Unz: Chinese Scandals v. American Incidents

Ron Unz has a new piece pointing out, among much else, how the American press seems to do a better job of covering Chinese scandals than American scandals. 

In a sidebar, he compares the Chinese baby formula scandal to an American corporate scandal that pretty much everybody has already forgotten about:

First, consider the details of the Chinese infant formula scandal of 2008. Unscrupulous businessmen had discovered they could save money by greatly diluting their milk products, then adding a plastic chemical compound called melamine to raise the apparent protein content back to normal levels. Nearly 300,000 babies throughout China had suffered urinary problems, with many hundreds requiring lengthy hospitalization for kidney stones. Six died.

See if you can guess which shameful American bit of history he is thinking of.

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

How good is the best woman at golf?

A decade ago, Annika Sorenstam was doing a lot of weightlifting*, and pulled away from other women golfers, becoming probably the best woman golfer ever for a few years. So, she entered the men's PGA tournament at Colonial in 2003 to a din of publicity. In the weeks leading up to that event, I collected a ton of data on the difficulty ratings of the courses that the PGA and LPGA play to provide an objective metric, and I announced:

So, I predict that if Sorenstam plays this week the way she's played in the rest of 2003, she'll miss the cut by four strokes.

And that's exactly what happened: she missed the cut to play on the weekend by four strokes. Out of 113 entrants, she outperformed 13 men, tied four, and finished behind 93. A highly respectable performance, but not up to Phil Mickelson's prediction (that she'd finish 20th -- although I'm guessing that was gamesmanship on the part of Phil, who is a sly devil) or Thomas Boswell's assertion that if she played the PGA regularly, she'd make the cut half the time and win a couple of events during her career. But, she beat the Vegas over-under line by eight strokes over two rounds. 

Of course, I was very lucky that she played in those two rounds about as well as she had been playing all year. Still, it was a pretty level-headed prediction. Sorenstam seems to have felt she'd given it a good shot, and didn't try it again.

I wanted to bring this up because prediction is widely recognized as crucial to science. On the other hand, one of my two or three most important contributions to the philosophy science is the idea that people tend to be more interested in those future events that are hardest to predict: e.g., will this stock outperform the market?  When thinking about the kind of things that people get most fascinated by, such as which NFL teams will beat the point spread on Sunday, the phrase "dart-throwing monkey" comes to mind. In contrast, most of the things that are pretty predictable, like test scores for large groups, bring to mind the phrase "boring and depressing."

In contrast, Sorenstam's entrance in that PGA tournament was the kind of novel event that is interesting to predict as a test of one's model of the world and struck the public, briefly, as not boring and depressing.

-------------
* By the way, I was attacked by the SPLC for noticing that Sorenstam, at her peak, had bulked up from weightlifting:

Sailer's website is rife with primitive stereotypes. On it, Sailer mocks professional golfer Annika Sorenstam for having well-developed muscles ...

What I actually said in my prediction article was, in the course of comparing her scoring proficiency to that of Corey Pavin:

Pavin is listed at 5'-9" and 155 pounds. The 32-year-old Sorenstam is 5'-6". She used to be listed at 130 pounds, but has clearly added a lot of muscle mass over the last two years. Now, she has that distinctive characteristic of a bodybuilder: her forearms no longer hang down along her sides because her upper arms are so muscular. Think of how Saturday Night Live's Dana Carvey and Kevin Nelon held their arms away from their sides while playing Hans and Franz, their Schwarzenegger-type "Ve vill pump you up!" muscle heads. (No doubt some male pros think she's been augmenting her weightlifting with steroids or human growth hormone, but there's no specific evidence for that at all.)

Noticing things is evil.

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

Can you raise your IQ thru mental exercise?

From the New York Times Magazine:

Can You Make Yourself Smarter? 

By Dan Hurley

Since the first reliable intelligence test was created just over a hundred years ago, researchers have searched for a way to increase scores meaningfully, with little success. The track record was so dismal that by 2002, when Jaeggi and her research partner (and now her husband), Martin Buschkuehl, came across a study claiming to have done so, they simply didn’t believe it. 

The study, by a Swedish neuroscientist named Torkel Klingberg, involved just 14 children, all with A.D.H.D. Half participated in computerized tasks designed to strengthen their working memory, while the other half played less challenging computer games. After just five weeks, Klingberg found that those who played the working-memory games fidgeted less and moved about less. More remarkable, they also scored higher on one of the single best measures of fluid intelligence, the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. Improvement in working memory, in other words, transferred to improvement on a task the children weren’t training for. 

Even if the sample was small, the results were provocative (three years later Klingberg replicated most of the results in a group of 50 children), because matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven’s: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns — up, down and across — from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled. 

If measuring intelligence through matrices seems arbitrary, consider how central pattern recognition is to success in life. If you’re going to find buried treasure in baseball statistics to give your team an edge by signing players unappreciated by others, you’d better be good at matrices. If you want to exploit cycles in the stock market, or find a legal precedent in 10 cases, or for that matter, if you need to suss out a woolly mammoth’s nature to trap, kill and eat it — you’re essentially using the same cognitive skills tested by matrices.

I tend to look at this from the opposite perspective: Can you let your intelligence deteriorate? Yes, probably, I would imagine. 

It's a little like the perennial question debated by stat nerds of whether or not athletes enjoy hot streaks. They certainly suffer cold streaks when they are marginally injured, suffering from illness, worried that their wives will divorce them, angry at their teammates, defended by outstanding players, fallen into bad mechanics, etc. Perhaps hot streaks are just the absence of all cold streaks?

Anyway, I can well imagine that not exercising your brain could lead to declines in intelligence. 

But, then, the question becomes what is the best brain exercise for you individually. Is it one of these abstract games that are kind of like a Ravens Matrices IQ test? Or maybe, say, reading, oh, I don't know, this blog is good exercise for your brain. Plus, it's fun and informative.

As they say at the end of scientific papers, more research is needed!

P.S. Think about the different kinds of sports: the best training for long distance runners is long distance running. Same for swimming. On the other hand, sprinters don't need to sprint 20 hours per week, but they do need to lift weights. The best training for soccer as a youth is not playing in an 11-on-11 soccer game (the way American soccer kids are taught), but playing one-on-one soccer exercises to get in hundreds of touches of the ball per day (the Dutch method). On the other hand, playing basketball is pretty good training for being a point guard, but not for perfecting the skyhook.

So, a priori, I can't guess. I suspect that general intelligence might be kind of like playing point guard, and the most important thing is to turn off the TV and get out there and do it. But maybe there are good exercises for working memory, just like weight training can be highly useful for different sports. But it also helps to craft a weightlifting plan to the sport. For example, when Michael Jordan switched from baseball back to basketball in the spring of 1995, his weightlifting regimen had been crafted to make him "baseball strong" and he looked kind of awkward on the court. Then, his trainer switched him back to basketball strong lifting routines and he was pretty awesome again the next season.

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

Pitcher Jamie Moyer wins at 49

Lefty hurler Jamie Moyer set the record for oldest winning pitcher in major league baseball history yesterday. At age 49, he threw 7 innings without giving up an earned run despite never reaching 80 mph on the radar gun. I can recall Moyer as an unimpressive 23-year-old rookie with the Chicago Cubs in 1986, so his remarkable career is testimony to character.

Mr. Moyer, who has earned $82 million as a pitcher despite modest physical gifts, has eight children, which I find heartening. Here's a question about heritability: do highly competent people like Moyer tend to have children who are above average in competence?

I can recall knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm being modestly effective in relief for the Dodgers at age 48 and 49 in the early 1970s, but the knuckleball is a special pitch. 

Here's another question: is it at all imaginable that a woman could make the major leagues as a knuckleball pitcher? (Moyer is not a knuckleballer, which makes his accomplishment even more impressive.)

Women aren't competitive with men in sports other sedentary sports like shooting and equestrian. But, theoretically, there is a backdoor route to major league baseball for a pitcher without tremendous arm strength who masters the knuckleball. The knuckleball is an anomalous pitch that is sort of shot-putted up toward the plate without any spin. It gets buffeted about by random air currents and can be extremely frustrating for batters (or, it can be extremely easy to hit if it happens to fly straight and slow - knuckleballers need to develop a Zen attitudes to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune). 

Still, any kind of overhand throwing is asking a lot of a woman. For example, here's a short video of Annika Sorenstam, the best woman golfer ever, throwing out a 57-foot ceremonial first pitch at Shea Stadium.

Still, a few women can bring some heat. A tiny number of young women have pitched at the lowest levels of college baseball -- I recall Caltech's baseball team being badly beaten once by a girl, daughter of a minor league pitcher, who supposedly threw fastballs in the upper 70s. That was Ila Borders, who went on to pitch for four seasons in independent minor leagues, generally with ERAs around 7 or 8 (e.g., bad, but not notably worse than the worst male pitchers in the league). She once threw 12 innings straight of scoreless ball to professional players when she had her Jamie Moyer-style junkball mojo working.

The one conceivable route to the big leagues for a woman would be as a knuckleball pitcher. Indeed, a 5'1" Japanese woman Eri Yoshida has pitched, with indifferent results, in a few low professional games in Japan and American over the last couple of years. Still, it helps to be able to throw in the eighties for two reasons: if you fall behind 3-0 in the count with random knuckleballs, can you throw a hard fastball for a strike? And, it's advantageous to throw a hard knuckleball, like Charlie Hough did.

But most knuckleballers, who are rare, started out as conventional hard-throwing prospects who switched to the knuckleball due to career setbacks (e.g., Jim Bouton in attempting his comeback in the book Ball Four). Almost no man has followed this hypothetical path of perfecting the knuckleball from youth onward to overcome sizable physical deficiencies.

My guess is that a woman might be able to make the majors if all the stars were aligned right: if she were tall and strong like the Williams sisters in tennis, and if her father was a long time pitcher who had experience throwing the knuckleball, and drilled her from an early age in that frustrating craft. But if she had the height and upper body strength to be a big league knuckleballer, why not be a woman tennis pro instead? Or basketball player, volleyball player, or soccer goalie, all of which are ways to get college scholarships.

Perhaps someday a woman tennis pro, looking for a new challenge as her career fades in her late 20s will take up the knuckleball next. Knuckleball pitchers generally don't reach their primes until their 30s and can go on for some time. The greatest knuckleball pitcher, Phil Niekro, won 50 games in the majors after his 45th birthday.

But, I think she'd really need a father who was a professional pitcher, or a retired pitcher husband (think of ballplayer Ray Knight and golfer Nancy Lopez) to teach her to be a wily knuckleball or junkball pitcher. You have to really like baseball to be a junkball pitcher and not that many women like baseball enough. So, there are a whole bunch of hoops to jump through, but I wouldn't be shocked if a woman knuckleballer / junkballer pitched a few major league games in this century.

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

The Forgotten Minority

From my new Taki's Magazine column:

Baseball season reminds us of the identity-politics group that doesn’t bark—left-handers. Why are certain aggregations of once-persecuted people, such as blacks or gays, so politically potent today, while others, such as left-handers, can be safely ignored? 

Indeed, it’s almost gauche to ask why no left-handed big-leaguer has played catcher since the 1980s. ... Why is the media so much more fanatical about discrimination against black quarterbacks than against left-handed catchers?

Read the whole thing there.

Lefthanded catchers are like black quarterbacks in that both lefthanders in MLB and blacks in the NFL are highly over-represented, but not at certain positions. The purported shortfall of blacks at quarterback has been a media cause celebre for a generation, while the utter extinction of lefthanders at catcher is the subject of an occasional speculative essay in the nerdier realms of baseball fandom attempting to understand why.

By the way, I'm not lefthanded, nor is anybody particularly close to me.

Odd fact: Obama is the first of the four recent lefthanded Presidents (assuming Reagan was a righthander -- he started as a child as a lefthander) to play golf lefthanded. Ford, Bush 1, and Clinton played with righthanded clubs, while Obama uses a lefthanded set. 

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

Is there anything left to say about racial profiling?

The George Zimmerman case, in which the special prosecutor signaled the Epitome of All Evil out for having "profiled" an unfamiliar 6'2" young black male, has, as they say, Reignited the Debate over Racial Profiling. But is there any actual debate in terms of either side grappling with the other side's arguments, rather than for one side to have the other side's proponents fired?

For example, here is what I wrote in VDARE way, way back in October 2000 after listening to a Presidential debate in which Bore and Gush Gore and Bush denounced racial profiling. As iSteve readers, but nobody else in the whole world, will recall, Bush was particularly insistent that profiling of Arab and/or Muslim airline passengers as potential terrorists -- "flying while Arab" -- would be abolished by a new Bush Administration. And so it came to pass ...

I went on to say in 2000:

This debate over racial profiling shows how utterly divorced American political discourse has become from personal reality. Every single person who lives in a diverse part of the country racially profiles every other pedestrian as he walks down the street at night. Jesse Jackson notoriously admitted that he does exactly that - and sighs with relief when he finds that the footsteps following him don't belong to a young black male.  

Indeed, the black-white ratio would be even higher if the FBI didn't insist upon counting most Hispanics as whites. This obfuscatory tactic makes it hard to break out precise crime figures for Hispanic groups. Most estimates place their rates of violence as well below those of African Americans - but well above those of whites. For example, Fox Butterfield reported in The New York Times on August 10, 2000 that Hispanics are imprisoned at a rate three times higher than "Anglo" whites. 

The reason we all do this is simple: African Americans commit far more violent crimes than anybody else. For example, according to official Clinton Administration statistics, in 1998 on a per capita basis blacks were seven times more murderous than whites. And this ratio is down significantly from the early nineties when the black crack wars were blazing. [http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm]

Actually, now I come to think about it, I do recall meeting one (1) man who never engaged in racial profiling. At a wedding reception in 1985, I got to talking with someone from Grant's Pass, Oregon. He was most upset by how whites (other than himself) worried more about black muggers than muggers of other races. "That's pure racism!" he insisted. 

I proposed to him a thought experiment. Say your wife's car runs out of gas in the middle of the night in a desolate neighborhood. She has no idea which way to walk to find a gas station. However, if she walks one way she has to pass by a half dozen black youths lounging on a corner. If she walks the other way, she would have to pass by a half dozen Indian immigrant youths. Which way would you prefer she went? 

"I would be completely indifferent," he replied. 

"Well, then, for your sake, I'm glad you live in Grass Pants, Oregon." 

"Where I live is irrelevant!" he responded triumphantly. "I've already been mugged three times!"

About all I can think of to add after all these years is this: Is it shamefully illiberal and politically incorrect for one sex to profile the other sex while walking down the street late at night with little security around? Is it a violation of our most sacred beliefs in gender equality that, for example, I try to make women walking late at night on an empty street feel less nervous by the presence of a strange man by my, say, crossing to the other side of the street, or by my walking on the far edge of the sidewalk out of arm's reach of them when passing them? Should I be deeply insulted that these good manners make women less nervous? Should I nurse a deep sense of rage over how these women are, subconsciously profiling me as a possible violent crime threat to themselves based solely on my accident of birth as a man?

On the other hand, on a busy, safe afternoon in broad daylight, would I resent it if a woman expected me to inconvenience myself by crossing the street? Sure. Especially if she were wearing a chador and didn't want me come close enough to her while walking down the street to cause a scandal with her in-laws that might lead to her brothers setting her on fire or whatever. 

Yeah, of course, who needs that kind of drama and those kind of people in their own neighborhood?

Now, the feminist explanation is purely Who? Whom? I possess Patriarchal Privilege so I must sacrifice for women. But my perspective is more realistic and sophisticated: that politeness suggests different behaviors for different people in different situations. Moreover, I also believe in political responses: treat rape as a serious crime, have the police hassle gangs of men who make weird sucking noises at women as they walk by, and so forth.

Of course, much of the response to allowing Women to Take Back the Night involves racial profiling and other police tactics with disparate racial impact. The liberal response is that to point out conflicting interests between liberalism's various sacralized victim groups (women, blacks, illegal immigrants, etc.) is crimethink, so we should all engage in crimestop, or protective stupidity.

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

The Demand for Black Rage

Last summer, I wrote about Bruce Norris's play about real estate and race in Chicago, Clybourne Park. (Here's an interview with Norris.) The NYT has an article about rehearsals for its opening on Broadway that unintentionally makes an important point about how Nice White People want middle class African-Americans to be driven to the edge of violence just by the thought of things that happened to blacks before they were born. 

Seven Actors Face a Big Challenge: He Just Said That? 

By PATRICK HEALY 

THE seven actors in the new Broadway play “Clybourne Park” were mostly strangers to one another when they met for the first table read of this stinging comedy by Bruce Norris in January 2010. They had no real comfort zone among them as they began to wade through the mudslide of racial indignities set off by white characters arguing about integration in 1959 Chicago. 

Midway through Act I, for instance, the character Jim — a white minister in the middle-class neighborhood of the title — becomes tongue-tied asking if “Negro” is more courteous than “colored.” Later a white homeowner named Karl Lindner questions Francine, a black maid, if she ever skis; after a stunned double-take, she says no. Lindner jabbers that “there is just something about the pastime of skiing that doesn’t appeal to the Negro community.” 

The scenes were so charged that the play’s director, Pam MacKinnon, decided she would never rehearse Act I for two days in a row without interspersing the second act, which is set in 2009 and includes new black characters who step up to the fight.
Even so, some actors asked for breaks to blow off steam. “If somebody hurts your feelings, you remember that feeling — it lives in you,” recalled Crystal A. Dickinson, who plays the maid, during an interview with the cast on the set of the play. “Now imagine that feeling 17 times in a row.” 

A likely contender this June for the Tony Award for best play, “Clybourne Park” has had an unusually long and rough road to Broadway, where it opens on Thursday. The cast members had to come to terms with the discomfiting contradictions in their characters; Mr. Norris won a Pulitzer Prize for the Off Broadway production of the play and waited to see if it would reach Broadway; and this new production nearly collapsed because of a falling-out between him and a former producer. The head-spinning events often seemed of a piece with the whiplash from the revelations and did-he-just-say-that? dialogue in the show itself. 

Typical of Mr. Norris’s style, the play takes place in two time periods. The Eisenhower-era Act I centers on whites preparing for the arrival of a black family on the block — and not just any black family, but the Youngers of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” in which the move to Clybourne Park represents a dream fulfilled. Act II is set 50 years later, in the same house, as white yuppies seek to gentrify a neighborhood that has become a black enclave. (The same actors play different characters in each act.) 

... That the production survived is joy enough for the actors to regard the emotional rigors of the play, during rehearsal two years ago as well as now, as worth the trouble. As they stretched out on the sofas and armchairs of 406 Clybourne Street on the stage of the Walter Kerr Theater, the cast even struggled to recall some of the earlier touchy moments — not for a lack of memories but because the relief of reaching Broadway trumped them.

In other words, the actors couldn't really remember any of this until the NYT reporter worked hard to dredge up largely forgotten memories. Or perhaps the actors made up these memories to give the NYT what it wanted? These are professional Broadway actors, and it was still evidently hard for them to initially conjure up what the reporter wanted from them.

... Perhaps the most vicious lines in the play are delivered by Mr. Shamos, both as Karl (the only “Clybourne” character actually in “Raisin”) and as Lindsey’s husband, Steve. During the pre-Broadway tryout of this production in Los Angeles this winter Mr. Shamos would hear gasps and even hisses at some of Karl’s lines, especially during matinee performances attended by school groups. After the first preview performances on Broadway last month some theatergoers moaned when the actors paused after a particularly harsh line by Karl. The next day Ms. MacKinnon, the director, cut the pause because she didn’t want the audience to have a chance to turn against the character quite yet. 

Mr. Shamos said he was mostly able to shake off the audience reaction now but recalled feeling relieved during the early days at Playwrights when the actors would finish difficult scenes or go out to eat or get smoothies together. Rarely, though, would rehearsals or meals become consciousness-raising sessions where the actors talked at length about what the play brought up from their own lives.
“I think it’s good that we never tried to overexplain why we felt a line was offensive or overanalyze our reactions to the work,” he said. “We just wanted to be the purest communicators of the play.”

Basically, this racial anger among the black cast members didn't really happen, but NYT subscribers want to believe it did.

As Orwell, liked to say, who controls the past controls the future. My in-laws were nice white liberals who tried to make integration work, not fleeing the West Side of Chicago until their children had been mugged three times. By trying, they wound up losing half their net worth and my late father-in-law ended up with a 126 mile commute to his job in the orchestra at the Chicago Opera House. But that kind of history is unappreciated, to say the least. Nobody wants to hear about it, and especially nobody wants to hear any hard feelings about it.

This is particularly funny because the playwright himself identifies with the white people who were driven from their Chicago neighborhood:

ED: Why did the play coalesce around A Raisin in the Sun? 

BN: Well, as a child, when I saw Raisin my  point of identification with that play was the character of Karl Lindner. He’s the white man who comes to ask the Youngers not to move into Clybourne Park. That’s the character that appears in the first act of my play Clybourne Park.When I became attracted to that play, I always thought of myself as the antagonist, not as the hero. 

ED: You identified with Karl? 

BN: I identified with Karl and I identified with all of my culture, the people that I grew up around, as the people of Clybourne Park who did not want integration.

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

MCAT changes: More NAMS or fewer Tiger Cubs?

From the NYT:

Pre-Med’s New Priorities: Heart and Soul and Social Science 

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

... In addition to the hard-science and math questions that have for decades defined this rite of passage into the medical profession, nearly half of the new MCAT will focus on squishier topics in two new sections: one covering social and behavioral sciences and another on critical analysis and reading that will require students to analyze passages covering areas like ethics and cross-cultural studies. 

The Medical College Admission Test is, of course, much more than a test. A good score is crucial for entry into a profession that is perennially oversubscribed. Last year, nearly 44,000 people applied for about 19,000 places at medical schools in the United States. So the overhaul of the test, which was announced last year and approved in February, could fundamentally change the kind of student who will succeed in that process. It alters the raw material that medical schools receive to mold into the nation’s future doctors. 

Which is exactly what the A.A.M.C. has in mind. In surveys, “the public had great confidence in doctors’ knowledge but much less in their bedside manner,” said Darrell G. Kirch, president of the association, in announcing the change. “The goal is to improve the medical admissions process to find the people who you and I would want as our doctors. Being a good doctor isn’t just about understanding science, it’s about understanding people.”

The public are idiots. I want Dr. House to diagnose me. I almost died in the 1990s because my nice guy doctor told me that the lump in my armpit, my night sweats, and my loss of energy was probably just a muscle pull. The cancer doctor who saved my life had a lousy bedside manner, but he had access to Rituxan years before everybody else did because he knew more about non-Hodgkins lymphoma than anybody else in the upper Midwest.

The adoption of the new test, which will be first administered in 2015, is part of a decade-long effort by medical educators to restore a bit of good old-fashioned healing and bedside patient skills into a profession that has come to be dominated by technology and laboratory testing. More medical schools are requiring students to take classes on interviewing and communication techniques. To help create a more holistic admissions process, one that goes beyond scientific knowledge, admissions committees are presenting candidates with ethical dilemmas to see if their people skills match their A+ in organic chemistry. ...

Where will students find time to take in the extra material? How to prepare pre-med students long primed to answer questions like “Where are the serotonin receptors 5-HT2A and 5-HT2B mostly likely to be located in hepatocytes” to tackle more ambiguous challenges, like: “Which of the following explanations describes why the Identity vs. Role Confusion stage likely affects views about voting and being a voter?”

... “With the growth in scientific knowledge, we were focused on making sure doctors had a good foundation in hard science,” Dr. Kirch said. Indeed, from 1942 to 1976, the MCAT had included a broad-based knowledge section called “Understanding Modern Society.” Liberal arts questions were eliminated in 1977. ...

Some experts have long identified the MCAT as a stumbling block in the often-failed quest to produce more caring, attentive doctors. It is a test that selects more for calculation skills than empathy. ... 

And so the Association of American Medical Colleges began three years ago to redesign the MCAT, surveying thousands of medical school faculty members and students to come up with a test tailored to the needs and desires of the 21st century. In addition to more emphasis on humanistic skills, the new test had to take into account important new values in medicine like diversity, with greater focus on health care for the underserved, Dr. McGaghie said. 

As a result, there will be questions about gender and cultural influences on expression, poverty and social mobility, as well as how people process emotion and stress. ...

The mere fact that psychology, sociology and critical thinking will be on the MCAT is likely to change priorities, prompting science majors to think harder about topics like the perception of pain, informed consent, community awareness and the ethics of the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. 

Okay, let me toss out a guess: The current American medical establishment wants more of their own children and grandchildren to make it as doctors, which, mathematically, means fewer Asians. So they are making it sound like they are changing the test to get more blacks and Hispanics, but they are small change: it's really a plan to cut down on the Asians.

And here's a prediction: it won't much work. Whatever they put on the test, within a few years, the Asians will memorize it and spit it back. 

Another possibility is that this is all part of a plan to liberalize Asians, to turn them into Nice White People, before they completely take over the world. That's not necessarily a bad idea. But of course the Nice White People couldn't imagine directly confronting Asians over their various bad habits, like, say, the caste system. Instead, the NWPs are attempting another classic triple bankshot by telling the Asians that Yes, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment Will Be on the Test.

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

Haidt: Political Sacredness = Motivated Ignorance

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt says (via Falkenblog):

The fundamental rule of political analysis from the point of psychology is, follow the sacredness, and around it is a ring of motivated ignorance.

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

Manhattan IS Lake Wobegon

If you are ever feeling in the need for a laugh, just look up the latest news from New York City on the Kindergarten Admissions Wars. Year after year, it's pure comedy gold. Amazingly, this NYT reporter, Anna M. Phillips, appears to be starting to get the joke:

After Number of Gifted Soars, a Fight for Kindergarten Slots 

By ANNA M. PHILLIPS 

Nearly 5,000 children qualified for gifted and talented kindergarten seats in New York City public schools in the fall, 22 percent more than last year and more than double the number four years ago, setting off a fierce competition for the most sought-after programs in the system. 

On their face, the results, released on Friday by the Education Department, paint a portrait of a city in which some neighborhoods appear to be entirely above average. In Districts 2 and 3, which encompass most of Manhattan below 110th Street, more students scored at or above the 90th percentile on the entrance exam, the cutoff point, than scored below it. 

But experts pointed to several possible reasons for the large increase. For one, more middle-class and wealthy parents are staying in the city and choosing to send their children to public schools, rather than moving to the suburbs or pursuing increasingly expensive private schools. And the switch to a test-based admissions system four years ago has given rise to test-preparation services, from booklets costing a few dollars to courses costing hundreds or more, raising concerns that the test’s results were being skewed. ...

Of the children who scored high enough on the entrance exam to be eligible for a gifted program, more than half — 2,656 — qualified for the five most selective schools by scoring at or above the 97th percentile. But those schools — three in Manhattan and one each in Brooklyn and Queens — have only about 400 kindergarten seats. The rest of the 4,912 children qualified for one of the dozens of gifted programs spread throughout the five boroughs. 

A.K.A., the Loser Gifted Programs for Loser Children of Loser Parents who Don't Love Their Children Enough to Figure Out How to Get Them into the Golden 400.

Gifted programs generally offer an accelerated curriculum, as well as the opportunity to be around other high-performing children.

Keep in mind, we're talking about high-performing kindergarteners here.

The city did not provide a racial breakdown of students who qualified, but as in years past, the more affluent districts — 2 and 3 in Manhattan, in neighborhoods west and south of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and in northeastern Queens — had the most students qualify. In District 2, 949 children qualified for a gifted program, far more than in any other district.

District 2 starts at about 96th St. on the Upper East Side and includes all of Manhattan south of Central Park, except, amazingly enough, Alphabet City on the Lower East Side. (And even that's gentrifying.)

In District 3, 505 children qualified. By contrast, in District 7, in the South Bronx, only six children qualified for gifted placements and none for the five most exclusive schools.

Two orders of magnitude difference.

Every year since 2008, when the city put the current testing program into effect and 2,230 students qualified for seats in gifted and talented kindergarten classes, the number of children scoring at or above the 90th percentile has steadily grown. The chancellor in 2008, Joel I. Klein, made the change to standardize the admissions process, replacing a system in which each district set its own standards for entry, a process that drew criticism from parents who said favoritism sometimes played a role.

When school supremo Joel Klein made the switch to pure test-based admissions, using tests would obviously have a huge disparate impact effect. But, Klein didn't know or didn't care, because kindergarten admissions is serious stuff where testing is too crucial to be sacrificed on the altar of racial equality. This isn't something trivial like saving people from burning skyscrapers, this is NYC kindergarten admissions, and don't you forget it. Different rules apply.

But the new process has come under scrutiny for its complete reliance on the test — actually two exams, the Otis-Lennon School Ability Test, or Olsat, a reasoning exam, and the Bracken School Readiness Assessment, a knowledge test. 

In January, the city awarded Pearson a three-year contract for roughly $5.5 million to replace the Bracken exam with the Naglieri Nonverbal Ability Test, which city education officials contend will better measure ability.

Isn't it weird that this is a golden age for the psychometric industry? Standardized tests are constantly denounced, yet governments keep shoveling more money to testing firms to create new tests that will Finally Get It Right. These firms have achieved the perfect marketing equilibrium.

The contract places restrictions on Pearson’s ability to sell its test materials to anyone outside the Education Department, to make it harder for test-preparation companies to get their hands on them.

Oh, well, that will stop New York City test prep firms dead in their tracks.

... Always on the alert for changes to admissions policies, some tutoring companies, true to the nature of their profession, are prepared for it. 

One of the companies, Aristotle Circle, already offers a $300 “test preparation and enrichment kit” designed for the Naglieri and similar exams. 

“You can build a better mousetrap, it doesn’t matter,” said Suzanne Rheault, one of Aristotle’s founders. “There’s no way you can stop it because now the idea of preparing for the kindergarten test is totally the norm. The stakes are so high.”

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

The Triumph of Reverend Bacon

From the Washington Post:

Al Sharpton, power player 

By Dana Milbank, Friday, April 13, 4:12 PM 

The Rev. Al Sharpton is lord of all he surveys. 

“Check out this,” the flamboyant civil rights leader told me during breakfast at his organization’s annual meeting this week. He flipped through the program until he found a full-page ad with the logos of Fox News, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. “News Corporation Proudly Supports National Action Network’s 2012 Convention,” it said. 

Sharpton grinned. “They bash me on Fox News,” he said. “But they sponsor my conference.” 

Everybody wants to be on Sharpton’s good side these days. No fewer than five Cabinet officers and a senior White House official went to this year’s convention to kiss his ring. President Obama spoke at last year’s conference and has sought Sharpton’s advice on policy. Sharpton has a show on MSNBC five nights a week, and he doles out airtime to a procession of politicians and journalists (including me). 

Wednesday night brought the sweetest moment yet in Sharpton’s long and controversial career: the announcement that Florida authorities would charge Trayvon Martin’s shooter. Sharpton, at the request of the boy’s parents, had done more than anyone else to bring the case national attention. 

Just hours before the announcement that George Zimmerman would be charged with second-degree murder, Martin’s parents held a joint news conference with Sharpton — and a few hours before that, Attorney General Eric Holder, also at the convention, praised Sharpton for his “tireless efforts to speak out for the voiceless, to stand up for the powerless.” 

It was confirmation that Sharpton has pulled off one of the rarest second acts in American public life: from pariah to power player. 

“It was a huge moment, because it was the coming together of everything,” Sharpton said, with his trademark vainglory. “We had the attorney general here and one of the biggest civil rights cases of the 21st century, and having to do TV and radio shows at the same time, it was all combined for everybody to see.” ...

On Thursday, the day after his most visible career triumph, Sharpton worked the ballroom at Washington’s convention center, grinning for photographs. Opening up for his breakfast speaker, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Sharpton regaled the crowd with a story of how Obama invited him and Newt Gingrich to the Oval Office and asked them to launch a five-city tour promoting education reform. When Duncan took the microphone, he requested “a huge round of applause for our leader, Reverend Al Sharpton.” 

I suspect Milbank will get the message quickly: Ixnay on the Sharptonian Triumphalism (Rev. Al 24x7 is not one of Team Obama's re-election talking points).

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

Dynasticism: Fading or Growing?

Speaking of nepotism in India, here's my 2003 article in The National Interest, "Revolutionary Nepotism," surveying the global resurgence of dynasticism. It would be interesting to update it to see which way trends have gone over the last decade. 

One of the things that got me interested in the topic was the growth of dynasticism among baseball players: the best National Leaguer and the best American Leaguer of the 1990s were, arguably, Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr., whose fathers I vividly recalled. (I watched Bobby Bonds's first major league game in 1968 on TV, and he hit a grand slam homer to beat my Dodgers.) Before the late 20th Century, there just weren't a lot of examples in baseball history of superstars who were the sons of all-stars or vice-versa. So, one question would be whether this trend has continued in baseball over the last decade.

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

Python Parents

From the NYT:

Across India, Nepotism as a Way of Life
By MANU JOSEPH

NEW DELHI — The Indian upper class, like royalty, is sexually transmitted. Politics, business, mainstream cinema and other occupations where talent is subordinate to lineage are dominated by family cartels, who plant their own over the rest. The Indian elite is a system where there is a 100 percent reservation for its own genetic material. And the most underrated joke in the country is when this class joins the middle class in lamenting reservations for the poorest Indians from the “backward” castes in colleges and jobs. 

The urban middle class, too, is a beneficiary of the generous and tenacious Indian family, which subsidizes its children far longer and deeper than is generally accepted. Only a young Indian who is not supported by a family purse will appreciate the simple fact that he or she does not compete with other young people for a shot at a decent life but with whole families. The Indian is less an individual and more the mascot of his family background — much the way Rahul Gandhi is the mascot of the Gandhi dynasty. ... 

Bilawal Zardari, 23, is chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party. Rahul Gandhi, 41, is a general secretary of the Congress party. Bilawal Zardari’s prime qualification for the position he holds is that he is the son of the late prime minister Benazir Bhutto and grandson of the late prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Mr. Gandhi’s is that he is the son of the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and grandson of the late prime minister Indira Gandhi. [And great-grandson of India's first prime minister, Nehru.]... 

In mainstream Hindi cinema, all the top actors cast in lead roles, barring one, are sons of former film stars, directors or writers. ... It is unusual for Indian businessmen to donate to charity because such generosity is at the expense of their primary function — to materially enrich the lives of their children. ... 

The parents stand by their children for a long time, buying them apartments and cars, and putting those with no family support at considerable disadvantage. In return, the useful parents exert considerable power over their children long after they cease to be children. 

The Indian cricket star Yuvraj Singh is more often photographed with his mother than with pretty girls. In any other country it would be unusual to see a young sports star photographed so often with his mama. Rahul Dravid, one of the most revered cricketers, once dated a top actress, but he married the girl his mother picked. 

Tiger Mothers, Eagle Fathers, Dalmatian Dads, and now, for the sake of alliteration, Python Parents. (Or maybe Boa Constrictor Parents?)

There are two theoretically distinct elements here: parental investment and nepotism. 

You can have societies that are low in parental investment and high in nepotism, but you wouldn't want to live in one. The most trouble-free societies are high in paternal investment and low in nepotism, but, it's not easy to stay that way. It's rather unnatural. As Ibn Khaldun pointed out 700 years ago, when the all-for-one-and-one-for-all tribes come screaming out of the desert and conquer a lush city, within a few generations of prosperity, they are all stabbing each other in the back in family quarrels.

One problem with high paternal investment, apart from nepotism, is that it funds a lot of diminishing marginal return competition for positional goods. In 21st Century America, the Ivy League to Wall Street career path is so lucrative that it generates a huge amount of competition without obvious societal benefit. In contrast, in Heinlein's America, which was fairly low nepotism (especially from December 8, 1941 onward) and fairly high (but not extravagant) paternal investment, in contrast, it seemed sensible just to send your kid to State U.

I don't know anything about the lower 80% or so of the Indian population, but the upper reaches seem to be a high paternal investment culture. 

This high level of nepotism makes India a more screwed-up nation than it has to be. What's interesting, however, is that high nepotism culture that helps make India a mess simultaneously makes Indians well situated to compete in globalized America. 

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

Trayvon's mom calls it "an accident"

On the Today Show today, there was the following exchange between interviewer Ann Curry and the mother of the late Trayvon, Sybrina Fulton:

Q.: I want to ask Tracy and Sybrina, either of you can take this question. If you were to come face to face with George Zimmerman, what do you want to tell him? What do you want to ask him? 

A.: One of the things that I still believe in: a person should apologize when they are actually remorseful for what they've done. I believe it was an accident. I believe that it just got out of control, and he couldn't turn the clock back. I would ask him, did he know that that was a minor, that that was a teenager and that he did not have a weapon? I would ask him -- that I understand that his family is hurting, but think about our family that lost our teenage son. I mean, it's just very difficult to live with day in and day out. I'm sure his parents can pick up the phone and call him, but we can't pick up the phone and call Trayvon anymore.

That seems about the most sensible thing anybody has had to say so far about this tragic mess-up. 

Not surprisingly, a few hours later, it was retracted.

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

Derbyshire talks back

John Derbyshire's new column at Takimag.com is up. John is his usual genial self. He advises readers to give me money, which is always good advice. Unfortunately, my Paypal button isn't working at the moment (as usual), but I'll get it fixed and start my first panhandling drive since August pretty soon. 

I would have added that you should consider age, sex, and class as well as race, but as he says:

On the other hand, the context here is advice to kids. Deciding which situation says, “Stay out of this!” and which says, “Help the guy” requires an act of judgment. Kids don’t have very good judgment; so a blanket “Stay out of this!” is not bad advice in context.

The other context is the huge amount of bilige from the prestige press over the preceding three weeks claiming that racial profiling was tantanount to child murder. Maybe John's piece went too far in the opposite direction, but certainly it left readers of the prestige press with a little bit better net understanding of how the world works compared to the unadulterated run of tosh they'd been getting.

Also, writing for a teenage daughter, I would have been especially emphatic about her staying away from black boys, no matter how smooth talking, until she's 21 at least.

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

Zimmerman, Jena Six, and overcharging

I have some fun below with the Dave Barry-ish Florida special prosecutor lady overcharging George Zimmerman with 2nd degree murder, but it's worth keeping in mind (because nobody else will) how this is the mirror image of the Jena Six brouhaha. 

As you'll recall (although nobody else will), Sharpton, Jackson, and Obama were all up in arms in 2007 about the prosecutor in Jena, Louisiana charging six black youths with Attempted Murder for their stomping of an unconscious white youth. This was the Most Racist Thing Ever according to the prestige press brouhaha. 

But it turned out that a local reporter named Abbey Brown had already gotten the real story, which was that the six stompers were the stars of the high school football team in this football crazy town, and, with the assistance of their coaches, had been getting away with a "reign of terror," as a local minister phrased it. Mychal Bell, the All-Stater who was their leader, had already been convicted three times in juvenile court, but that hadn't impeded his playing time. The prosecutor's ploy of overcharging them was to get them out of the juvenile justice system and into the adult system, where they wound up with modest sentences that at least made an impression on them.

This is not to say that blacks are never the victims of racist injustice, but that crime stories involving blacks that the prestige press gets most worked up over (Dominique Strass-Kahn, Duke Lacrosse, various campus hate hoaxes, etc.) turn out, with remarkable regularity, to be travesties.

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

SAT scores & race: Everything you ever wanted to know

The Unsilenced Science has the world's most comprehensive blog post on SAT scores and race. Check it out.

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

Liberalism as leapfrogging loyalties

I want to come back to this new New York Times op-ed about how the guy in Toulouse, France who massacred those Jewish children was, when you stop and think about it, a victim of French nationalism. It's by:

Karl E. Meyer, a former member of the New York Times editorial board, is a co-author of “Pax Ethnica: Where and How Diversity Succeeds.”

It's such a perfect illustration of how the defining aspect of 21st Century liberalism (or leftism or whatever you want to call it) is "leapfrogging loyalties." 

The default human tendency is toward concentric loyalties. If you look at people in Szechuan or Paraguay or Burkina Faso, you'll notice that they tend to feel the most duties and allegiance toward people whom they consider most like themselves, moderate amounts toward people moderately close to them, and so forth onward and outward.

But the Western liberal is noteworthy for feeling loyalty toward his inner circle, however defined, then ostentatiously leapfrogging over a whole bunch of people who are kind of like him but whom he despises, in order to embrace The Other. 

Who Gets to Be French? 

By KARL E. MEYER 

Published: April 11, 2012 

THE French language is justly renowned for its clarity and precision. Yet on a seemingly simple matter its speakers stumble into a fog — who or what can be defined as French? The question arose afresh in the wake of the Toulouse killings. No one doubted that the perpetrator was 23-year-old Mohammed Merah, a native son of Algerian descent. But was Mr. Merah French? 

Impossible, declared four members of Parliament belonging to President Nicolas Sarkozy’s center-right party. In a joint statement, they insisted that Mr. Merah “had nothing French about him but his identity papers.” 

Nonsense, retorted the left-wing journal Libération: “Merah is certainly a monster, but he was a French monster.” A childhood friend of Mr. Merah provided a poignant elaboration: “Our passports may say that we are French, but we don’t feel French because we were never accepted here. No one can excuse what he did, but he is a product of French society, of the feeling that he had no hope and nothing to lose. It was not Al Qaeda that created Mohammed Merah. It was France.” 

These opposing approaches to what it means to be French — one rooted in an uncompromising ideal of assimilation, the other grounded in the messy realities of multiculturalism — struck a chord with me. While researching a book on the politics of diversity with my wife, Shareen Blair Brysac, I encountered not only the exclusionary attitude prevailing in metropolitan Paris, but also the more tolerant worldview epitomized by the port city of Marseille — a worldview that the rest of France would be well served to embrace. ... 

Can and should the Marseillais spirit of civilized tolerance spread northward? My wife and I were reminded that it was a throng of volunteers singing a melody as they marched to Paris from already polyglot Marseille who gave France its national anthem, “La Marseillaise.” 

In other words, Meyer is embracing Mohammed Merah, an anti-Semitic mass murderer, as a handy club with which to beat the majority of the French for their insensitivity to Mr. Merah. Granted, even by the standards of anti-Semitic terrorists, Merah seems like nasty, dismal company, but he appeals to Meyer and to the editors of the New York Times because he's The Other. He's not like all those terrible people whom Meyer and the editors strive to be seen as better than, so that makes him useful

And, granted, French secular nationalism is the one of the main achievements of the signature event of the Left, the French Revolution, while Mr. Merah would appear to be, by objective standards, a would-be rightwing thug (who just got born in the wrong country), but who cares about all that stuff? Merah is a member of a designated victim group, so let's use him to bash the average French person for not being as down with diversity as we are!

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