November 7, 2013

GOP Donorists v. Populists

A reader reflects on recent electoral events:
Wondering what your take is on what looks to be a clear split of the entire GOP establishment from the Tea Party. I see it as pushing the Tea Party into, at the very least, a rhetorically anti-business direction (probably attacking big business). The Tea Party would lose money, but probably more than make up for it in votes.  
It strikes me as though they're being pushed into the sweet spot of American politics. If it is they who oppose immigration reform (and the Chamber of Commerce being for immigration reform is now another reason to hate them for Tea Partiers), the only missing piece from offering a real change to voters would be a less interventionist foreign policy (though some of them already take that position). 
While that technically wouldn't be a Sailer strategy, if voters want a change, the Tea Party is the only entity offering it. White Democrats are probably the only swing vote left (what would Obama's current poll numbers look like with the demographics of 1980 or 1960 America?), and anti-business, anti-war could probably be the few percent they'd need to pull out a win.

Interesting. I'd say, though, that it's a long way from here to there.

Has a 15-year-old explained the Flynn Effect?

10-year-old Elijah Armstrong wins
2008 Marin County Spelling Bee
The "Flynn Effect," the name invented by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray in The Bell Curve for the phenomenon documented most thoroughly by James Flynn of rising raw scores on IQ tests, remains perhaps the most important (and technically daunting) conundrum in psychometrics.

Many worthy explanations have been offered, but we can use another one. And the brand new paper from Elijah Armstrong (see picture at right) and Michael Woodley is a standout.

One clue might be that the Flynn Effect tends to be largest on those types of IQ tests that seem designed by Mr. Spock-like aliens or robots, such as the Raven's Matrices, that tour d'force in minimalist test design from the late 1930s. 

Raven's Matrices
The more broad-based Wechsler brand of IQ tests was introduced in the same era. On this, we see a wide disparity in magnitude of the Flynn Effect by subtests. 

I adapted the table below from Flynn's 2007 book What Is Intelligence? On Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children subtests, the size of raw score gains from 1947 to 2002 on general information, arithmetic, and vocabulary subtests were small. But they were quite large on the more Raven's-like subtests, along with the high-concept Similarities subtest:

Information
+2 (IQ Gain in Points, 1947-2002)
Example: On what continent is Argentina?

Arithmetic
+2 point gain
If a toy costs $6, how much do 7 cost?

Vocabulary
+4
What does "debilitating" mean?

Comprehension
+11
Why are streets usually numbered in order?

Picture Completion
+12
Indicate the missing part from an incomplete picture.

Block Design
+16
Use blocks to replicate a two-color design.

Object Assembly
+17
Assemble puzzles depicting common objects.

Coding
+18
Using a key, match symbols with shapes or numbers.

Picture Arrangement
+22
Reorder a set of scrambled picture cards to tell a story.

Similarities
+24
In what way are "dogs" and "rabbits" alike? 
(Answer key: 2 points for "mammals," 1 point for "four-legged," and 0 points for "I wuv them.")

The last item deserves a separate explanation, but it's not hard to see that the first four subtests, on which the Flynn Effect has been restrained, are qualitatively different from the next five, on which it has been dramatic. All else being equal, more recent children, who grew up with an abundance of complex toys and electronic devices, would seem more likely to ace subtests five through nine. Robert Gordon said life is an IQ test, and life may well have become more like an IQ test, thus making it better training for taking IQ tests.

This pattern may help explain why kids these days don't seem all that hep when you try to talk to them about Grandma's debilitating hemorrhoids, but they are whizzes with their MyFace and Tweeter.

James Thompson blogs at Psychological Comments:
Flynn effect as a retesting, rule-based gain 
It is very good to see a paper which takes a large scale effect, the secular rise in intelligence test results, and links it to an intriguing large scale explanation. A new contribution to understanding the Flynn Effect is to be found in the journal Learning and Individual Differences, which became available 30th October: 
Elijah Armstrong and Michael Woodley  
The rule-dependence model explains the commonalities between the Flynn effect and IQ gains via retesting.” 

And here is an uncorrected proof of Woodley and Armstrong's upcoming paper.

Woodley is a prominent young psychologist, now at the U. of Umea in Sweden.

There's young and then there's young. Elijah Armstrong is a 15-year-old who lives in Marin County, California. Above is the Marin News' picture of him winning the county's spelling bee for elementary school students. In the picture he is a fifth-grader at age 10 -- that was slightly less than five years ago. He's been working on his rule-dependence model of the Flynn Effect since early 2012.

Here's Elijah's blog

Thompson continues:
Armstrong and Woodley argue that the Flynn effect is partly driven by the retest effect, whereby familiarity with the test material means that if you can learn a rule of thumb you can solve those particular sorts of problems when you see them again, without having to use much intelligence.

Civilization is a system for conservation-of-cognition.
In very simple terms, the test wears out quickly once you get to learn how it works. Using implicit learning and working memory, test takers learn how to solve rule dependent problems, which leads to apparent IQ gains which are partly independent of general intelligence. 
As readers of this blog will know, the ultimate IQ test is the one for which no-one knows the answers at the moment. Intelligence tests in the real world are more modest affairs. Raven’s Matrices is a test based on progressions: you need to find the rule which underlies the visible changes in the problem arrays, and a good enough memory to hold in mind how those changes are progressing, so that you can correctly choose the final missing picture. ... Carpenter et al. (1990) found that 5 rules covered all the items in the test. Once you know that, it is less of a test.

I suspect the more "culture fair" a test is (such as the Raven's Matrices), the more you can test prep for it. The less you can effectively test prep for an IQ subtest, such as vocabulary or information on the Wechsler Children's IQ test, the more culturally biased it is. For instance, I read a huge amount of William F. Buckley in 9th and 10th grades, which helped my vocabulary no end, but (pre-Internet) if your high school library didn't have a subscription to National Review like mine did, you'd be at a disadvantage compared to me.
Another aspect of being test savvy is the capacity to de-contextualise, that is, to be able to generalise about types of problem, without being confused by the particular context in which the specific example is presented to you.

For example, the "trolley problem" appeals to high IQ individuals good at de-contextualizing -- i.e., not asking a lot of stupid questions about how, exactly, do you push a fat man to his death to stop a runaway trolley. Instead, you should recognize that it's a question about consequentialism v. deontology and therefore only focus upon the details that the questioner wants you to focus upon.

Personally, the older and dumber I get, the more I enjoy "re-contextualizing" -- taking abstract ideas and considering them in light of empirical realities. But, re-contextualizing tends to drive smart people crazy.
Armstrong and Woodley assert that, from the point of view of intelligence, education amounts to a vast re-testing enterprise. There are modest gains from rules of thumb, mnemonics and being “taught to the test”. Indeed, the reliance on exam results makes teachers and pupils confederates in ensuring that nothing is taught which is not taught to be examined. Incidentally, this view does not exclude what James Flynn calls “scientific spectacles” which more people now adopt when solving problems. 

On average, kids in 2002 had watched a lot more nature documentaries on TV than kids in 1947 had, so scientific concepts like "mammals" are more common.
Armstrong and Woodley rank tests according to how much “cognitive scaffolding” they have. Raven’s Matrices is level IV: rules are very helpful, only a few of them are required; Catell Culture Fair is Level III: rules help, but will not help you on many items; the majority of IQ tests [e.g., Wechsler, but I don't think they used it because it's an oral test and they stuck to paper-and-pencil tests -- I may be wrong here] are Level II: very many rules are required, but working out which to use is difficult, (and selecting the rule is what requires general intelligence); and Draw A Man test is Level I: no rule is of much help. 
They then simply correlate the vector of the position of any particular test in the rule dependence typology with the vector of the size of the Flynn effect on that test. A positive correlation would indicate that tests that were more dependent upon rules were yielding the larger Flynn effects. They tested it on 14 data sets, and found a correlation of 0.6

r = 0.6 isn't huge, but it's a lot better than a sharp stick in the eye.
The authors say: “It is proposed that tests like the Raven’s are only highly g loaded when encountered initially — even basic familiarity with the rules and heuristics on a test, or familiarity with inductive reasoning itself, has the potential to radically diminish the g loading of this test over time, both under controlled conditions (such as in a retesting scenario) and over larger societal time scales (i.e., across generations in the case of the Flynn effect).” 

To me, the Raven's looks as sinister as it's Edgar Allen Poe-like name implies. But, with some practice I could probably get the hang of it. In contrast, if you tested me on a random sample of vocabulary words drawn from, say, Dr. Johnson's Dictionary, I'd jump right in, but would only get slightly better as I went along.

(There's a separate issue that many IQ tests have, in practice, a limited question bank. So, if you practiced enough on old tests you'd eventually hear all the words in, say, the Wechsler's vocabulary subtests. But, in theory, that wouldn't be a problem. As Bruce Charlton pointed out, the use of the Wechsler as an admission exam for Manhattan four-year-olds with $40k to burn annually on kindergarten has becoming increasingly gamed because the WISC is intended as a clinical test for diagnostic purposes, not as a gatekeeper exam to select among the children of the most ambitious parents this side of Seoul.
They continue: “The increasing capacity of societies to detect and explicitly utilize rules as a function of the Flynn effect may be related to increasing rule exposure via mass education and to ‘ways of thinking’ endemic to cognitive modernity (Flynn, 2009). 
This is a good paper. It contains lots of ideas, proposes a theory and then tests it, and draws out the conclusions in a thoughtful way. Not content with linking the observed phenomenon with the Flynn Effect and life speed theory, it also includes 5 testable predictions, to encourage other researchers to test whether their proposal has merit. It is a notable debut for the first author, whose first paper this is, and whose ideas formed the basis for the eventual publication.
Postscript 
Elijah lives in Marin County, California, and is interested in philosophy and intelligence research. He originated the rule-dependence model in early 2012 and worked on it for eighteen months thereafter. He claims his conscientiousness is below the 10th percentile. He is also prone to end all his emails saying “Excuse typos, I typed this with my feet”. If you imagine that he is a sad old man gathering up a lifetime of scholarship into a well-honed rant, your imagination would be wrong. Elijah is 15. 

Here's Armstrong and Woodley's abstract:
We present a new model of the Flynn effect. To wit, we propose that Flynn effect gains are partly a function of the degree to which a test is dependent on rules or heuristics. This means that testees can become better at solving ‘rule-dependent’ problems over time in response to changing environments, which lead to the improvement of lower-order cognitive processes (such as implicit learning and aspects of working memory). These in turn lead to apparent IQ gains that are partially independent of general intelligence. We argue that the Flynn effect is directly analogous to IQ gains via retesting, noting that Raven's Progressive Matrices is particularly sensitive to both the effects of retesting and the Flynn effect. After an extensive review of the relevant supporting literature, we test our thesis by developing a rule - dependence typology and then correlate the vector of a test's position in the typology with the vector of the Flynn effect that it yields. We find a significant vector correlation of r = ~ .60 (N = 14). Finally, we make a number of novel and testable predictions based on our model. 

For some readable background on the Flynn Effect, here's my 2007 review of Flynn's What Is Intelligence?

November 6, 2013

In the future, everything will be endowed

College football is basically tribal warfare without all the impalings, so it's interesting to watch the off-the-field maneuverings behind college football to gain some sense of how immemorial emotions are acted upon in the 21st Century. For example, the recent rise to football powerdom of Stanford (rated #5 in the country at the moment) reflects America's growing inequality. Ben Cohen writes in the WSJ:
Stanford isn't like other football powers. It can't generate as much cash from its fans, since it doesn't have nearly as many. Stanford Stadium seats about 50,000—half the size of some venues in the Southeastern and Big Ten conferences. 
The school accounted for $9.7 million in football ticket sales on its 2012 annual report. The four teams ranked above Stanford in the latest Bowl Championship Series standings averaged $27 million, with Ohio State topping the list at $41 million. In merchandise sales, Stanford ranked 42nd this year on the Collegiate Licensing Company's list of top-selling schools, well behind not just Texas but also Texas Tech. 
The normal revenues Stanford receives from football are so low, in fact, that its 36 varsity sports teams depend on something no other school has, or would dare rely so heavily on: an athletics-only endowment worth between $450 million and $500 million that pays out at 5.5% each year, people familiar with the matter said.

To put Stanford's secretive half-billion dollar sports stash in perspective (Stanford's overall endowment is $17 billion), here are the entire endowments of some large colleges:

Penn State $1,780 million
Tulane U. $961 million
Rutgers ($694 million)
U. of Arizona $563 million
Arizona St. (the largest university in the country) $500 million
Florida St. $498 million
The way Stanford keeps up in the college-football arms race is to lean on private donations. As a result, almost everything the football program touches is endowed, from each of the school's 85 football scholarships to David Shaw's head-coaching position. Stanford's offensive coordinator is even known as the Andrew Luck Director of Offense in honor of an anonymous gift in 2012.

What Open Borders looks like from sending end

Puerto Rico has enjoyed an Open Borders relationship with the United States for most of the last century, along with a plethora of tax breaks for over half a century to keep everybody from leaving. And yet, Puerto Rico has still managed to mess up.

A Washington Post editorial:
Puerto Rico’s sinking economy

ALAS FOR Puerto Rico, the Caribbean commonwealth attracts little attention on the U.S. mainland except when it’s in trouble. So it is with the looming crisis over Puerto Rican public debt, estimated at $70 billion. Detroit’s bankruptcy was bad for the municipal bond market; a default by Puerto Rico, though unlikely, could be worse: Some 70 percent of U.S. municipal-bond mutual funds hold the island’s paper, which bears tax-free interest. Large U.S. bond insurers are heavily exposed as well. 
How Puerto Rico got into this mess is a long story, with plenty of villains: The island’s government frittered away funds on unproductive investments and bloated payrolls; Wall Street bankers enabled more borrowing, collecting $880 million in fees since 2000; the U.S. government's policy of tax-free status for Puerto Rico bonds, meant to boost its economic development, subsidized the island’s habit of living beyond its means. 
And last but not least is the near-collapse of economic growth . Puerto Rico’s output has declined 16 percent since 2004. Its recession, triggered by the 2006 phaseout of a federal manufacturing tax break, began before that of the mainland and lasted longer. Only about a million of Puerto Rico’s 3.6 million people are employed. Not coincidentally, Puerto Rico’s population shrank 4 percent in the past decade, as many of the best and brightest sought opportunity on the U.S. mainland. 
... Commonwealth officials say default is not only undesirable but, literally, unconstitutional since Puerto Rico’s constitution gives general-obligation bondholders first dibs on the island’s cash. But that guarantee has never been tested in a predicament such as this, which is economically analogous to Detroit’s — and that of Greece, another heavily indebted political entity linked in a currency union with far larger and more competitive neighbors. 

NYT: Jason Collins to the rescue!

From the NYT:
Knicks Need Help. Why Not Jason Collins?

The Knicks need frontcourt help, and the veteran center Jason Collins happens to be looking for a job. 
By HARVEY ARATON 
One week into an already stressful season, the Knicks do not have a center, a defensive beacon in the N.B.A. storm. There is no short or complete answer to the loss of Tyson Chandler with a nondisplaced fracture of the right fibula. But there will be suggestions on how to cobble together a plan to survive for the next four to six weeks. And here is one: 
Get the agent Arn Tellem on the phone and see how quickly they can get Jason Collins to New York. 
Collins has been home in Los Angeles, working out and waiting for the inevitable injury that would send a front-line player to the injured list and get him back into the league for at least part of a 13th season. ... 
Reluctant to be quoted on a touchy subject, many N.B.A. insiders have insisted that Collins’s exclusion has had nothing to do with the announcement last spring that he is gay. It has been, they said, more about his age, limited abilities and in some cases about luxury tax complications related to the salary cap.

It may have something to do with Collins averaging 9 minutes, 1.1 points, and 1.6 rebounds per game last season. 

Anyway, a gay center is just so Spring 2013. This season, New York would need a transgender center who insists upon playing in six-inch stripper heels.

If the Knicks are looking for an aging big man whose signing would generate some social media buzz, let me point out that that airport incident suggests Bill Russell has some fight left in him. And Wilt Chamberlain is extremely well rested.

More Trolleymania: Dave Chapelle's white friend Chip

For the study on why liberals are more ardent to make an omelet by cracking Chip Ellsworth III's skull than cracking Tyrone Payton's, see my new column in Taki's.

A reader writes:
Hi Steve, 
Great work lately.  I've been following your 'throw the fat man' series with enjoyment as I've tried to make similar claims for years that impulsive moral decision-making should not be expected to be a test of purely abstract reasoning, and that the fat-man test in particular doesn't test whether people really make large moral distinctions between passive and active efforts.  
My view has always been that the facts of the scenario tend to stimulate instinctive or culturally-conditioned reflexive responses that generate subliminal hesitations and tribal preferences. 
So, when the examiner says 'throw the big fat man off the bridge', he thinks that stands for the abstract example of 'kill a random human, that we assume is sure to stop the train', but the examinee feels, just below the state of conscious awareness, 'Push a big fat man?!  That's really dangerous!  I might fail, and he pushes me instead, without even saving the trolly - that's the worst of all worlds!' 
Since the 'moral function' often manifests itself in the form of post-facto rationalizations for reptilian-calculations of self-interest, it's not hard to get people to try and piece together a string of words which 'justifies' their failure to intervene on the basis of asserted 'moral principles'. 
But as with you, the typical response of people who really want to believe in the meaningfulness of this scenario is that either I, or these people, are just unable to think abstractly, or are making ridiculous 'not real enough' criticisms of an abstract test.  

One skill tested by IQ tests is the ability to de-contextualize, to move from the concrete to the abstract. But the older I get, the more interested I am in re-contextualizing, moving from the abstract back to the concrete. History is an old man's game.
I noticed that analogy to Newton's laws on your site, but of course, the analogy is false.  Newtonian mechanics posits idealized assumptions to draw conclusions about abstract natural laws.  But experiments in moral psychology are making abstract assumptions about the workings of the human mind, which are not like natural laws of Physics.  They are putting the cart before the horse and assuming away psychological tendencies that have major impacts on the responses of the study participants. 
So, to test my theory, I have often proposed to people who quote the 'throw-the-fatty' examples at me, that they rephrase the question with different characteristics of the individual to be thrown. 
So, rerun the test with 'throw the old fat woman', or 'throw the fat black child', or 'throw the wheelchair-bound invalid', or 'throw your favorite celebrity', or 'throw Obama', or 'throw an Asian communist'.  For progressives, or open-borders advocates, I would suggest 'throw Steve Sailer' - who happens to be a large male like in the original scenario - but I imagine that one would get a great deal of enthusiasm for active intervention and explanation of moral justification.  
This has proven persuasive to my interlocutors on several occasions.  And it's made me permanently skeptical of results from the field if they don't apply some kind of control or test for the impact of these sorts of variations.

Meanwhile, in the current issue of The New Republic, Thomas Nagel ruminates on a new book about the Trolley Problem by Joshua Greene called Moral Tribes.

November 5, 2013

Throw Whitey Under the Trolley

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:
If a runaway trolley were about to smash into a bus containing 100 trapped members of the Harlem Jazz Orchestra, would you push a wholly innocent man named Chip Ellsworth III onto the tracks to stop the accident? What if the bus held 100 members of the New York Philharmonic and the guilt-free man's name is Tyrone Payton? 
Would your politics have any relevance to whether you’d prefer to kill the white man to save the black musicians or to kill the black man to save the white musicians? 
In a fascinating 2009 academic paper by four social psychologists, The Motivated Use of Moral Principles, UC Irvine students who identified as politically conservative were found to be racially evenhanded. When given the scenario about killing Chip to save 100 Harlemites, conservatives were no more or less likely to agree it’s the right thing to do than when told to ponder killing the man with the cornerback’s name to save 100 classical musicians. 
In striking contrast, liberal students displayed greater bloodthirstiness when presented with the scenario that gave them an opportunity to kill the WASP to help the blacks. 

Read the whole thing there.

Cosh: The IQ benefits of winter in Japan

Edmonton, Alberta is the farthest north major city in Canada, 587 miles farther north than Minneapolis, which, I hear, gets kind of chilly in winter despite being practically equatorial. And Edmonton is at 2,100 feet altitude, which lowers the temperature another 7 or 8 degrees compared to sea level. The high today in Edmonton was 28 degrees F, or below freezing, in contrast to today's high in, say, Van Nuys of 79 F. So, loyal Edmonton native Colby Cosh is always on the lookout for why frostbite is good for you if it doesn't quite kill you, like it makes your descendants' smarter. He writes in Maclean's:
A new study in the biometric journal Intelligence presents surprising data from Japan that reveal that IQ, imputed from standardized tests given to a large random sample of Japanese 14-year-olds, varies strongly and persistently with latitude. The Japanese are usually thought of—even by themselves—as being quite homogeneous ethnically; the myth of the sturdy, super-cohesive “Yamato race” has not yet been entirely obtruded out of existence. But it turns out that the mean IQs of students in Japanese prefectures apparently vary from north to south by two-thirds of a standard deviation—a spread almost as large as the “race gaps” in cognitive performance which trouble education scholars in multicultural countries like ours. Sun-drenched Okinawans, as a group, do not test as well as the snowbound citizens of Akita.

I don't know anything about Japan so I can't say whether this finding is plausible or not. This pattern isn't necessarily seen in other major Asian countries. In China, the highest achieving region on college tests is said to be the moderately southern province of Fujian, on the coast. In India, southern provinces have come up in the world, with the software capital being Bangalore down south (but also up modestly high, which no doubt helps health and fosters a culture less dragged down by relentless heat and humidity).

Michael Hastings recalled

People who make themselves obnoxious to the Washington-Wall Street axis of power tend to get in trouble on sex charges (Spitzer, Assange, and Strauss-Kahn). So, when investigative reporter Michael Hastings, who had brought down the top general in Afghanistan, died last June in a car crash in nice part of Los Angeles, I actually left the house to visit the scene. 

In person, while still somewhat puzzling, it looked less suspicious than in pictures online. Brave guys, I guess, are often brave about bad driving, too. 

Interestingly, blogger Paleo Retiree of Uncouth Reflections (and formerly of 2Blowhards, the best arts and culture blog of the previous decade) had been a good friend of Hastings. Here he interviews brother Jonathan Hastings about the late Michael Hastings.

Charlie Trotter, RIP

The great Chicago chef Charlie Trotter has died at age 54. A couple of years ago, I wrote about having dinner in his restaurant's kitchen.

Scandal! Tory cabinet minister met distinguished scientist

As we all know, conservatives hate science, while the left is the Reality-Based Community. Thus, from the leftist Independent:
Michael Gove held talks with 'IQ genes' professor 
JANE MERRICK    SUNDAY 13 OCTOBER 2013

Michael Gove held talks with a leading scientist who believes that genetics, not teaching, plays a major part in the intelligence of schoolchildren, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. 
Professor Robert Plomin, the world's leading behavioural geneticist, met the Secretary of State for Education and ministers at the Department for Education in the summer. Mr Gove's policy adviser, Dominic Cummings, provoked outcry yesterday when it emerged he had backed Professor Plomin's research that genes accounted for up to 70 per cent of a child's cognitive abilities. Mr Cummings, in a 250-page "private thesis", said the link between intelligence and genetics had been overlooked in the education system and wanted to introduce Professor Plomin to ministers to redress the balance. 
A spokesman for Mr Gove refused to respond when asked three times whether the Education Secretary also believed intelligence was genetic. "Professor Plomin has given a few talks to different groups including ministers," the spokesman said. 
"[He] suggested lots of different things, for example, that genetic research might allow us to help those with learning difficulties much earlier and more effectively." 
Linking intelligence to genes has long been controversial, but Professor Plomin has conducted research showing up to 70 per cent heritability for reading and maths tests at age seven, nine and 12, while scores for English, Maths and science GCSEs show up to 60 per cent heritability in a twin study. 
The research is contentious because ministers and educationalists have long believed that any child, from whatever background, can achieve the highest academic ability. 
In his document, leaked to The Guardian, Mr Cummings cited at length research by Professor Plomin, including the studies showing up to 70 per cent of a child's performance is genetically derived. Mr Cummings said: "There is strong resistance across the political spectrum to accepting scientific evidence on genetics. Most of those that now dominate discussions on issues such as social mobility entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless." 
In the document, effectively a lengthy and detailed parting shot before he leaves the Department for Education at the end of this year, Mr Cummings also claimed that mediocrity is ubiquitous in education and criticised the amount of money the Labour government spent on Sure Start and other measures to improve social mobility, claiming billions had been spent "with no real gains". He added: "The education of the majority even in rich countries is between awful and mediocre." ...
Kevin Brennan, the shadow schools minister, said: "His claim that most variation in performance is due to genetics rather than teaching quality will send a chill down the spine of every parent – we need to know if these views are shared by Michael Gove."

November 4, 2013

Nature over nurture: Usain Bolt's gold medal diet

From The Independent:
Usain Bolt reveals he devoured 1,000 Chicken McNuggets during the 2008 Beijing Olympics 
It didn't do him any harm..he smashed three world records 
The Jamaican revealed in his soon-to-be released autobiography, Faster than Lightning, his passion started with a box of 20, yes 20, of the golden chicken treats, but with his training going into overdrive, he soon needed far more, up to 100 a day, and even turned to an apple pie to take the edge off. 
“At first I ate a box of 20 for lunch, then another for dinner,” he wrote. “The next day I had two boxes for breakfast, one for lunch and then another couple in the evening. I even grabbed some fries and an apple pie to go with it.” 

Of course, the Jamaican Milkshakes you ingest through a hypodermic needle don't slow you down, either.

By the way, my reading of David Wallechinsky's endlessly informative Complete Book of the Olympics suggests that nobody gets into severe auto crashes more than Olympic gold medalists. Hopefully, modern high end German safety technology will help Usain walk away from his next several wrecks as well.

As Enrico Fermi would ask: "Where is everybody?"

From the NYT:
Cosmic Census Finds Billions of Planets That Could Be Like Earth 
By DENNIS OVERBYE 
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Somewhere in all of this, there must be a planet where the volcanoes spout chocolate. 
Astronomers reported Monday that there could be as many as 40 billion habitable Earth-size planets in the galaxy, based on a new analysis of data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. 
One of every five sun-like stars in the galaxy has a planet the size of Earth circling it in the Goldilocks zone — not too hot, not too cold — where surface temperatures should be compatible with liquid water, according to a herculean three-year calculation based on data from the Kepler spacecraft by Erik Petigura, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. 
Mr. Petigura’s analysis represents a major step toward the main goal of the Kepler mission, which was to measure what fraction of sun-like stars in the galaxy have Earth-size planets. Sometimes called eta-Earth, it is an important factor in the so-called Drake equation used to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in the universe. Mr. Petigura’s paper, published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, puts another smiley face on a cosmos that has gotten increasingly friendly and fecund-looking over the last 20 years.
“It seems that the universe produces plentiful real estate for life that somehow resembles life on Earth,” Mr. Petigura said.

I did a high school science project on the Drake equation in 1975 and came up with the same general result: There ought to be lots of intelligent aliens out there!
Over the last two decades, astronomers have logged more than 1,000 planets around other stars, so-called exoplanets, and Kepler, in its four years of life before being derailed by a mechanical pointing malfunction last May, has compiled a list of some 3,500 more candidates. The new result could steer plans in the next few years and decades to find a twin of the Earth — Earth 2.0, in the argot — that is close enough to here to study. 
The nearest such planet might be only 12 light-years away. “Such a star would be visible to the naked eye,” Mr. Petigura said. 
His result builds on a report earlier this year by David Charbonneau and Courtney Dressing of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who found that about 15 percent of the smaller and more numerous stars known as red dwarfs have Earth-like planets in their habitable zones. Using slightly less conservative assumptions, Ravi Kopparapu from Pennsylvania State University found that half of all red dwarfs have such planets. Astronomers estimate that there are at least 200 billion stars of all types in the Milky Way galaxy, room for the imagination, and — who knows — perhaps for a few microbes or more complicated creatures to roam.
Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley, who supervised Mr. Petigura’s research and was a co-author of the paper along with Andrew Howard of the University of Hawaii, said: “This is the most important work I’ve ever been involved with. This is it. Are there inhabitable Earths out there?”
“I’m feeling a little tingly,” he said. 
At a news conference Friday discussing the results, astronomers erupted in praise of the Kepler mission and its team. Natalie Batalha, a Kepler leader from the NASA Ames Research Center, described the project and its members as “the best of humanity rising to the occasion.” 
According to Mr. Petigura’s new calculation, the fraction of stars with Earth-like planets is 22 percent, plus or minus 8 percent, depending on exactly how you define the habitable zone. 
There are several caveats. Although these planets are Earth-size, nobody knows what their masses are and thus whether they are rocky like the Earth, or balls of ice or gas, let alone whether anything can, or does — or ever will — live on them.
There is reason to believe, from recent observations of other worlds, however, that at least some Earth-size planets, if not all of them, are indeed rocky. Last week, two groups of astronomers announced that an Earth-size planet named Kepler 78b that orbits its sun in 8.5 hours has the same density as the Earth, though it is too hot to support life. 
“Nature,” as Mr. Petigura put it, “knows how to make rocky Earth-size planets.”

Now, 38 years later, I don't believe my Drake Equation calculations. Enrico Fermi turns out to be smarter than me. The celebrated Copernican paradigm shift was right on the relatively trivial shape-of-the-solar system question, but Ptolemy increasingly seems right about the Humans-Are-the-Center-of-the-Universe question.

As far as we can tell, we're the only intelligent life in the galaxy.

So let's not screw it up.

Open borders debate: Let the recriminations begin!

In a public debate on Open Borders (topic: "Let anyone take a job anywhere"), Bryan Caplan and Vivek Wadhwa got crushed by Ron Unz and Kathleen Newland. (Transcript, video).

Before this debate on the Upper West Side of Manhattan (i.e., perhaps the best possible location for Caplan and Co. in the U.S. -- the Upper West Side is Ground Zero for the intellectualized Ellis Island ancestor worship schmaltz that dominates the mainstream media worldview on immigration), 46% of the audience started out for Open Borders, 33% undecided, and only 21% against.

After the debate, pro-Open Borders dropped from 46% to 42%, undecideds dropped from 33% to 9%, and Against soared from 21% to 49%.

This is apparently one of the larger swings in IntelligenceSquared debate history.

Bryan Caplan has been lamenting his defeat at great lengths upon his blog. He has too many recrimination posts to link to individually, but one theme is that his partner, the charming Vivek Wadhwa, treasonously betrayed Caplan's side by just not being extremist enough.

Here's something worth noting that Caplan wrote last summer:
Think about it like this: Steve Sailer's policy views are much closer to the typical American's than mine.  Compared to me, he's virtually normal.  But the mainstream media is very sweet to me, and treats Steve like a pariah.  I have to admit, it's bizarre.

That I'm moderate and sensible, coming out of the mainstream of the American intellectual opinion going back to Ben Franklin, contributes to the hatred toward me.

It's amusing how several of the more Straussian intellectuals who react to my siting myself squarely in the center of prudent reasonableness do so by emphasizing their most extremist positions: "Let anyone take a job anywhere!" "Let them eat beans!" "Let everyone grow up in a highrise apartment like I did!" Others pretend that an absurd strawman version of me represents the media mainstream: "The conventional wisdom is that your IQ score represents the only thing important about you, but the latest brain scans prove this universal dogma wrong!"

World War T marches on

From the New York Times:
Bill on Workplace Bias Appears Set to Clear Senate Hurdle 
By JEREMY W. PETERS 
Published: November 4, 2013

WASHINGTON — A measure that would add sexual orientation and gender identity to federal nondiscrimination law has gained its 60th supporter in the Senate, giving it what appears to be a filibuster-proof majority as a key vote looms. 
... It will be the first time that the full Senate has considered a measure that includes protection for transgender people.

You can blow them up, but you can't marry them

Billboard in L.A. for anti-snoring product
From AdWeek:
Sleep Aid Defends Billboard Featuring U.S. Soldier With a Muslim Wife
'There are couples like this'

Are there? 

White American with veiled wife?

I imagine there are a few, but a very few.

One of the many drags of America's endless efforts to win the hearts and minds of Muslims by blowing them up is that taking their women is almost completely off-limits. You can blow them up, but you can't marry them.

In contrast, the Germans, Italians, and even Japanese were pretty good sports about G.I.'s marrying their womenfolk. For example, in the later 1970s through 1990s in the San Fernando Valley, about half of my mom's social circle of bridge ladies were a half-dozen old German warbrides of high degrees of gemütlichkeit. She was booked to go with them on a return visit to Germany and Austria, when illness forced her to drop out, which is too bad because the trip sounded like it would have been a blast for her.

Has anybody ever measured Classroom Discussion Quotient?

From the NYT:
Which comic strip character does
this U. of Chicago applicant resemble?
Robots or Aliens as Parents? Colleges Gauge Applicants’ Creativity

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

As legions of high school seniors polish their college applications, plowing through predictable essay topics about their lives and goals, they might also run across something like this: “Tell us your favorite joke and try to explain the joke without ruining it.” 
A small but growing number of select colleges have turned to off-kilter questions like that one, part of this year’s application to the University of Chicago, or like this one, from Brandeis University: “You are required to spend the next year of your life in either the past or the future. What year would you travel to and why?” ... 
And even those are tame compared with some choices from the last few years, like “If you could choose to be raised by robots, dinosaurs or aliens, who would you pick?” (Brandeis), or “What does Play-Doh have to do with Plato?” (Chicago). 
For the colleges, such questions set them apart, though the applications invariably give a choice of subjects, including some that are closer to traditional. And at a time when some elite colleges worry that high school students are more likely to be high achievers than independent thinkers, oddball essay questions offer a way to determine which of the A-student, high-test-score, multi-extracurricular applicants can also show a spark of originality. 
A quirky essay subject can seem like a burden to students who, already stressed out by the application process, find that being diligent and brilliant is not enough — that colleges also want them to be whimsical and creative. Teenagers pepper social media with complaints about the questions, though they do not want to be interviewed, for fear of alienating their colleges of choice. 
But others embrace the chance to express themselves, seeing it as a welcome relief from the ordinary applications. 
“Usually, the essay prompts are boring,” said Sam Endicott [pictured], a high school senior from Edmond, Okla., who said he chose the University of Chicago’s topic on explaining a joke. “They don’t inspire a whole lot of creativity. I like the ones that allow more free rein to be a little different.”

One reason for colleges' quirky essay questions is to discriminate against Asians, who are viewed as often not contributing much to classroom discussion beyond "Will this be on the test?"

A college admission issue I've never seen investigated quantitatively is quantity and quality of class participation. How important is class participation and how do you predict it?

I suspect it matters to the morale of professors. But it's hard to quantify on USNWR ratings, so it can't be treated as really important.

The main tools for predicting class participation are likely recommendations and interviews.

I suspect recommendations work best for students who attend plugged in high schools. If you are at Groton, and the counselor writes that you are one of the three best students for class participation in the last decade at Groton, that turns heads at colleges. If you go to some average school, though, how much do effusive recommendations help?

Interviews are similar -- they don't quantify on USNWR rankings, the sample sizes are tiny, and how much can you believe some interviewer's recommendation?

Also, one-on-one conversational ability is somewhat different from group discussion ability. I was always okay at the former, but was, not surprisingly, extremely good at group discussions.

What quantitative measures correlate with strong classroom participation? Off the top of my head, I'd guess: strong verbal logic and a large supply of information.

In 1981, an old teacher of mine who had always been overqualified (e.g., Harvard Ph.D.) for my high school and thus had moved on to L.A.'s top academic high school, now-called Harvard-Westlake, told me that Harvard-Westlake required Asian applicants to have much higher test scores and grades than other applicants because they were so passive in the classroom. He was all in favor of discriminating against Asians.

Perhaps that isn't fair, but has anybody measured this question?

It's important to note that anti-Asian discrimination at Harvard-Westlake wasn't some rudiment of the fading past, it was based on observations of a new flood of affluent Asian students in the 1970s. Harvard-Westlake (my high school's arch-enemy in debate) was just years ahead of the rest of the country.

November 3, 2013

Nurture over nature even in the NBA

From the NYT:
In the N.B.A., ZIP Code Matters 
By SETH STEPHENS- DAVIDOWITZ 
Published: November 2, 2013

AS the N.B.A. season gets under way, there is no doubt that the league’s best player is 6-foot-8 LeBron James, of the Miami Heat. Mr. James was born poor to a 16-year-old single mother in Akron, Ohio. The conventional wisdom is that his background is typical for an N.B.A. player. A majority of Americans, Google consumer survey data show, think that the N.B.A. is composed mostly of men like Mr. James. But it isn’t. 
I recently calculated the probability of reaching the N.B.A., by race, in every county in the United States. I got data on births from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; data on basketball players from basketball-reference.com; and per capita income from the census. The results? Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men.

I don't know if county-level information is detailed enough: e.g., a large fraction of blacks are born in a small number of big counties with many different income levels, like Cook, Kings, Queens, Dade, and Los Angeles. But, it's a start.
Is this driven by sons of N.B.A. players like the Warriors’ brilliant Stephen Curry? Nope. Take them out and the result is similar. 
But this tells us only where N.B.A. players began life. Can we learn more about their individual backgrounds? In the 1980s, when the majority of current N.B.A. players were born, about 25 percent of African-Americans were born to mothers under age 20; 60 percent were born to unwed mothers. I did an exhaustive search for information on the parents of the 100 top-scoring black players born in the 1980s, relying on news stories, social networks and public records. Putting all the information together, my best guess is that black N.B.A. players are about 30 percent less likely than the average black male to be born to an unmarried mother and a teenage mother. 

This sounds plausible, but the methodology seems difficult to pull off. If you are a sportswriter, do you put something embarrassing in the newspaper about a giant black man's mother?
Need more evidence? The economists Roland G. Fryer and Steven D. Levitt famously studied four decades of birth certificates in California. They found that African-American kids from different classes are named differently. Black kids born to lower-income parents are given unique names more often. Based on searches on ancestry.com, I counted black N.B.A. players born in California in the 1970s and 1980s who had unique first names. There were a few, like Torraye Braggs and Etdrick Bohannon. But black N.B.A. players were about half as likely to have a unique name as the average black male.

High achieveing blacks don't have goofy names quite as often as blacks in the police blotter.
From 1960 to 1990, nearly half of blacks were born to unmarried parents. I would estimate that during this period roughly twice as many black N.B.A. players were born to married parents as unmarried parents. In other words, for every LeBron James, there was a Michael Jordan, born to a middle-class, two-parent family in Brooklyn, and a Chris Paul, the second son of middle-class parents in Lewisville, N.C., who joined Mr. Paul on an episode of “Family Feud” in 2011. 
These results push back against the stereotype of a basketball player driven by an intense desire to escape poverty. In “The Last Shot,” Darcy Frey quotes a college coach questioning whether a suburban player was “hungry enough” to compete against black kids from the ghetto. But the data suggest that on average any motivational edge in hungriness is far outweighed by the advantages of kids from higher socioeconomic classes.

 The notion that blacks are better at basketball than whites because they are hungrier is one of those flimsy rationalizations that people make up to avoid admitting that biological differences in getting a hand up high and in quickness are what really matters. Surely, if being poor mattered, there would be more Mexican NBA stars.
What are these advantages? The first is in developing what economists call noncognitive skills like persistence, self-regulation and trust. We have grown accustomed to hearing about the importance of these qualities for success in school, but players in team sports rely on many of the same skills. 
To see how poor noncognitive skills can derail a career in sports, consider the tragic tale of Doug Wrenn. Mr. Wrenn was born five years before Mr. James, also to a single mother in a poor neighborhood. He, too, was rated among the top basketball players in high school. But Mr. Wrenn, unlike Mr. James, was notoriously uncoachable and consistently in legal trouble. He was kicked off two college teams, went undrafted, bounced around lower leagues, moved in with his mother and was eventually imprisoned for assault.

I'd be fascinated by a study of the heights of inmates. What proportion of guys in the joint are of NBA height?
The second relevant advantage of a relatively prosperous upbringing is height. 
The economist Robert W. Fogel has demonstrated the impact of improved early life nutrition on adult height over successive generations. Poor children in contemporary America still have substandard nutrition, holding back their development. They have higher infant mortality rates and lower average birth weights, and recent research has found that poverty in modern America inhibits height. In basketball, the importance of every inch is enormous. I estimate that each additional inch almost doubles your chances of making the N.B.A. 
The N.B.A.’s changing demographics may also reflect the advantages of growing prosperity. Even casual fans will have noticed the difference the past 30 years have made: In 1980, fewer than 2 percent of N.B.A. players were foreign-born; now more than 20 percent are. 
... Foreign countries are producing taller men. 
From 1900 to 1980, the average American adult male’s height rose to 5-feet-10 from 5-feet-6. But American height has leveled off since 1980. The number of American-born 7-foot N.B.A. players, which increased from 1 in 1946, the N.B.A.’s first year, to 16 in 1980, has leveled off as well (there were 20 last year). ...
Meanwhile, other countries have caught up to the United States in health and height. A widely available proxy for early life conditions is infant mortality. In the United States, roughly 20 fewer infants per 1,000 births died in 2012 than in 1960. In other countries, declines have been much larger. In Turkey, over the same period, the rate dropped by a staggering 159 per 1,000 births. Even some Western European countries, like Spain, Greece and Portugal, had declines more than twice as large as those in America. All of these countries, recent research finds, have grown taller.

When I was young, basketball was biggest outside the U.S. in Mediterranean countries (assuming Yugoslavia should be counted as a Mediterranean land). Back around 1980, the top pro basketball leagues were, roughly, America, Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey. But, with the exception of the Balkan countries, those Mediterranean basketball-crazed countries didn't produce many outstanding Olympic players, in part because they just weren't that tall. Now, a single Spanish family, the Gasols, has produced two NBA star 7 footers. Nontwin 7 footer brothers are vanishingly rare. (Not surprisingly, the Gasol Brothers' parents are affluent professionals.)
Take every country with bigger health improvements than the United States. Suppose they grew an inch on average in the past 30 years. This would most likely increase the proportion of 7-footers in these countries fivefold, and indeed these fast-improving countries have about five times as many N.B.A. 7-footers now as they did 30 years ago. 
Or look at it from the other direction. Suppose Omer Asik, a 27-year-old Turkish player on the Houston Rockets, was born 25 or 30 years earlier, when Turkey’s children were much worse off. Perhaps he would have peaked as a 6-foot-10 forward in Ankara, not as a 7-foot center in Houston. 

Here's my 2009 post on this general subject.