My new Taki's column: Education-Industrial Complex

From my new column in Taki's Magazine:

During the Vietnam War, a famous protest bumper sticker read: 

It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. 

But these days, spending on quick fixes for education is approaching levels similar to the military-industrial complex. For example, Los Angeles school superintendent John Deasy plans to pay Apple a billion dollars to furnish every student with an iPad and software (some of which hasn’t gone through the formality of existing yet). 

While the Air Force’s notoriously expensive B-2 Stealth Bomber program cost $45 billion from 1979 to 2004, the LAUSD iPad rollout, if scaled up to the entire country, would total about $75 billion. 

That’s a lot of Rice Krispies Treats. 

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon we ought to be talking about real management. Unfortunately, the education industry approaches aerospace-sized projects with more starry-eyed optimism than is prudent for a bake sale, much less a war.

Read the whole thing there to see what lessons we can learn for education reform management from a successful military innovation: the invention of stealth technology.

My single is dropping

Here's the cover picture of the new single "What Is Winter Good For?" by the French rock band Sudden Death of Stars. The song is pretty good! You can buy it on vinyl here. By the way, that's me, c. December 25, 1964-67, about to fire a warning shot over your head if you take one step closer to my presents while Topper, my Cocker Spaniel, bites you on the calf.

(By the way, I'd appreciate it if anybody can narrow down the year for me. Here's a less tightly cropped version of the photo that displays even more of my loot. So, if you are an expert on mid-Sixties boys' toys, please give it a look.)

That reminds me that one thing winter is good for is giving me presents, such as money. 

I want to thank everybody who has contributed so far to my latest quarterly iSteve fundraiser. It's very encouraging to wake up to donations.

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To explain the title of my post "My single is dropping:"

Handle's Haus on Edward Luttwak on China

Handle's Haus is a relatively new blog of heavyweight analyses. Currently, he has up an extremely in-depth review of strategist Edward Luttwak's “The Rise of China vs. The Logic of Strategy.”

Extremely long-term strategizing involves so much complexity and uncertainty that one cannot conceive of goals in anything but large generalities.  Luttwak is, very reasonably, highly materialistic on this score, and says that Grand Strategy is largely about trying to maximize the resources and various forms of capital under the sure command of future decision makers, but even more importantly the relative advantage one has over one’s potential rivals.  It’s worth it to take oneself down a notch if it takes your adversary down two.  But the positive side of the coin of Grand Strategy involves economic growth, a large and high quality population, the accumulation of lots of cutting-edge military hardware and advanced intelligence capabilities, and the right set of international alliances. 

So, you might simplify greatly and say that Grand Strategy is, “Make Decisions So As To Be As Much Stronger Than Your Competitors As Possible In The Future”.  Doing that, and assuming everyone else is also trying to do that, is very Realpolitick. 

But there’s a catch that is similar to what Heartiste says about super-alpha Paul Walker, “Rules governing human interaction break down and recombine into strange new polarities, nearly the inverse of the laws that regulate most biocommerce between the sexes.” 

Likewise, Luttwak contends that at the higher levels of Grand Strategy the logic of ‘get big or get stomped‘ reverses paradoxically.  If you pursue military agrandizement so monomaniacally and consistently with realpolitick that you start to seriously threaten your neighbors and competitors then, if they are smart enough and act in time, you will provoke them into forming an alliance of resistance dedicated to doing whatever is necessary short of nuclear war, but including crushing your economy, to prevent you from getting big enough to dominate.  Luttwak says that the ‘realists’ are in fact fooling themselves with a delusion in regards to imagining themselves as actors with ‘free will‘ and that the sequence of international power politics is much more deterministic as all the actors are in fact, “… trapped by the paradoxes of the logic of strategy, which imposes its own imperatives …” 

In other words, pursuing the action of rapid and massive growth in your military capabilities ends up being counterproductive in that it stimulates reactions by your counterparties which will  lower your overall competitiveness.  Trying to get ahead one notch encourages your competitors to get ahead two notches.  Of course, if you [are] able to get so big, so fast, while those counterparties fail to summon their will and organize, then you pass a tipping point and really do get to dominate and stomp.  The resistance-of-rivals-to-your-expected-future-power graph is a bell curve, running from indifference to near-conflict but then back to resignation and acquiescence or even effective subservience. 

What characterizes the realm of strategy is the impossibility of achieving straightforward results by straightforward action, because others exist and others react in between the two. 

But short of that, the ideal thing to do for an emerging great power (China, in this case) would be to artificially suppress your military aggrandizement and try to influence perceptions about your country in the direction of ‘friendly’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘peaceful’, ‘non-confrontational’, ‘cooperative’ and especially ‘non-threatening’ growing out of ‘objectively not interested in domination because not interested in military power’. 

Then the people that could stop you will be lulled into just ignoring you as you are able to devote all your resources grow your economy to colossal proportions.  All butter, no guns.  And then, after you’ve built your Mt. Everest of butter, you can use it later to buy yourself a world-class regionally-dominating military in short order, too quickly to be stopped.  And then you can stomp and dominate with it.  Suckers! 

That’s what you could do, but the bottom line of Luttwak’s book is that China is making a huge unforced error in this regard by not doing this, and in fact, doing the opposite.  China is pursuing a Realpolitick National Strategy of ‘get stronger fast’ (it’s no coincidence that Kissinger’s latest book, ‘On China‘, is a collection of flattery over growth which encourages them to do this) at the expense of more subtle Grand Strategy considerations, ‘but be careful not to provoke your counterparties into reaction’. 

China is doing it wrong in two ways, especially since a well recognized ‘behavioral shift’ in 2008 coinciding with the Global Financial Crisis.  First, it is growing its Armed Forces rapidly, with impressive annual military budget increases that sometimes even exceed their stellar pace of economic growth. 

 Second, in what Luttwak calls its ‘Premature Assertiveness’, China has pursued very obnoxious, aggressive, and confrontational policies with regard to territorial, maritime, and airspace disputes with other nations in the region.  It constantly makes stubborn and uncompromising maximal claims over everything ,and it has taken risky and threatening actions over every trivial pile of rocks in the ocean that ever had a Chinese subject sing a poem in which he dreamed about stepping foot there or maybe just fishing in the general vicinity. 

Contradicting the conventional wisdom as to its ‘purely commercial’ rationale, it does this whether or not there is actually any indicated of hydrocarbon reserves nearby, which emphasizes the military and regionally hegemonic motives of behavior. 

One other thing that has changed since 2008 or so is the new assumption that oil or gas might be found anywhere. Look at the change in attitude toward North Dakota: from "Maybe we should give it back to the bison; after all, Richard Florida's Creative Class is never going to move there, so what hope does North Dakota have for economic development?" to the current situation in which the New York Times runs frequent articles on the theme of "North Dakota: Threat or Menace?" out of a sense that the last thing NYT subscribers want is Another Texas.

So it now seems like a good idea to have as much territory as possible, because who knows when it will be profitable to frack the seabed around some rocks sticking up above low tide that you had the foresight to claim back in the day. 

The return of the economic importance of possessing sheer territory has the potential to increase military tensions in a world that had been getting pretty stable as the business logic of military conquest had been ever more widely seen to be a sham, just like Norman Angell said in The Great Illusion a hundred years ago.

David Brooks: "The Thought Leader"

David Brooks is back in the NYT after a sabbatical and has a column in his best style: Tom Wolfe-Lite social satire. And it makes use of the gimmick he invented for his didactic novel "The Social Animal" in which the main character ages but the era he lives in remains perpetually right now. His book seemed rushed by the demands of his other duties, but I still think this idea of writing about one character who lives perpetually in the present but whose perspective changes as he ages is an extremely promising one that other writers should consider exploiting.

The Thought Leader 

By DAVID BROOKS

Little boys and girls in ancient Athens grew up wanting to be philosophers. In Renaissance Florence they dreamed of becoming Humanists. But now a new phrase and a new intellectual paragon has emerged to command our admiration: The Thought Leader.

The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. ...

Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like. 

In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. ... 

Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading. 

Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?” 

Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore. 

Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre. 

By now the Thought Leader uses the word “space” a lot — as in, “Earlier in my career I spent a lot of time in the abject sycophancy space, but now I’m devoting more of my energies to the corporate responsibility space.” 

The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out. 

He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone. 

The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots. 

In the end, though, a lifetime of bullet points are replaced by foreboding. Toward the end of his life the Thought Leader is regularly engaging in a phenomenon known as the powerless lunch. He and another formerly prominent person gather to have a portentous conversation of no importance whatsoever.  ... 

As a literary format for fictional social satire, Brooks' method where the main character ages but society doesn't has some major advantages for both author and reader. The most natural genre for novelists is the lightly fictionalized autobiographical novel, but what it was like to grow up in, say, Westchester County in the 1980s isn't necessarily all that galvanizing a subject matter in 2013, especially for somebody of satirical bent: hair metal bands really aren't that funny anymore. They've been done. We're more interested in the author poking fun at what's going on right now, but an autobiographical character can only live in 2013 for a year.

So, Brooks' invention is to write an autobiographical novel always set in the eminently satirizable present.

The traditional alternative for a The Way We Live Now satirical novel is to invent a bunch of realistic characters of different ages and different backgrounds and have them interact in a well-crafted plot. But, that's hard work. Wolfe, for example, only was fully successful at it in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Hence, this Brooks method has promise as a genre that shouldn't demand as much talent and time from the author as traditional ones.

I presume somebody else in the long history of literature did this before Brooks, but off the top of my head, I can't think of who.

Steve and friend

I want to thank everybody who has contributed so far to my latest panhandling drive. It has been most encouraging.

Today, I'd like to focus upon readers who have never contributed. Please just try it once.

Here are some options for donating:

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. You can use credit card or check (please put my name on the memo line of any checks).

Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution via credit card at WePay by clicking here. 

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer

P.O Box 4142

Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

Texas coach out after failing to recruit accused rapist

U. of Texas football coach Mack Brown has resigned. Manny M. Escam writes:

I’m a University of Texas alum and bleed orange and have always supported Mack Brown as HC. However, even I know he did the right thing in passing the torch to someone else. One thing that will always stick in my mind is this: What do the last 4 Heisman Trophy winners (Jameis Winston, Johnny Manziel, Robert Griffin III and Cam Newton) have in common? They all wanted to play for TEXAS, but Mack & Company were not interested. Either they were not recruited at all, and if they were, they were deemed low-profile recruits for positions other than QB at TEXAS.

The other thing they have in common, excluding Griffin (who appears to be a decent guy even though everybody now thinks he's a terrible person because his leg still hasn't healed from the horrific injury he suffered in a Redskins playoff game last year), is that Winston, Manziel, and Newton have all had serious brushes with the law.

Football coaches get paid millions of dollars per year to find and slide large, scary men onto campus alongside the thousands of coeds.

Is media coverage of intelligence testing really less accurate than 29 years ago?

In James Thompson's graph of Rindermann et al's new survey of psychometric experts' opinion of the accuracy of media outlets, the blue bars represent current ratings on a 1-9 scale. In contrast, the yellow bars represent similar ratings in the 1984 Snyderman and Rothman survey of experts. Seven media sources appeared in both the 1984 and 2013 studies: WSJ, NYT, Time, NPR, Washington Post, Newsweek, and commercial TV networks. All seven were rated roughly one point lower than 29 years ago.

(It's unfortunate that Fortune magazine doesn't appear in the chart: Back in 1984, Daniel Seligman's "Keeping Up" column in Fortune was outstanding. I can recall it occurring to me one day in the early 1990s while driving to work down Lake Shore Drive that Seligman's successor ought to be me.)

Has the accuracy of coverage declined over the last 29 years, as the graph suggests? I'm leery of drawing comparisons over time. It's the usual problem that social science instruments are pretty good at easy comparisons -- e.g., the quality of this blog vs. that of commercial networks -- but the kind of trend questions that everybody likes to obsess over -- Are things getting better or worse? -- require more methodological care.

Thinking back to my own memories 1984, I can't really come to a conclusion.

Consider the career of Charles Murray. In 1984, when he published Losing Ground, he didn't think much of IQ and therefore didn't know much about it. Over the next decade, he educated himself. But when he and the distinguished psychologist Richard Herrnstein proposed publishing The Bell Curve, Murray was dumped by his think tank. On the other hand, AEI snapped him up.

The New Republic published a big summary article on their book by Herrnstein and Murray in 1994, but it turned out that only publisher Marty Peretz and editor Andrew Sullivan didn't hate it. Fifteen staffers demanded to publish rebuttals, most of which were embarrassing. This suggests to me that back in the 1980s and 1990s passions were high , but the blanket wasn't so suffocating. My impression is that Peretz and Sullivan were kind of surprised that their staffers were such dopes on this subject.

My impression is that there are a few main differences between now and 1984.

- First, we have 29 years more of the accumulation of evidence of all types. And mostly things look pretty much as they did in 1984, just more so. It's a lot harder to argue today in good faith that Real Soon Now everything will be different, so the urge to crush dissenters and to control the past is even stronger.

- Second, back in 1984 the Orwellian practice of rewriting the past was only getting going. Stephen Jay Gould's bestseller The Mismeasure of Man was just three years old and hadn't yet been assigned to a generation of college students.

Obviously, Gould was in over his head in writing about intelligence testing. But he had a malign genius for appealing to modern college graduates' worst instincts. He grasped that what people want is not arguments based on data, but to be told who are the Bad Guys and who are the Good Guys: the professional wrestling version of the history of science. It's best to attack people who can't defend themselves and don't have any friends left to defend them. Thus, Gould got a lot of mileage out of smearing Samuel George Morton, who died in 1851. It was a brilliant innovation.

- Second, the last time Americans in general were interested in testing from a patriotic perspective was Post-Sputnik. There was a huge effort then to find and mobilize talent to out-think the Soviets.

And, guess what? It worked.

In 1984, the post-Sputnik era was a fading but still live memory. Today, it might as well be the bimetalism debate behind The Wizard of Oz.

- Third, neoconservatism has long since petered out as a dynamic interested in investigating domestic issues from a social science perspective. Back in the day, Norman Podhoretz and Martin Peretz commissioned a lot of intelligent articles on intelligence. But nobody with adequate funding has come along to replace the old neocons and neolibs who actually knew something.

- Fourth, media accuracy should have improved since 1984. We now have this thing called the Internet that let's you look stuff up without going to the library.

Hotbed of racists uncovered: Minnesota schoolteachers

One of the weirder aspects of our never-ending War to Sniff Out Racists is that many of the accused witches are nice liberal anti-racists themselves. For example, what percentage of Minneapolis-St. Paul public schoolteachers voted for Obama? Maybe 75%, right?

Well, they still smell racist. Just look at 'em. And we can prove they're evil because Data.

Thus, the big front page package on Sunday's Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

In Minnesota, race drives school labels, discipline 

Article by: JEFFREY MEITRODT 

Star Tribune Updated: December 15, 2013 - 9:25 PM 

The little yellow buses line up every morning outside Harrison Education Center in north Minneapolis, discharging dozens of teenagers to a high school no parents choose for their child.  

Classrooms are kept locked at all times. Fights and suspensions are common. No one has graduated in a couple of years. 

The school is where Minneapolis sends special education students with the worst behavior problems, kids who typically failed everywhere else they went. 

Administrators say the high school is supposed to be a temporary stop for students to learn self-control before going back to a less restrictive setting. 

But few ever leave. And nearly 90 percent of the students are black. 

Discrimination in the way students are labeled and disciplined has plagued special education across the country for decades, but a Star Tribune review of state and federal enrollment records shows that the problem is especially acute in Minnesota.  ... 

Similarly, black students account for 13 percent of special-ed enrollment but more than 40 percent of discipline measures. 

Minneapolis and St. Paul have been cited twice by state officials for suspending or expelling a disproportionate number of disabled black students since the state started tracking such data in 2009.  

The federal Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating Minneapolis’ discipline record. 

“This is at a crisis level,” said Liz Keenan, who oversees special education programs in St. Paul. “We can’t keep ignoring the fact that racially driven practices are occurring every day in school systems that are not benefiting our kids of color. … We can’t keep saying we didn’t know when we have the data right in front of us.” ...

In Minnesota, she said, mostly white educators decide who has a disorder and who doesn’t. ... 

St. Paul administrators have decided to confront the problem, and this fall, the district moved about 270 EBD [Emotional or Behavioral Disturbance] children out of their self-contained “learning centers” and into mainstream classes. The move affected 19 schools across the district, including seven elementary schools. 

That change in approach came after the district slashed suspensions of black students by 25 percent last year, well above its target of 10 percent, said Michelle Walker, CEO of St. Paul schools. Walker said the key was holding teachers and other school workers accountable for “their role in escalating the incident.” ... 

But the approach has polarized the district, leaving many teachers unhappy. They say the switch has compromised the quality of instruction and jeopardized the safety of students and staff members.  

“I have never been assaulted more in my entire career,” said one St. Paul teacher, who joined colleagues to protest the switch at a union meeting.  

Teachers at Hamline Elementary cite problems: A first-grader was slapped in the face by a newly mainstreamed EBD student; a disabled kindergartner took advantage of looser controls and ran away; nearly half of students in one class are EBD, causing frequent disruptions. 

Craig Anderson, Hamline’s principal, acknowledged the transition has been rough. He said it was too ambitious to think that every EBD student could handle a mainstream class all the time, and he agreed it was a mistake to put 11 kids with behavioral problems in a fifth-grade classroom. 

But he said his teachers, and most of his students, are making the adjustment. “This is the right thing to do. The kids are proving time and again that they can do it.” 

The transition dominated a St. Paul school board meeting in early December. Several board members said they had been inundated with calls and e-mails from teachers questioning the new approach. 

Board Member John Brodrick, a former teacher, said his impression was that moving so many EBD children into mainstream classes “is not working.” 

Administrators refused to back down, noting that 80 percent of the children who made the switch have been able to spend most of their time in the classroom. 

“The adults are the ones who are struggling,” not the kids, Frost Lake Principal Stacey Kadrmas said. ... 

Federal officials first notified Minnesota about that issue in 2010, concluding that the state’s ratio for defining unequal treatment was “too high.” At the time, a school district could face consequences only if minorities were disciplined five times as often as whites or dominated a disability category, such as EBD, by a ratio of 5-1. Under Minnesota’s rules, a district also has to be cited three years in a row and must have practices that caused the problem. 

Minnesota lowered its ratio to 4-1 in 2011. That remains among the highest thresholds in the country, according to a report this year from the Government Accountability Office. At least six other states use a similar ratio. 

By contrast, Louisiana regulators require action when racial groups are identified for special education at twice the rate of other students in any given year. They recently demanded changes in 73 school districts, according to the GAO.

You know, maybe there's a difference between white people in Lake Wobegon and white people in Louisiana? At least that's my impression from listening to Prairie Home Companion and Born on the Bayou. (Yes, I know CCR was from the San Francisco Bay.)

The Economist finally discovers the GOP's Marriage Gap (but for women only)

My November 2012 graph showing the GOP's
singles problem isn't just with unmarried women:
it's 77% as bad with unmarried men.

From The Economist:

Lexington 

The marriage gap 

Republicans should worry that unmarried women shun them 

Dec 14th 2013 | From the print edition

THE slow decline of marriage is upending American politics. In the 2012 presidential election, unmarried women accounted for nearly a quarter of all votes cast. Their votes went decisively to Barack Obama, by 36 percentage points. 

You might not think that a group that runs from not-yet-married college students to inner-city single mothers and divorced professionals had much in common. Yet unmarried women are spectacularly loyal to the Democrats—if they vote, which many do not. (Widows are outliers, voting more like married women.)

My graphs group widows/widowers with the married under the logic that widowhood is an inevitable byproduct of marriage.

The “marriage gap” dwarfs the sex gap, by which women as a whole have long favoured Democrats: Mr Obama beat Mitt Romney by a less dramatic 11 points among female voters. 

There are minor differences between my graphs and the numbers The Economist reports because my graphs use the larger Reuters-Ipsos American Mosaic national online panel of 40,000 voters compared to The Economist's use of the exit poll of 25,000, which didn't invest in having adequate coverage in 20 states it considered uninteresting, such as giant Texas. But, the two big polls were in general agreement.

Like boffins squabbling about quantum physics, some political types wonder whether “unmarried women” amount to a discrete voter block at all, or whether the label merely sweeps up various left-leaning slices of the electorate: ie, younger voters, poorer ones, more secular Americans and non-whites. That would be no more than an interesting metaphysical question, but for three big and inter-related developments. 

First, unmarried women are one of America’s fastest-growing groups, leaping from 45m in 2000 to around 53m today—making them, in theory, a larger block of eligible voters than blacks and Hispanics put together (though in reality the groups overlap). 

Indeed.

Second, Democrats—notably the Obama crowd—have found ways to map the electorate with unprecedented precision, using everything from polls and doorstep canvassing to commercial consumer databases. In the Dark Ages (ie, before 2008), campaigns might have blanketed majority-black city blocks or mostly-Democratic neighbourhoods with appeals to register and vote, while saturating the airwaves with paid advertising. That wasted time and money on those who always vote anyway, those who never vote, and those who (gasp) might vote Republican. Now the talk is of target “universes”: focusing resources on those who need just a nudge to come out and vote the right way. 

It turns out that two principal campaign tasks—persuading swing voters, and turning out loyal but sporadic supporters—are made far more efficient if marital status is added to the mix, alongside such markers as sex, race, income and geography. That holds equally true when buying advertising alongside the right TV shows, and when leafleting selected homes in specific streets. Nationally, Page Gardner, a voter-registration expert, has crafted models that allow unmarried women to be found with great accuracy. Conservatives are still playing catch-up. 

In November’s election for governor of Virginia—a race won narrowly by Terry McAuliffe, a Democratic fundraiser and member of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s inner circle—fully two-thirds of voters chosen for special attention by Democratic get-out-the-vote teams were unmarried women, says Michael Halle, a McAuliffe campaign guru. Unmarried women voted for Mr McAuliffe by a thumping 42 percentage-point margin over his Republican rival, Ken Cuccinelli, arguably handing him victory. (Married women backed Mr Cuccinelli by nine points.) 

For an explanation, consider a third big development: the Republicans’ embrace of policies and slogans that might have been laboratory-crafted to upset and unite different types of unmarried women. ...

A more accurate way of thinking about this is that the Democrats know that they can trawl online through the public utterances of hundreds of miscellaneous Republican candidates nationwide, then sic their pet national news media outlets to carpet bombing the public with an orchestrated campaign of umbrage over what some Republican somewhere said.

Pragmatic Republicans know the party needs to tone down its social conservatism. But even so, it may struggle with singletons. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, says single women of differing races, ages, classes and religiosity are united by a sense of fending for themselves. That makes them more likely to favour a strong role for government as a safety net.

"Fending for themselves" < > "strong role for government as a safety net," but never mind logic.

I bring up this article to show how hard it is for anybody to step outside the dominant Who? Whom? Narrative of our times in which vast exercises in power are used to redefine their beneficiaries as the sainted Powerless.

The GOP's marriage gap is 77% as large among men as among women, which suggests the GOP's problem is less women than singleness. But, practically nobody notices that because everybody is so inculcated in thinking in terms of Good Guys and Bad Guys.

Single women are, by Narrative definition, Good Guys.

Single men are ... well, ambiguous at best. They are men, so they are by that definition by Bad Guys. Their singleness could be spun either way, but mostly there are a lot of single ladies out there who want single men to put a ring on it. On the other hand, single men do vote strongly for Obama. It's a puzzlement, so it's best just to completely ignore single men because they don't fit conveniently into Narrative categories of Good v. Bad.

Moreover, the policy recommendations that flow from these perspectives (the GOP's problem is single women versus the GOP's problem is single people) are opposite. The Economist, representing the dominant mindset, thinks the GOP should strive harder to make single motherhood even more socially acceptable than it is now, which, presumably, would lead to even more single women. But they are natural Republicans. Oh, except they are not.

My suggestion, in contrast, is that the GOP should finally notice that it's time to try policies for making marriage more affordable.

Bomb Brothers: The Full(er) Story

The Boston Globe has published an in-depth story of the Tsarnaev family, including asking a key policy question: Why were they here?

The Globe’s five-month investigation, with reporting in Russia, Kyrgyzstan, Canada, and the United States, also: 

■ Fundamentally recasts the conventional public understanding of the brothers, showing them to be much more nearly coequals in failure, in growing desperation, and in conspiracy. 

■ Establishes that the brothers were heirs to a pattern of violence and dysfunction running back several generations. Their father, Anzor, scarred by brutal assaults in Russia and later in Boston, often awoke screaming and tearful at night. Both parents sought psychiatric care shortly after arriving in the United States but apparently sought no help for Tamerlan even as his mental condition [hearing voices in his head] grew more obvious and worrisome. 

■ Casts doubt on the claim by Russian security officials that Tamerlan made contact with or was recruited by Islamist radicals during his visit to his family homeland. 

■ Raises questions about the Tsarnaevs’ claim that they came to this country as victims of persecution seeking asylum. More likely, they were on the run from elements of the Russian underworld whom Anzor had fallen afoul of. Or they were simply fleeing economic hardship. 

In any case, the family from which two alleged bombers emerged very likely should not have been here at all. .... 

[Anzor, the dad] would later say in interviews that he also earned a law degree, but the university in Kyrgyzstan’s capital, Bishkek, where his three sisters and one of his brothers earned law degrees, has no record that Anzor received a diploma. Friends say he was more likely just taking classes. 

Anzor and family members have also said that he worked for a district prosecutor’s office in Bishkek, but the Kyrgyz Interior Ministry has no record that Anzor ever did. More likely, according to Uzbek Aliev, a leader of Tokmok’s Chechen diaspora, he had some kind of unpaid internship. 

But the internship provided Anzor with something perhaps more valuable to him than a law degree — an ID card from the prosecutor’s office. This, according to friends, helped him ward off corrupt officials and extortion gangs seeking to get in on his main livelihood: “Shuttle trading,” moving consumer goods to meet free market demand in the ruins of the Communist economy. 

One product Anzor traded in was tobacco, according to Badrudi Tsokaev, a longtime family friend. Anzor and an uncle would transport tobacco from a factory in southern Kyrgyzstan and to buyers elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. It was a good business, but a dangerous one. Gangsters were also drawn to the tobacco trade. 

It is possible that threats from such criminals prompted Anzor’s hasty departure, with his family, from Kyrgyzstan. His wife would later suggest as much, but that wasn’t the story Anzor told. 

In interviews with Russian journalists after the Boston bombing, Anzor said that the family had been the victims of oppression of ethnic Chechens. Anzor, according to family and friends in the United States, suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and often woke up screaming or weeping in the middle of the night. 

But some associates believe that Anzor exaggerated his narrative of persecution. Among them is Aliev, the deputy head of the Chechen diaspora. While Chechens faced hardships in Kyrgyzstan, he said, “there was no special treatment, bad treatment, for Chechens” in Tokmok when Anzor lived there. 

Some experts have also raised doubts about Anzor’s claim. Kathleen Collins, a University of Minnesota associate professor of political science who worked in Kyrgyzstan in the mid-1990s, said that Chechen community leaders complained about harassment in Kyrgyzstan after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States — and after the Tsarnaevs left Kyrgyzstan for Zubeidat’s homeland of Dagestan in southern Russia.

Taking a look at the life of Tamerlan and Dzhokar’s grandfather sheds light on their violent roots. 

Mark Kramer, program director of Harvard University’s Project on Cold War Studies, who has testified in a number of asylum cases from the region, says he sees, “no basis for their being granted asylum at all.” 

So, too, do associates of the family in Kyrgyzstan scoff at the notion of such persecution. As the family friend Tsokaev, put it, “He made that up … so that the Americans would give him a visa.” 

Zubeidat told a different story of the origins of her husband’s nervous disorder and nightmares to a health care aide in the United States who worked with Zubeidat for over a year caring for a disabled couple in West Newton. The aide said Zubeidat told her that Anzor had “tried to prosecute” some members of the Russian mob involved in an illegal trading venture. “When the case was over, the mob came and took Anzor for one week and tortured him so severely that he almost died. When they were done they dumped him out of their truck in the middle of nowhere,” said the aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

“Zubeidat went to the hospital and when she saw how horribly beaten he was she said that she realized they had to get out of the country,” the associate said. 

The mob, according to this account, took one macabre, parting shot. Before Anzor could leave the hospital, someone took the family’s German shepherd, cut off its head, and deposited it on the Tsarnaevs’ doorstep. 

“Zubeidat said that is why they left,” added the aide. 

Back in Kyrgyzstan, there is still another account of why the Tsarnaevs wanted to go to America, and it, too, has nothing to do with persecution. 

“We watched all these films, saw how beautiful Hollywood was,” said Nurmenov. “It seemed that life was good there. [Anzor] told me, ‘Let’s go to America. Why should we sit here and rust?’ One day I found out that he was going away. He said, ‘You can get a visa to America. It’s easy.’ And then later he left.”

We need a National Immigration Safety Board that inspects policies and implementation after disasters like this, much like the National Transportation Safety Board uses plane crashes to order improvements in procedures.

By the way, there's little mention of the role of Uncle Ruslan, who used to be married to CIA insider Graham Fuller's daughter. I've always thought it likely that that somehow played a role in the Tsarnaevs' getting refugee status, but it never comes up in this article.

Also, the reporters didn't come up with anything new on the ritual murder on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 of three of Tamerlan's dope-dealer buddies, or the FBI shooting of a Chechen "refugee" while being questioned about the triple murder.

Graph of most and least accurate media sites on IQ

Psychologist James Thompson has graphed one bit of the new survey of psychometricians by Rindermann, Coyle and Becker:

Now, obviously, iSteve is #1 relative only to a rather short list of mostly well-known outlets. In my blogroll, I link to specialist sites that are significantly better than mine at covering this difficult field, some of which even publish their own new research.

One reason that New York Times coverage of testing isn't very good these days (barely over a 4 on a 1 to 9 scale, while I scored about a 7) is because it's generally not assigned to the Science and Medicine staffs, which have a lot of solid veteran reporters. It seems like the beat is usually covered by a combination of Education, National, Opinion, Business, Legal, and Local writers, few of whom know much about this complex subject.

The Local kindergarten IQ test stories are probably consistently the best testing coverage that the NYT does, because subscribers want the straight scoop on how to get their kids into a $40,000 per year kindergarten.

On most else, however, subscribers just seem to want to know what the right kind of people think so that they can think the same thing too. Knowing what you are supposed to think makes conversations go much more smoothly at fundraising receptions for parents of toddlers who got into expensive kindergartens that use the Wechsler IQ test for admissions.

Beyond all that, there's the issue of mastery. Personally, I find cognitive testing to be cognitively challenging to understand. I'm just barely intelligent enough to write about intelligence. It takes a lot of work to move from the point where you have to rely upon fluid intelligence to where you can skate by on crystallized intelligence. It's not surprising that people who drop in on the subject briefly during their quick stint at the Education desk seem particularly baffled. 

It's time to spread Christmas cheer

A friend emails from Japan:

My browser just rendered your site upside-down AND backwards! 

That reminds me: it's time for an iSteve fundraiser. 

You may be wondering: Didn't I just have one? And my answer is: Yes, thank you for noticing. I'm being organized about this and intend to keep to a quarterly schedule from now on. 

I'd like your support. 

Here are some options:

First, you can make a tax deductible contribution via VDARE by clicking here. You can use credit card or check (please put my name on the memo line of any checks).

Second, you can make a non-tax deductible contribution via WePay by clicking here. 

Third: You can mail a non-tax deductible donation to:

Steve Sailer

P.O Box 4142

Valley Village, CA 91607-4142

Thanks.

Army football coach fired for not recruiting enough accused rapists

From the NYT:

Army Coach, Winless Against Navy, Is Fired After Rout 

By JOE DRAPE

One day after it lost to Navy for the 12th consecutive time, Army fired its football coach, Rich Ellerson, acknowledging he was a “tremendous role model for our cadet-athletes” but deciding that his 20-41 record at West Point and 1-9 record against the other service academies was more important to the direction of its football program. ...

The Black Knights last beat the Midshipmen in 2001. The Midshipmen, who also defeated Air Force this season, won the Commander in Chief Trophy as the top service academy team for the ninth time in 11 seasons. Navy’s 12-game run is the longest in the history of the rivalry that began in 1890. 

In a wholly unrelated New York Times story last September:

Navy Hearing in Rape Case Raises Alarm 

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER 

Published: September 20, 2013  

WASHINGTON — For roughly 30 hours over several days, defense lawyers for three former United States Naval Academy football players grilled a female midshipman about her sexual habits.

And from a 2010 op-ed in the NYT by an English professor at Annapolis:

The Academies’ March Toward Mediocrity 

By BRUCE FLEMING 

Published: May 20, 2010 

Annapolis, Md. -- THE idea of a football star receiving lenient treatment after testing positive for drug use would raise no eyebrows at most colleges. But the United States Naval Academy “holds itself to a higher standard,” as its administrators are fond of saying. According to policy set by the chief of naval operations, Adm. Gary Roughead, himself a former commandant of midshipmen at the academy, we have a “zero tolerance” policy for drug use. 

Yet, according to Navy Times, a running back was allowed to remain at Annapolis this term because the administration accepted his claim that he smoked a cigar that he didn’t know contained marijuana. (He was later kicked off the team for a different infraction, and has now left the academy.) 

The incident brings to light an unpleasant truth: the Naval Academy, where I have been a professor for 23 years, has lost its way. The same is true of the other service academies. They are a net loss to the taxpayers who finance them, as well as a huge disappointment to their students, who come expecting reality to match reputation. They need to be fixed or abolished. ...

Meanwhile, the academy’s former pursuit of excellence seems to have been pushed aside by the all-consuming desire to beat Notre Dame at football (as Navy did last year). To keep our teams in the top divisions of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, we fill officer-candidate slots with students who have been recruited primarily for their skills at big-time sports. That means we reject candidates with much higher predictors of military success (and, yes, athletic skills that are more pertinent to military service) in favor of players who, according to many midshipmen who speak candidly to me, often have little commitment to the military itself. 

It’s no surprise that recruited athletes have been at the center of recent scandals, including a linebacker who was convicted of indecent assault on a female midshipman in 2007 and a quarterback who was accused of rape and dismissed from the academy for sexual misconduct in 2006. Sports stars are flattered on campus, avoid many of the onerous duties other midshipmen must perform, and know they’re not going to be thrown out. Instead of zero tolerance, we now push for zero attrition: we “remediate” honor code offenses. 

Another program that is placing strain on the academies is an unofficial affirmative-action preference in admissions. While we can debate the merits of universities making diversity a priority in deciding which students to admit, how can one defend the use of race as a factor at taxpayer-financed academies — especially those whose purpose is to defend the Constitution? Yet, as I can confirm from the years I spent on the admissions board in 2002 and ’03 and from my conversations with more recent board members, if an applicant identifies himself or herself as non-white, the bar for qualification immediately drops. 

Some in the administration have justified the admissions policies on the ground that it “takes all kinds” to be officers. But that’s not really what the academies recruit. They don’t give preference to accomplished cellists or people from religious minorities or cerebral Zen types.

In the British tradition, the Army was politicized and anti-meritocratic and very much gave preference to the Church of England upper class. Officers were disproportionately from the landed aristocracy so that they wouldn't be tempted to take over the country in a military coup because they already owned it. The Royal Navy was more for careers open to talent, because it was more technologically complicated than a cavalry charge and seemed less likely to pull a coup.

Peter O'Toole, RIP

From my review of Stephen Fry's 2004 comedy "Bright Young Things," a fine adaption of Evelyn Waugh's bleak comic novel Vile Bodies:

Nonetheless, the brilliance of Waugh's ear for spoken idioms has made Vile Bodies a steady seller for three quarters of a century. Those conversations help make watching "Bright Young Things" far more satisfying than reading Vile Bodies. Although Fry's ensemble comedy ... is rather slight, no film rendition of a major novelist's work has been this much more fun than the original book since Bogie and Bacall steamed up Hemingway's embarrassing To Have and Have Not. 

For example, Peter O'Toole delivers a howlingly funny cameo performance as a passive-aggressive eccentric, one as striking as John Gielgud's similar role as Jeremy Iron's slyly mad father in the famous miniseries of Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. I went home sure that Fry had penned some new jokes because the character is so much funnier than I recalled. Upon checking the novel, however, I found that Mr. O'Toole, being a much better reader of dialogue than I am, had only drawn out hilarity that I'd never noticed.

A surprisingly high proportion of the great actors are great readers.

MIT: "Even when test scores go up, some cognitive abilities don’t"

The trendy Common Core in K-12 education is intended to teach "critical thinking skills" rather than rote memorization of stale facts. This sounds much like the old fluid v. crystallized distinction in IQ research. But can even effective schools improve fluid IQ?

From an MIT press release:

Even when test scores go up, some cognitive abilities don’t 

MIT neuroscientists find even high-performing schools don’t influence their students’ abstract reasoning. 

Anne Trafton, MIT News Office 

December 11, 2013 

To evaluate school quality, states require students to take standardized tests; in many cases, passing those tests is necessary to receive a high-school diploma. 

These high-stakes tests have also been shown to predict students’ future educational attainment and adult employment and income. 

Such tests are designed to measure the knowledge and skills that students have acquired in school — what psychologists call “crystallized intelligence.” 

However, schools whose students have the highest gains on test scores do not produce similar gains in “fluid intelligence” — the ability to analyze abstract problems and think logically — according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists working with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University. 

In a study of nearly 1,400 eighth-graders in the Boston public school system, the researchers found that some schools have successfully raised their students’ scores on the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS). 

However, those schools had almost no effect on students’ performance on tests of fluid intelligence skills, such as working memory capacity, speed of information processing, and ability to solve abstract problems. 

“Our original question was this: If you have a school that’s effectively helping kids from lower socioeconomic environments by moving up their scores and improving their chances to go to college, then are those changes accompanied by gains in additional cognitive skills?” says John Gabrieli, the Grover M. Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and senior author of a forthcoming Psychological Science paper describing the findings. 

Instead, the researchers found that educational practices designed to raise knowledge and boost test scores do not improve fluid intelligence. “It doesn’t seem like you get these skills for free in the way that you might hope, just by doing a lot of studying and being a good student,” says Gabrieli, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

If you are effectively teaching kids the right things, they don't need as much fluid IQ.

This study grew out of a larger effort to find measures beyond standardized tests that can predict long-term success for students. “As we started that study, it struck us that there’s been surprisingly little evaluation of different kinds of cognitive abilities and how they relate to educational outcomes,” Gabrieli says. 

Actually, there has been, but the answers never turn out welcome, so findings get forgotten.

The data for the Psychological Science study came from students attending traditional, charter, and exam schools in Boston. Some of those schools have had great success improving their students’ MCAS scores — a boost that studies have found also translates to better performance on the SAT and Advanced Placement tests. 

The researchers calculated how much of the variation in MCAS scores was due to the school that students attended. For MCAS scores in English, schools accounted for 24 percent of the variation, and they accounted for 34 percent of the math MCAS variation. However, the schools accounted for very little of the variation in fluid cognitive skills — less than 3 percent for all three skills combined. 

Civilization, when properly functioning, is a device for minimizing the amount of fluid intelligence you need to function. You don't need to turn military history into a superb epic oral poem like The Iliad anymore: you just write it down. Nowadays, you don't have to go the library to read it. You can look it up on the Internet.

A huge problem with educational reform efforts is that they are typically designed by people who have high confidence in their own fluid intelligence relative to the average. Combine that with the contradictory dogma that students must all have equally high fluid intelligence -- Jefferson wouldn't have written it into the Declaration of Independence if it weren't true -- and you wind up with remarkably little critical thinking about education fads like critical thinking.

In contrast, the military tends to assume that everybody is an idiot who will find a way to screw up massively and probably get himself and large numbers of people around him killed, so it's best to break things down into simple steps so soldiers can rely upon crystallized intelligence rather than fluid intelligence.

But the notion that the public schools can learn anything from the military has been out of fashion for just under 50 years. The people who took control of education 45 years ago may talk all the time about critical thinking skills, but they sure don't like critical thinking about themselves and their ideas.

In one example of a test of fluid reasoning, students were asked to choose which of six pictures completed the missing pieces of a puzzle — a task requiring integration of information such as shape, pattern, and orientation. 

“It’s not always clear what dimensions you have to pay attention to get the problem correct. That’s why we call it fluid, because it’s the application of reasoning skills in novel contexts,” says Amy Finn, an MIT postdoc and lead author of the paper. 

Even stronger evidence came from a comparison of about 200 students who had entered a lottery for admittance to a handful of Boston’s oversubscribed charter schools, many of which achieve strong improvement in MCAS scores. The researchers found that students who were randomly selected to attend high-performing charter schools did significantly better on the math MCAS than those who were not chosen, but there was no corresponding increase in fluid intelligence scores. 

However, the researchers say their study is not about comparing charter schools and district schools. Rather, the study showed that while schools of both types varied in their impact on test scores, they did not vary in their impact on fluid cognitive skills. 

“What’s nice about this study is it seems to narrow down the possibilities of what educational interventions are achieving,” says Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia who was not part of the research team. “We’re usually primarily concerned with outcomes in schools, but the underlying mechanisms are also important.” 

The researchers plan to continue tracking these students, who are now in 10th grade, to see how their academic performance and other life outcomes evolve. They have also begun to participate in a new study of high school seniors to track how their standardized test scores and cognitive abilities influence their rates of college attendance and graduation. 

Gabrieli notes that the study should not be interpreted as critical of schools that are improving their students’ MCAS scores. “It’s valuable to push up the crystallized abilities, because if you can do more math, if you can read a paragraph and answer comprehension questions, all those things are positive,” he says. 

Right.

He hopes that the findings will encourage educational policymakers to consider adding practices that enhance cognitive skills. Although many studies have shown that students’ fluid cognitive skills predict their academic performance, such skills are seldom explicitly taught. 

“Schools can improve crystallized abilities, and now it might be a priority to see if there are some methods for enhancing the fluid ones as well,” Gabrieli says.

You know, there is a literature on this subject going back generations.

Some studies have found that educational programs that focus on improving memory, attention, executive function, and inductive reasoning can boost fluid intelligence, but there is still much disagreement over what programs are consistently effective, 

The research was a collaboration with the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, Transforming Education, and Brown University, and was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

By the way, this somehow reminds me of the famous video "A Private Universe" shot at the graduation ceremony at that other college in Cambridge, MA, where cap-and-gowned newly minted Harvard graduates answer the question "Why is it colder in winter" with winning self-confidence, eloquently explaining that it's because the Earth's orbit isn't a perfect circle as in the discredited Ptolemaic model; instead, as the Copernican revolution emphasized in displacing humanity from the center of the universe, the earth's orbit is an ellipse, which means we are farther from the sun in winter, ergo, it's colder. Meanwhile, the working class students at a local public high school stumble with deer-in-the-headlights expressions through their implausible-sounding explanation that it's colder in winter because the earth is ... further ... from the sun?

(Here's the real reason.)

In other words, much of what you acquire at Harvard isn't fluid or even crystallized intelligence, but attitude.

A friend of mine remarks that going to Harvard was kind of depressing since half of the cabdrivers in Cambridge wanted to hear how their favorite professors were still doing. "Has old Grosvenor finally given in and gotten a hearing aid, or is he still as deaf as when I took Intro?" But he discovered over a long career in corporate law that the farther he got from Cambridge, MA, the more people seemed to be impressed with his diploma. East of Suez, he found himself treated like a demigod whenever he dropped it into conversation.

It was a huge help in business negotiations in Asia. Whenever he found himself losing dominance, he'd excuse himself to go the the men's room, stare in the mirror, and buck himself up with the thought, "Never forget -- I am a Harvard Man! Now, get back in there and fleece these swine!"

Survey of psychometricians finds iSteve one of 3 best journalistic outlets in the world for intelligence coverage

Psychologist James Thompson has been in Melbourne attending the annual conference of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). He writes:

What do intelligence researchers really think about intelligence?

There are many reasons for intelligence researchers to keep their opinions to themselves. Intelligence research raises strong emotions, not all of them positive, and a researcher saying the wrong thing in public can lead to disputes, loss of funding, general harassment and sometimes a loss of job. 

So, when finding out about real opinions, anonymity is required. Rindermann, Coyle and Becker have replicated the last survey on experts done 30 years ago.

That's the big survey done by Stanley Rothman and Mark Snyderman in the 1980s.

Researchers were invited to participate only if they had recent intelligence-related publications in Intelligence, Cognitive Psychology, Biological Psychology, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Contemporary Educational Psychology, Journal of School-Psychology, New Ideas in Psychology, and Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 

Invitations were emailed to 1237 persons and at the end only 228 (18%) participants completed the process (70 fully and 158 partially). As far as the authors could make it out, “lefties” and “righties” turned down the offer in equal numbers, complaining that the questions were not good enough, the selection of experts would not be good or that they did not want to participate in a process which suggested that the truth could be found by majority decisions. In fact, the authors just wanted to find out what expert opinion was, in all its variety, and were not intending to come to any conclusions of a majority sort. (Perhaps climate research has poisoned the academic atmosphere, and no-one wants to be involved with anything which smacks of consensus science). As many pointed out, one good study can smash down an old consensus. 

Experts agreed that the following were sources of reasonable evidence for significant heritability of intelligence: monozygotic twins reared apart, comparisons of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, adoption studies, “patchwork” family studies. 

Asked: Is there sufficient evidence to arrive at a reasonable estimate of the heritability of intelligence in populations of developed countries?” 73% said Yes. 

Asked: What are the sources of U.S. black-white differences in IQ? 

0% of differences due to genes: (17% of our experts)
0-40% of differences due to genes: 42% of our experts
50% of differences due to genes: 18% of our experts
60-100% of differences due to genes: 39% of our experts
100% of differences due to genes: (5% of our experts)
M=47% of differences due to genes (SD=31%) 

Like I always say, "Fifty-Fifty" is a pretty reasonable rule of thumb that won't lead you too far astray. It may not be the most accurate, but it's the best for reminding you to stay balanced: this is a complicated subject.

As far as I can see, there are two extreme positions, the 17% who think that the difference is none of it due to genes, and the 5% who think it is all due to genes. The rest are in the middle, and the “consensus” is that 47% of the difference is due to genes. (See above why one should not get too excited about consensus results). All this is obviously very different from the public narrative, which is that 0% of the difference is due to genes. Such a view is rejected by the majority of experts, but there is still a sizeable minority of experts who hold that view. In sum, there are a variety of opinions. 

Asked: What is the influence of average cognitive ability level and highly cognitive competent persons on positive development of society, the economy, technology, democracy and culture? All of the results were above the mid point, suggesting agreement about a positive relationship between high intelligence and social progress.

Asked about measurement bias: a majority thought that test taker motivation and anxiety were important, the race of the examiner much less so. 

Asked: Is there racial/ethnic content bias in intelligence tests? The mean agreement was 2.13 out of 4. 

Asked whether there was bias against lower SES and Africans in the western world, the mean agreement was about 4 out of 9. 

Only a minority wanted separate norms for minority groups. 

Out of 26 media sources on intelligence, only 3 were rated better than 5 out of 9: 

Steve Sailer 

Anatoly Karlin 

Die Zeit. 

Experts rated public debates on intelligence as twice as likely to be ideological than scientific. I think it is plain that most experts do not regard the press as being much good at reporting intelligence. Stories of marginal importance tended to be paid too much attention. 

They thought the Flynn Effect was due to educational and other environmental causes. The most important factors for cognitive ability differences between nations were education 21% and genes 15%.

I shot a man in Reno just to hear him whine

From the Associated Press:

A Reno man has been placed on probation and fined $1,000 for shooting a golfer whose errant ball broke a bedroom window at his home. 

Jeff Fleming, 53, was put on probation for up to five years in Washoe County District Court. He had faced as much as 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine after he earlier pleaded guilty to a felony charge of battery with a deadly weapon. 

The unidentified golfer who struck Fleming's house took a drop and was attempting to play his next shot on the Lakeridge Golf Course in September 2012 when Fleming fired a shotgun at him. The golfer, who was playing with a friend, was treated at a hospital for minor injuries to an arm and both legs.

Fleming's attorney, Larry Dunn, said Friday his client was just waking up when the stray golf ball shattered his bedroom window and sprayed him with glass shards. Fleming shot at the golfer from some 50 yards away in an attempt to scare him, not injure him, Dunn said. 

The ball "came crashing through the bedroom window and it startled him, and he thought he was being shot at," Dunn told The Associated Press.  

Stand-up comic Daniel Tosh talks about his underprivileged childhood: he grew up in a house on a public golf course ... on the right side of the fairway.

About three guys in the audience will laugh. Private club golfers tend to be better players, and when better players miss, they tend to hook the ball to the left; but public course hackers tend to slice to the right, so a house on the right side of a public course fairway gets bombarded.

It's kind of funny how tens of billions of dollars of houses and condos were built right alongside fairways from about 1960 to 2000, yet now it just seems like an all-around bad idea.

M.C. Escher's "Library of Babel"

These photos of the old-time Cincinnati main public library that was finally torn down in the 1950s have been going around. The picture above looks like an illustration for Jorge Luis Borges's The Library of Babel if done by M.C. Escher after visiting an exhibition of Piranesi's prisons. It reminds me that while I love vast reading rooms, such as Boston's, I always found going into the stacks at Rice University's big library slightly nightmarish. 

I particularly like the contrast in men's headgear between the polite gentlemen scholars in the Art Room:

and the hat-wearing hoi polloi in the Newspaper Room:

This confirms all my treasured stereotypes from reading Ben Hecht and watching His Girl Friday about the profound link between old time newspapers and wearing your hat indoors. (In case you are wondering, although Magritte's paintings are full of men wearing hats, they only wear them outdoors.)

Another triumphant shattering of stereotypes

Via Marginal Revolution, a quote from Machine Gambling in Las Vegas:

While in the past the typical gambling addict had been an older male who bet on sports or cards for ten years before seeking help, now it was a thirty-five-year-old female with two children who had played video for less than two years before seeking help.

Lonely old white men used to hog the gambling addiction, but that stereotype has, finally, been shattered: young mothers are no longer forced to ride in the back of the bus to bankruptcy.

You know, when we stop to think about all the progress America has made toward ensuring that the marginalized get equal access to financial ruin, we shouldn't forget that it's unsung individuals like Donald Trump, Steve Wynn, and Sheldon Adelson who are some of the real heroes.

Twin studies debunked: Twins are "Similar but not identical"

In the UK leftosphere, The Independent strikes back against The Guardian betraying the sacred verities when the Grauniad gave a good write-up to Robert Plomin's giant twin study of heritability in school test scores. From The Independent:

Similar but not identical: study reveals more about twins than about education 

The headlines this week about a new study of genetics told only part of the story 

STEVE CONNOR  

Genes play a bigger role in educational achievement than teachers, schools or home environment, and the reason we know this – apparently – is because we can compare the performance of thousands of pairs of twins.

At least, this was the main conclusion of a “representative” sample of 11,117 identical and non-identical 16-year-old twins, who were used as the basis for the largest research effort in this country into the role that genes and environment play in a range of traits – from the chances of contracting a lethal disease to aspects of personality. 

By comparing identical twins, who share identical genes, with non-identical twins, who share half their DNA, scientists are able to tease out the differences that result from genetics from those that come from the environment. This, at least, is the idea. But not all experts agree over the importance of twin studies, and indeed some molecular geneticists are extremely hostile to them. Marcus Pembrey, emeritus professor of paediatric genetics at University College London, for instance, believes they are next to useless when it comes to telling us anything significant about the role of genes. 

“In all the years of twin studies I can only think of two occasions when they have produced a meaningful result and I’d be nervous about saying that monozygotic [identical] twins are truly representative of the population. I abandoned my twin studies in 1972,” he said. 

Monozygotic twins are one of nature’s idiosyncrasies. A few days after an egg is fertilised by a sperm the developing embryo splits in two, each sharing the same set of parental genes. 

Non-identical or dizygotic twins occur when two eggs are fertilised by two sperm and the resulting pair of embryos develops within the same womb, sharing the foetal environment but only 50 per cent of their parental genes, just like ordinary siblings. 

... Although identical twins share the same DNA they are frequently different in many ways. One twin can be larger than the other from birth, indicating an unequal environment in the womb, and it is now firmly established that identical twins can be born with very different health prospects. 

John Burn, professor of clinical genetics at Newcastle University, told a London conference on twins this month about the case of a pregnant woman who was an alcoholic. She gave birth to identical twins. One had foetal-alcohol syndrome while the other did not. So even though they shared the same genes and the same foetal environment, the twins were different. “We can’t explain it,” Professor Burn said. 

There is also the case of enantiomorphic or “mirror-image” identical twins. Although physically similar, they show certain features that are mirrors of one another – their hair parts on opposite sides of the head or they suck different thumbs when babies, for example. 

At the same London conference, organised by the charity Progress Educational Trust, a member of the audience said she and her identical twin sister needed to sit or stand on a particular side of the other in order to feel comfortable. This had been the case for as long as she could remember. “Is this because our mother always put us in our cot on the same side?” she asked. 

Professor Burn was unsure, but suggested it might be because she and her sister were enantiomorphic. 

It is increasingly clear that identical twins are not in fact identical. This is even more so when epigenetic factors are considered. These control the way genes are expressed and even though the DNA sequences are the same, the way their genes work are almost certainly different. 

And yet, the principal assumption behind twin studies is that identical twins share the same genes and, largely, the same environment. This is crucial to working out heritability, which is a measure of how much variation in a particular trait is down to genes.

Interesting points, but, correct me if I'm wrong, isn't the logic of this argument against twin studies 180 degrees backward? Don't twin studies work by positing that the difference in degree of phenotypical variation between identical twins and fraternal twins is due to genetics, so by emphasizing all the random non-genetic differences between how similar identical twins turn out, you're saying that twin studies are actually less sensitive to finding the full magnitude of heritability?

I may have this backwards, so don't take my word for it.

Heritability is at the centre of the TwinsUK study run by King’s College London, which for 18 years has built up and followed a cohort of identical and non-identical twins. The latest effort on the GCSE performance of 16-year-olds found, for example, that the heritability of compulsory core subjects was 58 per cent, of English 52 per cent, of mathematics 55 per cent and of science 58 per cent. 

This is why the scientists concluded that genes played a bigger role in a child’s GCSE performance than any other environmental factor. “We suggest a model of education that recognises the important role of genetics,” the researchers said in their study, published in the journal Plos One.

A serious problem with heritability as a metric for measuring anything, however, is that it varies depending on what you are measuring, on which population it is based, and on the time of assessment. Significantly, few politicians seem to understand this limitation. 

The heritability of general intelligence, for instance, rises with age. In infancy, about 20 per cent of a child’s intelligence is attributed to genes, whereas in adults it can be as high as 70 or even 80 per cent, according to Robert Plomin, professor of behavioural genetics at King’s College, who led the twins study into educational achievement.

As a commenter pointed out this, new study should be considered a triumph for nurturists, since it found Shared Environment accounted for 36% of variations in these high-stakes tests at age 16. That's unusually high for a twin study, which typically find that Unshared Environment accounts for most of the non-heritable percentage.

Uh oh, Martin Scorsese took my advice

While reading about Martin Scorsese's upcoming movie The Wolf of Wall Street (opening Christmas) with Leonardo DiCaprio playing convicted stock swindler Jordan Belfort, I keep wondering, "Didn't I already see this movie?"

Yes. The 2000 movie Boiler Room was also based on Belfort's pump and dump business. In fact, I blogged a quick review of the movie in 2009 in response to the subprime crash:

So, I rented the 2000 movie. It's well worth seeing, as are so many movies that give you an inside view of some masculine institution.

A movie about the U.S. Marines, for instance, doesn't have to be terribly good to still be entertaining. There's just so much lore the screenwriter can crib. For example, there was a spat over "Jarhead," about a Marine in the First Gulf War, because the author of another memoir about that war pointed out that that a speech a colonel gives welcoming the Marines to the war zone was lifted nearly word for word from his book. Veteran screenwriter William Broyles ("Apollo 13") replied that that, sure, it's the same speech, but it's also the same speech Broyles heard from his colonel when he arrived in Vietnam in 1965. Marines don't let a good speech go to waste.

Similarly, it's fitting that the real life subprime peddlers at Ameriquest all watched "Boiler Room" because the crooked stockbrokers in "Boiler Room" all watch "Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Wall Street." They get together in the evening in one broker's giant empty house and watch "Wall Street" on the big TV and see who can do Michael Douglas's Gordon Gekko lines best.

High pressure salesmen watch movies about high pressure salesmen for pointers. The rest of us could use a refresher in the games they are playing on us. The chief reminder, of course, is that they persuade men to make dumb outlays of money by challenging their manhood.

"Boiler Room" has lots of great lines, although it's a little clunky overall. This is a very young writer-director's first movie (Ben Younger was 27 when it was released) and it shows. 

The casting is a little off. I wonder if somebody told Ben Younger that for his lead, the conflicted college dropout who can't decide whether he wants the money or his soul back, he should get, "You know, what's-his-name, that young guy, the pale one with the really Italian-sounding name," but instead of getting Leonard DiCaprio, he got Giovanni Ribisi instead. (Of course, there are a lot of movies that could have gone from half empty to half full just by DiCaprio in the title role.) 

Ribisi's quite good in the selling scenes, but he never sold me on the idea that he should be a Hollywood leading man -- he's too toad-like and his complexion resembles the singer's in My Bloody Valentine. 

Ben Affleck has the Alec Baldwin in "Glengarry Glen Ross" role as the sales manager who gives motivational speeches. (Here's the Youtube clip of the "group job interview" -- language NSFW.) Affleck is a guy who has shown some talent as a director and screenwriter, and has had enough work done that he looks like a leading man, but he's not really quite good enough of an actor. He's fine here giving motivational soliloquies, but there's fifty guys who could have done them even better. 

On second thought, that might be a little harsh. It's just that in general, you don't want to get into a head to head acting competition with Alec Baldwin.

Vin Diesel plays the one senior broker who is not a total jerk. I like Diesel, and I think he's a rather good actor when he's not talking (his control of his facial muscles is surprisingly delicate). But Diesel has some kind of speech impediment. I'm not sure exactly what it is -- some times it's a lisp, some times something else. But "Boiler Room" is the wrong movie for him: way too talky. 

Here's a Youtube clip of him reeling in a client where his charisma is locked in uneasy conflict with his speech impediment. (The really odd thing about Vin Diesel is how much his facial expressions resemble those of Jerry Seinfeld.) 

With DiCaprio starring, Martin Scorsese directing, and an extra $100,000 of script doctoring, "Boiler Room" would be one helluva movie.

So I left myself an out there -- if Wolf of Wall Street isn't good, it's because they didn't spend quite enough on script doctoring.