skepticism toward the hiring of single women as head coaches; and scare the parents of potential recruits. 

“I think there are coaches who may try to use this against any female coaches who are not married and just make innuendo, to put fear in some players’ minds or parents’ minds,” said Gail Goestenkors, the former Duke coach who moved this month to the University of Texas. “That happens sometimes now anyway. I think that will fuel the fire a little bit.” ...

The most immediate impact of the Chatman case, some coaches said during the N.C.A.A. tournament, may be an increase in negative recruiting. Coaches and administrators disagree on how widespread the role of suspected lesbianism plays in pitting one university against another, but many agree the practice exists in a manner that can be subtle and overt.... 

Sometimes, coaches say, sexual orientation becomes a blunt tool in recruiting, with a rival coach saying to a prospective player or her parents: “You don’t want to go to this school because the coach is a lesbian or there are lesbians on the team.” 

A coach who is described as being a lesbian becomes almost defenseless in confronting such claims, left with the choice of denying it or saying, “I am but I won’t bother your daughter,” said Linda Carpenter, emeritus professor of physical education at Brooklyn College who has studied the participation of women in sports for three decades. 

“It gives fodder to people looking for a reason to carve out an area where women need not apply,” Carpenter said. ...

Kane, the sports sociologist at Minnesota, said she once heard a female coach say that the best coaching qualifications for a woman are to be divorced with no children. This ostensibly establishes her heterosexuality while leaving her free to hit the road on recruiting trips. 

Chatman has been replaced at L.S.U. by Van Chancellor [a man]. This is a sensitive subject at a time of a declining rate of women’s teams being coached by women. In Division I women’s basketball, 230 of the 332 teams — 69.3 percent — were coached by women in 2006, Carpenter said. In 1992, that percentage was 72.2 percent. ...

That because pay and pressure has gone up, so more men have gotten into coaching women's basketball.

“I think there needs to be an opportunity for women to coach women,” Finch said. “I hate to see people that are anti-Title IX — and there’s a lot of that sentiment — say, ‘Here’s another way we can take down women in sports.’ ” A regrettable aspect of the L.S.U. case was that it would likely reinforce the stereotype of lesbians as sexual threats, said Pat Griffin, professor emeritus of social justice at the University of Massachusetts and author of the book “Strong Women, Deep Closets: Lesbians and Homophobia in Sports.” Her own research, Griffin said, indicated that the “vast majority” of lesbian coaches were “very scrupulous” about their treatment of players. “They know how unfounded accusations can ruin careers,” Griffin said.

... The resignation of Coach Rene Portland from Penn State last month may also signal that those who discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation could face a loss of top-quality recruits and a loss of their jobs, Kane said. 

Portland resigned weeks after settling a lawsuit filed by a former player who accused her of banning lesbians from her team. Previously, Portland was fined by the university and ordered to take diversity training. 

Penn State ... No homophobia allowed!

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

My patience with "Moneyball" is running out

The subhead for Michael Lewis's review of Daniel Kahnemen's Thinking, Fast and Slow in Vanity Fair reads:

Billy Beane’s sports-management revolution, chronicled by the author in Moneyball, was made possible by Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Then Lewis goes on to lament in amazement how could anyone have made such super gigantic mistakes as all the baseball executives in the history of the world until Bill James and Billy Beane came along, or something like that.

I'm a big fan of advanced baseball statistics, but its actual impact has been pretty marginal (other than the message: take lots of performance-enhancing drugs, but that didn't really require a degree in stats to figure out). Consider this shocking revelation I discovered in my voluminous readings of sabermetrics:

Q. Who was the greatest baseball player of all time?

A. Babe Ruth.

Of course, Babe Ruth was also the most famous and popular baseball player of all time, in real time. Baseball fans went nuts over him the moment he started hitting huge numbers of homers. Decades later, sabermetricians fired up their computers and figured out: hey, the bleacher bums were right.

Q. Who was the greatest American League player of the 1950s?

A. Mickey Mantle.

So, the nine year old boys of America were right in 1956. Mickey Mantle was enormously famous throughout his career. I suspect many of my foreign readers don't believe that Mickey Mantle was a real baseball player. They can vaguely recall the name, but he sounds like a fictitious folk hero, like Yankee Doodle or Jack Armstrong or Horatio Alger, made up to symbolize American post-WWII dominance. (Similarly, I suspect foreigners sometimes get Babe Ruth and Paul Bunyan confused.)

In other words, baseball fans's views were pretty accurate. And that's not terribly surprising: if you listen to most of your teams's games on the radio, much less have season tickets, you'll figure out pretty accurately who are the best players on the team and who are the worst. For example, sabermetricians like to claim that LA Dodger first baseman Steve Garvey was overrated because he was handsome but didn't get a lot of walks. Statistics prove, they like to say, that Reggie Smith was better than Garvey in the Dodgers' World Series years of 1977-78. Indeed, but Dodger fans knew that already. Fans at Dodger Stadium voted Smith the team MVP both years over Garvey.

What advanced statistical analysis did was improve what national baseball intellectuals had to say. What sportswriters had to say about their local team had always tended to be pretty reasonable: they watched all the games and, as Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot just watching. But when sportswriters went to vote for the Most Valuable Player award for the whole league, since they didn't see many games played by the likely candidates, on other teams, they tended to overvalue dumb statistics like runs batted in. They felt they needed some statistical evidence to justify their votes, and it was traditional to overweight the RBI number.

Bill James argued that people who denounced his emphasis on statistics weren't free of statistics, they were just slaves to dumb statistics. But that was mostly true of their evaluations of players not on their own team. You know how at hockey games, the announcer comes on after the game is over and announces the third-best, second-best, and best player in tonight's game? They don't say that out-loud in baseball, but fans kind of do it in their heads, so if they listen to 100 games on the radio in the season, they have a pretty good idea in their head that in those 100 games Reggie Smith was the best player in about 18 of those games and Steve Garvey in about 12, so Reggie is the team MVP.

But league MVP awards are a pretty minor part of the game. 

Similarly, when I was a kid in the 1960s, Babe Ruth was the most famous ballplayer ever, but it was a mark of intellectual sophistication to say that his homerun hitting was vulgar and that real experts all knew that the line drive hitting and base stealing Ty Cobb was better. But that's just mostly an epiphenomenon. Nobody benched Ruth because they didn't understand baseball statistics. They just watched games and Ruth clearly dominated over the other players.

So, while the rise of sabermetrics had some impact on how baseball was played (much of its impact malign), in the big scheme of things, it's pretty small change. The big impacts of better statistics are on the post-season awards and who gets into the Hall of Fame, not on the field of play.

Remember how it drove sabermetricians crazy in 2001 that sportswriters gave the AL MVP award to elegant Ichiro Suzuki rather than lumbering Jason Giambi, who almost died a few years later from all the PEDs he was taking in order to get his Billy Beane-approved surfeit of homers and walks? (For some reason, those statistical geniuses never tried to figure out which players were on the juice.)

For example, who were the best players on the 2002 Oakland A's, the team featured in Moneyball, as ranked on Wins Above Replacement? Oddly enough, you can't answer that question accurately from reading Lewis's book. The main reason the team did well was little mentioned in the book: its three ace pitchers Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Mark Mulder were 15.4 wins above replacement. Three of the bad guys in the book for not taking enough pitches, Miguel Tejada, Eric Chavez, and John Mabry, were 10.8 wins above replacement. And the three heroes of the book, Scott Hatteberg, Chad Bradford, and David Justice, were 5.5 wins above replacement: useful acquisitions, but pretty marginal in the big picture of things, which is a pretty accurate evaluation of sabermetrics role in baseball: modestly useful.

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

Italy

So what exactly has changed over the last few weeks in Italy, a country that, in my experience, doesn't change much fundamentally over time, that it is now suddenly the world locus of financial crisis? Or is Italy just next on the list now that the financial community has gotten what it can out of the Greece situation?

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

I don't get it

Here's a question from the sidebar, The Quiz Daniel Kahneman Wants You to Fail, to Michael Lewis's review in Vanity Fair of Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow:

2. A team of psychologists performed personality tests on 100 professionals, of which 30 were engineers and 70 were lawyers. Brief descriptions were written for each subject. The following is a sample of one of the resulting descriptions:

Jack is a 45-year-old man. He is married and has four children. He is generally conservative, careful, and ambitious. He shows no interest in political and social issues and spends most of his free time on his many hobbies, which include home carpentry, sailing, and mathematics.

What is the probability that Jack is one of the 30 engineers?

A. 10–40 percent
B. 40–60 percent
C. 60–80 percent
D. 80–100 percent

Here's the explanation given:

If you answered anything but A (the correct response being precisely 30 percent), you have fallen victim to the representativeness heuristic again, despite having just read about it. When Kahneman and Tversky performed this experiment, they found that a large percentage of participants overestimated the likelihood that Jack was an engineer, even though mathematically, there was only a 30-in-100 chance of that being true. This proclivity for attaching ourselves to rich details, especially ones that we believe are typical of a certain kind of person (i.e., all engineers must spend every weekend doing math puzzles), is yet another shortcoming of the hyper-efficient System 1.

Huh?

Let's add some more of those rich details:

Jack has a B.S. degree from Purdue. At work, Jack wears a short-sleeve button-front shirt with a pocket protector full of mechanical pencils, just like most of Jack's coworkers on his floor. Jack always wears a tie clasp to keep his necktie from getting smudged by the blueprints when he leans over a drafting table. Jack's favorite line from Shakespeare is, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." In fact, that's the only line from Shakespeare he knows. Jack wanted to name his firstborn son Kirk Spock, but his wife wouldn't let him.

So the percentage chance of Jack being an engineer is still "precisely 30 percent"?

I think one of the most widely overlooked cognitive flaws in the media is assuming that ignorance is smart, that scientists have proven that not noticing human patterns shows you have a high IQ (not that there's any such thing as IQ!).

I imagine that this sidebar wasn't made up by Kahneman or Lewis, but by some intern at Vanity Fair.

But, let me explain the fundamental flaw in Kahneman's underlying reasoning on this topic, and why it can mislead Vanity Fair staffers into thinking it validates their Jihad Against Prejudice. From Lewis's article:

It didn’t take me long to figure out that, in a not so roundabout way, Kahneman and Tversky had made my baseball story [Moneyball] possible. In a collaboration that lasted 15 years and involved an extraordinary number of strange and inventive experiments, they had demonstrated how essentially irrational human beings can be. In 1983—to take just one of dozens of examples—they had created a brief description of an imaginary character they named “Linda.” “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright,” they wrote. “She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” 

Then they went around asking people the same question: 

Which alternative is more probable? 

(1) Linda is a bank teller.
(2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement. 

The vast majority—roughly 85 percent—of the people they asked opted for No. 2, even though No. 2 is logically impossible. (If No. 2 is true, so is No. 1.) The human mind is so wedded to stereotypes and so distracted by vivid descriptions that it will seize upon them, even when they defy logic, rather than upon truly relevant facts. Kahneman and Tversky called this logical error the “conjunction fallacy.”

Of course, Jack and Linda don't, actually, exist. They were made up by K&T. Now, most people don't read about other people, real or fictional, in the context of psychology experiments where the professors are attempting to pull the wool over their eyes. They read about other people in novels, journalism, history and so forth where writers try to select details to communicate larger, more interesting points. So, they've gotten pretty good at figuring out what larger message the author is trying to communicate by selecting details. As a commenter says, it's Chekhov's Gun: If Jack cleans his gun in Act I, you better believe his gun is going to go off at some point in the play.

So, the point is that Kahneman and Tversky went to the trouble of telling their subjects these specific details. The subjects didn't observe these details, they read them in a piece of prose that K&T crafted. So their subjects assumed that Kahneman and Tversky weren't tossing in random details to yank their chains and waste everybody's time. Subjects assumed good faith on the part of the professors. If a novelist gives you a bunch of details about a character, which is what Kahneman and Tversky were imitating, the novelist isn't going to throw in random details. But, of course, time-wasting and chain-yanking were exactly what K&T were trying to do.

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

Chinese kindness

The L.A. Times has an article about how the Chinese are doing some soul-searching after videos have been posted of their callousness toward accident victims. In one incident, a lady from Uruguay was the only bystander to come to the aid of a victim.

On the other hand, I'm not sure if people in general are that quick to help out in emergencies, especially if they can tell themselves that somebody else will handle it. 

In 1993, I was driving down Lawrence Blvd. in Chicago, and was stopped at a red light at Western Blvd., third in line. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw somebody sprint across Western trying to make the bus at the corner. Bam! She got hit by a car, rolled up on the hood, fell off the right side of the hood, and landed on her head in the lane of traffic. 

"Wow," I said to myself. "If there weren't so many pedestrians, bus passengers, and other drivers closer to her than me, I really ought to get out and drag her out of the street before somebody else runs her over and finishes her off." I waited maybe two seconds, but nobody else moved toward her. So, I grabbed my keys and sprinted about 100 feet to her, waving my arms to alert drivers not to hit us. The young woman had a golf-ball size lump on her skull, but was moving enough, trying to get to her knees to crawl, to show that her neck and back weren't broken. I hauled her to the sidewalk. 

In May 1999, I was walking south along the west bank of the Chicago River toward, as I recall, the Madison St. bridge at 6 pm, in a huge crowd during rush hour. I saw something plummet off the bridge, which is about 50 feet high, heard a splash, and saw arms waving frantically in the cold river. Probably about thousand bystanders gawked at the woman in the water. 

I ran a half block down to the bridge, yelling for somebody to call 911 (I didn't have a cell phone), then sprinted across the river, passing hundreds of people, to the lifesaver ring attached to a rope in a glass case at the bridgetender's tower near the corner of Madison and South Wacker. That's probably a few hundred yards, and I'm slow, so that must have taken at least 90 seconds, but when I got to the life preserver, nobody else was there. (I am an old Boy Scout type, so I had noticed the life ring years before; I imagine most pedestrians never paid any attention to it.)

I whacked ineffectually on the glass with my casual leather shoe a few times, but then a well-dressed passer-by gave me his umbrella and I smashed the glass, wrecking his umbrella. (He didn't mind.) I then ran back to the middle of the river, tied the rope to the railing, yelled down to the woman, and dropped the buoy (managing to not clonk her on the head with the lifesaver, which would have been ironic but unfortunate). She grabbed it and hung on, and about 5 minutes later a fire department boat arrived and hauled her in. 

This was an upscale crowd, too, mostly Loop office workers on their way to the Northwestern train station to ride home to the nice suburbs. But the guy who volunteered his umbrella for me to use in smashing the glass was the first other person I noticed taking any self-initiated action in the first 100 or so seconds. 

So, while I imagine the Chinese do need to get better, it's not like Americans are all that forthcoming, especially when there is a huge crowd of others who might get involved first.

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

"A New Book Argues Against the SAT"

From the NYT:

A New Book Argues Against the SAT 

By REBECCA R. RUIZ 

When Wake Forest University announced three years ago that it would make the SAT optional for its undergraduate applicants, among those cheering was Joseph Soares, a sociology professor at the university. Mr. Soares has channeled his enthusiasm for Wake Forest’s decision — as well as for similar policies at several hundred other colleges — into a new book, “SAT Wars,” that argues for looking beyond standardized test scores in college admissions. (The book was published last month by Teachers College Press.) 

“The SAT and ACT are fundamentally discriminatory,”  Mr. Soares said in a phone interview last week. 

Through his own essays in the book, as well as those of contributors that he edited, Mr. Soares seeks to build a case against the SAT. He characterizes it as a test that tends to favor white, male, upper income students with the means to prepare for it.

Because Asians do so badly on the SAT.

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

"Tower Heist"

From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:

Six years ago, Eddie Murphy proposed taking Ocean’s Eleven and inverting it. An all-black cast would play Trump Tower servants who join forces to steal tens of millions from their overbearing boss. And rather than be ace criminals, they’d be bumbling, law-abiding citizens who have to learn their new craft on the fly. 

Producer Brian Grazer and widely despised director Brett Ratner (Rush Hour) immediately started kicking around names such as Tracy Morgan, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Jamie Foxx to team with Murphy in Tower Heist. Over the years, they paid a dozen or so top screenwriters to take a whack at this story. But Hollywood’s finest were repeatedly stumped. 

Why wasn't the movie made with an all-black cast as Murphy proposed?

Read the whole thing there.

By the way, Tower Heist features some good casting and/or rewriting to fit the cast. For example, I've long wondered why Matthew Broderick is considered a star. He seems lazy, puffy, and unenergetic to me. I guess it's because Ferris Beuller was a hit 25 years ago and he's been coasting on that every since. So, here he's cast as resident of Trump Tower, a former Merrill Lynch trader, who has gotten foreclosed upon.  He's introduced with lines something like these:

Ben Stiller as manager: "Sir, the bank insists that you vacate today."

Matthew Broderick (looking puffy, probably from heavy duty anti-depressants): "The market went up 106 points today. Do you know why?"

Ben Stiller: "No, sir."

Matthew Broderick (mournful and slightly hysterical): "Neither do I. I used to know, or I thought I did. But now I don't."

In other words, Matthew Broderick's character, a stock trader who got lucky early in his career, is pretty similar to Matthew Broderick, an actor who got lucky early in his career. And guess what? Broderick is good at playing a passive, self-pitying has-been.

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