The publishing sensation of 2010 is Thilo Sarrazin's million selling work of statistical analysis, Germany Abolishes Itself. You might think that the New York publishing industry would be abuzz over rumors of plans for how to put out a similar product to obtain megasales. But all I hear is crickets chirping.
November 25, 2010
November 24, 2010
An English review of Sarrazin
Via Arnold Kling, David Goodhart, editor of the U.K. Prospect, reviews Thilo Sarrazin's book Germany Abolishes Itself in his magazine, which may have been the best intellectual journal in the English language over the last decade:
Thilo Sarrazin, a minor German politician on the technocratic wing of the country’s Social Democratic party, has just written what is probably the bestselling political book in postwar Europe (1m copies in hardback and counting). Everyone in Germany knows at least a simplified version of what Germany Abolishes Itself says, and the reaction to the book is helping to drive government policy on minority integration.
The message of the book, in headline form, is that Germany is becoming smaller (thanks to the familiar story of a falling birthrate among native Germans) and stupider (thanks to the fact that educated Germans are having fewer children and the fastest growing part of the population are poorly-integrated Muslim immigrants). That “stupider” is, of course, contested and has led to accusations of a flirtation with eugenics—of which more later.
But Sarrazin is no right-wing populist in the image of Jörg Haider, the late Austrian politician, or even Geert Wilders, the anti-Islamic leader of the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. Much of the book is a dry compendium of economic and social data. Indeed, I suspect his book is the political equivalent of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time—much purchased but little read. Although controversy has swirled around his comments on group intelligence and the failure of German immigration policy, there is little in German public policy that he does not also take his axe to: welfare policy, education and training policy (apparently Britain now has a much higher proportion of students studying maths, science and technology than Germany), the poverty lobby and more. In fact, it is a meticulously prepared trashing of the liberal pieties of the 1968 generation.
The political and media class’s initial instinct was to denounce the book, and Sarrazin was forced out of his job at the Bundesbank. But as sales started to take off and as the new social media—the bloggers and emailers—lined up overwhelmingly behind Sarrazin, the reaction of political Germany shifted, albeit grudgingly. Chancellor Angela Merkel opportunistically declared the happy-clappy multikulti of the German left to have “failed utterly.” There was even a respectful and self-critical essay in Der Spiegel magazine by a leading liberal, Peter Schneider.
This shift is rather remarkable and it may help to prevent the rise of a serious right-wing force equivalent to France’s National Front. As the book complains, German public debate has, for obvious historical reasons, been more constrained by various kinds of taboos about national culture than any other big European country. As recently as 2000 a leading Christian Democrat politician, Friedrich Merz, had his political career damaged by merely asking that minorities show respect for the law and institutions of the dominant culture (Leitkultur). In the ensuing row the then-president of Germany, Johannes Rau, declared that he was not proud to be German.
Nowhere in Europe is the gap between public opinion and published opinion as wide as in Germany. And nowhere has public policy been more influenced by a 1960s generation, post-national, society-is-to-blame kind of liberalism. Yet this “official” liberalism has never reflected the way people live and think, even in the German chattering classes. When I lived in the country, 20 years ago, it felt far more socially conservative than the similar circles I had come from in London.
Another difference that struck me was the invisibility of the Turks and the other big minorities living in Germany, compared with the relative visibility of Britain’s minorities. I later worked out why this was. There was what Peter Schneider calls an “unholy alliance” between left and right to pretend that Germany did not have an integration issue—especially amongst its Turkish, middle eastern and north African minorities. By 1990, there were more than 2m Turks living in Germany, many of them second and third generation. Yet the Christian Democratic right still refused to accept that some of the “guest workers” who had arrived in the 1950s and 1960s had come to stay—and rejected the idea that Germany was an “immigration country.” This meant that they put no effort or money into turning Turks into Germans. As for the anti-national left, the idea that the exotic Turks should be forced to learn the language of the SS was equally abhorrent. So the mainly Muslim minorities were left alone in their parallel worlds.
I would add my impression after a couple of weeks in Turkey attending Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Property and Freedom Society conference in Bodrum, which is kind of like the Santa Barbara of Turkey, is that Turks don't particularly want to make spectacles of themselves either. In some ways, Turks and Germans seem pretty similar in personality, although Turks don't drink much, so they are less likely to loosen up after a few beers the way introverted Germans sometimes do.
The most obvious personality differences are in neuroticism and conscientiousness. Germans tend to be energetic worrywarts, while Turks are more sedate and easygoing. This makes driving in Turkey less alarming than I had expected. Even though winding country roads in Turkey feature vehicles of wildly different maximum velocities, from S-Class Mercedes to the common sight of a farmer driving a tractor pulling an open wagon holding a dozen middle aged ladies in head scarves, Turks in slower vehicles are pretty good about pulling over to let faster cars go by. It's a polite culture.
On the other hand, there are lots of stray dogs around because they aren't really into worrying and organizing about things like that.
If I were a Turk I'd be proud of being a Turk and would have no problem coming up with reasons why I shouldn't conform to the neurotic culture of the Germans. Who cares about stray dogs?
Add in Islam ...
... The fact that Muslim migrants perform poorly in the context of German society does not, however, support the outlandish claim that they are inherently stupider than Germans or other minorities. Sarrazin does not quite say this but he does assert that their poor performance is dragging down the country’s average ability level—something that could probably be said of most of Europe’s immigrant groups from poor countries, at least for a generation or two.
Turks in Germany are well into a third generation. How's that working out?
Much of the issue is upon whom should the burden of proof be placed. Germany is currently 45 years into a massive social experiment. So far, the vast majority of the evidence is on the side of Sarrazin. Social scientists Detlef Rost and Heiner Rindermann conclude: "As far as the psychological aspects of his book are concerned, they are largely compatible with the state of knowledge in modern psychological research."
Not surprisingly, the political class in Germany thinks, however, that it's all much too soon to tell. Germany should merely wait another 45 years, by which time everybody responsible for the current situation will be beyond blaming. What could be fairer?
Goodhart goes on to repeat the standard embarrassing sophistries about intelligence, which is depressing in reminding us that a good guy like Goodheart is reduced to this in today's anti-intelligence intellectual world. But, he concludes:
Ultimately, Sarrazin’s hard-headedness is a welcome counterpoint to the wishful thinking of the 1968 generation. The former finance minister of Berlin, who looks like a soldier in the Kaiser’s army, is a member of the awkward squad. You can imagine him causing minor riots at liberal Berlin dinner parties. Most of his argument is clear-eyed and well-informed, but he could not resist the provocations both on intelligence and on the nature of the underclass, which he never bothers to define. Yet the fact that his book has been so influential, despite the provocations, marks an important step forward for Germany—not only in facing up to the failures of its past immigration policies, but also in bridging the wide gap between popular opinion and the political class and thus preventing a German Haider.
November 23, 2010
Link Fixed: "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1"
Read my review in Taki's Magazine:
Kids these days have short attention spans.
Or so I’ve often been informed. For example, Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford professor of “synaptic pharmacology,” recently warned the House of Lords that social-networking websites “are devoid of cohesive narrative and long-term significance. As a consequence, the mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilized, characterized by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathize, and a shaky sense of identity.”
Yet having recently plunked my 20th-century mind down amid an otherwise superbly attentive young audience cheering on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, the seventh and penultimate film in the witches and warlocks series, I suspect the opposite is truer. When sufficiently interested, the new generation can display attention spans that boggle the old.
Read the whole thing there.
November 22, 2010
More unsolicited advice for President Obama
In VDARE this week, I offer the President another policy suggestion that he won't hear from anybody else that would be politically feasible and good for himself, good for the Democrats, and good for the country.
You're welcome, Mr. President.
November 21, 2010
"Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction"
The NYT has a long article on the younger generation's shrinking attention spans.
By MATT RICHTEL
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer?
By all rights, Vishal, a bright 17-year-old, should already have finished the book, Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” his summer reading assignment. But he has managed 43 pages in two months.
He typically favors Facebook, YouTube and making digital videos. That is the case this August afternoon. Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework.
On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”
Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But computers and cellphones, and the constant stream of stimuli they offer, pose a profound new challenge to focusing and learning.
Researchers say the lure of these technologies, while it affects adults too, is particularly powerful for young people. The risk, they say, is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.
“Their brains are rewarded not for staying on task but for jumping to the next thing,” said Michael Rich, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and executive director of the Center on Media and Child Health in Boston. And the effects could linger: “The worry is we’re raising a generation of kids in front of screens whose brains are going to be wired differently.”
But even as some parents and educators express unease about students’ digital diets, they are intensifying efforts to use technology in the classroom, seeing it as a way to connect with students and give them essential skills. Across the country, schools are equipping themselves with computers, Internet access and mobile devices so they can teach on the students’ technological territory.
It is a tension on vivid display at Vishal’s school, Woodside High School, on a sprawling campus set against the forested hills of Silicon Valley. Here, as elsewhere, it is not uncommon for students to send hundreds of text messages a day or spend hours playing video games, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.
The principal, David Reilly, 37, a former musician who says he sympathizes when young people feel disenfranchised, is determined to engage these 21st-century students. He has asked teachers to build Web sites to communicate with students, introduced popular classes on using digital tools to record music, secured funding for iPads to teach Mandarin and obtained $3 million in grants for a multimedia center.
He pushed first period back an hour, to 9 a.m., because students were showing up bleary-eyed, at least in part because they were up late on their computers. Unchecked use of digital devices, he says, can create a culture in which students are addicted to the virtual world and lost in it. ...
“Video games don’t make the hole; they fill it,” says Sean, sitting at a picnic table in the quad, where he is surrounded by a multimillion-dollar view: on the nearby hills are the evergreens that tower above the affluent neighborhoods populated by Internet tycoons. ...Big Macintosh monitors sit on every desk, and a man with hip glasses and an easygoing style stands at the front of the class. He is Geoff Diesel, 40, a favorite teacher here at Woodside who has taught English and film. Now he teaches one of Mr. Reilly’s new classes, audio production. He has a rapt audience of more than 20 students as he shows a video of the band Nirvana mixing their music, then holds up a music keyboard.
“Who knows how to use Pro Tools? We’ve got it. It’s the program used by the best music studios in the world,” he says.
In the back of the room, Mr. Reilly watches, thrilled. He introduced the audio course last year and enough students signed up to fill four classes. (He could barely pull together one class when he introduced Mandarin, even though he had secured iPads to help teach the language.)
I was going to read the whole thing, but I got distracted.
Anyway, one thing I did notice before I zoned out, however, is that Woodside H.S. is one of the Five Bad Schools featured in the much-lauded documentary Waiting for "Superman". In this article, though, it sounds groovy.
November 18, 2010
Rindermann's "Smart Fraction" paper
I should have gotten around to posting on this before, but here, via Steve Hsu, is the 2009 paper The impact of smart fractions, cognitive ability of politicians and average competences of peoples on social development by Heiner Rindermann, Michael Sailer (no know relation), and James Thompson.
To test La Griffe du Lion's "smart fraction" theory, they first synthesize a large number of results from international school achievement tests (PISA, TIMSS, and PIRLS), then convert them to an IQ-like scale where Britain has a mean of 100 and the standard deviation is 15. (They don't use Lynn and Vanhanen's database of IQ tests, but Rindermann previously showed strong correlations between L & V's numbers and performance on international school achievement tests. Just looking through this data from international school achievement tests, it's remarkable how few surprises there are if you are familiar with Lynn and Vanhanen's data from IQ tests.
The most notable difference that jumps out at me is that the Irish do fine on school achievement tests (100), where they've done mediocre on some IQ tests, which I never quite believed. It might be worth investigating this discordance. For some reason, I'm reminded of the story of the English traveler in County Kerry who asks the Irish stationmaster why the clock at the north end of the railway station platform says 12:00 and the clock at the south end of the platform says 12:10: "And what would we be needing two clocks for if they both told the same time?" says the Irishman.
There are big concerns about school achievement tests, such as clarity of translations. Or, what does it mean to test fourth graders? For example, Finland doesn't start kids at regular school until seven. And how do we know the tests are nationally representative? And how do we know how hard the kids worked on the tests? Rindermann's aware of these problems (see his 2007 paper) and he's given it a pretty good shot at working out adjustments. But, the point is that we shouldn't put too much weight on any single number. For example, the Kazakhstan score is based on a single test of a single grade for a single year. (Rindermann should try to come up with a way to summarize how many datapoints he has for each country.)
The most notable difference that jumps out at me is that the Irish do fine on school achievement tests (100), where they've done mediocre on some IQ tests, which I never quite believed. It might be worth investigating this discordance. For some reason, I'm reminded of the story of the English traveler in County Kerry who asks the Irish stationmaster why the clock at the north end of the railway station platform says 12:00 and the clock at the south end of the platform says 12:10: "And what would we be needing two clocks for if they both told the same time?" says the Irishman.
There are big concerns about school achievement tests, such as clarity of translations. Or, what does it mean to test fourth graders? For example, Finland doesn't start kids at regular school until seven. And how do we know the tests are nationally representative? And how do we know how hard the kids worked on the tests? Rindermann's aware of these problems (see his 2007 paper) and he's given it a pretty good shot at working out adjustments. But, the point is that we shouldn't put too much weight on any single number. For example, the Kazakhstan score is based on a single test of a single grade for a single year. (Rindermann should try to come up with a way to summarize how many datapoints he has for each country.)
Since these tests report performance at the 5th and 95th percentiles, we can see not only the means but also the performance at the top and bottom by countries. Here, for example, is the last page of their results, Singapore to Yugoslavia/Serbia.
Singapore, a high-income high-cost, well-administered city-state, has the highest school achievement test scores in the world at their 95th percentile. It would be interesting to compare a metropolitan area, such as Silicon Valley, to Singapore. Judging by National Merit Scholar awards, the southern half of Silicon Valley would blow away even Singapore at the 95th percentile.
They write:
The highest values for the smart fractions are found in East Asia (1. Singapore IQ 127, 2. South Korea IQ 125, 3. Japan IQ 124, 5. Taiwan IQ 123, 9. Hong Kong IQ 122). A similar result was found in psychometric (average) intelligence or in student assessment studies (see Rindermann, 2007a). Different from the SAS, Scandinavia reaches in the cognitive elite not such a good rank (11. Finland IQ 121, 12. Estonia IQ 121 [the Baltics are added here], 16. Sweden IQ 120, 25. Denmark IQ 118, 34. Latvia IQ 117, 38. Lithuania IQ 116, 39. Iceland IQ 116, 41. Norway IQ 116). Maybe a homogenizing educational policy furthering weaker but disadvantaging high ability pupils leads to a smaller standard deviation and lower values for a gifted subgroup. Better are the traditional Commonwealth countries (5. New Zealand IQ 123, 7. Australia IQ 122 and 8. United Kingdom with IQ 122). They are followed by Western and Eastern European and North American countries, by South European countries, Arab or Muslim and Latin American countries and finally by sub-Saharan countries.
Most of the Gulf Arab countries do awful, but United Arab Emirates does quite well (mean 92).
The countries with the lowest results [at the 95th percentile] are 84. Botswana (IQ 96), 85. Saudi-Arabia (IQ 95), 86. Morocco (IQ 95), 87. Kyrgyzstan (IQ 94), 88. Belize (IQ 90), 89. Ghana (IQ 89) and 90. Yemen (IQ 84). Presumably many not participating countries would have lower values.Some astonishing results are observable like the high level of Kazakhstan (6., IQ 122) and the comparatively low for Israel (31., IQ 118, mean 93).
You mean, we were lied to by the movie Borat?
For Kazakhstan we have only results from TIMSS 2007 (4th grade); Mullis et al. (2008, p. 34) describe sample anomalies, a correction would be necessary. Israel has participated in several studies, compared to older studies and [for?] Jews in the Western World the results are deteriorating (e.g. Lynn & Longley, 2006). Most probably multiple reasons are responsible and not only the 20% fraction of Arabs (a thorough analysis would be necessary).
Israel's score at the 95th percentile is ahead of Norway's, so it's not that bad, but Long Island would probably do better. Israel is a country where Zionist intellectuals designed a populist, non-intellectual culture, so smart kids don't get as much cultural backing in Israel as in other parts of the Jewish diaspora.
There are also characteristic differences between mean, upper and lower levels. For instance between Canada and USA there is no difference in the upper level (IQ 120 and 120), but in the lower level (IQ 80 and 75). The past history of slavery and a different immigration policy (or different success of migration policies and geographical distance to societies with lower mean abilities) may be reflected into this difference. A similar pattern could be found for Finland and Germany: The difference in the upper level is only 1.20 IQ-points (IQ 121 and 120), but at the lower level 9.60 IQ-points (IQ 85 and 76). Most likely different immigration histories are reflected here, furthermore differences in educational policy (age of tracking, in Germany between age 10 and 12, in Finland at age 16). Early tracking increases ability variance.
I presume Thilo Sarrazin was thinking about results like this? It would be fun to see Jurgen Habermas respond to Rindermann.
Using regression analysis (as predictors mean and lower level) the largest residual (standing for difference between upper level and the rest) is found in South Africa (with its heterogeneous population of European, Asian and African descent), inverted the largest residual (standing for difference between lower level and the rest) is found in Belgium (probably a result of immigration and educational policy).
A few other notes: Armenia has a low bottom but a decent high end, close to Norway and Belgium. Armenia scores better than Georgia. Oddly, Azerbaijan beats Armenia at the bottom but has a very poor top.
Ireland, which has lagged in some IQ tests in the past, does fine (99.9), almost exactly the same as the U.K. (by definition, 100.0).
Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105). If you want to complain about teacher's unions, start with Mexico, where teachers have a hereditary right to pass their jobs down to their offspring! Mexico ought to be able to bump these numbers up. Brazil is another country with a weak high end (105).
China and India aren't on the list.
Estonia and Finland, neither of which has many immigrants, have about the narrowest 5th to 95th percentile gaps among smart countries: 36 points. In contrast, Japan, which we like to think of as homogeneous, is 41 points, Taiwan 41, South Korea 39, Hong Kong 38, and Singapore 48.
South Korea (106) has the highest mean and highest 5th percentile (86).
They go on to evaluate La Griffe's Smart Fraction theory. Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.
Ireland, which has lagged in some IQ tests in the past, does fine (99.9), almost exactly the same as the U.K. (by definition, 100.0).
Mexico does crummy (65, 85, 105). If you want to complain about teacher's unions, start with Mexico, where teachers have a hereditary right to pass their jobs down to their offspring! Mexico ought to be able to bump these numbers up. Brazil is another country with a weak high end (105).
China and India aren't on the list.
Estonia and Finland, neither of which has many immigrants, have about the narrowest 5th to 95th percentile gaps among smart countries: 36 points. In contrast, Japan, which we like to think of as homogeneous, is 41 points, Taiwan 41, South Korea 39, Hong Kong 38, and Singapore 48.
South Korea (106) has the highest mean and highest 5th percentile (86).
They go on to evaluate La Griffe's Smart Fraction theory. Also, here's Rindermann's 2007 paper, with responses.
November 17, 2010
"American Narcissus: The Vanity of Barack Obama"
Jonathan V. Last had a good article a few weeks ago in The Weekly Standard demonstrating the size of the President's ego.
For example, he highlights this quote from a 2008 Ryan Lizza profile of Obama:
Obama said that he liked being surrounded by people who expressed strong opinions, but he also said, “I think that I’m a better speechwriter than my speechwriters. I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m gonna think I’m a better political director than my political director.”
If true, Obama should have hired better speechwriters, policy directors, and political directors ASAP.
Two points:
Does Obama have a sense of humor about his egomania? For example,
Just a few weeks ago, Obama was giving a speech when the actual presidential seal fell from the rostrum. “That’s all right,” he quipped. “All of you know who I am.”
Now, that's not a bad ad-lib. I'm sometimes surprised by Obama's wit because Dreams from My Father is so self-serious. Still, I'm left wondering about whether Obama makes many second order jokes about his ego? (I don't watch TV news so I can't say.) Or does he take himself that seriously? You can't expect a President to be humble, but you can hope he'll be self-aware about his ego. Some of Obama's more egregious lines in Last's compendium could be taken as Obama mocking his own ego, but I haven't noticed that he does that. But I could be wrong.
The second point is that Obama's Smartest-Guy-in-the-Room syndrome is directly related to his being constantly seen by his admirers (including his Admirer-in-Chief, the President) as the Living Refutation of The Bell Curve. It's not a coincidence that just about the only exercise in national journalism Obama indulged in during the 1990s was to deliver on NPR in 1994 a commentary on The Bell Curve.
Much of David Remnick's hagiography The Bridge, for instance, consists of smart Jewish people raving about how smart Obama is. He was the one they'd been waiting for to hold up as an example of a smart black guy, which, in turn, in the "He who says A must say B, C, and D" reasoning that dominates American intellectual life today, could be read to also imply the really important lesson of all this: that Jews aren't naturally smarter on average (so put away those pitchforks).
I know this web of subliminal logic seems ridiculous when exposed to the light of day, but that's how a lot of important people feel.
The problem with all this investment in Obama's smartness as more than just a personal characteristic is that for any of minions to say to him, "No, Mr. President, you don't understand" or "Let me try to explain that more simply" is not just a personal and political insult, but is also a racial insult.
Love
Back in 2007, freshman UCLA basketball center Kevin Love -- whose father Stan played for awhile in the NBA and whose uncle Mike (and Kevin's more distant relatives, the Wilsons) were in the Beach Boys -- dominated the first four rounds of the NCAA tournament, only to look slow and short (he's 6-7.75 barefoot) and white against Memphis St.'s NBA-level athletes in the semifinals.
My idea at the time was that rather than head immediately to the NBA, Kevin Love should announce he was going to stay all four years at UCLA. That would make him very popular in SoCal (which should pay off in the long run), attract numerous one-and-done superstar recruits to UCLA, and probably lead to one or two national titles. (The downside is that the NBA pays by check and college basketball chews up your knees -- e.g., Patrick Ewing's 4 years at Georgetown were more awesome defensively than his career with the Knicks.)
Love, however, thought he knew better than I did about just how good he was, so he went to the NBA.
It turns out: he was right. This year, at age 22, when he'd be a senior at UCLA under the Sailer Plan, Love is making like the second coming of Moses Malone, leading the NBA in rebounding following last week's game in which he became the first man since Moses in 1982 to have 30 points and 30 rebounds in one game.
Last year, I though the same thing about running back Toby Gerhart of Stanford: he should announce he was passing up the NFL to try to lead Stanford to the national title in football, which would make him very popular in Silicon Valley, which can't be a terribly bad thing. But he went to the NFL, where he's gotten a couple of dozen carries as a backup for Adrian Peterson's in Minnesota, averaging 3.6 yards per carry, which is okay, but isn't exactly leading fans to demand Peterson be benched.
The funny thing is that Stanford just might have won the national title this year if Gerhart had returned for his last year of eligibility. This year, Stanford is 9-1 and #6 in the BCS rankings, with a terrific quarterback in Andrew Luck and an amazing story in Owen Marecic, who is starting at both fullback and middle linebacker. I remember when Tommy Nobis and Leroy Keyes started on both offense and defense in college in the mid-1960s, but not many since then. Marecic has scored four touchdowns rushing and one on an interception return (scoring on offense and defense on consecutive plays from scrimmage against Notre Dame.)
Stanford's only loss was to #1 ranked Oregon, a game in which Stanford took a 21-3 lead. But, they didn't grind out the clock because they they failed to get the ball enough to Gerhart.
So, I've only been proven wrong in one of my two suggestions, at least so far.
November 16, 2010
"127 Hours"
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
The exuberant 127 Hours, director Danny Boyle’s first movie since winning the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire, is surprisingly comparable to The Social Network.
While 127 Hours is shorter, slighter, and more upbeat, both films are deftly made reconstructions of famous 2003 events within young elite subcultures: Harvard undergrad Mark Zuckerberg founding Facebook and alpinist Aron Ralston walking away from a solo canyoneering accident by amputating his own arm.
Both movies overcome their inherently static situations through showbiz razzmatazz. Aaron Sorkin enlivens a story of typing and giving depositions with snappy dialogue. Boyle employs flashbacks, hallucinations, alternative endings, and his zap-pow digital cinematography to juice up the tale of a man, his hand wedged to a canyon wall by a fallen boulder, contemplating his options: somehow survive in a crack in the Utah desert on a liter of water until somebody stumbles upon him; rig a pulley to lift the 800-pound rock; chip the boulder away; perform radical surgery on himself with a dull knife; or die.
Read the rest there.
By the way, here's the story of Leonid Rogozov (1934-2000), a Soviet surgeon wintering at a scientific station in Antarctica in 1961, who successfully performed a two-hour long appendectomy on himself using a mirror.
November 14, 2010
How could Obama earn re-election?
My new VDARE.com column: "How Obama Could Earn Re-Election"
In an alternative universe in which John McCain had had the guts to take Obama to the mat over Rev. Wright, the Arizonan likely would have made a pretty miserable President. Yet one constructive thing McCain would have been politically well-positioned to do—if he so chose—would have been to use his reputation for bloodthirstiness to instead declare victory in the expensive war in Afghanistan and bring the troops home.
In contrast, Obama, hamstrung by his lack of military credibility, is now hinting that he’ll keep troops in Afghanistan past his announced withdrawal date of 2011, all the way to 2014.
So in what field does Obama have the personal credibility to declare victory and bring the troops home?
Where does he possess the personal authority to end a wasteful war, thus simultaneously improving the economy and getting himself re-elected by reassuring white voters?
The NYT on Thilo Sarrazin, again
In the New York Times, Michael Slackman delivers yet another deeply researched, tremendously well-informed, empirical-minded news article on the complex subjects being currently discussed by one million book buyers in Germany:
The debate started off boring and slow with Thilo Sarrazin trying to bullshit everyone with a bunch of smart talk: 'Blah blah blah. You gotta believe me!' That part of the controversy sucked! But then the Chief J. just went off. He said, 'Man, whatever! The guy's guilty of being a Nazi! We all know that.' And he sentenced his ass to one night of rehabilitation.
Corporations and Left Conspire in Australia
Australians have been deeply worried in this century about two problems: running out of water and potentially rising seas due to carbon emissions. As Jared Diamond pointed out in Collapse, one obvious step is to take the pedal off the metal when it comes to immigration to Australia. The more people in Australia, the less water per person. And the more people who move to Australia from Asia, the more people on Earth shift from public transport and motor scooters to roaring around like Mad Max, with an inevitable increase in carbon emissions. (Australia and Canada are right behind the U.S. in carbon emissions per capita.)
This logic is so obvious that it actually broke through to public consciousness in the last Australian election, with both parties calling for moderation on immigration.
But now the election is over, with Labour (the left in Australia) winning a very narrow victory, so business interests are back to quietly shushing up this outbreak of common sense and potential majority rule. From the Sydney Morning Herald:
Josh Gordon
November 14, 2010
JULIA GILLARD's election pitch to avoid a ''big Australia'' is to be abandoned after a Treasury warning that strong future immigration is ''probably inescapable''.
In another policy retreat, the government's population review has been delayed and ''recalibrated'' to focus on skills shortages and regional growth, rather than nominating population targets.
During the election campaign in August, Ms Gillard said Australia should not ''hurtle'' towards a big population. At the time, she said a Treasury projection that Australia would have a population of 36 million people by 2050 was excessive. ''I don't support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say … a 36 million-strong Australia,'' she said.
However, a Treasury briefing sent to Ms Gillard after the campaign suggests she could have no choice. The briefing warns that the prediction of 36 million people ''factors in a significant reduction'' in migration, from a recent peak of 300,000 to an annual average of 180,000.
It concludes that even if annual net migration was lowered to an unrealistically low 60,000 per annum, Australia's population would still reach 29 million by 2050.
''Given the powerful global forces driving the Australian economy, net immigration figures well in excess of that low number are probably inescapable,'' the briefing says.
''Strong population growth is not necessarily unsustainable. It need not adversely affect the environment, the liveability of cities, infrastructure and service delivery, provided the right plans and policies are put in place now in anticipation of it.''
I realize that a Treasury ministry can't be expected to keep up to date with all the breakthroughs in economic reasoning made between the Enlightenment and 1914, but there is this hot new idea around called "opportunity cost."
A senior Labor source said business groups had been pressuring the government to adopt a default position ''where the issue of specific targets is not addressed''.
''I believe the government has accepted the reality that it is not prepared to cut migration to the extent needed to significantly reduce population growth,'' the source said. ...
Days before the election was called in July, Mr Burke appointed three population panels to provide advice on demographic change and liveability, productivity and prosperity, and sustainable development.
Treasury's budget update released last week predicted that unemployment will fall to 4.5 per cent by June 2011, heightening concerns that skills shortages could re-emerge as a key issue.
Asked if it was prudent to be talking about immigration cuts at such a time, Treasurer Wayne Swan said the government had refocused the migration program on skills.
Unemployment could fall to 4.5%? The horror, the horror ...
November 12, 2010
Prescience
One thing worth noting about Anthony Burgess's 1962 book A Clockwork Orange is how prescient it was about a future England of high crime, home invasions and, especially, about how the Government's response would be technocratic. When New Labour came into office 35 years later, it pursued a largely sci-fi approach to fighting crime, putting up millions of surveillance cameras. If the Ludovico Technique actually worked, I suspect Blair would have used it.
Art talk
Not having much to say, I realized I might as well post these comments from Ray Sawhill that were buried deep in the comments:
Hey, Steve's comment about Annie Liebovitz -- "Sure, Annie Liebowitz is an airhead, but she's made more people look cool over the last 40 years than anybody else" -- highlights a little hobbyhorse theme of mine, namely that art-talent and IQ have little or nothing to do with each other! Fun.
If anyone's interested and open to the idea ... As someone who's led the arts-and-media life for more than 30 years, I suggest that you'll find it far more useful to think of art-talent as something that resembles athletic talent than it is to think of it as something having anything to do with IQ-style brainpower. The work of art-and-entertainment world people is sometimes worth paying attention to not because these are such smart people who are conferring their brainpower on us but because they're gifted people who've managed to find ways to turn their often bizarre talents into products that the rest of us can enjoy.
Creative artsworld people are often seriously unimpressive intellectually. But they're also often gifted in ways that can make your jaw drop.
And ...
Which to my mind brings up a whole other topic: How much fabulous art is out there that you've never heard of (and never will hear of), because editors, critics and profs are ignorant, or resistant, or copycats? In my experience, ANY time I poked around a little corner of art history on my own (in other words, any time I bore down on a little corner of art history hard enough to get by the usual masterpieces and landmarks and do a little investigating of my own), I found work that I thought was great, in fact often greater than what the profs, critics, historians etc had told me about.
Another question: Let's face it, historians, critics, editors and such -- the people who write and publish the articles and books, and who teach the classes -- are a peculiar bunch. They're a lot more scholarly and intellectual than most people are, for one thing. To what extent has this shared temperament shaped our view of art history? Maybe the version of it they pass along is best understood as "a history of the art that intellectuals approve of"? Should we -- we non-scholar types -- maybe be a little more challenging of (and wary of) their tastes and their lists?
I would add that a lot of the art of the past that gets left out of the standard art history textbooks wasn't obscure outsider art, it's stuff that was a really big deal in its time. We all like to think that great artists like Van Gogh and Kafka are dropping dead unheeded all the time, only to be discovered much later. But the reality is that most of the artists who get rediscovered were stars in their own day, or would have been if they'd only lived their three score and ten.
It's kind of depressing to think of all the talent that gets forgotten. For example, compare Borges and Burgess. Today, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is seen as one of the giants of 20th Century literature. Google comes up with 2,340,000 pages for his name. Back in the 1970s, however, Borges was probably no more famous than Anthony Burgess (1917-1993), who is little mentioned today except in conjunction with his novel A Clockwork Orange, which was made into a celebrated movie by Stanley Kubrick in 1971. ("Anthony Burgess" has only 463,000 pages on Google today). Borges, an ardent Anglophile and admirer of Burgess, wrote that he hoped that he and Burgess were relatives.
Today, Burgess's reputation is in one of those lulls that follows the death of a writer who lived a long time, wrote a gigantic amount, and whose later novels weren't as strong as his earlier ones. It's like how a lot of basketball fans remember the fortyish Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of 1989 more than the force of nature Kareem of 1972.
Burgess mostly pursued music composition and teaching as a young man, then started publishing books around age 39 and wouldn't stop, publishing something like 50 books over the rest of his life.
Was Burgess as good as everybody assumed he was in the 1970s? I don't know. In the mid-1970s I was hugely impressed by his 1974 novel The Napoleon Symphony, a historical novel about Bonaparte structured to follow Beethoven's Eroica Symphony (which had originally been dedicated to Bonaparte until he crowned himself Emperor). But, I was a callow youth, so what do I know? I read quite a few more of his books, but they became progressively less dazzling.
Likewise, was Burgess a good critic? God knows he was a prolific critic. In the 1970s, his reviews were highly prestigious, but by the 1990s, he was increasingly seen as a hack.
Was Burgess a hack who deserves to be forgotten? Perhaps. He certainly liked making money from writing. But, it's also possible that the reputation he enjoyed in the 1970s was reasonable.
Hopefully, some consensus will emerge on what was Burgess's best stuff, and his influence will come into better view.
Anyway, it's more likely that Burgess will be rediscovered by a new generation than that some dead writer who was obscure all his life will be discovered for the first time.
November 11, 2010
College Admissions in America v. Canada
Here's an article from the Toronto Star that got me wondering about something else:
Long admired for raising academic superstars, parents of Asian background are coming under fire from their own community for pushing their children into university programs for which many have no real interest or talent and often quit in distress.
At a recent conference hosted by and for the [Greater Toronto Area’s] Asian community, Chinese-Canadian educators and professionals warned some 300 parents in Mandarin, Cantonese and English to stop giving their children no other choice than professional courses such as engineering, medicine, accounting or pharmacy — programs for which some are so ill-equipped and uninterested they drop out, fail, get suspended for cheating or suffer depression and acute anxiety.
This is the kind of article that you'd read in Los Angeles back in the 1970s: "Mellow Out, Chinese Dudes."
Since then, however, American parents in LA have largely decided that 1400 years of Chinese test prep (the first Chinese civil service exams were held in 605 A.D.) can't be wrong, and have since switched their tunes to the Chinese one: getting into a fancy college is the most important thing ever.
But that Canadians are just now finally getting around to this raises a different question, one about differences between America and Canada. Granted, I don't know very much about Canada. Most of the time I've spent in Canada was in Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas, but I can say that Canada looked a lot like America (or at least its Crowne Plazas did). The main difference I noticed on business trips in the 1990s was that everybody drove around during the day with their headlights on, like they were on their way to some national funeral. "Did Wayne Gretzky die?" I asked, but it just turned out to be a safety regulation.
Anyway, my point is that because America and Canada are so similar, it's interesting when they differ, especially when they differ in something that we Americans assume is just an inevitability of 21st Century life, like College Admissions Mania. In 2010, Chinese immigrants in LA and Toronto apparently feel the same way about getting into college, but Americans and Canadians evidently don't.
I just realized that I have no idea if Canadians get all worked up over getting into college the way Americans do.
If Canadians do, you sure don't hear about it much. Off the top of my head, I can name all of four colleges in Canada (Simon Fraser, McGill, U. of Toronto, and U. of Western Ontario). I guess that Canadian colleges must not employ the vast number of publicists and promoters that American colleges do. For example, to pick small liberal arts college at random, Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA has an Admissions Staff of 13, while Grinnell College in Iowa (1600 students) has an Admissions staff of 19. They spend the first few months of the year reading applications, but most of the rest of the year promoting their respective colleges.
To an American by now, that just seems like the natural order of things. How can you have a modern civilization of Holiday Inn Crowne Plazas and automobile safety regulators without having a vast pyramid of increasingly exclusive colleges all expensively elbowing each other for the spotlight?
But, does it seem inevitable to a Canadian? The only thing I've ever read about college admissions in Canada was a Malcolm Gladwell article about his own extremely low-key experience getting into college, which made Canada in the 1980s sound like America in a Heinlein novel in the 1950s: You know, when it's Labor Day Weekend and the 18-year-old hero of the book still hasn't decided where he's going to go to college: "I don't know, I guess I'll take the bus down to State U. on Tuesday and register for some classes."
So, if you know anything about college admissions in Canada, please let me know.
November 10, 2010
White Flight from MySpace to Facebook
Here's a scholarly article by danah boyd (e.e. cumming-like lack of capitalization intentional) called White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook. It's based on a lot of interviews with teens. For example, one white boy pointed out that MySpace's tools for customization to bling up their sites drove off more cultured teens:
"These tools gave MySpacers the freedom to annoy as much as they pleased. Facebook was nice because it stymied such annoyance, by limiting individuality. ... The MySpace crowd felt caged and held back because they weren't able to make their page unique."
Unfortunately, it's one of those academic articles which could be about 50% shorter if danah didn't have to constantly puff up the possibility that the universally perceived differences on average between the races might just be one giant mass delusion. We're not talking about reality, you see, just perceptions of reality and perceptions of perceptions of reality.
Like the lack of bling on Facebook, that kind of Occam's Butterknife talk is a marker of respectable academic discourse about race: No, we don't find race interesting, we find our perceptions of other people's perceptions about race interesting. We try to make our interest in it as uninteresting as possible by padding our writing out with endless meta-ness. (We wouldn't want any MySpacers reading our articles, now would we?)
Like the lack of bling on Facebook, that kind of Occam's Butterknife talk is a marker of respectable academic discourse about race: No, we don't find race interesting, we find our perceptions of other people's perceptions about race interesting. We try to make our interest in it as uninteresting as possible by padding our writing out with endless meta-ness. (We wouldn't want any MySpacers reading our articles, now would we?)
How Obama could improve the economy
How could Obama boost U.S. productivity during this economic downturn? Well, the President could announce that so long as he's President, he's suspending all federal disparate impact discrimination lawsuits. If the country is non-discriminatory enough to elect him President, it's probably non-discriminatory enough to go about the rest of its business without the heavy hand of the EEOC and Justice Departments looking for statistical evidence of discrimination under the Four-Fifths Rule.
Cognitive Abilities and Household Financial Decision Making
Having spent an inordinate amount of time earlier this year figuring out an optimal family cell phone plan, it strikes me that an awful lot of American corporate activity these days consists of figuring out ways to nickel and dime people over complex monthly charges. It's like a never-ending low intensity war between MBAs with computers versus customers, half of whom will be below average in intelligence, energy, or experience.
The MBA holy grail now is to figure out a way to get people to agree to pay an extra $9.99 per month for something they won't use -- especially, if the original process of coming up with their bill of $173.41 per month was so arduous that they won't bother to go through all the work it would take to have it reduced to $163.42.
My impression is that American business has gotten more chisely over the years, probably because it's now so easy for MBAs to model complicated variations of payment plans on spreadsheets and then have them coded into the software used by the $10/hour people at the customer service phone bank. In the old days, it was too complicated for a business to concoct and (especially) administer a whole bunch of different payment options, so corporations offered the equivalent of vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry, and didn't change them too often. Hence, customers had a fighting chance to figure them out.
Nowadays, though, every MBA can whip up on his PC a million different options. That sounds good for consumers, right?
In theory, it's also gotten easier for customers to whip up a spreadsheet of their own to figure out their optimal choice. Yet, what percentage of the public is proficient with Excel? Ten percent, maybe?
When I was a young MBA in 1984, the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet was the first piece of software I used on my $9,000 IBM PC-XT (10 meg hard disk). It was awesome. I figured at the time that half the public would be spreadsheet mavens within a decade.
I was wrong. Although spreadsheets were the glamor software in the mid-1980s, they rather quickly hit a ceiling in popularity and were supplanted by words and pictures software.
This trend toward complexity led us to disaster in the mortgage meltdown as the complexity of the new products covered up their implausibility. As products became more complicated, customers and investors became more dependents upon professional experts, whether mortgage brokers, appraisers, ratings firms, or investment bankers. Simultaneously, however, the various players figured out how to corrupt the people who were supposed to be the independent, neutral professional advisers. For example, mortgage brokers were offered payments to put their clients into higher interest products.
This trend toward complexity led us to disaster in the mortgage meltdown as the complexity of the new products covered up their implausibility. As products became more complicated, customers and investors became more dependents upon professional experts, whether mortgage brokers, appraisers, ratings firms, or investment bankers. Simultaneously, however, the various players figured out how to corrupt the people who were supposed to be the independent, neutral professional advisers. For example, mortgage brokers were offered payments to put their clients into higher interest products.
As daily business becomes more complicated, the intelligent and energetic, the ones who can figure out how to cut their bill to $163.42, benefit at the expense of the tired and dumb who can't.
Here's a new paper by two Chicago Fed researchers who looked up the military's Armed Forces Qualifying Test entrance exam scores for people who had a chance to make two common mistakes with their finances.
Cognitive Abilities and Household Financial Decision Making
Sumit Agarwala and Bhashkar Mazumder
We analyze the impact of cognitive skills on two specific examples of consumer financial decisions where suboptimal behavior is well defined: first, the use of a credit card for a transaction after making a balance transfer on the account, and second, cases where individuals are penalized for inaccurate estimation of the value of one’s home on home equity loan or line of credit application. We match individuals from the US military for whom we have detailed test scores from the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery test (ASVAB), to administrative datasets of retail credit from a large financial institution. Our results show that consumers with higher overall composite test scores, and specifically those with higher math scores, are substantially less likely to make a financial mistake. Importantly no such effects are found for verbal or for most other component scores.
Here's their description of the first of two potential mistakes they can track versus AFQT scores that consumers often make:
Credit card holders frequently receive offers to transfer account balances on their current cards to a new card. Borrowers pay substantially lower APRs on the balances transferred to the new card for a sixto-nine-month period (a “teaser” rate). However, new purchases on the new card have high APRs. The catch is that payments on the new card first pay down the (low interest) transferred balances, and only subsequently pay down the (high interest) debt accumulated from new purchases.
The optimal strategy during the teaser-rate period, is for the borrower to only make new purchases on the old credit card and to make all payments to the old card. To be clear, this implies that the borrower should make no new purchases with the new card to which balances have been transferred (unless she has already repaid her transferred balances on that card). Some borrowers will identify this optimal strategy immediately and will not make any new purchases using the new card. Some borrowers may not initially identify the optimal strategy, but will discover it after one or more pay cycles as they observe their (surprisingly) high interest charges. Those borrowers will make purchases for one or more months, then have what we refer to as a “eureka” moment, after which they will implement the optimal strategy. Some borrowers will never identify the optimal strategy.
Got that?
This is the kind of puzzle I would have been fascinated by in 1984. I would have fired up Lotus 1-2-3 and worked it out. Today, though, it just makes my brain feel tired merely to start reading the above description. I just immediately get the impression "Somebody with a fresher MBA than mine has put a huge amount of energy into trying to confuse me into paying more," and I want to go lie down.
Conversely, in 1984, would I have fired up my PC to figure a way to chisel our customers out of an extra $9.99 per month? Well, in 1984 my customer was P&G, my employer's biggest client, and we were all terrified of offending them in any way, so I wouldn't have done it. But, if my customers were just a bunch of nobody consumers, well, yeah, I probably would have done it and then justified it to myself with some libertarian spiel. But now, I'm old, tired, not as smart, and not as persuaded by libertarian theories of ethics. Anyway, the difference in 1984 was that the natural response to getting a PC was: "What problems can I solve with this?" By 2010, most of the obvious problems solvable with a PC and a spreadsheet have been solved already, so more energy is devoted to creating new problems.
Conversely, in 1984, would I have fired up my PC to figure a way to chisel our customers out of an extra $9.99 per month? Well, in 1984 my customer was P&G, my employer's biggest client, and we were all terrified of offending them in any way, so I wouldn't have done it. But, if my customers were just a bunch of nobody consumers, well, yeah, I probably would have done it and then justified it to myself with some libertarian spiel. But now, I'm old, tired, not as smart, and not as persuaded by libertarian theories of ethics. Anyway, the difference in 1984 was that the natural response to getting a PC was: "What problems can I solve with this?" By 2010, most of the obvious problems solvable with a PC and a spreadsheet have been solved already, so more energy is devoted to creating new problems.
Not surprisingly, it's easier to chisel people with two digit IQs than people with three digit IQs:
We find that among those with AFQT scores above 70 [i.e., the 70th percentile], everybody ultimately identifies the optimal strategy. In contrast, among those with an AFQT score below 50 [50th percentile, i.e., two-digit IQs], the majority will not identify the optimal strategy. ...
Interestingly, verbal intelligence doesn't help much:
In columns (5) through (8) we use the four component scores (arithmetic reasoning, math knowledge, paragraph comprehension and word knowledge) that are used to calculate the AFQT score. In all four specifications the two math scores are both highly significant suggesting that quantitative skills are critical for avoiding suboptimal behavior. In contrast, we estimate that the effects of the two verbal test scores are a fairly precisely estimated 0. For example, the largest point estimate for a verbal score suggests that a one standard deviation increase in word knowledge would only increase the incidence of “eureka” moments by a little more than a tenth of a percentage point.
By the way, this should provide a cautionary note for using the ten-word vocabulary test score in the General Social Survey (GSS) as an automatic proxy for IQ. It's often a decent proxy, no doubt, but there are certain situations in which it's not.
November 9, 2010
The evolution of extraversion
Anthropologist Peter Frost blogs:
This has long been the case with simple ‘horticultural’ societies in the tropical zone. The women feed themselves and their children with minimal male assistance because they can grow food year-round. And this food production is not appropriated by a State or a land-owning class.
Such societies remain simple in large part because intense sexual competition keeps them from evolving into more complex entities. The surplus males stir up endless conflict, if only because their sole access to women is through warfare, i.e., rape and abduction. There can never be pacification and, therefore, the formation of larger, more advanced societies.
A high incidence of polygyny favors men with a different toolkit of physical and mental traits. Some personality traits, for instance, will be more advantageous than others. Such is the finding of a series of studies from rural Senegal, where 48% of men over 40 are polygynous.
Alvergne et al. (2009, 2010a, 2010b) found no correlation among Senegalese men between mating success and most personality traits, i.e., neuroticism, openness, and agreeableness. One trait, however, showed a strong correlation. This was extraversion, defined as “pro-social behavior which reflects sociability, assertiveness, activity, dominance and positive emotions.” Men with above-medium extraversion were 40% more likely to have more than one wife than those with below-medium extraversion, after controlling for age. Furthermore, this personality trait correlated with higher testosterone levels. Such a linkage suggests that extraversion is part of the male toolkit for mating success in a high-polygyny environment.
Perhaps this goes along with the notion of a mid-latitude Jealousy Belt (Sicily, Lebanon, Afghanistan, etc.), where life is full of interest because men tend to be extraverted and on the prowl but women remain major investments.
Creative Women
David Brooks explains that America will do swell economically in the 21st Century:
The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power. ... In fact, the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation.
Okay, but, that raises the paradox that in 2010 the American state that is the biggest drag on the economy at present, California, is also the one blessed with two vast creative hubs, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, both of which are doing reasonably well right now. (Here's Apple's balance sheet, which is a lot better looking than mine.)
Yet, California, as a whole, isn't doing well.
Yet, California, as a whole, isn't doing well.
A population cannot live by creativity alone.
Yet, what really struck me about Brooks' column was this section:
Howard Gardner of Harvard once put together a composite picture of the extraordinarily creative person: She comes from a little place somewhat removed from the center of power and influence. As an adolescent, she feels herself outgrowing her own small circle. She moves to a metropolis and finds a group of people who share her passions and interests. She gets involved with a team to create something amazing.
Then, at some point, she finds her own problem, which is related to and yet different from the problems that concern others in her group. She breaks off and struggles and finally emerges with some new thing. She brings it back to her circle. It is tested, refined and improved.
Is this self-parody or self-abasement? My impression is that Brooks tends to get the joke, and that he does this kind of thing on purpose to ingratiate himself with the huge audience of Gladwellians who don't get the joke. As an officially designated "conservative," it's particularly necessary for Brooks to periodically humiliate himself like this to assuage suspicions that he might get the joke. Perhaps I'm wrong, though.
Obviously, the first thing anybody would notice when drawing up a composite picture of the "extraordinarily creative person" is that she isn't a she.
I mean, isn't that a theme in The Social Network: 21st Century Silicon Valley is overwhelmingly dominated by guys? By the way, the creators of The Social Network are named David and Aaron, so Hollywood isn't that different from Silicon Valley.
Further, my vague impression of extremely creative women is that they are less likely than extremely creative men to come from somewhere "removed from the center of power and influence." I don't have a good database of creative women right at hand, but let's take as examples the two women who have been nominated for a Best Director Oscar over the last decade (out of 50 nominees): Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow. The former is the daughter of the man who made The Godfather and the latter used to be married to the man who made Terminator and Titanic. That's about as close as you can get to the center of power and influence in the filmmaking. 
My general impression is that women who have made a big splash in a creative (artistic or scientific) field are more likely, on average, to have had strong support from loved ones than their male peers enjoyed. For example, the two most famous female painters of the 18th Century, Angelica Kauffman (left) and Louise Elizabeth Vigee Le Brun (above) were daughters of professional painters, married into artistic families, and were both adorable-looking. The first major female painter, Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653) was the daughter of a follower of Caravaggio, although she was of more Rubenseque proportions than her Rococco heiresses. 
I went to look up some of my favorite female creative artists of the late 20th Century to see if this trend continues. Choreographer Twyla Tharp -- here's a minute of Baryshnikov in her witty 1975 ballet, Push Comes to Shove, about how much fun it is to be a heterosexual male ballet god -- turns out to have been born on a farm in Indiana. Her parents then moved to the San Bernardino area and bought a drive-in movie theatre. So, that's one strike against my theory.
How about portrait photographer Annie Liebowitz? (Here's a sneering British article about how she's broke because she won't play along with galleries and museums in artificially restricting the supply of her pictures. But, so what? If you had the chance to pick the photographer who would take the picture by which you would -- or wouldn't -- be remembered, who wouldn't make Liebowitz your number one draft choice?) She turns out to be a military brat, the daughter of an Air Force Lt. Colonel. As with Tharp, that's an above average background, but it's not like being Sofia Coppola.
So, my impression went 0-2 with my more recent examples. Perhaps it's becoming less true.
November 8, 2010
"Four Lions"
From my movie review in Taki's Magazine:
In WWII and the Cold War, we faced enemies of the caliber of Wernher von Braun and Andrei Sakharov. In the War on Terror, however, a strikingly large fraction of Muslim would-be terrorists, such as the recent Underpants Bomber and the Times Square Fizzler, are screwups. ...
Directed by Chris Morris, who is apparently legendary in Britain for his TV satires (I confess to never having heard of him before), Four Lions is a British buddy comedy about five Muslim yobbos in Sheffield peer-pressuring each other into staging a terrorist attack on “unbelieving Kafir slags.” (The quintet is culled to the titular four when one, carrying explosives made from hydrogen peroxide purchased at the corner shop, trips over a sheep. CNN subsequently headlines: “ASIAN MAN’S HEAD FALLS OUT OF TREE.”)
Read the whole thing there.
The movie reminds me of when Greg Cochran would tell me, "Terrorists are idiots. Now, if I were a terrorist --" and I would exclaim, "No, don't tell me! I don't want to know. Don't even say it out loud! Echelon could be listening in."
Obama's view of Asians
With the President visiting his old home, Indonesia, it's worth noting that one of the funnier themes in Dreams from My Father (granted, I'm using "funny" pretty relativistically here) is how little attention Obama pays to Asians in his book's black-white conceptual framework, despite having lived amidst many Asians in Hawaii, Indonesia, Hawaii, Occidental and Columbia. If they're Muslim Asians, like his friends in college, he's for them, but otherwise, he barely notices them. In Dreams, Obama's attitude toward people who aren't black or white is much like the Rev. Lovejoy's attitude on The Simpsons towards people who aren't Christian or Jewish:
Rev. Lovejoy: No, Homer, God didn't burn your house down, but he was working in the hearts of your friends, be they [points to Ned Flanders] Christian, [points to Krusty the Klown] Jew, or [glances at Apu with lack of interest] ... miscellaneous.
Apu: Hindu. There are seven hundred million of us.
Rev. Lovejoy: Aww, that's super.
In Dreams, Obama's feelings toward non-Muslim Asians are like those of a New York Yankees-obsessed Boston Red Sox fan regarding the Milwaukee Brewers: "Which league are they in these days?"
Group Selection, Again
The "Level of Selection" debate in evolutionary theory has been going on for decades, with the advocates of lower levels (e.g., the Selfish Gene) usually drubbing, through better math, the advocates of significant amounts of selection at the group level.
Personally, I've always found the arguments for group selection plausible (although that probably just shows how bad at math I am). Think of two tribes in prehistoric northern Europe squaring off militarily along the river that divides their traditional territories. They each covet the others' lands, but both groups have been afraid to attempt a river crossing under archery fire. One tribe is mostly lactose tolerant, the other tribe is mostly not. The leaders of the lactose tolerant tribe decide to send their cavalry, without their grain wagons, on a multiday sweep up the river in an attempt to turn the enemies' flank. They can drink mare's milk on their expedition. The lactose intolerant tribe's cavalry attempts to follow them, but gets slowed down by their food wagons. The milk-drinking cavalry outdistances the non-milk drinking cavalry to the point where they can get a full day free to cross the river.
In the next generation, the women of the lactose intolerant former tribe have many children who are lactose tolerant. The men don't have many children at all.
Now, that seems to me like group selection with a bang. Membership in the group -- outflankers or outflankees -- determines much about the fate of your genes in future generations.
But, it's often been explained to me that that's not real group selection, which can't happen because cheaters would undermine the evolution of altruism.
Okay, but, I've long had the hunch that this debate isn't framed as productively as it could be.
In recent years, Edward O. Wilson, the ant expert and author of Sociobiology, has taken up the the cudgels for the concept of group selection, which has widely been seen as evidence of imminent senility. A commenter, however, offers an interesting perspective.
Many here have missed the terms of this controversy. EO Wilson & co's change of mind was forced by 1999 work by James Hunt who studied multiple origins of sociality in a wasp phylogeny in which all the species had about the same “kin selection potential” and found that sociality evolved when there were strong “ecological” incentives (Hunt JH 1999. Trait mapping and salience in the evolution of eusocial vespid wasps. Evolution 53: 225-237). But since ~2005 Wilson, Hoelldobler, etc, have hijacked the controversy.
People have indeed started realizing that crucial for the existence/persistence –and thus for the evolution– of animal societies is not (or not so much) “kin selection” but rather the very rewarding ecological niches out there in which biomachines that adopt group-approaches to foraging and interference competition are much more effective trophically than are biomachines which adopt “solitary-consumer/fighter/reproducer” strategies.
This means that the evolutionary success of the genetic programs encoding such group behaviors is fully subordinate to the existence of such ecological opportunities!
In other words: people have begun realizing that, e.g., “altruism” is also a winning ecological strategy, rather than just an example of the promotion, or not, of altruism genes and the rejection (or invasion) of cheater genes.
The social-ant colony, e.g., is an ecological machine that out-competes at the foraging- and interference-competition level most other organisms in almost any terrestrial ecological setting, i.e., a social-ant colony in the field cannot be reduced natural-historically and evolutionary-historically to just an example of an Evolutionarily Stable Strategy immune to “selfishness” mutations that may undermine the genetic encoding of its sociality.
Wilson indeed has always made a big deal of the fact that ant species monopolize nearly 70% of the insect biomass on earth, but he did not realize the implications of this until the wasp guy rubbed it in to him and his coterie while they were still happily repeating the empty syllogisms of kin-selection numerologists [who meanwhile have even almost managed to deny Darwin (sic!) the credit for explaining the existence of sterile ants, etc., when he mentioned in the Origin of Species that an individual's sacrifice can benefit the reproduction of relatives, i.e., kin selection].
This 70% means that evolution by “natural selection of individuals” delivers niche-occupancy strategies that suffice to claim only ~30 of the trophic energy monopolized by the insect Bauplan (assuming termites and other social insects are insignificant biomass-wise).
The situation among many mammals is the same. Wild-dog packs and hyenas, e.g., beat the hell out of tigers and lions, and biomass wise they dominate.
It is time for gratuitous faux-aprioristic arguments to be confronted with ultimate natural-historical facts. And it is also time that the applied-math peddlers posturing as evolutionary biologists learn that “natural selection” is not the same as “evolution by natural selection”, that differential fitness is always caused by differential ecological performance (and never by “genes”), and that evolution by natural selection is just something that “may” happen when there is differential ecological performance at some level of biological organization, which however does not “prove” that ecological performance is caused by molecular interactions of genes (or of proteins; genes may suffice but are not necessary for differential performance, but additive genetic variation in performance suffices for evolution driven by differential ecological performance).
In other words, Sober’s 1984 [1984 sic!] book “The Nature of Selection” should be required reading for every evolutionary biologist. Sober showed first that the “kin selection” oxymoron is a muddled verbal construct to refer to that special case of group-level differential ecological performance in which “selected” groups happen to also be kin groups (most of the time but not always... see mutualism, e.g.).
Manny Pacquiao answers my question
I was wondering why the exit poll showed 79 percent of Asians voting for Harry Reid in Nevada. Boxer Manny Pacquiao has an answer, according to Ben Maller:
Manny Pacquiao didn’t make his boxing trainer, Freddie Roach, too happy last week when he announced he’d be leaving after a workout Friday to board a flight to Las Vegas. Pacquiao, a congressman in the Philippines, had some important political work to tend to: campaigning for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). “[Reid] was behind 4% in the polls before I got out there ... There’s a lot of Filipinos in Las Vegas.” Population figures show an estimated 30,000 Filipinos in Las Vegas, with perhaps triple that in all of Nevada. Reid defeated Tea Party candidate Sharron Angle by 40,000 votes ...
November 7, 2010
Cuckoo's Egg
I hadn't realized before that Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), the leading French painter of the Romantic Era, was perhaps the illegitimate son of Talleyrand, the most glamorous name in the history of diplomacy. Wikipedia says:
There is reason to believe that his father, Charles-François Delacroix, was infertile at the time of Eugène's conception and that his real father was Talleyrand, who was a friend of the family and successor of Charles Delacroix as Minister of Foreign Affairs, and whom the adult Eugène resembled in appearance and character.[5] Throughout his career as a painter, he was protected by Talleyrand, who served successively the Restoration and king Louis-Philippe, and ultimately as ambassador of France in Great Britain, and later by Talleyrand's grandson, Charles Auguste Louis Joseph, duc de Morny, half-brother of Napoleon III and speaker of the French House of Commons.
Are there other likely examples of one famous person being the secret child of another?
November 6, 2010
An Uncle Tim
Perhaps the best-written response to Tuesday's election -- frank, clear, logical, and pithy -- is by professional anti-racist Tim Wise.
First, though, who is Tim? TimWise.org says:
Tim Wise is among the most respected anti-racist writers & educators in the U.S., having spoken in 48 states and on over 400 college campuses. He has trained teachers as well as corporate, government, media and law enforcement officials on methods for dismantling institutional racism, and has served as an consultant for plaintiff’s attorneys in federal discrimination cases in New York and Washington State. Wise has contributed essays to fifteen books, and has appeared on hundreds of radio and television shows worldwide to discuss race and racism.
His Wikipedia page says he's now up to 600 college campuses. He has an appearance scheduled at the University of the South in Tennessee next Tuesday and at Cal State LA on Wednesday. (That's not a particularly easy trip. The man works hard to make a living.) I was under the impression that he had a gig at Georgia Tech as well, but that now seems to be off his schedule.
Now, you might think that this kind of career would be reserved for blacks, but that just shows how you aren't aware of White Privilege. Tim is a white man of Scottish and Jewish heritage.
Of all the Uncle Tims, he's the Uncle Timmiest.
Of all the Uncle Tims, he's the Uncle Timmiest.
It's important to understand that Tim is neither controversial nor a controversialist. The colleges that pay him his lecture fee view him as a public-spirited citizen, no more controversial than was, say, a doctor in the 1920s who traveled the country lecturing on the dangers of venereal disease. Tim is not "controversial" -- a term that has shifted in the 40 or so years I've been reading newspapers from one of praise (often, back then, with Ron Burgundyish hubba-hubba connotations: "Masters & Johnson Reveal their Controversial Report on the Female Orgasm!") to one of sniffy warning. Today, Charles Murray is "controversial." Tim Wise is, oh, "outspoken."
And Tim is not a controversialist. He is no more expected to engage in debate with those he denounces than that VD doctor was expected to debate the spirochaetes he warned against.
Keep in mind, that Tim is not a major newsmaker in American public life. The last time he was cited in the New York Times, for example, appears to have been 2006 and before that in 1992. Is that because he's kind of a junior varsity player or because what he has to say is not terribly controversial?
And that raises a key question about his recent essay, An Open Letter to the White Right, On the Occasion of Your Recent, Successful Temper Tantrum. Something this lucid seem hardly like an idiosyncratic effusion. Instead, it's the product of a clear worldview. I don't think most of Tim's political allies have thought this through as fully as he has, but I think the emotions and basic logic are, indeed, widespread. We've heard endlessly about Republican anger and hatred, but Freud's concept of "projection" remains a highly useful one to keep in mind when reading the newspaper.
Tim writes:
For all y’all rich folks, enjoy that champagne, or whatever fancy ass Scotch you drink.
And for y’all a bit lower on the economic scale, enjoy your Pabst Blue Ribbon, ...
Whatever the case, and whatever your economic station, know this . . .
You need to drink up.
And quickly.
And heavily.
Because your time is limited.
Real damned limited.
So party while you can, but mind the increasingly loud clock ticking away in the corners of your consciousness.
The clock that reminds you how little time you and yours have left.
Not much more now.
Tick, tock.
Tick, tock.
Tick.
Tock. ...
Put it on your Facebook wall and leave it there so you’ll remember that I told you so.
It is coming, and soon.
This isn’t hubris. It isn’t ideology. It is not wishful thinking.
It is math.
Not even advanced math. Just simple, basic, like 3rd grade math.
The kind of math that proves how your kind—mostly older white folks beholden to an absurd, inaccurate, nostalgic fantasy of what America used to be like—are dying. ...
And in the pantheon of American history, old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.
Fine, keep it up. It doesn’t matter.
Because you’re on the endangered list.
And unlike, say, the bald eagle or some exotic species of muskrat, you are not worth saving. ...
By then, half the country will be black or brown. And there is nothing you can do about it.
Nothing, Senõr Tancredo.
Nothing, Senõra Angle, or Senõra Brewer, or Senõr Beck.
Loy tiene muy mal, hijo de Puta. ...
We just have to be patient.
And wait for your hearts to stop beating.
And stop they will.
And for some of you, real damned soon, truth be told.
Do you hear it?
The sound of your empire dying? Your nation, as you knew it, ending, permanently?
Because I do, and the sound of its demise is beautiful.
So know this.
If you thought this election was payback for 2008, remember . . .
Payback, thy name is . . .
Temporary.
It's important to note that Tim isn't calling here for, say, mass murder, just as when Khrushchev said "We'll bury you," he didn't mean "Under rubble and fallout," but more like, "We'll dance at your funeral."
But, the emotions are clear. And they're common.
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