December 11, 2012

New TIMSS and PIRLS test results

There are new results out from two international school achievement tests:

The U.S. average mathematics score at grade 4 (541)
was higher than the international TIMSS scale average,
which is set at 500.
• At grade 4, the United States was among the top 15
education systems in mathematics (8 education systems
had higher averages and 6 were not measurably
different) and scored higher, on average, than 42
education systems.
•  The 8 education systems with average mathematics
scores above the U.S. score were Singapore, Korea,
Hong Kong-CHN, Chinese Taipei-CHN, Japan,
Northern Ireland-GBR, North Carolina-USA, and
Belgium (Flemish)-BEL. ...
• At grade 8, the United States was among the top 24
education systems in mathematics (11 education
systems had higher averages and 12 were not
measurably different) and scored higher, on average,
than 32 education systems.
• The 11 education systems with average mathematics
scores above the U.S. score were Korea, Singapore,
Chinese Taipei-CHN, Hong Kong-CHN, Japan,
Massachusetts-USA, Minnesota-USA, the Russian
Federation, North Carolina-USA, Quebec-CAN, and
Indiana-USA.
At grade 8, the United States was among the top
23 education systems in science (12 education
systems had higher averages and 10 were
not measurably different) and scored higher,
on average, than 33 education systems.
• The 12 education systems with average science scores
above the U.S. score were Singapore, MassachusettsUSA,
Chinese Taipei-CHN, Korea, Japan, MinnesotaUSA,
Finland, Alberta-CAN, Slovenia, the Russian
Federation, Colorado-USA, and Hong Kong-CHN. 

For example, here is 8th grade math:
Grade 8
Education systemAverage score
TIMSS scale average500
Korea, Rep. of613
Singapore1611
Chinese Taipei-CHN609
Hong Kong-CHN586
Japan570
Russian Federation1539
Israel2516
Finland514
United States1509
England-GBR3507
Hungary505
Australia505
Slovenia505
Lithuania4502
Italy498
New Zealand488
Kazakhstan487
Sweden484
Ukraine479
Norway475
Armenia467
Romania458
United Arab Emirates456
Turkey452
Lebanon449
Malaysia440
Georgia4,5431
Thailand427
Macedonia, Rep. of6426
Tunisia425
Chile416
Iran, Islamic Rep. of6415
Qatar6410
Bahrain6409
Jordan6406
Palestinian Nat'l Auth.6404
Saudi Arabia6394
Indonesia6386
Syrian Arab Republic6380
Morocco7371
Oman6366
Ghana7331
Benchmarking education systems
Massachusetts-USA1,4561
Minnesota-USA4545
North Carolina-USA2,4537
Quebec-CAN532
Indiana-USA1,4522
Colorado-USA4518
Connecticut-USA1,4518
Florida-USA1,4513
Ontario-CAN1512
Alberta-CAN1505
California-USA1,4493
Dubai-UAE478
Alabama-USA4466
Abu Dhabi-UAE449
△ Average score is higher than U.S. average score.
▽ Average score is lower than U.S. average score.
There are a bunch of different tables like this for different subjects in different grades, so don't take this one all that seriously. I just plunked it in because it was handy.

Here's 8th grade science:

Grade 8
Education systemAverage score
TIMSS scale average500
Singapore1590
Chinese Taipei-CHN564
Korea, Rep. of560
Japan558
Finland552
Slovenia543
Russian Federation1542
Hong Kong-CHN535
England-GBR2533
United States1525
Hungary522
Australia519
Israel3516
Lithuania4514
New Zealand512
Sweden509
Italy501
Ukraine501
Norway494
Kazakhstan490
Turkey483
Iran, Islamic Rep. of474
Romania465
United Arab Emirates465
Chile461
Bahrain452
Thailand451
Jordan449
Tunisia439
Armenia437
Saudi Arabia436
Malaysia426
Syrian Arab Republic426
Palestinian Nat'l Auth.420
Georgia4,5420
Oman420
Qatar419
Macedonia, Rep. of407
Lebanon406
Indonesia406
Morocco376
Ghana6306
Benchmarking education systems
Massachusetts-USA1,4567
Minnesota-USA4553
Alberta-CAN1546
Colorado-USA4542
Indiana-USA1,4533
Connecticut-USA1,4532
North Carolina-USA3,4532
Florida-USA1,4530
Ontario-CAN1521
Quebec-CAN520
California-USA1,4499
Alabama-USA4485
Dubai-UAE485
Abu Dhabi-UAE461
△ Average score is higher than U.S. average score.
▽ Average score is lower than U.S. average score.


I have no idea how representative the samples are, or how hard the students felt like trying.

These things are a lot of work to set up. Think of how hard it would be to coordinate all over the world in all these different languages. Then try to think about all the things that could go wrong if you were in charge. It's pretty daunting.

Looking at all 53 education systems that participated in PIRLS at grade 4 (i.e., both countries and other education systems), the United States was among the top 13 education systems in average reading scores. The five education systems that had higher average scores were Hong Kong-CHN, FloridaUSA, the Russian Federation, Finland, and Singapore. Seven education systems, Northern Ireland-GBR, Denmark, Croatia, Chinese Taipei-CHN, Ontario-CAN, Ireland, and England-GBR, had average scores not measurably different from the U.S. average score. The United States had higher average reading scores than 40 education systems.

Education system Overall reading average scale score
   PIRLS scale average 500
Hong Kong-CHN1 571
Russian Federation 568
Finland 568
Singapore2 567
Northern Ireland-GBR3 558
United States2 556
Denmark2 554
Croatia2 553
Chinese Taipei-CHN 553
Ireland 552
England-GBR3 552
Canada2 548
Netherlands3 546
Czech Republic 545
Sweden 542
Italy 541
Germany 541
Israel1 541
Portugal 541
Hungary 539
Slovak Republic 535
Bulgaria 532
New Zealand 531
Slovenia 530
Austria 529
Lithuania2,4 528
Australia 527
Poland 526


France 520
Spain 513
Norway5 507
Belgium (French)-BEL2,3 506
Romania 502
Georgia4,6 488
Malta 477
Trinidad and Tobago 471
Azerbaijan2,6 462
Iran, Islamic Rep. of 457
Colombia 448
United Arab Emirates 439
Saudi Arabia 430
Indonesia 428
Qatar2 425
Oman7 391
Morocco8 310
Benchmarking education systems
Florida-USA1,4 569
Ontario-CAN2 552
Alberta-CAN2 548
Quebec-CAN 538
Andalusia-ESP 515
Dubai-UAE 476
Maltese-MLT 457
Dhabi-UAE 424


December 10, 2012

Education Realist responds to Unz essay on college admissions

Education Realist has a long post up entitled "An Alternative College Admissions System." Here's a sample:
….the overrepresentation of Asians is explained more by their dominance in GPA, as opposed to test scores. And that’s harder to fix. It’s easy enough to tell white kids with high test scores to go to test prep and maximize their scores, but by junior year, the GPA damage has been done. 
What that means: no more room for, say, the idiosyncratic white boy who scores 2250/34 on the SAT/ACT, scored 4s and 5s in 7 AP tests, got 780, 730, and 690 on the US History, English Lit, and Math 2c, but whose weighted GPA is a 3.8. 
So just raise the GPA, you say. White parents need to raise their expectations for their own kids. Hahahahaha. This is me laughing. Unless the white kid is ruthlessly driven and competitive on his own merit, parental pressure as a means of raising his or her grades to the degree needed to compete with Asians is a non-starter.

Okay, but this isn't to say that white parents shouldn't push farther out on the diminishing returns curve than they are doing right now on average.
Amy Chua isn’t kidding. If a white parent tried to drive her kid the way Amy Chua did hers, the kid would end up in therapy, and the therapist would make the parent stop. Asian parenting techniques are abusive in white people world. Full stop. (What disgusts me most about Chua’s story is not her own behavior, as she doesn’t know any better, but that her white husband stood by and let her abuse her daughters. But then, I’m a white parent.) 
Not only does this difference between white and Asian cultural expectations lead to lower GPAs for whites, but smart white kids with B averages are then denied access to AP classes (in most Asian schools, access to AP is strictly limited by GPA), which put even a lower ceiling on their GPA. 
And finally, understand that those Asian good grades do not necessarily translate to a well-educated student. As my primary second job, I teach enrichment at a private educational company (aka, an Asian cram school), which over seven years adds up to a lot of Asian high school students. I love them. They’re great kids. But my experience has taught me to question any straightforward comparison between white and Asian academic credentials. 
All of my enrichment kids, as sophomores, are taking honors English and pre-calc. Maybe 10% of them can reliably read a complex text and offer an interesting or informed analysis without referring to Wikipedia and repeating verbatim what they read there, and in seven years and probably 300 kids I have never once had a student who could explain the derivation of the quadratic formula (that is, the generalized case for completing the square). 
I also teach an AP US History prep course every year, at two different locations, to a dozen students per class. All but a few kids each year will have taken six months of APUSH by the time my class starts, and fewer than a quarter of them have ever known who wrote the Federalist papers, or the most important achievement of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, when the class begins. Very few of them can even make a stab at naming the presidents in order, or even identify any of the “forgettable” presidents. These are kids attending public schools with some of the highest SAT averages in the country, more than a few of them topping out at 2400. [Northern California]
In comparison, I’ve tutored and taught (in public schools) a lot of bright white kids and their awareness and retention of their own education, including the above benchmark questions, is far superior, on average. There are, of course, white soulless swotters and creative inquisitive Korean eccentrics. But the betting goes the other way. 
So, for the grade manipulation that goes on at the bottom end of the scale, and the cultural skew that goes on at the top end of the scale, grades are just flatly useless. Unless or until we move to a system in which grades are taken out of teachers’ hands and determined by outside standardized tests, grades must be eliminated from any truly meritocratic admissions process. End rant. 
(Two points before I go on: 1) bright Hispanic and black kids are also more likely to retain their knowledge than Asian kids, but they are rarer and are going to write their own tickets regardless; 2) just as Asian test performance may overstate their abilities, black test performance may understate their abilities because the tests focus too much on abstraction and generalized situations. That’s another reason I want a much more competitive test market, to see if perhaps we can find a more meaningful way to test the bottom half of the ability spectrum. )

The real money would likely be for new tests for the high end, however. White people in Park Slope would like some objective test that shows their kids really are as amazing as they think they are.

For 45 years, people have wanted a test that closes The Gap. But, blacks really aren't going to be that big of a deal in the America of the Future. 

The future of testing will arrive when somebody comes up with a test that Asians can't crush whites on. 

In theory, blacks and whites could wind up on the same side on testing reform. Some clever Park Slope SWPL might someday come up with a new test that cuts down on Asian advantage over whites and then push it through because blacks do relatively better on it than on old tests. Recruit a third-generation Asian-American to push it as well, and it just might work.

Barone: "The End of the Wave"

A popular idea right now is that amnesty wouldn't cause more illegal immigration in the future because Mexicans are done coming to the U.S. (and don't even think about the possibility of large flows from other countries). Michael Barone makes a sophisticated (i.e., Sailerian) case for the new conventional wisdom in National Review:
The End of the Wave  
The northward surge of Mexicans into the United States may never resume. 
By Michael Barone

Is mass migration from Mexico to the United States a thing of the past? 
... There’s a widespread assumption that Mexican migration will resume when the U.S. economy starts growing robustly again. But I think there’s reason to doubt that will be the case.

Over the past few years, I have been working on a book, scheduled for publication next fall, on American migrations, internal and immigrant. What I’ve found is that over the years this country has been peopled in large part by surges of migration that have typically lasted just one or two generations.
Almost no one predicted that these surges of migration would occur, and almost no one predicted when they would end. 
For example, when our immigration system was opened up in 1965, experts testified that we would not get many immigrants from Latin America or Asia. They assumed that immigrants would come mainly from Europe, as they had in the past.  

I would take from this history of elite failure to predict the future of immigration a precautionary principle: There are a lot of different peoples in this world, and we don't know what any one of them might get up to, so we need to be prudent and protect ourselves. Instead, the failures of elite forecasting have led elites to double down on the idea that policy should be based upon a philosophy of Hope for the Best, Come What May.
Life in Mexico is not a nightmare for many these days. Beneath the headlines about killings in the drug wars, Mexico has become a predominantly middle-class country, as Jorge Castañeda notes in his recent book, Mañana Forever? Its economy is growing faster than ours.

I reviewed Castaneda's book and he emphasizes how much Mexican material desires outrun any possible fulfillment for most Mexicans within the borders of Mexico. In some other Latin American countries, middle class people are content to live in apartments and take public transportation. Mexicans, in contrast, hate sharing a wall or a subway car with other Mexicans. The Mexican Dream is a single family house with a V8 vehicle or two or three parked out front. Mexicans love sprawl.
And the dreams that many Mexican immigrants pursued have been shattered. 
You can see that if you look at the statistics on mortgage foreclosures, starting with the housing bust in 2007. More than half were in the four “sand states” — California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida — and within them, as the Pew Hispanic Center noted in a 2009 report, in areas with large numbers of Latino immigrants.  
These were places where subprime mortgages were granted, with encouragement from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to many Latinos unqualified by traditional credit standards. 
These new homeowners, many of them construction workers, dreamed of gaining hundreds of thousands of dollars as housing prices inevitably rose. Instead, they collapsed. My estimate is that one-third of those foreclosed on in these years were Latinos. Their dreams turned into nightmares. 

I call this Convergence. Letting in tens of millions of Mexicans has made the U.S. more like Mexico economically, which is what Mexicans have been trying to get away from. They don't come to American because they love the Declaration of Independence's propositions, they come to live the Exurban Dream, to emit a lot of greenhouse gases. A decade ago, the Bush Administration announced at the 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership a war on racist old downpayments to facilitate that. Now, we are out of money, but how much of a reckoning has there been? Barone has largely adopted my analysis of What Went Wrong, but how many others in the press are completely clueless?
We can see further evidence in last month’s Pew research report on the recent decline in U.S. birthrates. The biggest drop was among Mexican-born women, from 455,000 births in 2007 to 346,000 in 2010.  

The most extreme fertility is among newly arrived immigrant women, who have been saving up their babies to have them on American soil. Less immigration knocks hell out of fertility among illegal immigrants. But, that means there are a lot of women in Mexico who have been doing a lot of saving up of babies over the last 4 years. An upturn in the American economy could bring them and their future anchor babies back in a hurry. The notion that Mexican women can't delay fertility for a few years, the way women in more advanced countries have done since the 1970s, seems naive.

Keep in mind also that the Drug War in northern Mexico since 2007 has made the traditional overland routes less attractive, especially for Central Americans (e.g., the large massacres in Mexico of Central Americans heading for the U.S.). The Drug War won't last forever.
Surges of migration that have shaped the country sometimes end abruptly. The surge of Southern blacks to Northern cities lasted from 1940 to 1965 — one generation. The surge of Mexicans into the U.S. lasted from 1982 to 2007 — one generation.  

The 1965 terminus for black migration reflects two changes: improvements for blacks in the South and the beginning of the black destruction of their own Northern neighborhoods through rioting and crime.

Similarly, Hispanic illegal immigration contributed hugely to the Recent Economic Unpleasantness, so maybe Mexicans won't find it in their interest to move to Mexico Norte anymore.
The northward surge of American blacks has never resumed. I don’t think the northward surge of Mexicans will, either.

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe there are other countries out there in this big world gearing up to send vast numbers into our land, and would find Amnesty II a big encouragement.

Certainly, the obvious lessons of history are that elites don't know what they are doing, have made disastrous immigration decisions in the past, and that they are loathe to admit their mistakes on the grounds that talking about what they did wrong could offend the busboys.

All this history suggests prudence, but the conventional wisdom is that we should make another Bet the Country decision based on tea leaf readings.

December 9, 2012

Ah, the good old days of late 1979

Late 1979 was the scariest period since the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the well-remembered landmarks being the Iranian hostage seizure on November 4, 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas. But the most bizarre and foreboding event came in between: on November 20, 1979 the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the absolute center of the Islamic religion, was seized and held for a bloody week against Saudi military assaults by ... a bunch of guys you had never ever heard of. 

Who were they? Wikipedia explains:
The seizure was led by Juhaiman ibn Muhammad ibn Saif al Otaibi, who belonged to a powerful family of Najd. He declared his brother-in-law Mohammed Abdullah al-Qahtani to be the Mahdi, or redeemer of Islam, whose coming at endtimes is foretold in many of the hadiths of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. His followers took that the fact that Al-Qahtani's name and his father's name are identical to Muhammad's name and that of his father, and the saying ("His and his father's names were the same as Muhammad's and his father's, and he had come to Mecca from the north") to justify their belief. Furthermore, the date of the attack, 20 November 1979, was the first day of the year 1400 according to the Islamic calendar, which was stated by another hadith as the day that the Mahdi would reveal himself.

Well, that clears that up. 

Unsurprisingly, Muslims in a half-dozen countries responded with anti-American riots, burning American embassies in Pakistan and Libya.

Oddly enough, a third of a century later, the Saudi royal family is still going strong. In fact that's turned out to be a pretty good rule of thumb over my lifetime: whatever craziness happens, no matter how many predictions you read of imminent overthrow of the Saudi rulers, the Saudi royal family comes out okay. Of course, some day that will presumably stop being true, but in the meantime, it almost seems like the royals benefit from stuff like this happening.

Social science for fun and profit

The field of social psychology was embarrassed recently when revelations respected, highly productive social psychologist Diederik Stapel was discovered to be simply making up data for his popular papers.

But you can still run experiments and cheat anyway.

The Data Vigilante
Students aren’t the only ones cheating—some professors are, too. Uri Simonsohn is out to bust them.
By CHRISTOPHER SHEA
... Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative enough with their statistics and procedures. 
The three social psychologists set up a test experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.

One thing that's interesting is how seldom these kind of data-mined false positives are published regarding The Gap, despite the huge incentives for somebody to come up with something reassuring about The Gap.

It's easy to come up with Jonah Lehrer-ready false positives if you don't care what your results are. Say you are having psych majors fill in Big Five personality questionnaires in four rooms: one is painted blue, one yellow, one light green, and one off-white. That gives you 5 personality traits times four rooms = 20 combos. It would hardly be surprising if one combination of room color and personality trait diverges enough to be statistically significant at the 95% level. (Especially if you can stop collecting data whenever you feel like.) People in yellow rooms are more neurotic! Or maybe they are less neurotic. Or maybe off-white rooms make people more conscientious. Or less.  It doesn't really matter. Jonah Lehrer would have blogged your paper whatever result you came up with. 

On the other hand, if your goal is to close The Gap, it's harder to stumble into a false positive by random luck because you know what you want ahead of time. You want to show you can close The Gap.

Thus, mostly we read about uncontrolled studies of Gap Closing: The Michelle Obama International Preparatory Academy of Entrepreneurial Opportunity Charter School, where black and Hispanic students are taught by Ivy League grads working 75 hours per week, had tests scores almost equal to the state average! (Don't mention that 45% of the public school students in the state are NAMs. And don't mention what white and Asian students would have done with those Ivy Leaguer teachers. There's no control group in this pseudo-experiment.)

The most popular social science research cited on The Gap -- stereotype effect -- seems to be a combination of two things: the file drawer effect (there isn't a big market for articles saying you couldn't replicate a beloved finding) and the fact that it's not really that hard to get black students not to work hard on meaningless tests.

Two modes of intellectual discourse: Taking everything personally v. debate as sport

Much of the intellectual progress the world has made over the millennia is due to men managing to turn argument into sport rather than either a test of popularity or of physical strength.

Consider Zeno's paradoxes. I suspect that other individuals in other times and places came up with similar ideas, but either nobody paid attention or the propounders of annoying paradoxes got punched in the face by frustrated listeners who couldn't come up with a response. The Ancient Greeks, in contrast, found this type of debate interesting and felt that there ought to be a way -- logic -- to figure out who wins.

As I've mentioned before, the superiority of debate in the British House of Commons to what we're used to in American politics can be startling to an American observer. This is a social construct of the highest order. The British have crafted a society over many hundreds of years that emphasizes sport as a nonlethal, even potentially friendly form of male combat, and parliamentary debate as the highest form of sport. Today, most countries have legislatures modeled upon the British parliament and play British sports such as soccer. (Outliers include British offspring such as America, which has its own system and plays its own games.)

Similar attitudes were reflected in the written spheres. A century ago, G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, say, could go at it hammer and tongs like the intellectual sportsmen they were. 

It's not surprising that Americans have never quite attained this level of intellectual sportsmanship. Nor is it surprising that the British masculine model is fading, both here and in Britain.

Englishman Alastair Roberts writes a blog called Alastair's Adversaria on largely theological topics. As a writer, he has what I call an indoor voice, attuned to the style of the time, which makes his endorsement of the fading tradition of debate as sport interesting by contrast. Starting from some controversy in England, Roberts launches into a lengthy but insightful description of what has gone wrong:
In observing the interaction between Pastor Wilson and his critics in the recent debate, I believe that we were witnessing a collision of two radically contrasting modes of discourse. The first mode of discourse, represented by Pastor Wilson’s critics, was one in which sensitivity, inclusivity, and inoffensiveness are key values, and in which persons and positions are ordinarily closely related. The second mode of discourse, displayed by Pastor Wilson and his daughters, is one characterized and enabled by personal detachment from the issues under discussion, involving highly disputational and oppositional forms of rhetoric, scathing satire, and ideological combativeness. 

To provide a scorecard: you can think of Roberts' "first mode of discourse" as the one dominant in the 21st Century, while the second mode represents an idealized 19th Century British view of discourse as sport. First = New, Second = Old.
When these two forms of discourse collide they are frequently unable to understand each other and tend to bring out the worst in each other. The first [new, sensitive] form of discourse seems lacking in rationality and ideological challenge to the second; the second [old, sporting] can appear cruel and devoid of sensitivity to the first. To those accustomed to the second mode of discourse, the cries of protest at supposedly offensive statements may appear to be little more than a dirty and underhand ploy intentionally adopted to derail the discussion by those whose ideological position can’t sustain critical challenge. However, these protests are probably less a ploy than the normal functioning of the particular mode of discourse characteristic of that community, often the only mode of discourse that those involved are proficient in. 
To those accustomed to the first mode of discourse, the scathing satire and sharp criticism of the second appears to be a vicious and personal attack, driven by a hateful animus, when those who adopt such modes of discourse are typically neither personally hurt nor aiming to cause such hurt. Rather, as this second form of discourse demands personal detachment from issues under discussion, ridicule does not aim to cause hurt, but to up the ante of the debate, exposing the weakness of the response to challenge, pushing opponents to come back with more substantial arguments or betray their lack of convincing support for their position. Within the first form of discourse, if you take offence, you can close down the discourse in your favour; in the second form of discourse, if all you can do is to take offence, you have conceded the argument to your opponent, as offence is not meaningful currency within such discourse. 
I also don’t think that sufficient attention is given to the manner in which differing forms of education prepare persons for participation in these different modes of discourse. There is a form of education – increasingly popular over the last few decades – which most values cooperation, collaboration, quietness, sedentariness, empathy, equality, non-competitiveness, conformity, a communal focus, inclusivity, affirmation, inoffensiveness, sensitivity, non-confrontation, a downplaying of physicality, and an orientation to the standard measures of grades, tests, and a closely defined curriculum (one could, with the appropriate qualifications, speak of this as a ‘feminization’ of education). Such a form of education encourages a form of public discourse within which there is a shared commitment and conformity to the social and ideological dogmas and values of liberal society, where everyone feels secure and accepted and conflict is avoided, but at the expense of independence of thought, exposure to challenge, the airing of deep differences, and truth-driven discourse. 
Faced with an opposing position that will not compromise in the face of its calls for sensitivity and its cries of offence, such a [new] mode of discourse lacks the strength of argument to parry challenges. Nor does it have any means by which to negotiate or accommodate such intractable differences within its mode of conversation. Consequently, it will typically resort to the most fiercely antagonistic, demonizing, and personal attacks upon the opposition.

Generally, anybody who denounces opponents as representing "hate" is hate-filled.
While firm differences can be comfortably negotiated within the contrasting [old] form of discourse, a mode of discourse governed by sensitivities and ‘tolerance’ cannot tolerate uncompromising difference. Without a bounded and rule-governed realm for negotiating differences, antagonism becomes absolute and opposition total. Supporters of this ‘sensitive’ mode of discourse will typically try, not to answer opponents with better arguments, but to silence them completely as ‘hateful’, ‘intolerant’, ‘bigoted’, ‘misogynistic’, ‘homophobic’, etc. 
A completely contrasting mode of education, one more typical of traditional – and male-oriented – educational systems, values internalized confidence, originality, agonism, independence of thought, creativity, assertiveness, the mastery of one’s feelings, a thick skin and high tolerance for your own and others’ discomfort, disputational ability, competitiveness, nerve, initiative, imagination, and force of will, values that come to the fore in confrontational oral debate. Such an education will produce a mode of discourse that is naturally highly oppositional and challenging, while generally denying participants the right to take things personally. Deep divergences of opinion can be far more comfortably accommodated within the same conversation by those accustomed to such discourse. While the first form of education risks viewing persons as passive receptacles of knowledge to be rewarded for their conformity to set expectations, which are frequently measured, this form of education prioritizes the formation of independent thinking agents. 
This form of discourse typically involves a degree of ‘heterotopy’, occurring in a ‘space’ distinct from that of personal interactions.

In other words: "in the arena."
This heterotopic space is characterized by a sort of playfulness, ritual combativeness, and histrionics. This ‘space’ is akin to that of the playing field, upon which opposing teams give their rivals no quarter, but which is held distinct to some degree from relations between the parties that exist off the field. The handshake between competitors as they leave the field is a typical sign of this demarcation.  It is this separation of the space of rhetorical ritual combat from regular space that enables debaters, politicians, or lawyers to have fiery disagreements in the debating chamber, the parliamentary meeting, or the courtroom and then happily enjoy a drink together afterwards. 
This ‘heterotopic discourse’ makes possible far more spirited challenges to opposing positions, hyperbolic and histrionic rhetoric designed to provoke response and test the mettle of one’s own and the opposing position, assertive presentations of one’s beliefs that are less concerned to present a full-orbed picture than to advocate firmly for a particular perspective and to invite and spark discussion from other perspectives. 
The truth is not located in the single voice, but emerges from the conversation as a whole. Within this form of heterotopic discourse, one can play devil’s advocate, have one’s tongue in one’s cheek, purposefully overstate one’s case, or attack positions that one agrees with. The point of the discourse is to expose the strengths and weaknesses of various positions through rigorous challenge, not to provide a balanced position in a single monologue. Those familiar with such discourse will be accustomed to hyperbolic and unbalanced expressions. They will appreciate that such expressions are seldom intended as the sole and final word on the matter by those who utter them, but as a forceful presentation of one particular dimension of or perspective upon the truth, always presuming the existence of counterbalancing perspectives that have no less merit and veracity. 
In contrast, a sensitivity-driven discourse lacks the playfulness of heterotopic discourse, taking every expression of difference very seriously. Rhetorical assertiveness and impishness, the calculated provocations of ritual verbal combat, linguistic playfulness, and calculated exaggeration are inexplicable to it as it lacks the detachment, levity, and humour within which these things make sense. On the other hand, those accustomed to combative discourse may fail to appreciate when they are hurting those incapable of responding to it. 
Lacking a high tolerance for difference and disagreement, sensitivity-driven discourses will typically manifest a herding effect. Dissenting voices can be scapegoated or excluded and opponents will be sharply attacked. Unable to sustain true conversation, stale monologues will take its place. Constantly pressed towards conformity, indoctrination can take the place of open intellectual inquiry. Fracturing into hostile dogmatic cliques takes the place of vigorous and illuminating dialogue between contrasting perspectives. Lacking the capacity for open dialogue, such groups will exert their influence on wider society primarily by means of political agitation. 
The fear of conflict and the inability to deal with disagreement lies at the heart of sensitivity-driven discourses. However, ideological conflict is the crucible of the sharpest thought. Ideological conflict forces our arguments to undergo a rigorous and ruthless process through which bad arguments are broken down, good arguments are honed and developed, and the relative strengths and weaknesses of different positions emerge. The best thinking emerges from contexts where interlocutors mercilessly probe and attack our arguments’ weaknesses and our own weaknesses as their defenders. They expose the blindspots in our vision, the cracks in our theories, the inconsistencies in our logic, the inaptness of our framing, the problems in our rhetoric. We are constantly forced to return to the drawing board, to produce better arguments. 
Granted immunity from this process, sensitivity-driven and conflict-averse contexts seldom produce strong thought, but rather tend to become echo chambers. Even the good ideas that they produce tend to be blunt and very weak in places. Even with highly intelligent people within them, conflict-averse groups are poor at thinking. Bad arguments go unchecked and good insights go unhoned and underdeveloped. This would not be such a problem were it not for the fact that these groups frequently expect us to fly in a society formed according to their ideas, ideas that never received any rigorous stress testing.

We've seen this deterioration of discourse in recent years among gay men. Gore Vidal, for example, liked to argue and insult. But gays have increasingly taken on lesbian modes.

In general, the contemporary mode of emotionalism and herding is the human default. The great ages of intellectual progress via debate were rare social constructs, and it's not surprising that they easily break down.

If I were a rich man ...

I think I'd want a private library like George Lucas's at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County. It appears to be modeled after the 1938 library at Chateau de Groussay, but with warmer colors and a 40' diameter stained glass dome. It's amazing what a 40' stained glass dome can do to spruce up any room. You should try it the next time you're redecorating.

You can browse through Truly Grand Home Libraries here. Interestingly, there are almost no pictures available on the Internet of the library that Bill Gates built his librarian mother.

The two guys on the list who definitely use their huge personal libraries, Larry McMurtry and Umberto Eco, go for the Ikea white pressed wood shelf look. You can't afford a George Lucas-style library from selling books, even as many as McMurtry and Eco have.

Why do we laugh?

In the Times Literary Supplement, Tim Lewens reviews a book on humor by three philosophers: Inside Jokes: Using humor to reverse-engineer the mind by Matthew M. Hurley, Daniel C. Dennett and Reginald B. Adams, Jr.
The big problem with theories of humour is not that they are sombre; it is that they are often implausible or myopic. 
All of the usual suspects have their shortcomings. Surveys typically list three broad varieties of humour theory: superiority theories, release theories and incongruity-resolution theories. Superiority theories say that humour illustrates the inferiority in some respect of the joke’s butt, provoking laughter as a sort of small triumph in the superior witness. This works well in some cases, but struggles to account for “butt-less” humour such as puns, or the kinder forms of imitation. Release theories have a Freudian pedigree: humour provides a sort of relief from a build-up of nervous tension. Again, it is not clear that one can plausibly think of simple puns as having such therapeutic functions, and many of today’s cognitive scientists are sceptical of the more general hydraulic metaphors used to depict build-up of energy, overflow, release and so forth. Incongruity-resolution theories are more popular: they assert that humorous situations involve the presentation of an incongruity that is subsequently resolved. Here we might be concerned about whether “incongruity” and “resolution” are understood in suitably precise ways: without such tightening, the theory seems vulnerable to counter-example. In The Emotions and the Will (1875), Alexander Bain complained that “There are many incongruities that produce anything but a laugh”, and went on to list many examples that are not funny, and that would remain unfunny even if they were, in some sense, resolved: “snow in May, Archimedes studying geometry in a siege; . . . a wolf in sheep’s clothing; . . . a corpse at a feast, parental cruelty”.

Actually, those examples of unfunniness sound pretty funny to me. A wolf in sheep's clothing is a standard for cartoonists, such as Gary Larson's Far Side panel where an entire flock consists of wolves wearing blatantly phony sheep disguises and one disgusted wolf, fake head under his arm, says to another, "Wait a minute! Isn't anyone here a real sheep?" (Warning: Far Side cartoons likely to disappear off the Internet.)

Perhaps the more that something seems comic rather than tragic is a sign of economic progress?

As for snow in May, admittedly, that wasn't as funny back in a more Malthusian age when it was likely to wipe out your crop and put your family in the poorhouse. But in Seventies Southern California, it was pretty hilarious. As Woody Allen pointed out in Annie Hall, most things in 1970s SoCal were pretty funny.

On May 28, 1977, my friend Steve (yes, it was a common name, mid-century) and I started backpacking from Crystal Lake above Azusa in the L.A. sprawl. 

We started up the dry south-facing slope of the San Gabriel Mountains under a scorching sun on our way to Little Jimmy Camp at 7,500 feet elevation over the Angeles Crest onto the north-facing slope.

What we found to our surprise when we reached the pass was that the north side of the mountains on Memorial Day weekend were covered with two feet of snow, and we hadn't packed anything warmer than those embarrassingly short shorts that were in fashion in 1977. You can crack up Steve to this day by reminding him of this snowy May campout I dragged him on.

I presume laughter has a variety of causes (as, clearly, do tears, although philosophers seem less baffled by crying than laughing). So, there's no apparent need for an all-purpose explanation. Still, I would suggest that humor often serves as a sort of brain candy to reward noticing stuff. For example, ever since I've been fairly obsessive in thinking about which directions slopes face. 

I learned my lesson.