How can we measure innovation and creativity?

As long as I can remember, the Japanese have been poor-mouthing their lack of creativity and innovation (and, by vague extension, that of East Asians in general). Presumably, they are right, but I've always wondered if there wasn't an element of strategy in this proclivity: "Don't you creative Western geniuses worry about us poor imitative Nipponese. We could never come up with those amazing annual model year changes in sheet metal like Chevy does! We'll just work on our boring little just-in-time manufacturing thingie -- which we totally got from an American, Edward Deming, by the way -- while you Westerners do all your creative wonders."

When commenters get into long debates about whether Asians or Asian-Americans are less creative / innovative than others, I find myself impressed by the certainty with which opinions are offered because I have a hard time coming up with data for, say, this century.

Creativity is clearly something that's terribly important, but it's also extremely hard to measure without the benefit of a long lag time to give historical perspective. 

For example, who was the more significantly creative American information theorist of the 1940s: Claude Shannon or Norbert Wiener? These days, well-informed people would likely say Shannon, who has been getting more famous throughout my lifetime. But if in the 1950s you'd asked an intelligent generalist such as, say, Robert Heinlein, he likely would have said Wiener. (See James Gleick's 2011 book The Information for a current assessment of the Shannon-Wiener rivalry.) Wiener had been famous since his days as a child prodigy (getting his Harvard Ph.D. in math at age 17), and his cybernetic perspective was more immediately appealing to a mechanical engineering-minded era. 

This is not to downplay Wiener, who did lots of other stuff, just that Shannon's work has proven more enduringly influential.

Can historians measure creativity with some degree of objectivity? I think so, for a reason that I outlined in my review of Charles Murray's Human Accomplishment:

Can we trust these data? The scholars upon whom Murray relies have their personal and professional biases, but, ultimately, their need to create coherent narratives explaining who influenced whom means that their books aren’t primarily based on their own opinions but rather on those of their subjects. For example, the best single confirmation of Beethoven’s greatness might be Brahms’s explanation of why he spent decades fussing before finally unveiling his First Symphony: “You have no idea how it feels for someone like me to hear behind him the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.” 

In Paul Johnson’s just-published and immensely readable book Art: A New History, you can see how even this most opinionated of historians must adapt himself to the judgments of artists. Much of the book’s entertainment value stems from Johnson’s heresies, such as his grumpy comment on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel: “No one ever wished the ceiling larger.” Still, Johnson can’t really break free from conventional art history because he can’t avoid writing about those whom subsequent artists emulated. 

For example, Johnson finds Cézanne (who ranks 10th in Murray’s table of 479 significant artists) painfully incompetent at the basics of his craft. Yet, Johnson has to grit his teeth and write about Cézanne at length because he “was in some ways the most influential painter of the late nineteenth century because of his powerful (and to many mysterious) appeal to other painters …”

(Of course, it could all just be a giant conspiracy going on for generations ...)

Anyway, that raises the question of how can we measure trends in creativity and innovation without long lag times? Murray, for example, halted most of his analysis in 1950 to avoid recent fads that won't stand the test of time. 

But, looking back in history, we can see sudden upsurges or declines in particular societies. For example, the traditional English view is that victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 set off a great age of English cultural accomplishment, of which Shakespeare is only the most famous. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but that has long been the standard story.

So, for this problem of measuring 21st Century innovation, I would propose that as an approximation, somebody do a surname analysis of the founders of technology firms that succeeded with initial public offerings of at least some size. This lacks the historical perspective, but it has the advantage that investors put real money down on their bets on what would be a successful and enduring innovation. Anybody want to try this? Or is there something better to measure?

P.S. A commenter kindly points to two papers that provide data on this subject. One by Ola Bengtsson and David H. Hsu looks at 1780 pairs of tech start-up founders and venture capitalists over about a decade centering around about 1998-2007. These are start-ups that at least got VC funding. About 48% of the start-ups are in California and 18% in Massachusetts.

Among founders, a surname analysis shows 3% Chinese and 7% Indian. There may be some miscellaneous Asians that they didn't break out. (Among venture capitalists, they find 4% Chinese and 4% Indian.)

Another analysis came up with 87% of founders white, 12% Asian, 1% black. These are both national surveys. The percent Asian in California is higher according to the second study: 18%.

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

Eric Holder: Quotas without End, Amen

Via Roger Clegg and Discriminations, I see this interesting interview by the president of Columbia U., Lee Bollinger, who was the named defendant in the Grutter and Gratz affirmative action cases of 2003, of Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. As you'll recall, Sandra Day O'Connor's majority opinion seemed to put some sort of 25-year timeline on affirmative action, but the Attorney General is having none of that:

One of Bollinger’s questions concerned the United States Supreme Court’s decision earlier this week to reconsider affirmative action. Bollinger was involved in defending affirmative action when the court declared it constitutional in a landmark 2003 case, and he said on Thursday that the court’s decision to revisit the issue is “ominous.” 

Holder expressed support for affirmative action, saying that he “can’t actually imagine a time in which the need for more diversity would ever cease.” 

“Affirmative action has been an issue since segregation practices,” Holder said. “The question is not when does it end, but when does it begin ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?”

As you'll also recall, the justification given for affirmative action in the majority opinion was not compensation for the historic effects of slavery and Jim Crow, but the benefits that white students gain from "diversity," from the free-wheeling, wide-open, politically incorrect intellectual atmosphere fostered on campus by letting in some students because of their racial/ethnic backgrounds. But, in the Attorney General's view, diversity is about people of color getting benefits. And we have not yet begun to fight! 

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

Andrew Breitbart, RIP

I don't actually know much about the late Andrew Breitbart, who dropped dead last night at age 43, but I want to relate something my wife observed when I had cancer at 38. Lots of people would eventually ask her, "So ... Steve smokes, right?" When she said I didn't, the nonsmokers would look worried and unhappy, and the smokers would look relieved.

We like to believe that whenever anybody dies, it's his own fault. That means, that you, personally, not having any major faults, don't ever have to die.

It's like the test pilots at Edwards AFB in The Right Stuff sitting around at a backyard cookout after one of their neighbors died flying some experimental piece of junk.

Husband 1: Poor Mike ...
Husband 2: Yeah, it's kind of surprising he let himself get in that situation.
Wife 2: What situation?
Husband 2: You know, not being able to handle it.
Wife 1: Handle it? The left wing fell off his airplane!
Husband 3: Yeah, but if afterward's he'd vectored the ailerons with a little more reactive thrust.
Husband 1: And updrafted the trailing surfaces.
Husband 2: Of course.
Wives 1, 2, and 3: The wing fell off!
Husbands 1, 2, and 3: He just didn't have the Right Stuff ...

Conversely, this reminds me of my own automatic assumptions about anybody with more energy than myself (i.e., about 75% of humanity):

A. Obviously, he's on cocaine / Adderall / steroids / adrenochrome etc.

B. Obviously, he's bipolar and is this close to snapping into a full-blown manic episode in which he declares himself the Emperor of Antarctica. 

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

A prediction about America in 2062

A commenter named John says in regard to the National Merit semifinalist lists:

What we are seeing is that Jews are beginning to neglect vanity projects in terms of intellectual achievement - they no longer care about dominating purely social markers of intellectual success, that are more about vanity than real accomplishment. 

So far as I know we have not seen any decline in Jewish Nobels or in Jewish names amongst famous intellectuals in all areas. Has there been such a decline? THAT would be a significant marker.

Good question. A methodological problem is that a lot of measures of accomplishment -- Nobels, Forbes 400, Oscars, etc. -- have time lags built in. Probably looking at founders of major IPOs in this century would be a good test with the shortest time lag. The three most obvious names are Zuckerberg, Page, and Brin, but I don't follow that field closely.

But as far as I know where it counts, Jews perform as well as ever. But in terms of social vanity markers, Jews simply no longer have the motivation they had when they were outsiders in American society - which is exactly what one would expect.  

Interestingly, whites have been underperforming their average IQ in terms of vanity and prestige projects (including admission to an elite unis, which is in many ways more about vanity than economic success) for quite some time now, which is precisely what one would expect - viewed from sociological perspective - from the group that has the most secure social position and feels the least need to *prove* anything. 

That Asians are exerting enormous effort to do well in areas whose significance is to a high degree about vanity and prestige makes total sense. It brings to mind the way many Third World countries spend enormous amounts to build sparkling, palatial airports, while LAX is a dump ;)  

That Jews are now converging with Whites in terms of their indifference to vanity projects is something that we should have expected.  

I predict that in 50 years, the crazy Asian numbers we are seeing now in all these fields - coupled with a troubling lack of real world excellence - will diminish considerably and become more in line with their average IQ, which will still give them a modest overrepresentation in some fields, but nothing like what we are seeing now. 

When that happens, we will know that Asians have *arrived* as Americans and no longer feel the need to *prove* themselves, and we can welcome them into the fold ;) But before that Asians will have to come to terms with the painful reality that their talents are far more modest than they would have wished. The Japanese have already gone through this self-reckoning, and are the most relaxed and easy going of the Asians as a result.

Could be. Or then again, maybe not. 

Remember how there was a brief war in 1962 between China and India over some sparsely inhabited high-altitude terrain in the Himalayas where the border wasn't agreed upon? Perhaps the big issue in American politics in 2062 will be over that border, with one party backing China's claims and the other India's. How do we know that in fifty years, the burning issue of the day in American political and intellectual circles won't be whether China or India has rightful control of Aksai Chin, a region of salt deserts at 16,000 feet?

If that sounds nuts, then imagine what President Eisenhower would have said in 1956 if you told him that in 2012 the candidates for the Republican presidential nomination would compete over foreign policy mostly by trying to promise the most fervently to beat up anybody who questions Israel's right to the shore of the Dead Sea? 

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

More views on California surnames of semifinalists

A) A rabbi checked out the potentially Jewish names for PSAT semifinalists in 2012 (see my Taki's Magazine column "The East Rises in the West") and came up with a range of 81 to 125 Jewish surnames, or 4 to 6 percent out of 1,950. I have to believe that this is way down from the percent of Jewish National Merit semifinalists in California in the 1970s. Has California's Jewish community shrunk just in relative terms, or in absolute terms (Portland, here we come?). Has marrying shiksas diluted the gene pool? Do Jewish kids try less hard now? But they seemed to be pretty heavy dope smokers at Beverly Hills H.S. in 1975? Or have Asians raised the test scores at the high end?

B) My Taki column is on PSAT semifinalists in California in 2011, but I found on College Confidential an analysis of the 2010 California semifinalists, and if you can't trust anonymous posters on College Confidential, whom can you trust?

Out of 2,003 semifinalists who took the PSAT in California in the spring of 2010:

This is what California's technocratic class will look like 20 years hence:

739 East Asian (Chinese surname, but half-dozen possible countries of origin)
98 Korean
126 undetermined (includes 37 with surname Lee)
18 Japanese (could be Japanese nationals or 4th generation American)
54 South East Asian (Viet Namese, Philippino, Thai, Pacific Islander)
198 South Asian (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,...)
46 Eurasian (Persian, Armenian, Arabic, Turkish, ...)
728 European (including Hispanic, Jewish, and Slavic)
1 Somali
1 Ghanian

Note: gender and ethnicity were inferred from student's firstname, lastname, and Google search

I rearranged the order. 

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

The One Percent

My new Taki's Magazine column includes a surname analysis (courtesy of reader Rec1man) of the latest National Merit Scholar list of semifinalists in California. About 1.6 million high school juniors take the PSAT annually, and the top 16,000 scorers are recognized as semifinalists. The NMSC does not release ethnic breakdowns of semifinalists, so you have to use surname analysis, which is time-consuming and inexact, but fun.

The white/black test-score gap has been in the news since the 1960s, yet rather like Mark Twain supposedly said about the weather, despite all the talk, nobody seems able to do much about it. ... 

The big news in this century has been the growing Asian-white test-score gap at the high end. 

Consider a feature article in The New York Times over the weekend, “To Be Black at Stuyvesant High.” It was seemingly commissioned to argue for admissions quotas at the famously competitive Manhattan public high school by pointing out that only 3.6 percent of Stuyvesant’s students are now black or Hispanic, down from 15 percent in 1970. My guess is that the story’s emphasis on a lonely black student was mostly an elaborate framing device for its more newsworthy but downplayed message: Holy God, look at ALL THE ASIANS!

Read the whole thing there.

Miscellaneous left over fact: Stuyvesant High in lower Manhattan has 121 of the state of New York's 969 National Merit semifinalists. Hunter College school isn't far behind.

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

Wash. Post: Black women fat and happy about it

From the Washington Post:

Black women heavier and happier with their bodies than white women, poll finds

... The poll found that although black women are heavier than their white counterparts, they report having appreciably higher levels of self-esteem. Although 41 percent of average-sized or thin white women report having high self-esteem, that figure was 66 percent among black women considered by government standards to be overweight or obese. ... 

“Historically, [self-esteem] research on black girls and women has always been the highest among all groups,” Perry says. “It’s really a powerful statement about our resilience given the dominant images of black women present in American culture, which have been generally degrading and unattractive, or hypersexual and less feminine.”

“Why Are Black Women Less Physically Attractive Than Other Women?” 

“It is very interesting to note that even though black women are objectively less physically attractive than other women, black women (and men) subjectively consider themselves to be far more physically attractive than others . . . 

“What accounts for the markedly lower average level of physical attractiveness among black women? Black women are, on average, much heavier than non-black women.”

Satoshi Kanazawa

May 15, 2011 

Removed from Psychology Today Web site after uproar

In other words, Kanazawa was right, but he was wrong (and got suspended for it) for the usual "Who? Whom?" reasons. 

Overall, the roots of all this sound somewhat hormonal. If you have a lot of muscle, fat, and self-esteem, you probably have a different balance of hormones and hormones receptors than if you are thin and uncertain. This applies to white men, as well. The difference between a fat and muscular Hells Angel and an ectomorphic and uncertain bookkeeper probably start with hormones.

By the way, let me note once again that Hollywood, in practice, doesn't put up with much Diversity Ideology. Walking down Ventura Blvd., an upscale shopping street that serves lower level movie and TV people, about 5% or so of the women are black. Most have some connection with the entertainment industry or at least want to look like they do. 

And, guess what, they almost all look nice and slender.

Also, I'm not surprised this article ran in the Washington Post. My observation is that D.C. has the world's highest density of Large and in Charge (but not moving too fast) black women among big cities I'm familiar with. Trying to get a black lady who works in customer service at a CVS drugstore in the District to actually engage in, you know, customer service got to be a running joke on trips to Washington. Every visit to CVS called to mind JFK's observation that Washington is a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency. 

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

Obama Admin: U.S. not accomplishing anything in Afghanistan, so can't leave

From the New York Times:

Afghan Uproar Casts Shadows on U.S Pullout 

WASHINGTON — American officials sought to reassure both Afghanistan’s government and a domestic audience on Sunday that the United States remained committed to the war after the weekend killing of two American military officers inside the Afghan Interior Ministry and days of deadly anti-American protests. 

But behind the public pronouncements, American officials described a growing concern, even at the highest levels of the Obama administration and Pentagon, about the challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan that hinges on the close mentoring and training of army and police forces.

The "challenges of pulling off a troop withdrawal in Afghanistan" seem somewhat exaggerated.

You just slip out the back, Jack
Make a new plan, Stan
You don't need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Hop on the bus, Gus
You don't need to discuss much
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free 

Things have gotten so wacky that the New Voice of Sanity on Afghanistan is the Newtster, who said to Afghanistan this week: "‘You know, you’re going to have to figure out how to live your own miserable life.'"

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

Reviewing the reviews of Coming Apart

In VDARE, I review the reviews of Charles Murray's Coming Apart. Read the whole thing there.

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

Rudi Can't Fail (in fact, Rudi Can Yale)

The NYT has a long article, To Be Black at Stuyvesant High, on a young heroine of diversity, Rudi-Ann Miller, who practically singlehandedly has kept multiculturalism alive at Stuyvesant H.S. by being one of only 40 African-American students out of 3200 at NYC's premiere exam-only public science and math school.

She has also had enough of the grumbling at Stuyvesant that black students do better in the college-admissions game because of their skin color.

Rudi will have to assuage her hurt feelings next year at Yale. 

Hey, wait a minute, what kind of African-American girl born in the 1990s is named Rudi anyway? Isn't there some foreign country where "Rudie" is close to being the national nickname?

If you followed the complaints of Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier about how Harvard's affirmative action slots tend to go to students who are not the descendants of American slaves (i.e., to Barack rather than Michelle Obama), you won't be surprised to find out from later on in the article that Rudi attended through seventh grade Campion College in Jamaica, a Jesuit school that her father, a Jamaican accounting executive recently relocated to the New York area, calls the finest in that country. (Campion College's website boasts that 14 of its graduates have gone on to win Rhodes Scholarships.)

A commenter notes:

As a Stuy alum who had many Black friends, I find it disappointing that the article didn't inquire further into the community of Black students who do make it to Stuy. While there is of course diversity within the Black community, I can testify that most are either the children of immigrants or products of inter-racial relationships. This is relevant because it shows that many are either of higher socio-economic status, or similar to the potpourri of second-generation immigrants who dominate the school. The real issue is why there are so few from the entrenched black communities, in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx who aspire to attend Stuy.

One reason is offered in the article:

Sometimes, Mr. Blumm said, blacks and Latinos who do well enough on the entrance exam to get into Stuyvesant are lured away by prestigious private high schools, which offer them full scholarships and none of the issues that even elite public schools have to contend with, like tight budgets and overcrowding. 

By the way, is this the first statistical graph to be published in this century where blacks are represented by the color black? I thought there was some sort of Rule of Randomizing colors where one one graph blacks are, say, white, and whites are brown, and Chinese are green, and Mexicans are red, and then on the next graph blacks are blue, whites yellow, Asians purple, and Latinos white? I dunno, this graph could be setting a dangerous precedent by making it easier for readers to make sense out of racial data.

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

It's Annual Subculturepalooza Day

A reader writes:

Academy Awards: Woodstock for women, gays, and celebrities 

NBA All Star Game: Woodstock for blacks and rappers 

Daytona 500: Woodstock for southerners and country stars 

All on the same day! [Although rain has postponed the NASCAR race until Monday]

What's about SWPL whites, normal men, and country club Republicans? The NFL combine? Accenture Match Play championship? Our ruling elites are underserved if just for one day!

Yes, but plenty of white guys will win Oscars, so a few elite white men will be happy. The Oscar voters are 94% white and 77% male. (For some reason, the L.A. Times study that came up with this didn't ask about politics, sexual orientation, or religion/ethnicity.)

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

When was the last Mexican American nominated for an Oscar?

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

Yet the most striking diversity shortfall in Hollywood is one that would get any less liberal industry in trouble with Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Los Angeles County is about half Hispanic, and Latino fans make up 30% of the enthusiasts for summer blockbusters. Despite all that, Mexican Americans—in the sense of those who have spent at least part of their formative years in America—are remarkably underrepresented in The Industry.  

Wikipedia’s Oscar lists suggest that no Mexican American has been nominated in any category, no matter how humble, since the 1980s. They're riding a zero for several thousand cold streak. 

Oddly enough, Mexican Americans did better in the pre-diversity days, receiving five acting nominations from 1952 through 1964.

Read the whole thing there.

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

Kipling would not have been surprised

From the BBC:

Thousands of enraged Afghans have taken to the streets for a fourth day, after US soldiers inadvertently set fire to copies of the Koran. 

In the deadliest day of unrest so far, at least 12 people died across the country, as mobs charged at US bases and diplomatic missions. 

More than 20 people have been killed since the unrest began, including two US soldiers who died on Thursday.

It didn't end well for Danny and Peachey, either.

For the concluding scene of what all of Daniel Dravot's efforts to civilize the Afghans gets him, see here.

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

Not not from The Onion

From The Onion:

"Great Team Chemistry No Match For Great Team Biology"

Despite college basketball analysts' frequent remarks that the team exhibits "great chemistry," the Texas A&M Aggies were edged out Wednesday night 66-58 by the No. 4-ranked Kansas Jayhawks, who apparently have great team biology.

Sports differ markedly in how easy it is to predict professional success, with basketball being the easiest, probably because height is so important and obvious. The NBA used to conduct a seven round draft, but bored teams would purposely fritter away later-round choices on random tall people, celebrities, and women. So, the NBA switched to only two rounds. Even so, the number of undrafted players to achieve stardom is low. The best undrafted player ever is probably defensive specialist Ben Wallace, followed by Brad Miller and John Starks and a surprisingly short list of other star players.

When you think about it, basketball's kind of a stupid sport because it gives such an advantage to height, which is a randomly genetic attribute, not an earned virtue.

Have any new team sports been invented in the last generation? We've got a bunch of new individual sports, most of them X Games stuff, like snowboard cross, that are pretty cool, but are any new team sports emerging? 

In contrast, baseball's draft goes on forever. Mike Piazza was picked in the 62nd round. 

In the NFL, famous undrafted players include Kurt Warner, Wes Welker, Warren Moon, and Jeff Garcia. 

In golf, the creation of the Senior Tour for 50+ players led to a small number of senior stars emerging who had never had any success on the regular Tour. One had lived in his car for years, working on his swing. 

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

Jeremy Lin: "These are the days of miracle and wonder"

Howard Beck reports in the New York Times on late-bloomer Jeremy Lin:

The Evolution of a Point Guard
By HOWARD BECK 

ORLANDO — The most captivating strand of the Jeremy Lin mystique is that he came from nowhere, emerging overnight to become a star, after being underestimated and overlooked, disregarded by college coaches, ignored in the N.B.A. draft and waived twice in two weeks. 

The narrative is well-established, factual in its broadest strokes and altogether flawed, or at least woefully incomplete. 

Jeremy Lin’s rise did not begin, as the world perceived it, with a 25-point explosion at Madison Square Garden on Feb. 4. It began with lonely 9 a.m. workouts in downtown Oakland in the fall of 2010; with shooting drills last summer on a backyard court in Burlingame, Calif.; and with muscle-building sessions at a Menlo Park fitness center. 

It began with a reworked jump shot, a thicker frame, stronger legs, a sharper view of the court — enhancements that came gradually, subtly, through study and practice and hundreds of hours spent with assistant coaches, trainers and shooting instructors over 18 months. 

Quite simply, the Jeremy Lin who revived the Knicks, stunned the N.B.A. and charmed the world — the one who is averaging 22.4 points and 8.8 assists as a starter — is not the Jeremy Lin who went undrafted out of Harvard in June 2010. He is not even the same Jeremy Lin who was cut by the Golden State Warriors on Dec. 9. 

Beyond the mystique and the mania lies a more basic story — of perseverance, hard work and self-belief. 

“He’s in a miracle moment, where everything has come together,” said Keith Smart, the Sacramento Kings coach, who was Lin’s coach with the Warriors last season. 

Smart can hardly recognize his former pupil these days. Nor can Eric Musselman, who coached Lin in the N.B.A. Development League for 20 games. Nor can Lamar Reddicks, a former Harvard assistant coach, who fondly remembers a freshman-year Lin as “the weakest guy on the team.” 

“I look at him on TV now,” Reddicks said, “and I’m like, I can’t imagine that he’s this big!” 

What scouts saw in the spring of 2010 was a smart passer with a flawed jump shot and a thin frame, who might not have the strength and athleticism to defend, create his own shot or finish at the rim in the N.B.A. The evolution began from there. ... 

Yet an outside shot would not be enough. Lin needed to be able to consistently convert shots in the lane. And to do that, he needed to withstand the contact. 

On Scheppler’s advice, Lin sought out Phil Wagner, a physician and trainer who owns Sparta Performance Science in Menlo Park. Wagner saw a player with enviable athleticism, but who lacked the explosiveness of an elite N.B.A. player. 

“Most basketball players can create force very quickly,” Wagner said, referring to a player jumping off the floor. “Jeremy couldn’t.” 

He compared Lin to a stretched-out rubber band — flexible, but lacking that snap-back quality. The goal was to make him “stiffer,” through a training program of heavy weights and low repetition, in conjunction with a high-protein diet. With the added muscle, Lin pushed his weight to 212 pounds from 200, while increasing his vertical leap by 3.5 inches, Wagner said. The result is evident every time Lin barrels into the lane this season. 

“The biggest thing I see is when he gets intro traffic, he’s able to maintain his direction and his balance, because he’s stronger,” Wagner said, adding, “He’s a physical guard. That’s where I see his hard work and the program he did with us paying off.”

It's a turn-around jump shot
It's everybody jump start
It's every generation throws a hero up the pop charts
Medicine is magical and magical is art
The Boy in the Bubble
And the baby with the baboon heart

And I believe...
These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is the long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

Paul Simon, 1986

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

Minority victimhood kicks in at 0.1 percentile

There's a fair amount of national chatter about the U. of Texas affirmative action case, but the far more revealing 5-year-old Vulcan Society v. Fire Department of New York lawsuit remains mostly of interest in the Outer Boroughs. The truth is that "affirmative action" pales in importance to "disparate impact," but practically nobody in the U.S. understands "disparate impact" law. Do you think, say, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Rachel Maddow, Keith Olbermann, or Maureen Dowd could explain the EEOC's Fourth-Fifth's Rule off the top of their heads?

From the New York Daily News today:

Seven applicants who failed the FDNY written exams that a federal judge tossed out as discriminatory are not entitled to damages because their grade was less than 25. 

The Vulcan Society of black firefighters, the city and U.S. Justice Department lawyers all agree that a score of 25 is too abysmally low to merit compensation. 

“Such a candidate would not have succeeded due to his or her lack of effort and therefore should not be eligible for relief,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Elliot Schachner wrote in papers filed Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court. 

Only seven black and Hispanic applicants out of 7,100 who took the tests scored less than 25 on the exams, according to court papers. Of nonminority applicants, 20 scored less than 25. 

The U.S. Justice Department filed suit against the city in 2007 alleging the written exams in 1999 and 2002 discriminated against minorities. 

Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis later ruled that minority candidates who were not hired and those whose hiring was delayed as a result of the test scores may be entitled to damages.

Except for the dumbest 0.1% (i.e., 7 out of 7,100) who took the test.

My recollection is that this was a multiple choice test with four answers for each questions. I don't know if 25 means 25%, but if so, that means the only minority applicants not eligible to share in the booty were those who did worse than random guessing.

But, what about firefighting applicants who were unable to finish their exam because they accidentally set their test booklets on fire? Surely, they deserve to share in the loot from the fight against racism, too?

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

Intellectualizing the Oscar movies

As I mentioned before, late 2011's crop of Ocar-contender movies proved peculiarly hard to come up with anything intelligent to say about how they relate to larger themes in American life (whereas Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Bad Teacher, X-Men: First Class, and so forth from the popcorn season were smart reimaginings of things you aren't supposed to talk about explicitly). For example, the most intelligent thought I came up from thinking about "The Artist" was that maybe instead of speeding up the film 2 frames per second, they should have sped it up 4 frames.

In contrast, in years past it was easy to come up with interpretations of Oscar-nominated films radically different from the conventional wisdom: e.g., "District 9" wasn't so much an "apartheid allegory" as it was a dystopian Malthusian take on illegal immigration from Zimbabwe by a refugee Boer. "Borat" wasn't a documentary exploring prejudice in Red State America, it was a 90 minute Polish joke illustrating traditional Jewish attitudes toward goyishe kop Slavs. But, "The Artist" is a fun silent movie.

That doesn't stop pixel-stained wretches from trying, however. Here, for example, is Frank Bruni in the New York Times painfully drawing analogies between each and every one of the 9 Best Picture nominees and the GOP presidential primaries.

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

Decreasingly Asymmetric Media

Henry Canaday comments:

Here’s another, related hypothesis: 

1. In the early 1970s, Big Media switched from generally favoring the Democratic Party to essentially defining the liberal agenda, with the Democrats piggy-backing on this agenda to hold onto office. 

For example, AFL-CIO boss George Meany, an elderly ex-plumber, went from being The Man for Democratic-leaning newspapers to being an embarrassing relic in a few years.

2. This happened because: a) Big Media had far more presence in front of voter eyeballs, in both news and entertainment, than a Democratic Party badly fractured by Vietnam and Civil Rights; b) Big Media was far more accustomed to pleasing and persuading readers-viewers-voters, since they make a living at this; c) Big Media was more unified in its view of how things should be than even Democratic politicians, who have to deal with different constituencies and with the consequences of dreamy policies. 

3. For the next 20 or 30 years, Dissident Conservative Media, on radio and TV talk shows and in a few publications, devoted itself to opposing the idiocies of the Big Media-Democratic liberal agenda. This Dissident Conservative Media influenced but did not define the Republican Party’s own program. 

4. During roughly the last ten years, Dissident Conservative Media has grown in presence and power and has begun to play the same role for Republicans as Big Media does for Democrats. And for much the same reasons. As media, it has far more daily contact with readers-viewers-voters than the shreds of the old Party organization and more power than even new grass-roots organizations like the Tea Party. As Media, it pleases for its daily bread and is skilled at persuading.  

5. In its role of now defining the Republican Party and conservative agenda, Dissident Conservative Media is affected by some of the same factors that affect Big Media. Certain subjects are simply too unpleasant and difficult to speak about to a general audience, while retaining this audience and the revenue it brings in. These troublesome subjects include race, ethnicity and the transformation of even American whites into a slob-and-slut society. 

6. So Dissident Conservative Media sticks with safer, less-offensive arguments about political principles on foreign policy, domestic policy and market economics.
I don’t think this is the whole explanation, but I think it is at least part of the explanation.

By the way, why do Republican insiders, media and wonk, really want to reclaim the White House in 2012? A second term for Obama would likely be a halcyon age for Dissident Conservative Big Media, while a first term for Romney would likely put them on the snooze-inducing defensive?

My guess is that the real reason Republican apparatchiks in Washington desperately want to win in 2012 is so that they can put in a couple of years as an assistant deputy undersecretary of this or that, making $147k or whatever, then resign and make approaching 7 figures on K Street because they have White House Experience.

Okay, I can understand that. But what's in it for the rest of us, other than the thrill of seeing Our Team Win?

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