I wrote a paper in high school in c. 1975 using the Drake Equation to prove that aliens would show up Real Soon Now.

Perhaps the Drake Equation needs more factors than I included in my calculations 43 years ago?

For example, the Bush Administration put together a sort of Drake Equation for their demand for 5.5 million additional minority homeowners, but the Bushies refused to consider a factor that perhaps Hispanic immigrants weren’t as good credit risks as white Americans. And indeed, immigrants defaulted at a about three times the rate of white natives. But that fact wasn’t allowed in the equation because it would be Immoral to consider such realities.

There was a finance community assumption that because housing prices hadn’t previously declined all across the country at the same time in quite a few decades, they would never decline all across the country at the same time.

Ironically, in 2007-2008, housing prices didn’t initially decline all across the country at the same time. Instead, what happened was that housing prices had inflated so high during the Housing Bubble in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida that those four states came to represent a huge chunk of total housing market values, so much so that those four states by themselves represented a huge bet that new mortgagees would be able to pay off their big mortgages.

When housing prices started declining in those states late in 2006, that started tumbling various financial dominos, beginning with the shakiest Orange County subprime mortgage firms in the late winter of 2007, moving on to more respectable sounding mortgage firms in August 2007 and prestigious Wall Street and European firms in 2008. The financial crash of September 2008 set off a general recession which, finally, led to housing prices falling nationwide. But the damage had been done before the last parts of the country saw falling housing prices.

Yet in retrospect there was nothing one-in-a-million about this chain of events. It seems pretty pre-ordained due to the national infatuation with believing that Diversity Is Our Strength.

The Bush Administration had campaigned in 2002-2004 as part of its Increasing Minority Homeownership initiative for lower downpayment and documentation requirements for mortgages on the grounds that traditional credit standards were bigoted against minorities. At the White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership on 10/15/2002, President Bush told his federal regulators that he wanted 5.5 million additional minority homeowners by 2010 and he didn’t want traditional credit standards, such as substantial down payments and transparent documentation of incomes, to stop his social justice initiative.

But it turned out that traditional credits standards were traditional for good reasons.

The authors need some Earthbound examples of their logic playing out so we can check up on their math. Do they offer any?

Do the authors offer an analogy to something else that we know to be true?

Piketty refuses to give much in the way of evidence for his Secret Old Money theory. I’m being charitable by assuming that as a European Piketty is referring to the Rothschilds above all else, which at least makes a certain amount of sense and comes with an extensive conspiracy theory.

Anyway, Piketty’s Secret Old Money conspiracy theory is both essential to his more general theory and is luridly interesting, but nobody else seems to bring it up when discussing Piketty.

Right.

England had incredible inequality around 1700. And you can see evidence for that just driving around and noticing the incredible country homes from the era.

For example, John Churchill (Winston’s distant ancestor) was royally authorized to skim 2.5% into his own pocket of every shilling Parliament sent to pay his army fighting France. When he was made Duke of Marlborough, he and his wife built themselves a 300,000 square foot Blenheim Palace.

But by the late 19th Century, the Marlboroughs couldn’t afford to fix the roof, and the whole thing was in danger of falling down until the Duke married Consuelo Vanderbilt of the NYC Vanderbilts and her dad wrote the Duke a 2.5 million check.

That kind of thing was real common among English aristocrats of the era, as in the fictional Downton Abbey.

So, the old money rich tended to get poorer from 1700 to 1900 because they spent money on such a baronial scale.

I’m being charitable to Piketty by assuming that he is more referring to Europe, which I don’t know as much about, than America. Perhaps the Forbes lists of billionaires are laughably bad in Europe. I have a lot more opportunity to grasp what’s going on in America, and Forbes seems to know more about the extremely rich in America than Piketty does.

And many Rothschilds are Old Money European aristocrats: e.g.,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Rothschild,_4th_Baron_Rothschild

When Piketty writes about something that I know a modest amount about, such as Forbes 400 lists, Carlos Slim, and the impact of immigration on inequality in America, Piketty’s judgment doesn’t strike me as confidence-inducing.

Of course, I don’t know enough whether it would be fair to generalize that impression to other fields he writes about.

Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” has a fun chapter detailing how Sherman McCoy is going broke despite earning a million dollars per year. Wolfe, of course, thought that American fiction needed more Balzac-like detail.

I suspect Wolfe got the idea from Irwin “Rich Man, Poor Man” Shaw’s 1939 short story “Main Currents of American Thought” of a radio serial drama writer balancing his checkbook.

Well, I am interested in who owns sports teams , who owns the biggest super yarchts and who owns backyard golf courses.

Thanks.

In the past, it was widely assumed that various business capitals such as Wall Street and Silicon Valley would diversify across the country. For example, financier Michael Milken operated out of Beverly Hills.

But its hard to get Wall Street inside info in Beverly Hills without leaving an electronic paper trail.

Milken went to prison in 1990.

Ian Fleming’s “Casino Royale” is largely food porn in which James Bond goes to a country without rationing and orders whatever he likes on the menu.

But what does Piketty’s Secret Old Money do with its Secret Old Money if it doesn’t do yachts, sports teams, golf courses?

Charity? Self-made man David Geffen is currently paying billions to put his name on edifices. Are Piketty’s Secret Old Money folks doing the same?

And charities are very diligent about figuring out who has what. For example, a few years ago it was discovered that a self-made man in the wholesale grocery business was worth between $2 billion and $10 billion, even though he’d never before been on the Forbes 400 list. His vast wealth was only discovered when he started to give money away.

Similarly, divorce lawyers are pretty good at discovering how much scions are worth.

In general, I think Piketty’s theory about vast hidden wealth, whether right or wrong, is pretty fascinating, but few seem terribly interested in looking for ways to test it, even though most of the tests — yachts, divorce lawsuits, etc. — sound luridly interesting.

Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos saw herself as descended from the Flieschman Yeast fortune, but was only upper middle class because, her father emphasized to her that her great-grandfather had wasted money on indolence in Hawaii and her grandfather had lost the rest in the Texas oil business. But Elizabeth saw herself as inheriting the yeasty Right Stuff to make herself a billionaire.

Like I said, the rich or formerly rich tend to be more driven to make money than normal people.

My impression is that the hereditary rich tend to be more ambitious about making money than average middle class people. For example, I had a young fellow working for me who came from an Old Money family — his grandfather belonged to the National Golf Links of America and had lots of scandalous stories about his old college roommate Adlai Stevenson. But in 1986 he quit our company and started at a Seattle firm called Microsoft.

When my wife and I visited him and his wife in Seattle in 1988, my wife asked my friend’s wife, “What should we do tomorrow?” The poor woman broke into tears and replied, memorably, “We can’t do anything with you tomorrow because we have to jump out of an airplane with Bill Gates and we’re going to die!”

It turned out that Bill Gates had decided to test his current girlfriend’s fitness as marriage material by insisting she go skydiving with him. She in turn countered that she would, but only if another woman went with her. Bill pored over the company roster for an ambitious young married man and settled on our friends.

They didn’t die and my friend did very well at Microsoft, becoming head of the New York office. Unfortunately, he worked himself to death at Microsoft and died before 40, although not in a skydiving accident.

An even funnier thing about Slim that never got mentioned in the NYT is that his six kids are surnamed Slim Gemayel because his late wife was a member of the Lebanese fascist warlord clan, the Gemayels. When Mrs. Slim’s cousin Bashir Gemayel was blown up during the 1982 Israel invasion of Lebanon, his followers ran amok slaughtering Palestinians. The NYT had an all-time great headline for Bashir’s obituary:

“Bashir Gemayel: He Lived by the Sword”

https://www.unz.com/isteve/the-fascist-roots-of-the-nyts-financial-savior-carlos-slim-helu/

The funniest part of Piketty’s book is when he suggests that criticisms of Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecom monopolist, are racist. Piketty is offended by how Slim

“… is often described in the Western press as one who owes his great wealth to monopoly rents obtained through (implicitly corrupt) government favors…

(Actually, Slim, himself, has been proactive about improving his press coverage: in 2008 he financially bailed out the New York Times and later became the newspaper of record’s second-biggest owner. Not surprisingly, Slim, who profits lavishly off long distance calls between illegal immigrants in America and their loved ones in Mexico, doesn’t get mentioned much in the Times’ vociferous denunciations of immigration skeptics.)

Piketty, in his inimitable prose style, explains that criticizing Slim is a mistake, if not downright racist:

“Rather than indulge in constructing a moral hierarchy of wealth, which in practice often amounts to an exercise in Western ethnocentrism, I think it is more useful to try to understand the general laws that govern the dynamics of wealth—leaving individuals aside and thinking instead about modes of regulation, and in particular taxation, that apply equally to everyone, regardless of nationality.”

In reality, Slim bought the Mexican phone monopoly from his close personal friend, President Salinas. When Salinas in turn invited Slim and 29 other privatizers to the 1993 Billionaires Banquet and asked each for $25 million dollars in campaign contributions, Slim quickly spoke up in favor of the President’s proposal.

http://takimag.com/article/better_a_crook_than_a_wasp_the_left_ditches_progressivism_steve_sailer/print#ixzz5JVoz2BVn

“Somewhat rich colleges (= $1 billion) grow at 8.8%, medium-rich colleges (= $500 million) at 7.8%, middling colleges (= $100 million) at 7.1%, and the poorest colleges (= $100 million) at 6.2%. And all of these do better than the average person saving for retirement, who – again – gets about 4% to 5%.”

Back before the 2008 crash, I noticed that there was a close correlation between how prestigious is was to have your kid admitted to an Ivy League school (Harvard #1, Cornell #8) and the ROIs on their investments. This might suggest that rich people are trading insider trading information for admission for their scions. E.g., rather than the Kushners donating money, other people could be getting their kids in by mentioning investment opportunities.

But I haven’t checked this in a decade or so, so it could have just been a fluke.

But are there Secret Old Money rentiers who own sports teams or yachts or have their own personal golf course?

Ever since reading Piketty’s book, I’ve looked for examples of these, but have not found many. For instance, the biggest yachts known to be owned by Americans are owned by people like David Geffen, Paul Allen, Larry Ellison, etc. — self-made men. Now there are other yachts whose ownership is kept secret, so that’s not proof, but it suggests a trend.

Maybe that’s just proof of how secretive Secret Old Money is, or maybe it suggests Piketty isn’t all that right. Or maybe Piketty is more right about Europe than about America.

Or maybe Piketty is wrong to criticize the Forbes 400, but if a Forbes 40,000 existed, it would indeed be dominated by Du Ponts, Astors, and Vanderbilts.

But it would seem incumbent upon Piketty to come up with a little merely anecdotal evidence in support of his conspiracy theory. So far, all I’ve seen is hand-waving.

Matthew Yglesias sums up Piketty’s conspiracy theory about Secret Old Money:

“Piketty’s interesting point on entrepreneurial wealth turns out to be that the famous Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America (and similar lists in other media outlets) is probably mistaken.

“Not just mistaken, in fact, but systematically biased to overrepresent entrepreneurs and underrepresent heirs and heiresses.

“Tracking it all down would be possible, though perhaps difficult, in the course of a contentious lawsuit in which someone has the power to issue subpoenas. But a merely curious journalist has no real way of finding out how the holder of a diverse portfolio of inherited financial assets is doing.

“In other words, we are almost certainly overcounting entrepreneurs among today’s super-rich and undercounting the descendents and past entrepreneurs. And a generation or two from now we are very likely to underestimate the wealth of the descendants of today’s entrepreneurial billionaires.”

Divorce lawyers, however, might disagree about the impossibility of figuring out how much Old Money the Old Rich have.

My guess is that being a European, Piketty is convinced that the Rothschilds have vast fortunes, but he knows enough that mentioning the R-word would make him sound like an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, so he’s left flailing about how the American Forbes 400 has to be wrong. But he doesn’t seem to know much about America.

Piketty hates the Forbes 400 list because it’s dominated by entrepreneurs. He sees it as propaganda that wealth is more created than inherited.

http://www.unz.com/isteve/a-challenge-piketty-v-forbes-400/

He thinks there is tons of Secret Old Money out there that we aren’t allowed to know about. He doesn’t mention the R-word, but it sounds like he could be talking about the Rothschilds. They’re usually #1 among Piketty’s fellow conspiracy theorists of Secret Old Money.

I don’t dismiss Piketty’s conspiracy theory. I’ve been looking into the ownership of spectacular assets — such as sports franchises, yachts, and personal golf courses. I don’t see much evidence for Piketty’s view that the Forbes 400 list is badly biased for the USA, but yacht ownership, in particular, is often kept secret so it’s hard to tell.

I’ve looked into most of the personal golf courses in Southern California and they are usually associated with famous rich guys rather than with Old Money — Walter Annenberg (although he was 2nd generation entrepreneur), Bob Hope (now Ron Burkle), Jerry Perrenchio, Will Smith, Larry Ellison, etc. There’s a personal golf course out near Zuma Beach that I don’t know who owns so that could be some old time Du Pont money or whatever like Piketty would assume, but the odds are it belongs to some hard charging arriviste.

“The US and Britain had the Baby Boom”

Just as an aside, the Baby Boom was much less of a thing in Britain than in America. There was a big spike in births in 1946, but then it fell off again until some point in the 1950s.

Britain was broke for quite awhile after WWII, so the Baby Boom was much more limited than in the US.

“If there is an easy way to to this, why hasn’t some smart company moneyballed their way into a cheap, top-rate workforce yet?”

My impression is that consumer packaged goods company Procter & Gamble long ago moneyballed their way into a high quality work force. One way they did it is by developing a high quality test for job applicants. The Griggs Supreme Court decision putting the burden of proof on employers caused P&G problems, but they ultimately jumped through every hoop the government demanded to continue using their test.

I would also be interested in learning more about how Walmart came up with a work force that made Sam Walton the richest man in the world. Walton picked a remote location in the Ozarks for his headquarters, but to the surprise of many was able to hire from the surrounding region the talent he needed to revolutionize retailing.

As late as the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher had to fight a fierce battle for control of the economy against the Stalinist boss of the large coal miner’s union, Arthur Scargill.

It wasn’t surprising that the decisive battle between Thatcherism and the left came in the mines. In the U.S. a century ago, miners’ strikes featured extraordinary levels of violence on both sides. Going underground together bonds miners like soldiers going into battle together, providing their unions with more solidarity. Mining was always radicalizing because working conditions were so harsh, as Ali G (Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen’s first character) realized during a visit to a Welsh coal mine:

Ali G: Check dis. I is now in a coal mine which is where the Wales people used to live, underground. Millions of years ago miners lived under here before they became human beings.

Miner: They never lived here, they just worked here.

Ali G: They worked in ‘ere? What a crap job.

In the U.S., however, miners became less and less a force for radicalism as the success of John L. Lewis, boss of the United Mine Workers of America 1920-1960, at winning higher pay lowered both their leftism and their numbers.

Lewis acknowledged that he was driving miners’ wages up so high that his union would be much smaller in the next generation. But if his members were paid enough today, they could afford to educate their kids to do something less miserable with their lives by the time the bosses had figured out how to do without them.

The often-brutal saga of mining in America has thus had a happy ending that would have astonished and frustrated Joe Hill. Today, mining is a small, reasonably well-paid profession.

https://www.vdare.com/articles/the-axis-of-amnestys-ideology-of-cheap-labor

Massachusetts and New Jersey may not be all that religious overall, but they are also pretty Catholic states. Catholicism is very anti-suicide, more so than Protestantism on the whole.

My memory is that suicide rates by state tend to be highest in the less religious parts of the country, such as the northwestern quarter of the states. A combination of not much faith and a lot of hunting rifles probably leads to more suicide.

It would be useful to look at the numbers without suicides by the terminally ill. My feeling is that preventing suicides by the non-terminally ill should be a higher priority of policy, while suicides by dying old men in a lot of pain would be a lower priority.

A woman who had switched from the marketing research industry to “gaming” (i.e., casino gambling) industry told me that men in the gaming industry were awful (of course, so were the women) and she was glad to be back in marketing research.

Illegal immigrants typically arrive in America when they are older than the age at which joining a street gang seems like a really good idea.

Also, since Mexico took over the cocaine business from Colombia in the 1990s, there has often been more money to be made in gangs in Mexico than in America, which tends to attract bad guys to Mexico rather than to the US. Before the death of Pablo Escobar in 1993, crime didn’t pay all that well in Mexico, and the brief reign of liberalism over the criminal justice system in the US in the 1960s and 1970s, with its short prison sentences, had made America an attractive destination for bad guys. But lately Mexico is more attractive to Spanish-speaking criminals than is the US.

On the other hand, more than a few of the sons of illegal immigrants think joining a street gang sounds cool.

On the other other hand, the average crime rate for African Americans is so high compared to every other group that in many cities illegal immigrants pushing out blacks would lower the overall crime rate, as has happened in Los Angeles.

Extremely logical high IQ males on the autism spectrum have high rates of transgenderism. For example, the smartest, most arrogant guy I knew at MBA school in 1981 was recently listed by the Washington Post as the highest paid female CEO in America.

I suspect Robert Heinlein noticed this pattern among his fans way back in the 1950s, judging by his short story “All You Zombies.”

It’s called satire.

What are the odds that, say, cocktail waitresses and professors of gender studies have identical definitions of “sexual harassment” in mind?

“Socially awkward men may make a lot of women uncomfortable unintentionally, but hopefully most are not reporting this as harassment.”

Hopefully, but shouldn’t America’s vast legal and social science fields have investigated this highly relevant question by now? I asked about this a lot in the wake of the 1991 Anita Hill brouhaha, but nobody seemed to have an answer back then.

I then wrote an essay in late 1992 predicting that, from what I’d heard from Arkansawyers, President-Elect Bill Clinton risked impeachment over some unwanted sexual advance he likely had made to some state employee even though no doubt most of his sexual advances had turned out welcome. But nobody would publish it back then, so it was a big surprise to the world when it turned out Clinton had sexually harassed Paula Jones, for which he had to pay $850,000.

Has anybody ever surveyed women about how many wanted sexual advances they’ve gotten at work?

For example, my dad was a bachelor engineer at Lockheed and my mom was a young widowed secretary at Lockheed whose Marine first husband had been killed on Iwo Jima.

I realize than in the Current Year our culture’s highest priority is preventing and punishing unwanted heterosexual advances. But I kind of think unwanted heterosexual advances are more or less the price our species has to pay for the wanted heterosexual advances that keep homo sapiens out of extinction.

The funny thing is that James Damore was explaining the rational reasons behind what Susan Wojcicki and the other Google executives actually do: hire mostly males for tech jobs.

The definition of sexual harassment as “unwanted sexual advances” is a logical morass. As I pointed out in 1992 when forecasting that the incoming Clinton administration would eventually be rocked by a sexual-harassment scandal (which indeed happened in 1998):

“What self-respecting woman would admit that no man had ever made an unwanted sexual advance toward her? She’d be admitting either that no man’s ever made her a sexual advance or that she’s never met a sexual advance she didn’t like.”

http://takimag.com/article/gender_offenders_steve_sailer/print#ixzz5D3xTh7RL

Damore got fired because Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who used to be Sergey Brin’s landlord and then sister-in-law, felt personally aggrieved by his memo — How would she answer its arguments to her five children?

So she spoke Power to Truth.

American women got the vote earliest in Western territories like Wyoming because Wild West towns might live or die depending on whether they could attract Respectable School Marms and the like. Three years before women’s suffrage on a national scale, Wyoming elected a woman, Jeannette Rankin, to the US House of Representatives. She was no shrinking violet politically: she was the only member of the House to vote against the 1917 Declaration of War.

I offered the opposite hypothesis last November:

“For years the press has been telling us that industries that hire mostly men—such as computer programming, defense, and the military—must be bad for women. No doubt, it is explained, all those horrible, evil male engineers must be teaming up to exploit the handful of female employees. After all, men and women are enemy genders. I mean, that’s what every lesbian women’s-studies professor says, and they wouldn’t have any incentive to lie, would they?

“Therefore, women must be given much more in the way of affirmative-action quotas in technology companies. …

“Instead, however, we see that careers where women are most abundant and most ambitious, such as television and movies, are where they are most exploited.

“Why? It’s simple supply and demand.”

http://takimag.com/article/gender_offenders_steve_sailer/print#axzz5CzheQjtf

The Ocean Hill-Brownsville imbroglio of the late 1960s in Brooklyn public schools came about when the Lindsay Administration gave black power activists control of a chunk of the public schools. They immediately started trying to fire Jewish and Irish schoolteachers and replace them with blacks. The white teachers under union leader Albert Shanker went on the warpath to save their jobs.

The whole story has pretty much been memoryholed, but it was a huge deal at the time. Thus in Woody Allen’s 1973 sci-fi movie Sleeper, a scientist explains that the old American civilization came to an end when:

“According to history, over 100 years ago, a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”

My impression from following the newspapers is that public school districts tend to be extremely bad at statistically modeling the consequences of policy change brainstorms they come up with. This example of DC changing some attendance rules and then being shocked by the collapse in the graduation rates happens all the time across the country — the main difference is that usually principals and teachers intervene to keep the consequences of the head office’s Big Idea from being quite so severe.

If America’s public school districts employed, say, just 10% of the quantitative talent that shows up annually to the MIT Sloan Sports Analytic Conference looking for Moneyball jobs in sports, they’d have a much stronger ability to anticipate the likely consequences of their various hot new ideas.

http://www.sloansportsconference.com/

True, but think about how nice it would be to be able to be able to assure your children of being able to go to a free school with 30 national merit scholars in each class just by living in the district?

In contrast, the last time I check for all LAUSD schools in the main Los Angeles Basin (i.e., not the San Fernando Valley) there were only 5 National Merit Semifinalists overall:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/national-merit-semifinalists-by-school/

In other words, LAUSD, the second biggest school district in the country, isn’t working very hard to attract the best students. My guess is that large school districts don’t see themselves as locked in a life or death struggle to attract families with good students, while smaller school districts are more likely to feel competitive and thus act competitive.

My impression is that big school districts see themselves as less needing to be competitive than small school districts. As a natural experiment, Los Angeles has two fairly similar suburban areas: the San Fernando Valley to the northwest and the San Gabriel Valley to the northeast The San Fernando Valley is mostly part of the immense Los Angeles Unified School District, while the San Gabriel Valley is mostly small independent school districts.

The San Fernando Valley is ringed by smaller school districts with decent reputations for trying hard to attract young families with decent schools — Los Virgenes, Santa Clarita, Burbank, and Glendale. But public schools in the main part of the vast San Fernando Valley seldom have a good reputation. But LAUSD doesn’t see itself as in a desperate competition with small school districts. It has something like 600,000 students.

In contrast, over the last 40 years, Asian parents have been flocking to various San Gabriel Valley school districts to take them over and reorient them to supporting their children’s ambitions. For example, Arcadia HS, where my cousins went in the 1970s, is now majority Asians and has about 30 National Merit semifinalists per year.

Almost nobody in the Mainland United States is aware of how remarkably horrible Puerto Rican public schools are at getting their students to score anything other than Below Basic on a special Spanish-version of the federal NAEP test that was designed to be as fair as possible to Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-amazingly-horrible-test-scores-of-students-in-puerto-rico/

I’m not shocked by too much, but I was shocked when I discovered these numbers in 2015:

“For example, among Puerto Rican 8th graders tested in mathematics in 2013, 95% scored Below Basic, 5% scored Basic, and (to the limits of rounding) 0% scored Proficient, and 0% scored Advanced. These results were the same in 2011. …

“Puerto Rico’s test scores are just shamefully low, suggesting that Puerto Rican schools are completely dropping the ball. By way of contrast, in the U.S., among black 8th graders, 38% score Basic, 13% score Proficient, and 2% score Advanced. In the U.S. among Hispanic 8th graders, 41% reach Basic, 18% Proficient, and 3% Advanced.”

The Obama Administration went on the warpath against school districts where blacks are suspended more than whites (i.e., virtually every single one in the United States):

Heather Mac Donald assembles the statistics on school discipline here:

Who Misbehaves?
Claims that school discipline is unfairly meted out ignore actual classroom behavior.
Heather Mac Donald
April 6, 2018

https://www.city-journal.org/html/who-misbehaves-15811.html

Washington DC has access to a lot of federal tax revenue, which is presumably why the Constitution doesn’t give it Congressional representation. So, DC has particularly strong incentives for Marion Barry-type local politicians to try to rip off the taxpayers because most of the taxpayers aren’t local.

It’s an interesting question why public school systems tend to be naive at understanding the statistical implications of their various brainstorms, while colleges tend to be pretty machiavellian about how to run, say, admissions.

My impression is that Harvard set a pretty intelligent course for college admissions across the country by quantitatively studying what works and doesn’t work in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Robert Klitgaard’s 1985 book “Choosing Elites” recounts a lot of Harvard’s findings. Most people who work in college admissions don’t seem particularly sharp, but my impression is that there actually is an Inner Party who do understand things. So you don’t see colleges doing really laughably dumb stuff with their admissions policies all that often. Harvard doesn’t, and everybody else keeps an eye on what Harvard does.

In contrast, I don’t think many big school districts have much of a clue how to think statistically about things like test scores, so they are always being surprised when their new policies have the opposite effect of what they had assumed.

Perhaps New York City and a few other huge school districts could create a small but prestigious office of highly educated statistical analysts whose jobs are immune to being fired for political reasons who could be charged with doing moneyball analysis of proposed policies. If NYC took the lead in mandating statistically vetting the likely impact of new policies, it could do the whole country some good over the following generation.

The international PISA test has a problem with students not taking the test. For example, Argentina complained that their terrible scores were do to rounding up a full of 80% of the students who were supposed to take the text while Mexico only lassos something like 63%.

Vietnam aced the PISA partly due to only having maybe 56% of students take the test. In contrast, America is at around 89%, high-scoring Finland around 97%, and the honest burghers of the Netherlands had 101% of expected students sit the PISA.

Texas usually does quite well on the NAEP, while demographically similar California does poorly. I’m not sure why. One reason is Texas usually maxes out the number of students who are excused from taking the NAEP for reasons such as being not very bright, while other states don’t seem to have thought of that ploy as much.

But it could be that Texans really are smarter. Or maybe they just game the NAEP more.

“4) Teachers received almost no support from the school administration. Had sane rules been followed at this high school, students would have been immediately sent to the office for formal punishment for these sorts of offenses I’ve described. However, under such a policy, the office would have been overwhelmed with misbehaving students and probably some of their enraged parents, so the administration solved the problem by forbidding teachers from sending students to the office for anything other than physical violence in the classroom.”

Private high schools tend to use assistant football coaches as professional disciplinarians. They hire guys with necks wider than their heads to be Assistant Deans of Discipline. So the teacher has backup from fellows who enjoy putting punks in their places.

Public schools tend to have much less disciplinary support for teachers. Partly this is for budgetary reasons. But unfortunately it’s also because public schools are constantly being accused of discrimination by people who ought to know better, such as the Obama Administration. The Obamaites declared it a national crisis a few years ago that black students were suspended 3x as often as white students, and blamed racist public school teachers.

So, school system respond by putting roadblocks on kinds of discipline that leave paper trails for the feds to deduce disparate impact from. Teachers are told to handle disciplinary problems themselves and not involve the front office unless it’s a severe problem such as violence against a teacher.

Not surprisingly, this makes life harder for the kind of nice, sensitive teachers who like to think about how to make The Great Gatsby appealing to today’s youth.

Thanks for writing from inside DC schools.

A general observation I have is that public school systems tend to be very poor at modeling the effects of proposed rule changes ahead of time. Public school systems seldom seem to have a lot of talented moneyballer statistical analysts working for them who can explain to the bigshots, OK, but if you change policy X to policy Y, that means Z% fewer students will graduate: are you okay with that?

From reading about the giant Los Angeles Unified School District in the local newspapers, the various leaders are recurrently coming up with pet policy changes, such as requiring graduates to pass more rigorous courses, that have inevitable but apparently wholly unexpected consequences on outcomes like who graduates, which then have to be mitigated by lower level employees such as teachers.

The concept of having some Nate Silver-type statistically model the likely effect of proposed policies ahead of time seems to have seldom occurred to the various leaders.

Last I checked, 23% of students in Puerto Rico went to private schools, which is not quite as high of a percentage as in San Francisco, but still is a lot.

Actor Benicio del Toro is the son of a lawyer in Puerto Rico and his parents sent him to a boarding school in Pennsylvania.

At the other end of the social spectrum, a lot of Puerto Rican kids start each school year in New York in English, then go to school in Puerto Rico in Spanish during the winter, then show up again at their New York school once the weather is nice in the spring. Not surprisingly, this lifestyle doesn’t do much for their test scores.

When I was applying to college in 1975, Stanford was notorious for grade inflation.

And we all know how Stanford has paid a terrible price for its notorious grade inflation ever since.

Oh, wait, Stanford is now pretty much on top of the world?

So maybe grade inflation isn’t a self-destructive practice, at least not if you own, say, 8000 acres in the heart of Silicon Valley?

About a decade ago, James Heckman, the Nobel laureate social scientist at U. of Chicago, studied the real graduation rates and found they were much worse than the reported graduation rates. Heck looked at seven longitudinal studies, such NLSY79, and found that the high school graduation rate fell from about 75% in the late 1960s to about 70% by 2000.

My guess is it stayed low until the economic wipeout of 2008, after which point high school graduation rates went up.

I wrote up Heckman’s study here:

https://www.vdare.com/articles/the-real-dropout-rate-and-why-some-students-should-drop-out-of-school

One possibility would be an Associate High School Diploma for successfully completing tenth grade. This would give the bottom 25% of students a pretty realistic goal to shoot for — kids want to “walk the stage” — and would help them distinguish themselves from the really bad apples. My impression is that the worst students and future criminals tend to drop out in 9th grade (at least at 4 year high schools).

When the economy was strong in 2005-2006, a lot of the more decent Hispanic male students dropped out in 11th or 12th grade to get jobs.

A lot of effort has since been put into keeping them in school and sending them off to start community college. When the economy was terrible, most kids hung around high school. I don’t know what’s happened in the last couple of years as a decent job market has returned. It could be that the cultural shift to completing 12th grade and walking the stage has permanently taken place, or Latinos might go back to dropping out to make $15 an hour. I don’t know.

True story: about 15 years ago I was walking across the Caltech campus and fell in with a crowd prospective students and their parents following a sophomore tour guide.

One of the parents asked the guide: “How hard is Caltech?”

She replied, “Well, when I was a freshman … it was … it was …” And then she broke into tears.

She sobbed for about ten seconds, then smiled wanly and said, “But it’s much better now.”

Honest.

A fair number of people get their GEDs in jail, so James Heckman reports that a lot of employers associate a GED with having been locked up.

Stephen Hunter, the old Washington Post Pulitzer-winning movie reviewer, wrote a 2005 nonfiction book, “American Gunfight,” about the Puerto Rican nationalist conspirators who almost assassinated Harry Truman in 1950. Hunter was pretty impressed with the two gunmen, one of whom died fighting, the other of whom did 25 years and kept his mouth shut the whole time.

My vague hunch is that the US in response to Puerto Rican nationalist terrorism pretty much bought off the caliber of people who might have been the natural leaders of an independent PR. This is a pretty humane way to maintain American imperialism, but it probably has costs as well besides the dollars.

My impression (and I could be wrong), for instance, is that Lin-Manuel Miranda of “Hamilton” comes from a prominent old Nationalist family (thus, he gave a benefit performance of “Hamilton” for a PR terrorist pardoned by Obama — ironically, at the same Chicago theater that the PR nationalist apparently had bombed in the 1970s). But PR Nationalism has been a dead cause for decades, so why hang around PR?

It could be I’m romanticizing in thinking that Puerto Rico ever had much hope of being a self-respecting country, but it’s definitely not today.

A couple of reasons:

– People who don’t like how Puerto Rico is run can hop on a plane to Orlando tomorrow and be done with it. People in Costa Rica can’t do that quite as easily.

– There’s probably more brain drain out of PR than CR. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s NYC political consultant dad, for example, might have made a decent governor of PR, but he’s in NYC. (Also, PR was an agricultural backwater of the Spanish empire compared to Cuba, which, for example, produced the world chess champion in the 1920s, Capablanco (sp?).)

– Politics in PR perpetually revolves around the Big Question of statehood vs. continuation of commonwealth. There’s not much point in local good government questions.

– Costa Rica has to scrape up most of its own revenue itself. PR gets a lot of subsidies from the US in welfare, tax breaks for corporations, and the like, so the standard of living was still quite high (pre-hurricane) relative to the poor governance.

For example, Washington DC’s school system gets a lot of critical media attention. I live 3000 miles away and I could probably talk for 10 minutes about it off the top of my head. There are a lot of high IQ white people living in DC right now with small children who would love to not have to move to the suburbs and not have to pay St. Alban’s tuition, so this is a big topic.

Puerto Rico, in contrast, gets zilch, nada, zippo in the English language press on the mainland. My 2015 blog post about PR’s NAEP scores was just about the first thing on the subject in English other than a few cautiously worded government press releases.

But, regarding Puerto Rico, I think the main reason there appears to be a lot of corruption and ineffectuality in the school system is because nobody really cares about Puerto Rico. It’s not a nation, it’s not a state, they don’t speak English, they don’t vote for President (although they do vote in Presidential primaries), it would seem racist to investigate, etc etc.

America kind of cared about Puerto Rico when Castro’s Cuba was trying to show communism was better than capitalism. But that’s over, so nobody in the US mainland is much interested in keeping PR people from ripping each other off. The Democrats kind of hope the whole place collapses and everybody moves to Orlando and votes Democratic to give Florida’s electoral votes permanently to the Dems. And Republicans are way too dumb to figure out that they have an Electoral College interest in keeping PR functioning.

Thus, there has been almost zero English-language media interest in how awful PR public school students score on the NAEP over the last half-dozen years.

Probably.

Also, the worse the students in a school district, the more the teachers want to do a career transition into administration or downtown staffer jobs where they can finally get away from the little hellions into nice child-free offices full of grownups.

In contrast, last I heard the mother of the Wojciciki Sisters (CEOs of YouTube and 23andMe) is still teaching at Palo Alto HS. Teaching is more of a pleasure in the Palo Alto school district than in many other districts.

It’s not at all uncommon across the country for states or local school districts to (temporarily) implement, or at least announce, extremely stringent high school graduation requirements. For example, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pushed through a requirement that to graduate from high school in California, you had to pass Algebra, Geometry, and, now, Algebra II. After all, who can’t pass Algebra II if they just put a little mental elbow grease into their effort?

Year after year, local school districts delayed implementing the Algebra II graduation requirement for just one more year. Last I heard, LAUSD was finally going to do it, but then I got bored and stopped following the issue.

An awful lot of fantasy rules are passed for making it tougher to graduate from high school, but then are never really implemented because, in truth, there are a fair number of decent kids who try pretty hard but just aren’t very bright, and educators really don’t want to hang the High School Dropout label on them for life.

You should check out how amazingly horrible public school students in Puerto Rico do on a special special Spanish-language version of the federal NAEP test that was redesigned from the ground up to be fair to Puerto Ricans after PR students bombed the first version. And they still do awful:

“For example, among Puerto Rican 8th graders tested in mathematics in 2013, 95% scored Below Basic, 5% scored Basic, and (to the limits of rounding) 0% scored Proficient, and 0% scored Advanced. These results were the same in 2011. …

“Puerto Rico’s test scores are just shamefully low, suggesting that Puerto Rican schools are completely dropping the ball. By way of contrast, in the U.S., among black 8th graders, 38% score Basic, 13% score Proficient, and 2% score Advanced. In the U.S. among Hispanic 8th graders, 41% reach Basic, 18% Proficient, and 3% Advanced.”

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-amazingly-horrible-test-scores-of-students-in-puerto-rico/

One reason is that everybody who can flee the Puerto Rican public schools does so: about 23% of students in PR attend private schools compared to about 10% on the Mainland. But, I suspect, the reason they flee is because Puerto Rican school administrators are ripping off the public: PR spends very little per student on teachers, but spends a lot on administrators. In some especially shifty sounding administrative categories, PR spends more per student than any of the 50 states and less than only … Washington DC.

“The combination of these policies does produce ‘kickbacks,’ but I see this as a side-effect of the above-mentioned policies, not as the goal.”

“Kickbacks” is such a harsh term …

Anyway, my general point is that roughly since the serious press went to war against “conspiracy theories” in the early 1990s when it looked likely that Oliver Stone’s “JFK” might sweep the Oscars, Americans with 3 digit IQs have been indoctrinated with the belief that there are no such things as conspiracies.

In contrast, in Turkey, it’s intellectually prestigious to believe in conspiracies — the Smartest Guy in the Room is not the Turk who best wields Occam’s Razor but the Turk who dreams up the most elaborate conspiracy theory.

Not surprisingly, this difference in mental orientation appears to allow at least one group of Turkish conspirators to sometimes put over on us naive Americans a pretty lowbrow conspiracy involving immigration fraud and the like without many educated Americans noticing what is going on for, broadly speaking, Sapir-Whorf reasons.

We’ve been lectured for the last quarter of a century that only rubes and crazy people like Randy Quaid’s character in “Independence Day” believe in conspiracies, so Americans have a very hard time cognitively engaging with a culture like Turkey’s where conspiring and conspiracy theorizing are socially prestigious activities.

“Which suggests that Dani Rodrick, who you were citing as a source, might not be entirely unbiased.”

No, but Turkish-born Harvard economist Rodrick is super-smart and also well-informed about Turkey. He’s upfront about being the son-in-law of a Kemalist general who was persecuted by Erdogan and Gulen working together a decade or so ago, so I’m quite interested in what he as to say about recent Erdogan vs. Gulen questions. That in 2016 Rodrick has arrived at (more nuanced) versions of what I came up with in 2014, suggests I wasn’t crazy in 2014.

The Gulen charter schools claim their students get high test scores.

Of course, since the Gulenites almost took over the Turkish state by monopolizing the test prep business so that their followers could ace the civil service exams, perhaps somebody in America should look into this a little more.

For example, in Turkey, there’s a sneaking suspicion that the reason young Gulen followers did so well on the police hiring exams was because older Gulen followers within the government were stealing the exams before they were given and leaking them to the Gulen test prep centers.

In contrast, the Gulenites didn’t seem to do as well on the military exams, so they didn’t take over the military. So, after Erdogan used the Gulenite cops to take down Kemalist generals like Dani Rodrik’s father-in-law in various show trials, the Gulenite police tried to take down Erdogan in 2013 by leaking wiretaps of him being a giant crook. Erdogan struck back by turning to some of his now humbled old enemies in the military to give him a non-Gulenite power base to strike back against his former friends in the Islamic Gulen movement.

Or at least that’s one Conspiracy Theory about recent Turkish events.

Here’s Turkish-born Harvard economist Dani Rodrik’s considered opinion on:

“Is the U.S. behind Fethullah Gulen?”

http://www.unz.com/isteve/rodrik-is-the-cia-behind-imam-gulen/

“Whenever I talk with another Turk about the Gulen movement, a question invariably props up: is the CIA behind Gulen? In fact for most Turks this is a rather rhetorical question, with an incontrovertible answer. The belief that Gulen and his activities are orchestrated by the U.S. is as strongly held as it is widespread among Turks of all political coloration – secular or Islamist.

“This is my attempt at providing a reasoned answer to the question. My conclusion in brief: I don’t think Gulen is a tool of the U.S. or has received support from the U.S. for its clandestine operations. But it is possible that some elements within the U.S. national security apparatus think Gulen furthers their agenda, is worth protecting on U.S. soil, and have so far prevailed on other voices in the establishment with different views. …”

Sailer’s comment: One obvious candidate for an American Deep State backer of Gulen is former CIA man Graham Fuller, who also happens to be the former father-in-law of the Boston Marathon-bombing Tsarnaev Brothers’ Uncle Ruslan.

Rodrik goes on:

“Perhaps of more direct interest to the U.S., foreign service officers have long been aware that many Turks have been obtaining visas under false pretenses, with the ultimate aim of ending up as teachers in Gulen’s charter schools. Yet apparently nothing was ever done to stop this flow, nor to hold the movement to account. A ridiculous number of H-1B visas — which require demonstration that no qualified U.S. workers are available — have been issued to Turkish teachers in these schools. One naturally wonders why the U.S. administration never clamped down on the Gulen movement for apparent visa fraud.

“The same question arises with respect to the widespread pattern of financial improprieties that has been uncovered in Gulen’s charter schools. A whistleblower has provided evidence that Turkish teachers are required to kick back a portion of their salary to the movement. The FBI has seized documents revealing preferential awarding of contracts to Turkish-connected businesses. Such improprieties are apparently still under investigation. But the slow pace at which the government has moved does make one suspect that there is no overwhelming desire to bring Gulen to justice.”

For background, here’s my January 1, 2014 article on Gulen, “The Shadowy Imam of the Poconos,” in Taki’s Magazine:

http://takimag.com/article/the_shadowy_imam_of_the_poconos_steve_sailer/print

I realize this Gulen stuff sounds nutty to Americans (to Turks, it sounds like business-as-usual), but it’s quite well-documented by this point.

Here’s a 2017 CBS News article:

“Are some U.S. charter schools helping fund controversial Turkish cleric’s movement?”

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/is-turkish-religious-scholar-fethullah-gulen-funding-movement-abroad-through-us-charter-schools/

I explained back in 2014 how the business model of the Turkish Gulen network of charter schools across the US appears to be based around immigration fraud, kickbacks, self-dealing in contracts, etc:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-economics-of-gulen-cults-american/

For example, the Gulen organization gets a lot of visas for Turkish men who belong to their cult to come to the United States to be employed as charter school teachers in their schools.

Charter schoolteachers aren’t all that well-paid by American standards, but they are very well paid by Turkish standards. The Gulen cult often demands that about 40% of the immigrant teacher’s salary be kicked back in contributions to Gulen.

(By the way, the basis of Gulen’s power in Turkey was cornering the test prep industry. This allowed Gulen to infiltrate his followers into the Turkish police by, oddly enough, scoring high on police civil service tests. Erdogan used Gulen’s cops to take down the anti-Islamist military in various conspiracy trials. Then Gulen and Erdogan clashed, and Gulen tried to take down Erdogan by leaking wire taps of Erdogan complaining, for example, that his house was so stuffed with ill-gotten cash that they were running out room. But then Erdogan went to war on Gulen, especially using the failed 2016 coup attempt to crush the Gulen network in Turkey.)

The FBI was raiding Gulen schools across the country in 2014, hauling off records.

But then that pressure just disappeared.

I can’t prove that the CIA had a talk with the FBI about why foreign policy demands that the Gulenites be allowed to get away with their skimming from local American taxpayers. But it’s a theory that would seem at least worth investigating and rather interesting. But, virtually nobody in America is interested in the tale of this weird Turkish organization being the biggest operator of charter schools in the US.

Contemporary Turkish politics largely consist of giant conspiracies to attribute giant conspiracies to the conspirators’ enemies.

Some of these Turkish conspiracies have echoes in the U.S. For example, the biggest network of public charter schools in the U.S. appears to be run by the Turkish Gulen cult with the CIA’s approval so they can skim a few hundred million dollars per year from local American taxpayers. Why? Because Gulen’s cult would be a plausible alternative government for the U.S. to install in Ankara if anything unfortunate were to happen to Erdogan. So having Gulenites rip off local schoolboards is a lowkey way of funding a big foreign policy contingency.

But, virtually nobody in America, whether pro or anti-conspiracy theories, finds this at all interesting.

The modern concept of “conspiracy theory” emerged out of the JFK and (to a lesser extent) RFK assassinations. (Oddly, there has been remarkably little interest of this kind in the MLK assassination.)

Before the 1960s, the three most famous assassinations — Julius Caesar, Abraham Lincoln, and the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand — each involved sizable conspiracies. Not surprisingly, therefore, on 11/22/63, LBJ immediately guessed a conspiracy by pro-Castro elements, while RFK ordered his top men to look into three possible conspiracies, with the mafia at the top of the list.

“it inspired three rebellions by people pretending to be Nero.”

Impostors played a pretty big role in history until not that long ago when pictures finally became cheap. King Henry VII of England had to fight off two rebellions under the nominal control of impostors pretending to be the poor Princes in the Tower.

Scott writes: “I’ve also watched his videos and find them unwatchable and boring. I don’t know why the book seems so much better – maybe I just respond more to the written word, or maybe he had a really good editor. I would wonder if this is what’s behind the high variance in how people respond to him, except I think a lot of the people who absolutely love him are working off the videos. Weird. It takes all kinds, I guess.”

If Dr. Peterson can wow the 80th to 98th percentiles with his videos and wow Scott with his book, well, maybe he really is something?

It’s not common to be able to do both.

The percentage of Amish who drop out when given a chance to before adult baptism appears to have dropped over the generations. Harpending and Cochran speculated in 2014 that as those less satisfied leave, the Amish have been evolving to become “plainer” (i.e., more satisfied with the Amish life):

http://takimag.com/article/race_of_the_amish_steve_sailer/print#axzz5BHqRM5nD

How much has the field of happiness research actually accomplished over the decades? I’m a big fan of most kinds of social science research, but happiness studies don’t give me a warm feeling like I’ve actually learned anything from them.

How much do different interviewers affect responses to happiness questions? One way to get people to take your interview, for example, is to be charming (i.e., to make them momentarily happy in your presence).

With famous anthropologists, for example, it often seems as if they manage to impress their personalities on the tribes they study. The Yanomamo were the “fierce people” around Napoleon Chagnon, who is a fierce person in general. I bet he’d be a helluva Pop Warner football coach at getting his kids to play fierce.

“the bottleneck for horses is human labour.”

Bryan Ferry, the elegant dandy who was the lead singer of Roxy Music, is the son of a farm worker who was in charge of the pit ponies in a coal mine.

Thanks for doing those jobs.

One thing to keep in mind is that America has a lot of square feet of housing per capita these days, so there is a lot of room under a roof somewhere for people who might not be working as hard as they could.

Seriously, how useful are search engines for building an audience for a high end blog?

My experience: not very. When my platform was Google’s Blogger (up through mid-2014), I got outstanding Search Engine support on Google. Now, in contrast, Google barely notices my existence.

But it doesn’t seem to make much difference in terms of long-term audience because barely any of the flood of searchers Google used to send to my blog stuck around for the long run. I would imagine that Scott’s blog is even more baffling to the average Google user.

Thanks.

How would one go about highlighting long-shot predictions that you don’t think are likely to come true in 2018 but you think people ought to consider?

For example, take Angela Merkel’s “Camp of the Saints” decision in the late summer of 2015. As far as I can tell, nobody that I’ve heard of forecasted that a major European leader would open the door to a million Muslims in 2015, but it happened and likely set off the subsequent Brexit and Trump aftershocks as voters came to see what conventional Establishmentarianism could lead to.

But it took 42 years for Raspail’s dystopian prediction to more or less come true.

Or take Houellebecq’s 2015 dystopian novel “Submission.” What are the generalized predictions in that? That a Muslim political party gets a share of the government in a major European state? That men of the right (like Houellebecq’s Houellebecqian narrator) begin to convert to Islam under the new regime? This second prediction in “Submission” is so out there that the odds of it happening must be tiny. But it’s still a really interesting idea.

When I was suffering panic attacks after being diagnosed with cancer in 1996, a lot of my panic attacks were rather meta: e.g., I’d get worried I would have a panic attack while I was on the airplane and then I’d have a panic attack over the possibility I’d have a panic attack.

Fortunately, Xanax helped quelled the panic attacks. But, interestingly, just carrying the bottle of Xanax around in my pocket soon put an end to the meta-attacks since I knew I could stop a panic attack with Xanax. After a few weeks, I never needed to take the Xanax anymore and after another month I stopped carrying the bottle around.

When I was suffering depression after being diagnosed with cancer in 1996, I found hypnosis quite helpful at improving my mood. I am, by nature, a fairly skeptical person so I hadn’t found previous optimistic pep talks about how I was going to beat this thing terribly plausible or helpful. And that’s a big problem when you have cancer because there’s a lot of work you need to do to get treated, and it’s not at all unlikely that you’ll feel instead like just pulling the covers over your head.

Fortunately, hypnosis lowers one’s resistance to influence. I wrote a specially crafted pep talk for my hypnotist to give me after she had gotten me into a more suggestible state.

At first the sessions improved my mood for a couple of hours, then for the rest of the day, then the rest of the week. After six or eight sessions, my mood problems were over.

In Roman times it wasn’t too hard to sail to India. You sailed to Egypt, crossed over to the Red Sea, sailed down to its opening onto the Indian Ocean (the Aden/Djibouti area), and at a certain time of the year there was a super-steady West wind that pushed boats right to southwest India. It was more work to work your way back west around the Indian Ocean, but the trips were made most years. Rome to India to Rome was, probably, at minimum a 2 year roundtrip, but it wasn’t hugely dangerous.

It seems odd that there wasn’t more Indian cultural influence on the Mediterranean world.

One question is whether narratives are getting more childishly Good Guys vs. Bad Guys in their morality.

For example, the current Oscar frontrunner, Del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” is set at about a 6-year-old’s level of moral sophistication. There’s the good Coalition of the Fringes versus the Evilest Evil White Evil Male of all time (played by Michael Shannon).

And this is in a movie where enormous efforts were expended to get just the right shades of green in every single shot. But, apparently, nobody made clear to Del Toro just how puerile and stereotyped his screenplay was.

A lot of current views on the Civil War reflect retconning by New York and Los Angeles media people who can’t imagine that any of their ancestors might have supported the racist and anti-Semitic South.

But I would guess that Scott is right that Christianity is a big deal. For example, the Romans were just different in values from the Italians and my guess is Christianity played a big role. The Romans tended to have the moral values of, say, NFL team owners, which is fine but kind of limited for an entire culture. Italians might be less effectual than Romans, but it’s easier for me to identify with their more complex if contradictory moral values.

Right, the bad guys are really bad in “King Lear.” “Lear” is a fairly Christian play by Shakespeare’s standards, even though (or because) it’s set in pre-Christian times.

One issue is stories for children vs. stories for adults. Star Wars, Harry Potter, etc. were always stories for children. So their moral structures are unsophisticated and black-white.

Other stories have stayed stories for adults (e.g., Gone with the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler aren’t particularly nice people, but they are sexy survivors, which appealed enormously to adult women in the 1930s).

Other stories probably started out for adults and then became kids’ classics. My impression is that Homer’s tales started out marketed to local royal courts (i.e., the most sophisticated audiences available at the time) but by Socrates time had migrated down to the main texts of schoolboys. (Gulliver’s Travels has undergone a similar path even though the book is a highbrow satire, kind of like a Pynchon or David Foster Wallace work.)

In the Republic, Socrates / Plato is objecting less to the elites indulging in Homer as commoners and boys. (Although the Republic tends to avoid hypocritical copouts and take reformist ideas too broadly and literally.)

English nationalism was a thing from, perhaps the 900s onward. There’s a certain amount of evidence that the rest of Europe organized over time on a nation-sized scale (rather than larger or smaller units) because of the threat posed by the unified, aggressive, indeed piratical England.

The territorial nation state, however, competed for legitimacy with dynasticism. For example, the English kings during the 100 years war were constantly invading France, but they didn’t see themselves as doing something wrong by invading another country. They saw themselves as upholding their hereditary claims to various feudal possessions, some of which happened to be on the mainland.

Joan of Arc articulated the more modern view in telling the English to go home to their own island. Shakespeare, by the way, couldn’t do much with Joan even though she is one of the most electrifying characters in recorded history, because he was an English nationalist and she was a French nationalist.

Hebrew/Jewish views of the Amalekites are probably relevant to the historical question. From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalek#Judaic_views_of_the_Amalekites

In Judaism, the Amalekites came to represent the archetypal enemy of the Jews. In Jewish folklore the Amalekites are considered to be the symbol of evil. This concept has been used by some Hassidic rabbis (particularly the Baal Shem Tov) to represent atheism or the rejection of God. Nur Masalha, Elliot Horowitz and Josef Stern suggest that Amalekites have come to represent an “eternally irreconcilable enemy” that wants to murder Jews, and that Jews in post-biblical times sometimes associate contemporary enemies with Haman or Amalekites, and that some Jews believe that pre-emptive violence is acceptable against such enemies.[17]

During the Purim festival, the Book of Esther is read in the commemoration of the saving of the Jewish people from Haman (considered to be an Amalekite) who leads a plot to kill the Jews. On the basis of Exodus 17:14, where the Lord promised to “blot out the name” of Amalek, it is customary for the audience to make noise and shout whenever “Haman” is mentioned, in order to desecrate his name.

Extermination of the Amalekites[edit]

Of the 613 mitzvot (commandments) followed by Orthodox Jews, three refer to the Amalek: to remember what the Amalekites did to the Israelites, not to forget what the Amalekites did to Israelites, and to destroy the Amalekites utterly.

I’ve read that Genghis Khan always felt that his conquests were morally justified by the bad behavior of his enemies.

Humans are pretty good at rationalizing.

Plato in “The Republic” complained about the amorality of Homer’s works, especially the behavior of the gods. He wanted only morally edifying selections from literature to be allowed in his ideal city.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) represents Sioux County, Iowa, which comes in very high ranking on a number of positive metrics, such as best upward mobility for working class children in Raj Chetty’s study, also has the best soil in the Midwest, as measured by highest price paid for farmland (up to $20,000 per acre in 2013).

One possible angle on this difficult question is the matter of time: racial profiling is more reasonable under time pressure.

For example, your daughter’s car breaks down at night in a bad neighborhood and her phone is dead. She can walk either north or south to get help. North of her she can see six African-American teens loitering on the corner, while south of her she can see six Laotian-American teens loitering on the corner. Which way should she go? Is she wrong to use race as a major input in her decision-making?

In contrast, a parole board has time to research in some depth into individual characteristics, so putting a high value on race would seem more questionable.

From what I’ve heard, Google CEO Sundar Pichai played Pontius Pilate on Damore. He really wouldn’t have wanted to fire Damore, but Youtube boss Susan Wojcicki, who was Sergey and Larry’s landlady back in the 20th Century and then was Sergey’s sister-in-law for awhile, had her feelings hurt when one of her five children asked her about Damore’s memo, so Damore had to go. (Susan sister Anne, who used to be married to Sergey before taking up with slugger Alex Rodriguez, is the CEO of 23andMe, which is pretty funny when you think about it. I’m not sure, however, that Susan ever got the joke.)

And, yeah, reports of this kind of high-estrogen soap opera lowered my estimate of the chance that Google could successfully build self-driving cars.

One interesting question is whether race adds predictive power incremental to even a host of other factors. Across much of the social sciences, race remains a powerful factor that makes forecasts more accurate.

It’s evident, for example, that NFL teams use race as a factor in addition to non-racial factors in determining who to play at cornerback. (Blacks have filled all 64 starting cornerback jobs since 2003.) Whites and Polynesians who would appear to have what it takes to play cornerback in the NFL tend to get routed to playing safety instead. (Bill Belichick, perhaps the all time smartest NFL coach, used Julian Edelman at cornerback at times, but eventually determined he was most valuable at receiver.)

Actually, self-reporting of race often works pretty well. It’s usually good enough for government work.

On the other hand, if you let people who self-report as Asian out of prison faster than people who self-report as black, eventually the jailbirds will figure it out and take steps accordingly.

Ilya,

You seem to be reluctant to spell out what you mean by “bias” and “discrimination” even though you seem offended that other commenters aren’t on the same wavelength as you as to whatever it is you mean. Could you illuminate us by copy and pasting from something else you’ve written what exactly it is you mean?

I would distinguish between trying to prevent crime before it happens and trying to punish crime after it happens. I would be more sympathetic to using race, as in “racial profiling,” to prevent crime. I’m wary of using race as a factor in determining punishment for crime.

The problem is that the two issues overlap in questions like determining when to let a prisoner out of prison, which has both a punishment for a past infraction aspect and a prevention of future crime aspect.

That, say, an Asian Indian-American in prison for a violent crime would be less likely statistically to commit another violent crime than an African-American with the same history of violence would suggest that it would be a statistically more efficient use of prison resources to let the Indian out before the black.

On the other hand, the idea of punishing one individual more than another individual due to racial differences seems distasteful and not in sync with the best principles of Anglo-American jurisprudence. I don’t really know how to resolve the two feelings.

Now I’m going to have a nightmare over your memory!

Have you looked at pictures of Baltimore City’s elected leadership and its police force?

In college, I stopped going to my 8am Business Law II class because the lecturer was incoherent. After a month or so of not going, I happened to wake up early one morning, so I dropped in. They were handing out pieces of paper. “Wow, this lecturer has decided to print up outlines for his lectures. That’s a big improvement,” I thought.

But it turned out to be a test I hadn’t studied for, just like in the classic nightmare.

I still got a 91 on the test (although the average score was 93).

It was a bad class.

Disney continues to invest a lot of money in Mickey Mouse, so I don’t have a problem with their keeping intellectual property rights in their creation. In contrast, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s estate isn’t investing in The Great Gatsby (published 1925), so it would seem reasonable for that book to enter the public domain.

“New study finds more evidence that small class size improves test scores.”

My impression is that private schools generally spend their higher funds per student more on smaller class sizes than on, say, higher quality teachers. But I could be wrong. This would be an interesting subject to research.

My son won a scholarship to an extremely good (i.e., extremely well-funded) private high school in part due to them putting a high value on classroom participation because they only had 15 in a class.

In general, I think education research should pay more attention to private schools. Generally speaking, it’s hard to prove statistically that anything works in public schools, but studying private schools might be helpful. My impression is that private schools tend to believe in small class sizes, and the people running the best private schools aren’t stupid.

I went through local newspaper reports for 2017 homicide totals in the 51 biggest cities in the country and Baltimore had the second highest homicide rate (after St. Louis) last year, so apparently somebody is doing something wrong in Baltimore:

http://takimag.com/article/president_trumps_murder_report_card_steve_sailer#axzz54u0kGUCA

Thanks. Fun stuff.

Much as we joke about Magic Dirt vs. Tragic Dirt, differences in soil quality really do play a role in the world. Tanzania has lousier soil on average than Belgium. Indeed, a lot of the tropical world has fairly poor soil. A combination of geologically old terrain and torrential tropic rains tend to lower the crop-growing ability of soils (except in river deltas).

Yes, Judge Crater was the paradigmatic case of disappearance in mid-20th Century American culture. Old “New Yorker” comic essays by the likes of James Thurber or Robert Benchley would often mention Judge Crater having disappeared without feeling any need to fill you in on any details about who he was, the way I reference the OJ Simpson case without bothering to explain who OJ was.

“Did you know that in Puerto Rico, you can just walk into a pharmacy and get any non-scheduled drug you want without a doctor’s prescription? (source: my father; I have never heard anyone else talk about this, and nobody else even seems to think it is interesting enough to be worth noting).”

I’ve been pointing out for decades that the vast increase in the number of baseball sluggers from the Caribbean may have something to do with how easy it is to get steroids over the counter back home. For example, here’s a movie review from 2009:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/all-star-break/

The stereotype of Caribbean ballplayers used to be “wiry middle-infielder,” but not anymore.

Clearly you have a problem in situations where your reader is, say, 15 years old and has siblings who are, say, 10. There are virtually no 10 year old SSC readers, I’m guessing. Another issue is that the more years you are cognitively mature the more chance you have to stumble upon SSC.

What if you just restricted your analysis to SSC readers over a certain age such as 35 or 40? Most of their siblings will be mentally mature and have had a chance to discover SSC.

Another idea might be that primogeniture would mold people in certain directions, either culturally or genetically, or it might mold the culture in ways that feed back to the individual. In Britain, the oldest son, who would inherit the land, was expected to be prudent and conventional about property, but daring with his life in defense of the social order.

Of course, keep in mind that most aristocratic younger sons were descended from long lines of first sons. For example, Mr. Winston Churchill was legally a commoner (and thus served in the House of Commons, to the benefit of his career), although his paternal grandfather was a duke.

In the Hollywood, there were relatively few brother pairs of filmmakers (frauteurs) until the Coen Brothers. I suspect they have chosen a number of strategies to minimize sibling rivalry, such as not encouraging the press to think of them as separate personalities. (When my son was in college, the Coens came to an assembly to be given an award; the students were amazed that they came in separate limos from separate directions; the thought that the Coens lived in separate houses had never occurred to the kids.) Since the Coens (or perhaps the Dardennes in Europe), brother acts have become fairly common in making movies.

In contrast, rock star brothers have a history of getting along badly (Everlys, Davies, Fogertys, the Gallaghers, etc.) The Van Halens seem to get along okay.

That was a big issue in Frank Sulloway’s birth order book in the 1990s. It was important to Sulloway’s theory, for example, for him to categorize Hitler as a first born (IIRC), but reading about Hitler’s family tree makes my head hurt with its complexity. Reading up on the Hitler family on Wikipedia, it appears that Hitler was the third oldest child of his father’s third wife, but his mother’s two older children died young, so was for most of his life he was his mother’s oldest living child, but his father’s third oldest living child.

Personally, in researching this topic, I would discard from my data complicated cases like Hitler’s family origin and focus upon simple nuclear families.

My impression is that there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence for the hypothesis that first borns / only children tend to to be both conventional and achievers. For example, I recall reading as a child about 40 or 50 years ago that something like 22 of the first 23 astronauts were first borns or only children.

Whether the stereotype about first borns is true, I don’t know.

But I haven’t heard all that much evidence for the opposite idea that first borns tend to be unconventional free spirits. That doesn’t seem to be a stereotype at all.

I reviewed “Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives” by Frank Sulloway for National Review in 1996:

https://www.amazon.ca/gp/customer-reviews/R226WB0UOTYD0K/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0679758763#R226WB0UOTYD0K

I noticed that there were all sorts of complex situations that complicated Sulloway’s data. For instance, you can be your father’s young childest and your mother’s oldest child, or vice-versa.

For example, Hitler’s family situation defies easy categorization:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_family#Father_of_Alois_Hitler

Sulloway, who didn’t lack confidence, crammed Hitler into one of his categories.

The leftist student uprising in May 1968 in Paris scared President De Gaulle into surreptitiously fleeing to West Germany, but PM Pompidou retrieved him. The Gaullists then bribed the Communist working class with pay raises into abandoning the bourgeois radical students.

This turn of events was eye-opening for leftist intellectuals like Foucault.

How much of a role did Foucault’s sadomasochistic urges play a role in his theorizing?

Ship of Fools?

How can they afford that?

Here’s one way to have a forecasting tournament that would be pretty exciting. Pit two celebrity forecasters, e.g., Scott versus Philip Tetlock or Nate Silver, against each other. The really interesting event would be at the beginning when decide who will bet on what. Give them a list of 100 forecasts for 2018 drawn up by a neutral party. Let them bid against each other to see who would go further out on a limb on each question.

For example, say that both agree that the Democrats will pick up seats in the 2018 House election. Scott bids that he bets the Democrats will pick up at least 30 seats. His opponent counters with the Democrats picking up at least 35 seats. Scott counters with at least 38 seats. His opponent thinks about one-upping this bet, but then decides to let Scott have it: if the Democrats pick up 38 or more seats, Scott wins; 37 or fewer and his opponent wins.

Alternatively, the third party could propose a bet over whether the Democrats will pick up at least 30 seats. Scott bids that he’ll take that bet with a 60% probability. His opponent offers 65%. Scott counters with 68% and his opponent lets him have it.

Thanks for all comments.

Of 50% predictions, I got 5 right and 3 wrong, for a score of 62%
Of 60% predictions, I got 14 right and 8 wrong, for a score of 64%
Of 70% predictions, I got 8 right and 5 wrong, for a score of 62%
Of 80% predictions, I got 16 right and 2 wrong, for a score of 89%
Of 90% predictions, I got 24 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 96%
Of 95% predictions, I got 8 right and 1 wrong, for a score of 89%
Of 99% predictions, I got 4 right and 0 wrong, for a score of 100%

This is quite a bit like how NFL field goal kickers are evaluated. E.g. Greg Zuerlein made 6 of 7 field goal attempts from 50 yards or further, 12 of 12 from 40 to 49, 11 of 12 from 30-39, 8 of 8 from 20-29, and 1 of 1 from 10-19 yards:

Player Team PAT FG 0-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50+ Lg Pts
Greg Zuerlein LA 44/46 38/40 1/1 8/8 11/12 12/12 6/7 56 158

NFL field goal kickers’ stats look strikingly like Scott’s predictions.

Nobody seems exactly sure how to weight placekickers’ performances, however.

There isn’t much interest in the media over who is the best NFL placekicker, in part because field goal percentages are so extremely high.

One problem that keeps kickers from becoming famous celebrities is that they don’t take many longshot kicks from beyond a point where they have about a 50% chance of making it. In contrast, way back in 1970 placekicker Tom Dempsey was sent out on the last play of the game to attempt a 63 yard field goal. The coach had gotten confused about where the ball was and later admitted he wouldn’t have sent Dempsey out if he’d known. But Dempsey who was born with no toes on his kicking foot, made the 63 yarder to win the game. This remained a record for longest field goal in the NFL until only a few years ago. Dempsey, unlike most placekickers, was famous.

Similarly, this kind of calibration forecasting doesn’t get much attention because Scott isn’t attempting any 63 yarders. In fact, he argues that he logically can’t make a prediction with less than a 50% chance of coming true. This tends to take a lot of the excitement out of reading about his impressive results.

“About 1-2% of people will get Parkinson’s if they live long enough. If Adderall increases that risk 60%, then presumably it could cause a 1% absolute increase in risk.”

Sounds like a certain beloved former TV and movie star who made his best movie in the mid-1980s by staying up all night after appearing in his hit TV show all day.

What are some of the cultural effects of amphetamines?

The cultural effects of LSD and marijuana on, say, famous 1960s musicians have been discussed endlessly. Amphetamines, however, don’t have as extensive of a literature. For example, I only recently realized that a big reason late 1970s British bands tended to play faster than American bands is because British working class kids had been heavy into amphetamines since WWII.

Scott, Here’s a pretty good book:

“An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood”
Paperback – August 8, 1989
by Neal Gabler

https://www.amazon.com/Empire-Their-Own-Invented-Hollywood/dp/0385265573

The title alone suggests that Jews ought to engage not just in self-congratulation over Hollywood successes (such as fighting off challenges from the rest of the world’s film and TV industries, leaving America economically supreme in entertainment), but also in some soul-searching over less admirable aspects of Hollywood culture, such as how attractive young people are treated by powerful people in Hollywood.

I’m sure you could say much the same about the genocide of whites in Haiti in the early 1800s, but that’s not considered a decent reason to avoid all objective study, much less criticism, of whites as a race and an ethnicity.

“I think it’s fair to say that there is not a ton of overlap between “vocal feminists” and “strong evopsych believers”.”

But feminist women are still products of evolution so their feelings tend to follow the findings of evolutionary psychology even if reject the findings for ideological reasons.

America had a giant to-do over sexual harassment in 1991 when the Democrats tried to use it to stop Clarence Thomas from getting on the Supreme Court. It then took a mere 26 additional years for the ace reporters of the mainstream media to get the goods on Harvey Weinstein, who only happened to have his hands on 341 Oscar nominations and be pretty much the main man connecting the Clintons to Hollywood.

Harvey Weinstein was, in New York and Los Angeles media circles, extremely famous since about the release of “Sex, Lies, and Videotape” in 1989, 28 years ago. He has been the single most prominent figure in Academy Awards Season for the last 25+ years. His close ties to the Clintons made him a personality in DC media circles since 1992. The most famous movie stars in the world all know Harvey and have opinions on him. He shows up as a lightly fictionalized character in “Entourage” and other movies and shows.

And yet, every serious press investigation into him got stifled until 2017.

I’m interested in the Patel Motel Cartel. I first read about it perhaps 30 years ago, and welcome updates. But … people don’t get hot under the collar and/or demand to know why in the world you’d be interested in Patels and motels when you mention it, the way well-trained Americans get “Crimestop” flashing in their heads when you mention Jewish disproportionate representation in the really influential jobs.

The full scope of Jewish achievement in American life was summarized in 1995 by Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University:

“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.”

80% is too high. One commenter here suggested 34% based on an NYT list of accused. And some of the accused, such as Matthew Weiner of Mad Men fame and, perhaps, Al Franken, seem relatively innocent to me (there is still only one accusation against Weiner after several weeks and the Franken stuff seems pretty minor to me), Yet, at least the NYT list is a start.

But clearly Jews are disproportionately represented in the current scandals by an order of magnitude or more

For example, the central figure, Harvey Weinstein, called a former prime minister of Israel to put him in touch with an Israeli deep state firm called Black Cube to help him intimidate into silence the 91 people on Harvey’s Enemies List. That’s pretty funny.

As Larry David implied, if nobody publicly criticizes Jews for stereotypical (i.e., statistically accurate) tendencies toward certain types of bad behavior, why would they feel much need to do better? Harvey Weinstein, for example, behaved like a completely stereotypical Jewish movie mogul for 30 years, and was almost totally shielded from public criticism for 29.8 of those years.

Human beings don’t like criticism and naturally try to silence it, but on the whole criticism is good for us.

“I’m sure there are statistics out there somewhere, but why would anyone care?”

Because we are constantly told by the respectable media that White Privilege explains the over-representation of whites in good jobs, but nobody ever is allowed to make the analogous argument that Jewish Privilege would therefore explain the extreme over-representation of Jews in those same jobs. (See the #OscarsSoWhite campaign of recent years for a comic example.)

If Jewish intellectuals and journalists were regularly confronted in respectable forums with questions about the evident, Jewish Privilege, then they might not be as aggressive in pushing the White Privilege storyline. But they’ve managed to rule out such questions so that most gentiles feel Crimestop descending like a fog on their brains whenever anyone is so rude as to mention it.

None of these starlets who played butt-kicking babes in Weinstein’s Tarantino movies seemed to be able to kick Harvey’s butt.

Funny how that works.

There haven’t been too many surprises in the names revealed so far: pretty much everybody who is interested in Hollywood gossip across the country had heard that Spacey was kind of an out of control gay back in the last century. There was a 1997 article about Spacey in Esquire or GQ that started with the reporter’s mom telling him that all the ladies at her retirement home in Florida knew Spacey was gay.

Weinstein? Ratner? Toback? Toback was notoriously documented to be a public nuisance to women back in the 1980s.

Part of what’s going on is that journalists are recycling old stories and following the connections. For example, Toback and Ratner are part of a string of lecherous buddies that includes Warren Beatty, Bob Evans, Russell Simmons, and Roman Polanski. So it’s pretty easy for journalists to follow the connections once they get the okay to do so. (So far, Beatty and Evans haven’t been called out.)

Right. Women get pregnant. That makes male-on-female a bigger deal.

Right. Various journalists have worked on Weinstein exposes over the decades, but nothing much was allowed to make it to the press until recently. Tina Brown explained how Weinstein expensively corrupted journalists to keep his misdeeds covered up:

http://takimag.com/article/the_overlord_of_oscar_bait_steve_sailer/print#axzz50O88CZZy

Wikipedia generally lists the ethnic ancestries of celebrities in the first few paragraphs. Most celebrities have generally explained their ancestries in interviews, so it’s public knowledge.

There are also numerous Jewish websites devoted to evaluating how Jewish celebrities are. And Jewish publications like the Forward and the Tablet tend to be pretty forward about the subject.

There’s a lot of data out there if anybody is interested. For example, humorist Joel Stein didn’t have much trouble coming up with the data for his 2008 column in the L.A. Times: “Who Runs Hollywood? C’mon”

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/dec/19/opinion/oe-stein19

But most gentiles have gotten the sense that this is the single most radioactive topic in contemporary America so don’t dare be interested in it.

Another aspect of the gay man hitting on underage boy versus lady schoolteacher hitting on underage boy student comparison is that the kind of boys that appeal to, say, James Levine are likely to be more sensitive and emotional than the kind of boys that appeal to a Mary Kay Letourneau. Maybe I’m completely wrong about assuming that that the 13 year old guys who sleep with their teachers tend to be 13 year old Adam Sandlers like in the movie comedy “That’s My Boy,” but I bet the teenage classical musician wannabes that Levine groomed for his gay classical music cult tend to be depressive and self-doubting and more likely to me messed up by child molestation than the precociously masculine guys who sleep with their lady teachers.

Spacey, for example, drunkenly hit on a lot of straight adult guys in bars:

http://takimag.com/article/hollywood_blacklist_david_cole/print#axzz50O88CZZy

That’s obnoxious, but not really a big deal compared to his hitting on underage kids, even if they turned out to be gay.

The homosexual cases like Spacey and Levine that have made the news involve underage or nearly underage kids, which seems worse than, say, what a lot of the heterosexual men have been accused of.

It’s likely that there are a number of other entertainment/arts industry scandals involving big shot men and underage boys coming up.

“Under what common circumstances have Catholics left girls alone with priests?”

I don’t think there’s that much paranoia about priests being alone with girls on occasion. That Catholic priests were supposedly raping females in the confessional was a big Protestant Reformation tale, but it wasn’t a big deal to Catholics.

I know this will be dismissed as cognitively crude, but could somebody help me out by giving some famous examples of female-on-male sexual harassment? What men are famous victims of female sexual harassment? I know it would be Anecdotal Data, but I’m scratching my head trying to come up with a list …

Joseph and Pharaoh’s Wife from the Old Testament?
Did Lot’s daughters sexually harass their dad?
Did Norma Desmond sexually harass Joe Gillis in “Sunset Boulevard?”

Help me out here, please, better understand what we are talking about by providing some examples.

The high rate of domestic violence among lesbians is often attested to but I’ve never heard a wholly convincing explanation for it.

“Catholic priest sexual abuse, by the way, was directed at children of both genders. It doesn’t matter in the slightest whether the priests were gay or not, what matters is abuse of power and pedophilia.”

That’s The Narrative all right. I remember a little sermon in “Spotlight” just like that.

Unfortunately, it’s more misleading than informative. In reality, most of the priest scandals involved gay men.

Mandatory celibacy is tough on a man. It’s a lonely life. That’s why most other religions don’t demand it of their religious leaders. And that’s why the Catholic church had so many more sex scandals than Protestant and Jewish sects. Being a Catholic priest was less and less an appealing career for straight men, so they let in a lot of gays, some of whom got lonely and slipped up, often while drunk.

By the way, as far as I can tell, there wasn’t much of the brutal Jerry Sandusky-style rape that people imagine in the priest scandals. Most of the perps were gentle gay men, not linebacker coaches, so the sex acts were more on the groping end of the spectrum. (The James Levine scandals so far also seem not quite as bad as you might think.)

“And the ethnic group is already overrepresented in high-profile people, but it’s hard to say by exactly how much.”

It’s funny how the news media have published tons of statistics about how whites are over-represented in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street, but the statistical question of Jewish representation in those three industries remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

It’s almost as if the reason nobody knows much is because everybody knows you aren’t supposed to know much.

My guess is that if Hillary had won, then we wouldn’t be seeing all these revelations against key men in the most pro-Democratic industries. Weinstein, the key figure in all this, was a huge Clinton supporter and if his candidate had become president, that probably would have intimidated his victims for another 4 or 8 years. But with the Clintons washed up and people fearing them and their friends less these days, the dam has burst.

Keep in mind that the Clintons and Hollywood have been interconnected at covering up “bimbo eruptions” at least since early 1992 when the Clintons hired Hollywood private eye Anthony Pellicano to get dirt on Gennifer Flowers.

Pellicano’s specialty was bribing phone company employees to wiretap the victims of powerful men in the entertainment industry so they could be blackmailed into silence. He’s currently getting close to getting out of prison. The feds have his wiretapped files, but he has refused to give up the password. It would be interesting to know who is going to pay him off for his omerta when he walks out the door of prison.

Hollywood brought some semi-instant karma on itself by giving its Best Picture Oscar 20 months ago to “Spotlight,” a decent but minor movie about the Catholic priest boy-bothering scandals at a time when Hollywood was sitting on tons of scandals and using its power to manipulate the press to keep most of them hidden.

Has there been an increase in the number of women schoolteachers having affairs with underage boy pupils?

I can recall the first massively publicized case in the 1990s involving Mary Kay Letourneau (whose father was Republican Congressman and right wing third party candidate for President in 1972 John Schmitz).

But now they seem pretty common. Were they just covered up before editors discovered how much readers enjoy reading about them? Or has there been a cultural change of some sorts generating more of this odd behavior?

Seinfeld co-creator Larry David did something during his Saturday Night Live monologue last month that is almost unknown in 21st-century America: He engaged in Jewish self-criticism in front of gentiles:

“A lot of sexual harassment stuff in the news, and I couldn’t help but notice a very disturbing pattern emerging, which is that many of the predators, not all, but many of them are Jews….

“I don’t like when Jews are in the headlines for notorious reasons. I want “Einstein Discovers the Theory of Relativity,” “Salk Cures Polio.” What I don’t want? “Weinstein Took It Out.””

Not surprisingly, David’s violation of the contemporary rule—Don’t joke about the Jews—was not well received.

http://takimag.com/article/curb_your_self_awareness_steve_sailer/print#ixzz50MoEGPXZ

Pederasty seems to be more common in the West at high levels of civilizational accomplishment, such as in ancient Athens or in British upper class educational institutions or in elite levels of Imperial Germany before 1914. Something similar might be true for samurai Japan.

On the other hand, pederasty is common among Afghan warlords.

Pedophilia is sexual attraction to prepubescent children of either sex. Pederasty is homosexual activity with post-pubescent male youths.

See Plato’s “Symposium” for a long salute to pederasty.

The currently-breaking James Levine scandal involving America’s top opera conductor running a sort of pederastic cult among aspiring teenage male musicians would seem pretty familiar to ancient Athenians.

Not many of the Catholic priest scandals involved actual pedophilia, but The Narrative explains it that way to distract from most of the perpetrators being lonely and often alcoholic gay men with fairly normal homosexual desires.

Yeah, it’s kind of like lady schoolteachers going to jail for statuatorily raping 8th grade boys in their class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhEfsx3W9aI

It strikes most people as less like the Jerry Sandusky case and more like the Adam Sandler-Andy Samberg movie “That’s My Boy” in which Sandler is estranged from his 14-year-younger son Samberg, the product of an affair with his middle school teacher.

In other words, most people see the effect on the boy as being pretty funny. My vague impression is that most boys who sleep with their female teachers tend to be macho, mature for their years, and crude (i.e., Sandler-like), and that they aren’t all that likely to be psychologically damaged by this.

But I could be wrong about all this.

It looks like the dam might finally be bursting on years of gay pederasty harassment rumors this week with top opera conductor James Levine. And today, director Bryan Singer got fired from the Freddie Mercury biopic.

These cases will probably get redefined from “pederasty” to “pedophilia” in The Narrative, however, as with the Catholic priest scandals.

“Under Jewish law, “informing,” giving gentile authorities information about a fellow Jew injurious to him, was a crime.”

Similarly, the Anti-Defamation League was upset at Larry David for mentioning in his Saturday Night Live monologue that a lot of the Harvey Weinstein-type sexual harassers in the news were Jewish.

The Amish are Anabaptists so they don’t baptize children. Teens can leave.

What the Amish really don’t like is adults who have chosen to go through adult baptism then breaking the rules.

Here’s my 2014 write-up of the Cochran-Harpending theory that the Amish have been breeding themselves for the last ten generations to be more “plain.”

http://takimag.com/article/race_of_the_amish_steve_sailer/print

“One little-admitted but much-worried-about justification for mass incarceration in our society is the concern that some people are just so naturally violent that, left in the outside world, they would offend again and again until they died.”

Scott asks: What happened to career criminals and basically defective anti-social pests? Old time legal systems seem to exist to adjudicate difficult cases in which both sides had some support.

Here’s an anecdote: NFL star Marvin Harrison, long Peyton Manning’s favorite receiver, retired and opened a bar in the slum where he grew up. A local career criminal who’d been a plague in the neighborhood for a long time started causing trouble for the new investor.

After awhile, the bad guy was dead. Most of the citizenry and the police didn’t seem to be in any hurry whatsoever to arrest anybody. But they also didn’t act like it was a mystery who did it.

Eventually, Harrison was elected to the NFL Hall of Fame in 2016.

http://www.philly.com/philly/sports/eagles/20150130_Marvin_Harrison_a_Hall_finalist__slaying_victim_s_kin_still_seek_answers.html

So maybe that might give us a clue about what happened to bad guy pests: a local hero would come back from the wars and after awhile the bad guy pest was dead. And few felt this was the kind of thing that needed to be adjudicated.

Of course, in this case, like so many others, the neighborhood pest has surviving family members who are sore about his death.

“In the first, Francis Galton discovered that some people didn’t have visual imagination. They couldn’t see anything in their “mind’s eye”, they couldn’t generate internal images. None of these people knew there was anything “wrong” with them. They just assumed that everyone who talked about having an imagination was being metaphorical, just using a really florid poetic way of describing that they remembered what something looked like.”

I was told by a fellow who was a grad student under heavyweight psychologist Leon Kamin (co-author of “Not In Our Genes” with Lewontin and Rose) that he didn’t really, when you got down to it, believe other people had visual imagination. He felt they were just kidding or being metaphorical. (I’m not saying this was Kamin’s public view, just the impression he gave in private conversation.) Kamin himself had no visual imagination but had prodigious text and numeric processing skills such as being able to multiply large numbers in his heads=.

The tricks for creating the realistic novel and then the realistic movie (e.g., Gone With the Wind) took a lot of work to come up with.

Edward Said’s 1978 book of literary criticism “Orientalism” was an influential milestone in postmodernism as an intellectual creed.

Said was ostensibly writing about the Middle East (i.e., “the Orient” in European rather than American usage). But he loudly announced he wasn’t going to write in his book about the “territory” of the Middle East, giving excuses such as that it was all very diverse and hard to sum up. (My suspicion: he found the reality of the Middle East depressing.) Instead, he devoted his book to a critique of the “map” of the Middle East created by European writers like Flaubert (whom he found more stimulating than actual Middle Easterners), implying that the biases in their maps had created the power imbalance that allowed Westerners to gain so much power over the Middle East rather than vice-versa.

I have to give Said a lot of credit: I think he intentionally and successfully did a fair amount of damage to his Arab people’s hereditary enemies (such as the Franks and the Jews) by insinuating this self-destructive way of thinking into their universities, such as Columbia.

Right. Postmodernism keeps getting reinvented. I’m remember when critics were enthusing over Woody Allen’s postmodern fourth wall-breaking like pulling Marshall McLuhan out from behind a poster to tell the loudmouth guy he doesn’t understand McLuhanism in “Annie Hall.” And Woody would say he was just imitating 1940s Bob Hope movies.

And Bob probably got the idea from some vaudeville act.

And so on.

Palestinian-American literary critic Edward Said, author of “Orientalism,” was an important figure in the rise of the postmodernism. I find him a rather sympathetic figure:

http://takimag.com/article/the_vengeance_of_edward_said_steve_sailer/print#axzz4wlrM5yr9

Ironically, the English novel started out rather postmodernist in the 18th Century. For example, Fielding’s “Tom Jones” (1751) plays a lot of late 20th Century games with the narration and Sterne’s “Tristam Shandy” (1762) is even more convoluted and self-aware.

The modernist third person objective novel with an impersonal reliable narrator was largely a social construction of the 19th Century that finally faded in the later 20th Century.

Take care.

Only 6% of Puerto Rican public school students score above the lowest of the four levels, Below Basic. Hispanic public school students in the US score about an order of magnitude better.

23% of students attend private school in Puerto Rico, compared to about 10% in the 50 states, so that’s one reason, but …

To focus on Puerto Ricans in the US, you can look at Hispanic NAEP scores in, say, Connecticut, which is heavily Puerto Rican.

Puerto Rican parents in the Northeast are notorious for yanking their kids out of school when the weather turns cold and then showing up again in the spring. I don’t know if these snowbird students get tested on the NAEP or where.

Chinese people who had the misfortune to grow up under Mao learned to adopt a perpetual scowl known as “class struggle face.”

What are “particulates?”

Are they poison or are they, basically, dust? If the latter, do they sink to the bottom of the Mediterranean, or do they mess it up in some fashion?

Try Googling

Puerto Rico test scores

and see how much media interest there is in these spectacularly bad test scores.

Puerto Rico is quite corrupt overall, but that’s not particularly interesting to the American press unless it can be somehow tied to Trump. For example, Puerto Rican public schools have unbelievably awful test scores on a Spanish-language version of the federally NAEP specifically made up to be culturally sensitive to Puerto Rico. But nobody in the 50 states much cares at all.

After all, what’s the worst that can happen due to the ineptitude and corruption of government in Puerto Rico: the island continues to empty out, Puerto Ricans continue to move to Orlando, and Florida’s 29 Electoral Votes permanently switch to the Democrats? That sounds like a plan …

I saw a documentary over the weekend about the famous chimp scientist Jane Goodall as a young woman. She was exceptionally English-looking. Her mother looked just like Margaret Thatcher when she was prime minister, another extremely English-looking woman. (Thatcher had been famously good-looking in the 1950s for a young parliamentarian according to several English Tory celebrities, such as Alec Guinness and Kingsley Amis, although they specified that her English looks might not appeal abroad.)

Here in America, you don’t see very many people as English-looking as Goodall or Thatcher. Whether it is due to more mixed genes or a different set of facial expressions in American culture, I couldn’t say.

One irony in the Damore tale is that the winning voice in the struggle within Google to make an object lesson out of Damore’s fate was Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki, who got to where she was by being Larry and Sergey’s landlady in the garage days and then by introducing Larry to his future wife (and ex-wife) Anne Wojcicki. Anne is famous as a founder of 23andMe, which, ironically, is in the genetic testing business about what your chromosomes determine about your fate:

http://takimag.com/article/a_tale_of_two_sisters_steve_sailer/print#axzz4wlrM5yr9

“And actually, reading the comments above, I would add that perhaps the temperament which makes a person want to be a scientist is also the temperament that gives them a pressing psychological need to express their ideas and have those taken seriously (albeit not necessarily shared) by others.”

A friend of mine is the son of a Soviet scientific giant who did the regime an immense service. As far as I can tell, his father was basically a conservative loyalist by personality who was proud to serve his country to the best of his ability: in other words his dad was like the average person, except he was a genius scientist. (As far as I can tell, he didn’t even get sent to the Gulag once, and he was awarded lots of Stalin and Lenin Prizes, which he was proud to receive.)

In contrast, dissidents with complex views like my friend’s dad’s colleague Sakharov are rare in the general population, but more common among the best scientists. You could say to Sakharov: Why not just be like my friend’s dad and have complex views about science but simple views about politics?

But often it doesn’t work that way. People who have complex views about science are more likely to have complex views about politics.

“a nazi cell in the Stalinist USSR”

There really weren’t many Nazi cells in the USSR, given that the Nazis viciously hated just about every ethnic group within the USSR.

What’s extraordinary about Stalin in 1937 is how many people he murdered who were largely on his side. Hitler murdered his opponents in vast numbers, but Stalin murdered remarkable numbers of his supporters.

“Discourse critical of islam is now heard on every side of the political spectrum”

All it took in France to make Houellebecq less beyond the pale intellectually were a number of spectacular Islamist terrorist massacres in the heart of Paris in 2015.

One _very_ important later 20th Century biologist with whom I was distantly acquainted escaped the current version of the Inquisition by:

– dying somewhat young

– doing most of his work in equations, and when writing using a complex prose style that was hard to quote in chunks of less than a couple of hundred words.

From Bloomberg View:

“Could Bowling Leagues and the PTA Breed Nazis?”
By Cass R. Sunstein Jul 30, 2013 7:30 AM PT

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2013-07-30/could-bowling-leagues-and-the-pta-breed-nazis-

Sunstein’s wife, Samantha Power, was the US UN ambassador and one of the architects of NATO’s war on Libya in 2011.

Newton kept lots of his ideas, religious and scientific, secret for a long time. One thing to keep in mind is that secrecy back then wasn’t always just defensive, it was also offensive: there wasn’t a tradition of publishing discoveries, because you might want to keep them secret so you can have a monopoly on resulting technology.

A third reason to hold back your discoveries would be to get them into shape so they wouldn’t be controversial when you revealed them. Newton had most of the Principia worked out many years before (although not quite all of it). When he finally did publish his big book, it was almost instantly accepted by everybody who mattered. It was triumphantly persuasive, in part because Newton took pains to format it in such a way that the top few hundred people in Europe would understand immediately. That took a fair amount of effort, which Newton wasn’t always willing to take away from his other pursuits.

Here’s John Maynard Keynes’ interesting essay on what he discovered about Newton by buying at auction a trunk of Newton’s unpublished notes:

http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Extras/Keynes_Newton.html

Puritanism played a big role in promoting a scientific point of view, often a few generations later. Countries that had virtually no puritan movement, such as Mexico, still don’t have much science.

Scientific accomplishment slowed down in Italy a generation or so after Galileo, as it sped up in other parts of Europe.

Any suggestions why?

Hollywood movies tended to be anti-alcohol Prohibition but pro-cocaine prohibition. Jewish and Italian screenwriters and directors didn’t have that much trouble with alcohol in the 1920s-30s, but lots of trouble with cocaine in c. 1975-1985.

Debates in public are, on the whole, much better than debates in private: e.g., Jensen vs. Flynn in public advanced science more than most private debates.

Scott quotes venture capitalist Paul Graham’s 2004 essay “What You Can’t Say,” which is an important exposition of why so much hatred is directed at cognitive dissidents:

“No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.”

He goes on:

“When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward criticism, but when he attacks a statement as ‘divisive’ or ‘racially insensitive’ instead of arguing that it’s false, we should start paying attention. … Labels like that are probably the biggest external clue. If a statement is false, that’s the worst thing you can say about it. You don’t need to say that it’s heretical.”

Why discuss “divisive” topics? Graham offers threes reasons:

“Curiosity”;
“I don’t like the idea of being mistaken”;
“It’s good for the brain … Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no idea is so overlooked as one that’s unthinkable …”

But Graham doesn’t want his readers to sacrifice their fabulous careers over this. So, he advises, don’t say anything in the open. But then, again:

“The trouble with keeping your thoughts secret, though, is that you lose the advantages of discussion. Talking about an idea leads to more ideas. So the optimal plan, if you can manage it, is to have a few trusted friends you can speak openly to. This is not just a way to develop ideas; it’s also a good rule of thumb for choosing friends. The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”

True. But oral discussions among a few refugees in the catacombs, while better than complete inanity, are hardly as good for the country as a whole as written discussions and public conferences.

A big form of social control is via what I call the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that vocabulary facilitates thought and lack of vocabulary retards it).

You can substitute Lysenkoism as a real world example in the Soviet Union.

A big difference between pre-modern Christendom and the Soviet Union was the latter was far more monolithic and politically centralized. A medieval thinker who was on the outs with, say, the Pope or the Dominicans could often find a principality with a friendly monarch who would hire him as court librarian or who had a Franciscan monastery in his duchy where his cousin was the abbot. This meant that life was full of interest for the dissenter, since the winds of politics could send him on his travels once again, but it was a lot less hopeless for a dissident than in an 8,000 mile wide superpower with armed borders to keep its subjects in.

Galileo’s problem was in part that the Catholic Church was drifting away from science during his lifetime as part of the Counter-Reformation. Before the Reformation, the upper ranks of the hierarchy were intellectually elitist and didn’t much mind highbrow speculation about astronomy (e.g., Father Copernicus dedicated his 1543 book to the Pope).

But over the next 80 years, the Catholic Church decided to respond to the anti-elitism of the Protestant Reformation by moving in a very populist direction. Catholic art (e.g., Caravaggio, Bernini) became more melodramatic and less intellectual than during the Renaissance (e.g., Raphael painted the School of Athens on the pope’s apartment wall in the early 1500s, but this glorification of non-Christian scientists and philosophers was less in fashion during the 1600s.

Galileo got trapped by this drift in Italy away from scientific thinking. He had Cardinals who supported him, but they were getting fewer in number as the logic of the Counter-Reformation worked itself out.

In general, this tendency for authoritarian tendencies to become more extreme and thus pester scientists who formerly were given a pass is a common one. Jared Diamond, for example, did yeoman service to the conventional wisdom in the past, and has a good chance to make it to his grave without being subjected to a massive struggle session, but if he were a younger man he’d likely to suffer Watsoning at some point at the hands of the new Red Guard.

Stalin occasionally responded to direct challenges by intellectuals and artists in a non-lethal fashion.

Bulgakov, the author of “The Master and Margarita,” was a Soviet playwright who kept getting censored. He wrote a letter to Stalin in 1929 asking permission to emigrate. Stalin called him up and explained that he had to censor his works, but that he admired Bulgakov, so Stalin got Bulgakov a job as a theatrical director and kept him from getting arrested or fully purged throughout the 1930s until he died of natural causes in 1940.

It’s a weird story, but a small number of talented people with immense courage managed to challenge Stalin directly and survive. Even Stalin didn’t feel like being Stalin all the time, evidently.

The classical world’s standard of living, as measured in terms of entertainment and professional sports venues, was pretty high. For example, the coast of Turkey is full of Greco-Roman theaters, such as the one in Miletus that’s somewhere between Pauley Pavilion and Wrigley Field in size. It’s not just benches on a hillside either: it’s built like a modern stadium with tunnels under the stands to make it convenient to get to your seat.

The chess champion Kasparov has endorsed the dubious theory that history is much shorter than we are told.

The monk Rodolfus Glaber wrote around 1050 about how Europe had begun to shrug off the burden of the past and was now cloaking itself in “a white mantle of churches.”

In general, there is a lot of prejudice about overlooking the differences between the worst centuries of the second half of the first millennium and the much improved early second millennium. For example, Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature” largely shudders in horror at the entire period between the fall of Rome and the renaissance, without noticing all the spectacular Gothic cathedrals begun around 1100 AD that clearly required a fairly lawful society to be built and survive unpillaged all these hundreds of years.

A simple explanation is that the western classical world had fallen to illiterate barbarians, who took a long time to climb up to the civilizational level of those they had conquered. It’s worth noting that the Germanic invaders didn’t particularly hate the Romans and would have more or less liked to keep things going at the same economic level, they just didn’t have the skills or culture to do it.

You can see something similar in the Late Bronze Age Collapse of around 1200 BC that brought down the palace cultures, but eventually climbed up to a higher level of complexity.

should we build seawalls to protect our cities today

In Blade Runner 2049, Los Angeles has a giant wall along the ocean to protect it from rising seas due to climate change … except that the climate change in the Blade Runner universe is that it now snows in July in Los Angeles.

A different anthropologist is rumored to have introduced a new sexual practice to that tribe.

I don’t want to pick on Chagnon, whom I admire, but famous anthropologists tend to be strong personalities, as measured simply by their impact on other academics. Chagnon, for example, is extremely masculine for a college professor. You’d want him by your side in a bar brawl. He has tended to be a polarizing figure among his fellow academics.

Would it be that unlikely that a distinctive persona would elicit different information and perhaps even behavior from native subjects? Margaret Mead, for example, got Samoan teenage girls to describe to her a culture much like Margaret Mead would like it to be.

I suspect something similar happens in cultural anthropology. The extremely masculine Napoleon Chagnon goes off in the jungle and comes back to report that the tribe he stayed with happen to be The Fierce People. Other anthropologists happen to meet tribes that wind up sounding much like them.

It’s not just reporting bias, it’s that the tribal people respond to the anthropologist’s personality. If Napoleon Chagnon were doing field reporting on your son’s Pee-Wee football team, you and the other dads would probably quickly make him the coach and he’d lead your kids deep into the playoffs.

Sorry, I was pointing out that 10 years ago I had made a point similar to the point of Scott’s post:

“Q. So, do IQ tests predict an individual’s fate?

“A. In an absolute sense, not very accurately at all. Indeed, any single person’s destiny is beyond the capability of all the tests ever invented to predict with much accuracy.

“Q. So, if IQ isn’t all that accurate for making predictions about an individual, why even think of using it to compare groups, which are much more complicated?

“A. That sounds sensible, but it’s exactly backwards. The larger the sample size, the more the statistical noise washes out.

“Q. How can that be?

“A. If Adam and Zach take an IQ test and Adam outscores Zach by 15 points, it’s far from impossible that Zach actually has the higher “true” IQ. A hundred random perturbations could have thrown the results off. Maybe if they took the test a dozen times, Zach just might average higher than Adam.

“But for comparing the averages of large groups of people, the chance of error becomes vanishingly small. For example, the largest meta-analysis of American ethnic differences in IQ, Philip L. Roth’s 2001 survey, [Ethnic group differences in cognitive ability in employment and educational settings: a meta-analysis, Personnel Psychology 54, 297–330] aggregated 105 studies of 6,246,729 individuals. That’s what you call a decent sample size.

“Q. So, you’re saying that IQ testing can tell us more about group differences than about individual differences?

“A. If the sample sizes are big enough and all else is equal, a higher IQ group will virtually always outperform a lower IQ group on any behavioral metric.

“One of the very few positive traits not correlated with IQ is musical rhythm—which is a reason high IQ rock stars like Mick Jagger, Pete Townshend, and David Bowie tell Drummer Jokes.”

More hate than rationality here …

For pre-med students, organic chemistry is often the make or break class. It requires a whole lot of memorizing.

Thanks. Very informative.

So nobody really had a plan in 1914 for what they were going to do in case they won?

I can recall reading Sergei Witte telling the Czar not to go to war in 1914 because Russia already had plenty of land and if they won, they’d just have more Germans and Jews to rule over, who would be more trouble than they were worth.

Maybe the late 1920s swing toward pacifism had to do with the realization that nobody in 1914 had had much of a plan of how to benefit from victory. How could the immense cost of total war possibly pay off?

The Nazis went in the opposite direction and came up with monstrous plans for how to benefit from victory: murder all the Jews, enslave the Slavs, plant German colonies all the way to the Urals, etc.

Feynman might wind up in American folklore in a position kind of like Davey Crockett, whom many people don’t realize was a real person.

A number of rock stars have gone on to get Ph.D.s in technical subjects: Brian May of Queen, Phil Alvin of the Blasters, and Greg Gaffin of Bad Religion. Dexter Holland of The Offspring hasn’t finished his, last I heard.

Judging by reading random New York Times marriage announcements, it would appear that trans-generational transmission of social status is higher than what the social scientists estimate. But I can sympathize with the social scientists’ difficulties in adequately quantifying social status in order to calculate correlations.

Arthur Jensen mentioned musical rhythm as the one talent that didn’t seem to have any correlation, positive or negative, with IQ.

That might be why Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and Pete Townshend all tell Drummer Jokes.

http://www.musicradar.com/news/drums/the-23-best-drummer-jokes-ever-169967

On the other hand, the careers of Jagger, Bowie, and Townshend all suggest that having a few dozen IQ points above average can be useful even in the Rock Star business.

Yes, but it’s nice to live around smart people. As Scott’s post suggests, while your personal IQ may or may not do you much good, in the aggregate being around a lot of smart people is better.

For example, a general trend over the last 50 years or so is that house prices have gone up most in high IQ neighborhoods. For example, a typical 2000 square foot house in Palo Alto now costs $3 million.

I know a couple of guys who knew Feynman. And they are both really smart.

I don’t see anything terribly implausible about some extremely smart person who knew Feynman commenting on this blog. On the other hand, without giving up your anonymity it’s hard to prove you’re not a dog on the Internet …

Or, at minimum, Feynman was a great storyteller and his only-moderately-high-IQ anecdote has made for a great story, considering how many millions of times it has been repeated.

Most comparably famous physicists had several highbrow predilections, such as listening to baroque music or reading philosophy. Feynman didn’t. Was he intentionally burying a part of himself under his populist act, or was that just the way he was?

Gregory Clark’s research on surnames suggests that correlations in income and social status are higher between grandparents and grandchildren than you’d expect just from the fairly low parent-child correlations that economists come up with.

One reason is that it’s hard to come up with a single metric to adequately measure what we are interested in overall, which tends to depress parent-child correlations.

I suspect Feynman’s cognitive profile was a little different than that of his peers. Feynman’s Regular Guy act was something of an act, but not wholly. Most of the other great physicists had highbrow tastes, but Feynman really was a regular guy — a very smart, original Regular Guy.

Here’s my IQ FAQ from a decade ago that makes some similar points:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/why-do-we-keep-writing-about-intelligence-an-iq-faq

I think they must be listing Africa as being conquered. Africa is really big in area.

On the other hand, the Scramble for Africa wasn’t much of a fight.

Pattern recognition is the cardinal sin these days.

Anyway, some interesting studies have been done on the accuracy of recognition of gay men by voice. The “sibilant S” sound or “lissssp” (as distinguished from the Mike Tyson-Daffy Duck “lithp”) is common enough to be the bane of choir directors of gay men’s choruses.

I was trying to get my neighborhood to be called The Mattress District, but these days practically every neighborhood has a whole bunch of mattress stores.

We live in a world today in which a statesman isn’t supposed to say that he is going to invade his neighbor and conquer some territory. That’s a big change from the past in which conquest was one of the main jobs of kings. It doesn’t seem all that unreasonable to think of 1928 as when Europeans actually wrote down this change in attitude.

I’d say a few things were going on:

– In the past, conquest didn’t really mean all that much because life didn’t change that much for the bulk of the population under feudalism. They just paid taxes and rents to different rulers, and life went on.

– The rise of democratic thinking meant that the outcomes of wars could be worse for the losing population. If the German people went to all the trouble of conquering the Slavs, they’d need to, say, enslave the Slavs to make all their wartime suffering pay off.

– The development of artificial fertilizer around 1913 lifted the Malthusian ceiling. Nations didn’t need to expand their territory any longer to avoid the threat of starvation because productivity per acre was going up faster than the population. Hitler refused to pay attention to the revolution in farm productivity because he liked the idea of nations fighting to the death to conquer or starve.

Excellent soil where the rivers of northwest Europe meet the sea, fairly mild weather for being so far north, excellent transportation by sea and by flat land, and long history of intensive agriculture. The lowland countries have been among the most densely populated parts of Europe for the last 1000 years or so.

What were the Germans planning to do with the immense territory that the new Soviet Union ceded to them in the Brest Litovsk treaty of early 1918: set them up as puppet states or incorporate them directly into the German Empire?

The rise of nationalism from 1789 onward made it harder for old fashioned conquest to operate quite as directly as before.

Take a look at today’s Google doodle and try to guess the sexual orientation of Gloria E. Anzaldúa:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloria_E._Anzald%C3%BAa

You don’t always need a supercomputer.

Lots of bedsheets are sold under heavily advertised brand names like Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Donna Karan, and Tommy Hilfiger. Other bedsheet brand names seem to be focused on the bedding segment, such as Hotel Collection. I would think that advertising works about as well or as poorly for sheets as for most other products.

Everybody is worked up over how the paper claims that you can train a computer to recognize gay vs. straight, but I’d be interested in whether you can train humans to be more accurate at that task. I suspect you can.

I suspect some groups of people would tend to be more expert than other groups (e.g., 60-year-old Hollywood casting agents would be better at distinguishing than 20-year-old psychology majors).

“When white explorers first came to America, the Indians had never seen distilled alcohol before, and entire tribes were destroyed by alcoholism before they even knew what was hitting them.”

Of the two big Indian casinos I’ve been to in Southern California, one was completely dry (Barona) and one kept the bar small and obscure (San Miguel). I was impressed, since promoting drinking by gamblers is an easy way for a casino to make even more profit.

Every species has a “type specimen”

Naturalist Edward O. Wilson turned down an attractive job offer from Stanford to stay at Harvard in part because Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology has the type specimen for 28,000 insect species.

“Jesuits will control everything”

Anti-Jesuitism was huge during the Enlightenment. The Jesuits were suppressed in the “Portuguese Empire (1759), France (1764), the Two Sicilies, Malta, Parma, the Spanish Empire (1767) and Austria and Hungary (1782).”

The Pope abolished the Jesuits in 1773. A later Pope revived them in 1814.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_the_Society_of_Jesus

Somebody on Twitter said all the pictures he’d seen of the Shkreli case looked like they should have been captioned: “The Trial of Rumplestiltskin.”

That was one helluva tweet to improvise:

Dwayne Johnson ✔ @TheRock
Just got word that will shock the world – Land of the free…home of the brave DAMN PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN!

The Rock jokes around about being President, but I’ve been following the guy since 1999 and that doesn’t seem all that implausible to me.

Can we kill an enemy, then offset it with enough money to save somebody else’s life?

That’s pretty common in a lot of cultures. Evelyn Waugh claimed to have observed a Death Row negotiation in Ethiopia between a murderer and the family of the man he killed over how much compensation to pay the bereaved in order not to be executed. Waugh was impressed with the murderer’s insistence that he wasn’t going to ruin his heirs’ inheritance, so they might as well just shoot him now.

The funny thing is that the very existence of the Palace of Fine Arts in Golden Gate Park probably couldn’t be justified rationally based on the calculus of effective altruism, but just thinking about it cheers me up, even though I probably haven’t seen it in person since I went to see the Queen in 1983.

When I arrived at the outlandish Hyatt Regency in San Francisco

https://94xd213ur0icvxo-zippykid.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/fig2-atrium.jpg

for a business trip in March 1983, I saw on the news that the President of the United States was hosting the Queen of England at a state dinner in Golden Gate Park. Feeling a sense of well-being from the extreme conspicuous consumption of the Hyatt Regency, for which I was rightfully entitled, I ran downstairs and told the cabdriver, like the hero of Pussycat Pussycat to “Take me to see the Queen!”

“Which one?” he replied. “This town is full of them.”

I explained that I wanted to see the Queen of England in Golden Gate Park. So he dropped me off at the edge of the park in a crowd of IRA protestors. Eventually, a motorcade appeared, and excitement mounted. Finally, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip roared by doing that weird vertical rotating wave they do. The crowd went nuts. The IRA protestors jumped up and down cheering in excitement at the hated monarch, then looked shamefacedly around at their cohorts.

“The lake-fringed monumental neoclassical architecture represents ‘utilitiarian distribution of limited resources’”

In “I Am Charlotte Simmons,” Tom Wolfe stops the flow of narrative at one point to deliver a Jovian thunderbolt of an insight:

“He stood in the lobby, just stood there, looking up at the ceiling and taking in its wonders one by one, as if he had never laid eyes on them before, the vaulted ceiling, all the ribs, the covert way spotlights, floodlights, and wall washers had been added … It was so calming … but why? … He thought of every possible reason except for the real one, which was that the existence of conspicuous consumption one has rightful access to — as a student had rightful access to the fabulous Dupont Memorial Library — creates a sense of well-being.”

I get a sense of well-being just remembering that I could go to San Francisco and visit those buildings in Golden Gate Park.

“Cashdollar Name Meaning: Americanized spelling of German Kirchthaler, from the field name Kirchtal ‘church valley’ + the suffix -er denoting an inhabitant.”

You get paid more as a public schoolteacher for having advanced degrees, so sometimes math teachers pick up doctorates from local colleges to get that salary bump.

The Frank Lloyd Wright architecture in Oak Park gave locals something respectable to rally around. They weren’t just evil whites, they were … historical preservationists!

My in-laws belonged to a liberal pro-integration group in the Austin neighborhood of Chicago who all promised not to sell. They stuck it out longer than the other members. But after several felonies committed against their children by newcomers to the neighborhood, they finally sold out, losing half their net worth versus if they’d listened to the doomsayers and sold immediately three years earlier. They ended up living on a farm without running water for a couple of years.

In the 1990s, I talked to the opera-composing priest who had run the pro-integration group. He took solace in the idea that while it had totally failed in Austin, it had given Oak Park time to organize its defenses.

Oak Park did a lot of things like turning sidestreets crossing Austin Blvd., the legal border between Chicago and Oak Park, into culdesacs. But it appears the big one was Oak Park imposing an illegal but highly successful racial quota on real estate agents: the legendary “black-a-block” rule. Real estate agents could integrate each block, but they couldn’t tip them to all black.

This was pretty clearly a violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, so there’s only one academic paper on the web studying this fascinating policy. But judging from how nice Oak Park looks today to how bombed out Austin looks, Oak Park’s notorious “black-a-block” quota deserves more serious consideration as an urban planning tool.

Here are some of Paul Revere Williams’ huge number of finished buildings:

http://www.paulrwilliamsproject.org/gallery/

Williams houses probably had more influence on average people like my parents than did famous architects since he designed so many houses for celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Lucille Ball, whose homes were featured on TV shows.

Schoolteaching?

“American Runners Are Getting Slower”

I noticed this in the paper:

About The Researchers
The study was lead by Jens Jakob Andersen and assisted by Ivanka Andreeva Nikolova. Andersen is a former competitive runner and statistician from Copenhagen Business School. Nikolova holds a Ph.D. in Mathematical Analysis.

The kind of people who are most into running tend to have Northern names like this.

Serious mass running was basically a white Baby Boomer fad of the 1970s that started with Frank Shorter winning the 1972 Olympic Marathon and that is slowly dying out along with white Baby Boomers.

It’s not all bad that people are less serious about running fast. The Los Angeles marathon these days lets people walk the 26 miles, taking up to 9 hours. The average times are pretty bad by late 20th Century standards, but at least a huge number of people turn out and give it a try.

Also, famous architects’ houses are often a drag to live in. For example, some of the most famous houses in Los Angeles from an architectural history point of view are Bauhaus steel and glass houses with flat roofs. But even in L.A. it rains sometimes, and flat roofed houses tend to leak more than houses with traditional roofs.

Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses very much reflect the personality of the designer, but that can be like living permanently with an Ayn Rand character’s ghost haunting your home.

Over the last decade here in Los Angeles, a once forgotten architect named Paul Revere Williams, who designed hundreds of houses for celebrities in the 1930s-1960s, has become famous. He was black, so that makes for a good story about the indignities he had to put up with. But, also, he didn’t see it as his job to impose his vision upon his clients, many of whom were talented, strong-opinioned entertainment industry stars. Williams would listen to his clients preferences and then build them the best house he could in whatever style they wanted.

This meant he was ignored by art historians (I never heard of him during the 20th Century). But nowadays he’s very cool among people who buy and fix up homes in L.A.. Who wouldn’t want to own a house by a famous black architect, especially if he designed it for a famous movie star, extra-especially if it were also extremely comfortable rather than “challenging” like the machine-for-living houses long preferred by art historians?

Also, having your house designed by a famous architect can lower its value because of historical preservation rules.

I was watering my lawn a few years ago, when a genial hipster came up and told me the name of the designer of my 1600 sq ft 1950s tract house. I’d never heard of him before, but it turns out he really was one of the better real estate developers working in the San Fernando Valley. But if this long forgotten but now merely obscure figure became super famous, then it might become hard for me to get permission to add on to my house, much less sell it to somebody richer who might have it torn down and replaced with a bigger house.

I know tons of stories about romantic triangles in real life, not just in operas. For example, about ten or 15 years ago, the NBA Dallas Mavericks suddenly started playing badly because the team’s two stars stopped passing each other the ball. That was because they were both in love with singer Toni Braxton.

Joey and Johnny Ramone didn’t talk to each other for the last decade of their careers touring together because Johnny stole Joey’s girl, married her, and had three kids.

But I don’t know that many such stories involving identical twins. My simple model of romantic attraction says that identical twins raised together should get into these kind of struggles all the time because of nature and nurture similarities. But they don’t seem to as often as you’d expect.

Sorry about being a bore on the topic, but I’m just tossing it out there in case anybody wants to research it.

I did too, but that would imply that identical twins would tend to have more clashes over this than they seem to do.

I don’t know.

It seems like a pretty interesting topic in general that might have implications for this question of whether AI can serve as a top notch matchmaker. Also, it’s a pretty interesting Nature-Nurture question in general.

Nancy Siegel at Cal State Fullerton is a top twin expert and she’s the one who told me that identical twins don’t fall in love with the same person that often.

Identical twins raised together often try to be more different than they would if they were raised separately.

For example, Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus” might really be about his rivalry with his twin brother Anthony Shaffer. They started out writing mystery books together, but then Peter specialized the writing for the stage while Anthony went into law and advertising. But then Anthony ruined Peter’s ego by suddenly writing the huge hit stage play “Sleuth.”

My interpretation of “Amadeus” is that diligent Salieri is Peter and unfairly talented Mozart is Anthony. I could be wrong, but both of their works appear to be obsessed with the pressures of being twins.

By the way, Anthony was straight and Peter was gay. That happens rather more than you might expect among identical twins.

Also, they seemed to believe they weren’t identical twins, but people who knew them told me that of course they were identical. It’s also pretty common for identical twins to believe they are fraternal twins due to very small differences.

“(a Picasso might cost a thousand times more than a less painter’s work; a Frank Lloyd Wright house costs 1-3% more than a house built by a nobody)”

My father grew up next door to a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Oak Park, IL from 1917-1929. While FLW houses may or may not sell at a premium, they certainly add a premium to housing prices in their neighborhood. Oak Park is currently an affluent and heavily gay neighborhood.

My wife grew up a couple of miles to the west in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood, which had a fine housing stock but not at Oak Park’s superstar architects level. The Austin neighborhood right next door to Oak Park is currently a depopulating slum with a very high homicide rate.

When I went with my father to see his old Oak Park neighborhood in 1982, I warned him that it would be a depressing experience. He scoffed. As we drove through dismal Austin on our way to Oak Park, I repeated my warnings. Then we arrived on his block with its six or eight Frank Lloyd Wright houses. it was paradise. Dozens of European tourists were wandering around listening to an audio tour and snapping pictures.

On the other hand, I’d probably rather live in my dad’s comfortable old anonymous architect house than next door in the amazing but slightly demented FLW classic.

When Mies van der Rohe built Chicago’s first steel and glass apartment tower around 1949 he reserved the penthouse for himself. But then he realized he couldn’t see his building from inside it. He eventually moved to the old building across the street from which he could admire his masterpiece conveniently.

“Machine Learning Applied To Initial Romantic Attraction: “Crucially [machine learning techniques] were unable to predict relationship variance using any combination of traits and preferences reported beforehand.””

My impression is that identical twins seldom fall in love with the exact same person. It sounds like it would be a good premise for a romantic tragicomedy, but it doesn’t seem to happen much.

I don’t know why.

That women would run as fast as men in the near future was believed seriously by many scientists and the general public in the later 20th Century. I had to do a lengthy study of Olympic running results in 1997 to explode that myth. Here’s the opening of my article:

Track and Battlefield

Everybody knows that the “gender gap” between men and women runners in the Olympics is narrowing. Everybody is wrong.

by Steve Sailer and Dr. Stephen Seiler

Published in National Review, December 31, 1997

Everybody knows that the “gender gap” in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. Moreover, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66% claimed “the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels.” The most publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: “Will Women Soon Outrun Men?” Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women’s world records in running had been falling faster than men’s. Assuming these trends continued, men’s and women’s marathon records would equalize by 1998, and during the early 21st Century for the shorter races.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/05/track-and-battlefield-by-steve-sailer.html

In reality, any narrowing of the gender gap in running after about 1976 was due to women getting more bang for the buck from steroids. The imposition of more serious drug testing after the 1988 Olympics and the collapse of the East German Olympic chemical complex led to the gender gap getting a little larger subsequently compared to the steroid-overwhelmed 1988 Games.

Right, the stock market is a big prediction market that is hard to beat.

Here’s my January 2016 review of Tetlock’s book Superforecasting that considers why nobody asked ahead of time about the really decisive event of 2015 — Merkel’s decision to let in all those migrants, which helped lead to Brexit and Trump in 2016.

http://takimag.com/article/forecasting_a_million_muslim_mob_steve_sailer/print#axzz4opn1Vslv

… from the perspective of early 2016, a really interesting question about Syrian refugees would have been: While this book’s manuscript is at the printers, will a European national leader decide upon a whim to invite in a million of them?

The name “Merkel” doesn’t appear in the index.

Let’s think through the process of what it would have taken to generate questions about the most interesting events of 2015: For instance, to have asked contestants to predict the probability of Merkel’s Boner, you would first have had to forecast yourself the possibility of it even happening. But inviting home a million-Muslim mob was a remarkably stupid decision by Dr. Merkel. And the universe of possible stupid decisions by politicians is perhaps too large to pester contestants to evaluate.

Nonetheless, Merkel’s blunderkrieg was more or less accurately foreseen in 1973 by French novelist Jean Raspail in his book The Camp of the Saints, based on his sense of the direction the zeitgeist was headed. In hindsight, Raspail’s prophecy appears brilliant. Still, you can imagine the technical problems in phrasing questions ahead of time to be both broad enough and specific enough. Raspail focused, for example, on a French-Hindu-impoverished-by-sea immersion rather than a German-Muslim-smartphone-by-land hegira. Is that close enough?

Moreover, Raspail being right 42 years ahead of time isn’t much use in an annual contest that, by its nature, can’t look more than 12 months ahead.

Also, Raspail missed key aspects of what happened in 2015. He imagined that the refugees would be starving masses who overcame European resistance by their pitifulness. But instead, the invaders turned out to be strutting military-age youths with smartphones, giving Germany’s surrender a weird sexual vibe that nobody yet has explained satisfactorily even in retrospect.

I built internal sales forecast systems for a couple of firms about 25 years ago, and they functioned like structured prediction markets.

Lower level people with sales responsibility listed all the potential deals they were working on, their dollar value, and the probability of closing them this quarter. They submitted them to their bosses, who would review them, and revise them after discussions with underlings, then submit them to the national sales manager. He’d discuss them with the regional bosses, then submit the national sales prediction to the COO.

All the numbers would get updated weekly.

How well did this work?

Better than not having a system, or one just based on finger to the wind guesswork.

Much of the value was that it made sales forecasting not a black box. All the working parts were visible to everybody on the line side of the business. People who routinely made bad forecasts of how much business they would close that quarter were upbraided or worse if they kept it up.

Would it have helped forecast accuracy to get the opinions of more staff people as well as line people?

I dunno. I was the staff guy who built the system and ran it until I handed it off to underlings, so I knew all the numbers. But I wasn’t really that interested in whether the Manhattan Beach office had a 75% chance or only a 50% chance of closing that $200,000 deal this quarter. That was a line responsibility.

A big part of the success of prediction markets is that a lot of people are interested in being able to boast about predicting elections, sports, or Academy Awards correctly. But a lot of business forecasting isn’t very interesting to anybody who lacks line responsibility.

Right, for example, if the national sales manager is making worse sales forecasts than the six regional sales managers who report to him, then most firms will probably eventually fire the top guy and replace him with one of his underlings.

I predicted on November 28, 2000 that a future Republican Presidential candidate could win the Electoral College by appealing to Rust Belt states’ blue collar whites rather than by trying to win over Hispanics via promoting more immigration, as Republicans were being advised to do by their good friends in the Democratic Party and the mass media:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/gop-future-depends-on-winning-larger-share-of-the-white-vote

Sixteen years later, that turned out to be how Trump won.

But, it’s not like there was an active betting interest in my prediction for most of those 16 years until it came true. Heck, barely anybody besides me talked about this strategy over all those years.

Instead, it simply never occurred to most people interested in Republican prospects that there was a potential alternative GOP path to the White House in contrast to the Democrats’ and NYT’s insistence was that the only hope for the GOP was to turn illegal aliens into voters.

Sure, the GOP would lose on each one, but they’d make it up on volume!

I mean, would Chuck Schumer lie to John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Marco Rubio about what was in the Republican Party’s best interest?

Eventually, my more realistic way of thinking persuaded Ann Coulter, and Donald Trump happened to see Ann on TV in the spring of 2015, and here we are.

But it took forever.

My impression about the real world is not that there is a shortage of answers that prediction markets could solve, but that there is a shortage of questions. Orwell’s “1984” insists that the key to maintaining political power is to emasculate the language of tools for asking questions inconvenient to the powerful. In “1984,” there are only two ways to think about things: the Party’s way, and via Crimethink, which triggers Crimestop or protective stupidity.

The long running Hollywood Stock Exchange for predicting movie box office grosses encourages the use of insider information:

http://takimag.com/article/betting_on_the_hollywood_stock_exchange_better_play_roulette/print#axzz4opn1Vslv

This became a problem in 2010 when HSX’s owner, Cantor Fitzgerald, tried to get permission to turn betting on movie grosses for pretend money into a real futures market using real money. Congress eventually outlawed movie futures.

It would be kind of silly for the SEC to have to try to police insider trading about movies, since Hollywood depends upon nonstop gossip for its decisionmaking. Heck, I learned a lot of stuff from my late stuntman neighbor about which seemingly rising stars were unreliable due to a drinking problem or whose careers were unlikely to thrive in larger roles because they weren’t as masculine as they had managed to seem in early small roles.

For example, my son made a killing on HSX in fake money a few years ago by betting on Chris Pratt and upcoming movies he was in. This was largely a bet on whether Chris could shed his extra weight and develop a leading man’s body. That’s a pretty public process if you happen to live near Chris Pratt. So should the SEC police gossip so that investors in Mobile, AL have a level playing field as people who live near Pratt and his wife Ana Faris?

All this is real ball of twine.

One of Tetlock’s superforecasters explained to me how he did it a few years ago:

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/12/tetlocks-good-judgment-project.html

Short answer: you need to be smart and sensible and work extremely hard for a whole year or more.

My guesstimate would be that it would take me 500 to 1000 hours of work in a year to have a shot at becoming a superforecaster, and I didn’t want to do that much work.

Tetlock’s superforecasters are kind of the opposite of an aggregation system. They are the result of a system of winnowing away all the chaff.

And even after you’ve been identified as a superforecaster, how do you prove that you aren’t coasting this year on your reputation?

I don’t think that is an insoluble problem, by the way.

My view centers around what I call the concept of being “In the Arena.” The more you choose to be In The Arena of, say, national debate, and the more successful you are at accomplishing your ambitions to be In the Arena, the more reasonable it is for you to be a target for criticism.

I try to be In the Arena, so I’m fair game for critics.

Similarly, I worked pretty hard at times from 2005 to, say, 2010 to point out flaws in the thinking of Malcolm Gladwell, because Malcolm, selling millions of books, giving many highly compensated speeches, and writing lots of long articles in a top magazine, had very much chosen to be In the Arena and was quite successful at accomplishing that.

Over time, my critique of Gladwell has spread, and Malcolm has responded somewhat by refocusing his efforts more toward his strengths than toward the weaknesses I had identified.

This would seem to be a constructive process, even if it involved hurt feelings on Malcolm’s part.

On the other hand, I don’t see much point in putting much effort into critiquing people who either haven’t chosen to be In the Arena or haven’t much succeeded at it.

“The informal know-how includes how to dress, how to judge situations, what a manager expects from a potential hire, how to study for an exam, etc.”

In the past, America had a more uptight, straight-laced society, so people from the bottom end had a simpler challenge to learn the rules. My mother came from pretty near the bottom of Minnesota society, but she paid very careful attention to the rules of proper behavior (in the 1930s, you could watch movies and figure out how to dress, speak, which fork to use, etc.) and wound up with a nice middle class life.

Since the 1960s, however, the rules of “appropriate” behavior have been rewritten to be easier for higher IQ people from educated families, but they are more difficult for lower IQ people from less educated families to master. (This, of course, was the moral of David Brooks’ much despised Sandwich Story.)

Tests are a lot more gamed today than when I was a teen in the 1970s. I showed up for the SAT in 1975 not hung over and having done the practice test sent out by the ETS, and even that level of test prep was considered slightly unsporting back then.

Our current testing system was largely invented by WASPs for WASPS. People like Stanley Kaplan and his 14-year-old protege Chuck Schumer (D-NY) realized it was a sitting duck for people who didn’t care about whether test prep was cricket or not:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112215648

But Kaplan was just the start. Tiger Mothers have been acquiring intensive test prep for their Tiger Cubs since the first Emperor introduced testing for mandarin civil service posts.

English journalist Toby Young has some interesting things to say about his father’s Michael Young’s book and current society.

And that pretty much happened:

“his attack on meritocracy was that it would strip the working classes of high-IQ individuals”

It’s not just that union leaders aren’t as powerful as they used to be, but they also aren’t as interesting as they used to be. Gompers, Reuther, Lewis, Hoffa, etc were interesting guys.

“There are many very stupid ideas about free speech in academia. Perhaps the stupidest is this: free speech is a legal norm used to protect the powerful at the expense of the powerless, but exceptions to free speech will benefit the powerless. Nobody with a passing knowledge of the history of free speech takes this seriously.”

Nah. People take away other people’s right to free speech not because they are powerless but because they want to demonstrate how powerful they are.

In the past, people claimed they deserved to be powerful because they were descended from the powerful. Now they claim to deserve power because they are descended from the powerless.

But it’s still the same urge: a boot stamping on a human face forever.

“Black turnout in 2016 fell back to 2004 levels”

In other words, with a white Democrat in 2016, black turnout fell back to the last time the Democrats ran a white candidate: 2004.

Romney’s term “self-deport” focus-grouped extremely badly, worse than “deport,” according to a friend who does research on political rhetoric.

I don’t know why.

I recall hearing on the radio when Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the Tory Party over 40 years ago.

Hillary lost because blacks didn’t turn out for her like they turned out for Obama. Why? Because she’s not black.

If you want to understand politics, watch the fourth episode of the miniseries “The People vs. O.J. Simpson” that’s about jury selection in the O.J. trial. (Currently on Netflix.) If Johnny Cochran were alive today, he could explain to the Democrats how things really work.

“I worry there’s a general undersupply of meta-contrarianism.”

Over the years, it has occurred to me that people tend to be motivated by money, power, and prestige, just like mass market Hollywood movies warned.

My personal predilection was for contrarianism, but Michael Kinsley got there first, so all that was left for me was meta-contrarianism, which looks like vulgar Brian de Palma movies from the 1970s-1980s..

Is there even merely anecdotal evidence that gay male relatives boost the number of surviving nephews and nieces at all relative to straight male relatives? Can anybody name three celebrities who were orphaned and raised by their gay uncles? I’m pretty good at coming up with examples in general, but I can’t think of even one example of this theorized phenomenon. This is not to say that it never happens, but I have never heard of it being a pattern at all … except in cases like this when people are inventing theories about how male homosexuality must somehow increase Darwinian fitness.

In the real world, if a 2-year-old child loses both parents, his or her uncle the antique dealer in Chelsea with a summer cottage on Fire Island is about the least likely member of the extended family who will be looked toward to take on raising the child. A straight uncle who lives in a house in the suburbs and has a kindly, child-loving wife would be much more likely to be called upon.

That would be a fun subject to study: types of people who are good at figuring out whodunit in mysteries.

I’m certainly not. I like Raymond Chandler mysteries best because he doesn’t seem to care anymore than I do whodunnit.

Now that I think about it, your father might make a good character for a mystery writer: a professional painter who moonlights as an amateur detective because of his ability to see things as they are.

Keep in mind that I can only think of two Olympic athlete steroid users who have transitioned: Jenner and a lady shotputter from East Germany who went the other direction. (And of course I don’t have proof that Jenner was on the juice, either. But, c’mon …)

Right. That sounds not implausible and worth checking out.

I’d add that I think the curious but fairly common phenomenon of people retconning their memories to make them more in accord with how they feel now plays a role as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this kind of thing is more common in highly masculine men who are talented at browbeating other people into believing whatever is in the interest of the alpha male: the famous “reality distortion field.”

Is there a name for this tendency to retcon memories to conform with current feelings?

For example, I don’t retcon my memories of my past political beliefs, but I am a little bit selective in my memory in that I’m more likely to dwell upon early insights that led to my more sophisticated current political beliefs while not paying much attention to memories of the bulk of my past political views that I now consider crude.

But I’m a fairly objective person with a good memory and a knack for reality checking my opinions. I can imagine that if you instead were a strongly triumph-oriented guy with a tendency to believe whatever was in your interest at the moment and a talent for getting others to believe it too, a drop in your masculinity as you age could set off all sorts of unpredictable retconnings of your memories.

In 2017, trans people have much power to punish dissenters, so they are treated with respect and fear.

To use my analogy, the man I knew who was extremely paranoid didn’t have any delusions, he didn’t hear voices in his head telling him the grocery clerks union was out to get him, he just arrived at that conclusion by a logical process caused by a subtle cognitive failure in his ability to form long term positive memories. So when he looked back on what he could remember of his past, the only sensible explanation was that the grocery clerks union had it in for him.

Maybe some of these famous transsexuals are similar: perhaps they suffer a failure in their memories of their highly masculine pasts or something like that, and thus use their high IQs to retcon a life story that makes sense of what they can now remember about how they felt. Granted, their new story sounds implausible to objective observers, but they get around that due to their high level of masculine rage in browbeating skeptics and punishing dissenters. An impressive percentage of the small number of famous late onset m to f trans people I’ve had contact, private or public, with have been real “wrath of Achilles” types.

Moreover, they have the ideological winds blowing at their backs. Granted when McCloskey and Conway teamed up with Morris Dees’ SPLC about a dozen years ago to wage SJW jihad against any scientists and science journalists who doubted the Conventional Wisdom on how transexuals had always felt like a girl on the inside, they were a few years ahead of their time.

Morris, of course, is, in his field, a genius, but one of the prices geniuses pay is they can get out ahead of the public a little too much. If the SPLC had waited until the triumph of gay marriage a few years ago had left a void in the SJW agenda, he would have made a killing off transgenderism. But Morris Dees didn’t get where he is in life by being cautious and moving slowly. The cost is that sometimes he pushes a big pile of his chips in a few years before his donors are in full hysterics.

Suppose instead that you are an atypical male: you are homosexual, effeminate, and maybe somewhat socially awkward.

The interesting thing is that the best known m to f late onset transexuals tend to have been highly masculine men, like McCloskey was a Harvard football player (no scholarships at Harvard so you only play if you really like football, especially if you are as scholarly as McCloskey, for whom football practice was a major sacrifice of his time hitting the books), Conway is a computer scientist, Morris is a Kiplingite adventurer, the guy I knew in B-school is an outer space tycoon, the Chicago billionaire heir is a colonel in the Army Reserve (even though he hardly needed the money from serving his country) and built a beautiful library of military history, etc.

Heck they remain highly masculine in their interests even After.

What I don’t see a lot of is moderately effeminate adult gay men or slightly below average in masculinity adult straight men (e.g., NPR announcers) announcing they have always been a girl on the inside.

The usual explanation is that all the He-Men types who decide they were always a girl on the inside have been faking it for all these years to cover up their True Natures.

But having known a famous one Before, well, he was just about the least feminine guy I’ve ever know. Enormous male ego and arrogance … Heck, Trump, who is somewhat similar in personality, has more feminine wiles than this guy.

So what is really going on that explains this pattern?

That’s a good one …

One obvious medical question to look into is whether or not steroid abuse increases the risks of gender dysphoria.

To take what ought to be the most obvious example, Bruce Jenner finished 10th in the 1972 Olympic decathlon while weighing 180 pounds. He won the 1976 Olympics weighing 220 pounds. Now he calls himself Caitlyn Jenner.

But there doesn’t seem to be much interest in scientifically researching this phenomenon. Instead, we are supposed to assume that the problem is not in Jenner’s head or body, but in our outdated social arrangements.

James / Jan Morris published dozens of books before and after. I never noticed much of a change — Morris always sounded like a romantic conservative imperialist man — but you could feed the text into a computer and see if anything changed.

Right. The U.S. is headed down the path of countries like Malaysia and Iran where effeminate gay boys are so often chemically/surgically converted into ladyboys.

What’s so horrible about an effeminate boy being allowed to naturally grow up to be a gay man that we are supposed to attack his “problem” with powerful chemicals?

Right, I’m just suggesting that when you stop and think about it, having two sexes co-occupy a woman’s body for nine months is a rather daunting biochemical engineering challenge. Ray Blanchard’s findings on the older brother effect suggest that perhaps sometimes there is cumulative long term damage to the function of the gestational system by repeatedly having male fetuses.

But I haven’t looked into the research in a decade or so, so I’m not up to date on the latest findings.

Here’s an NYT article about the Targeted Individual community who believe they are being gang stalked by the NSA or the Freemasons:

United States of Paranoia: They See Gangs of Stalkers
By MIKE McPHATE JUNE 10, 2016

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/11/health/gang-stalking-targeted-individuals.html

… “Dr. Sheridan’s study, written with Dr. David James, a forensic psychiatrist, examined 128 cases of reported gang-stalking. It found all the subjects were most likely delusional.”

I’m wondering though whether the psychiatric profession is missing one cause of this kind of paranoia in attributing it almost wholly to positive delusions, where it might also be cause by a negative incapacity to remember certain things.

In my experience with this one older gentleman, he wasn’t hearing voices or other delusions at all, he just lacked the ability to longterm remember countervailing information.

So his conspiracy theories were rather reasonable, given what he could and couldn’t remember, just as Dr. McCloskey has a powerful logical mind for constructing explanations for why his post-transition unhappiness is the fault of subversive truth-telling scientists like J. Michael Bailey and Ray Blanchard who must be shut up, along with anybody who has ever associated with them.

Of course, the anti-science trans activists have powerful institutions on their side today who see their plight as justification for massive social upheaval, while the Targeted Individual activists are seen, in the rare cases when any attention is paid to them by respectable organizations, as deluded loons.

Right, like the older gentleman who had lost the ability to remember the good things that happened to him, he was highly rational about constructing explanations for why his memory consisted 100% of bad things, such as grocery clerks looking at him funny. He didn’t make up any of his memories, he just made up rational theories about why they were what they were.

And about why, when he went to the cops to explain that the grocery clerks were conspiring against him, did they carefully write down his complaint about the clerks union but never did anything beyond that? Well, obviously, the police commissioner must know that the grocery clerks union has a lot of pull in this town. So a lowly desk sergeant doesn’t dare mess with the clerks union. It’s simple logic.

Right.

Perhaps analogously, I knew a man who at advanced age lost the cognitive ability to remember happy memories overnight. If you asked him how his day had been, he’d have lots of cheerful things to tell you about what he’d done today. But if you asked him about yesterday or the day before yesterday, his face would cloud over in distress: he couldn’t hold in his memory happy long term memories, so while his short term memories of today was very nice, his past life appeared to him, looking back, as one long nightmare of nothing but unpleasant incidents.

But because his past life hadn’t actually been a nightmare of horrors — he was still highly functional at doing whatever he felt like doing every day — he tended to dwell on obscure incidents, such as times that grocery store checkout clerks had looked at him funny. Because he had lost the ability to remember pleasant memories, he couldn’t replicate his past very well in his mind. He couldn’t say to himself, “80% of the time grocery clerks laugh at my jokes, but 20% of the time they look at me funny.” All he could remember were the times they’d looked at him funny.

Why, therefore, did grocery clerks always look at him funny?

But while his memory suffered this specific deficit, his imagination and reason still worked fine. So he constructed giant paranoid, but logical, conspiracy theories from his recollection of clerks always looking at him funny, such as that the grocery clerks union was out to get him. This was the only reasonable explanation; he could remember lots of times visiting new stores and clerks he’d never seen before had looked at him funny. So, ipso facto, the clerks union must have put his picture out to all their members as somebody to look funny at.

I pointed out to several psychiatrists that his paranoia wasn’t caused by delusions about horrible incidents that didn’t happen — indeed, various clerks probably had looked at him funny over the years — but by a cognitive inability to form long term positive memories such as clerks laughing pleasantly at his jokes. From what he could remember about a lifetime of interactions with grocery clerks before today, the notion that their union was conspiring against him was quite rational.

But none of the psychiatrists I spoke with had ever heard of such a thing and weren’t in the mood to listen.

Anyway, this gentleman’s mood improved even later in life, although he never felt any doubt about the validity of his favorite old conspiracy theories. He just laughed them off as not very important: “Yeah, of course the grocery clerks union is still trying to get me, but you just can’t let that kind of thing bother you on a beautiful day like today. If grocery clerks were so powerful that I need to worry about them, they’d have better jobs. Ha-ha-ha!”

On the other hand, Morris Dees hasn’t yet dreamed up a way for the SPLC to get a lot of donations for fighting hate groups of scientists who are Grocery Clerks Union Conspiracy Denialists.

By pointing out that the essay by renderinglight might be a parody?

Or, then again, maybe there is some relatively new chemical that is getting into the water supply that is causing an increase of particular kinds of mental problems such as autism and/or transgenderism?

I certainly don’t know. But shouldn’t somebody be checking? Wouldn’t it be a bad thing if scientists are discouraged from checking because the increasingly powerful Trans Lobby has a track record of persecuting overly inquisitive scientists?

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/galileos-middle-finger-by-alice-dreger.html?_r=0

Well, I certainly hope trans people can win the argument on the grounds of what’s true, without having to tell lies.

But, of course, actual trans people like Dr. McCloskey and Dr. Conway organized a large scale persecution of truth-tellers in order to shut them up:

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/12/when-liberals-attack-social-science.html

An interesting analogy for the much publicized use of sex hormones to transition away from one’s chromosomal sex is the much more popular use of artificial hormones to take on more secondary sex characteristics of one’s own sex: e.g., Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mark McGwire, The Rock, Lance Armstrong, Ben Johnson, Barry Bonds, Sylvester Stallone, etc. etc.

I would very much doubt that is true for the highest profile late onset m to f trans people, like the ones I’ve dealt with in my private life or my public life. Instead, they were extremely non-feminine.

How much evidence is there that transitioning makes people happier?

For example, Professor McCloskey, the brilliant libertarian economist and former Harvard football player, appears to have remained extremely unhappy that the children he fathered consider him/her a jerk.

He/she externalized his/her unhappiness by helping organize with the SPLC a persecution of the handful of scientists who have argued against the conventional talking point espoused by McCloskey. In McCloskey’s logic, the scientists must be silenced in order to avoid confirming his children’s perception of himself/herself as, indeed, a jerk.

Obviously, that’s just anecdotal evidence, but it was rather extraordinary behavior for a libertarian economist.

So perhaps the current transgender movement is more a symptom of a massive undiagnosed environmental pollution crisis than a self-evidently beneficial social liberation movement?

Shouldn’t somebody be looking into this possibility?

I don’t see much discussion of diminishing marginal returns for radical biochemical and/or surgical interventions in the huge push by prestigious parts of our society to get more children defined as transgender so they the can be, say, dosed with powerful drugs such as puberty blockers.

Maybe that would be a good thing for X% of the population, but would it be equally good for 10X% as this trans fad plays out? I tend to doubt it, but nobody else seems too concerned these days.

Our culture has gone through a lot of medical fads, like electroshock therapy. I knew somebody who had it 50 years ago and it did her some good. But the general opinion is that our society once got too enamored of electro-shock therapy and subjected too many people to it beyond the optimal cases for this powerful treatment.

What are the odds that our society is going down a similar path during an era when dissenting voices of prudence and skepticism are denounced as Horrible People?

Homosexuality is probably just the result of various mistakes in the complicated process of reproduction and development. But homosexuals have enough political and social power (due in part to their being able to afford to invest more resources in themselves due to needing to invest fewer resources in their children) to impose the view that the mistakes are in the social order created by the other 97% of the population.

The current transgender brouhaha that emerged after the victory of the gay marriage movement left a vacancy is similar, just raised by an order of magnitude. This is in part due to the extraordinary masculine aggressiveness of a few hyper-alpha males in imposing upon the other 99.7% of society their talking point that they always felt like a girl on the inside, even while fathering all those children and defeating all those other sportsmen, soldiers, and financiers.

I mean, it is pretty funny that almost nobody notices that famous m-to-f trans people tend to be extremely masculine. Of course, there is a sinister reason for this mass obliviousness to the obvious. Here’s a good NYT article from a decade ago about how hyper-IQ, super-masculine academics Conway and McCloskey teamed up with Morris Dees’ SPLC to persecute anybody who gave a blurb to a Northwestern professor’s book offering a more plausible explanation of late onset m-to-f trans:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/21/health/psychology/21gender.html

These days, most people are pretty good at not noticing the kind of things that could bring the SPLC down on your head. Orwell called it “crimestop” or “protective stupidity.” It’s a valuable trait to possess.

Either way you want to look at it, grandmothers tend to be an awful lot more helpful around the house than gay uncles.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master — that’s all.”

Is there even much merely anecdotal evidence for the theory that a Gay Uncle doubles fertility among his nieces and nephews by helping the extended family reproduce?

I’ve looked for anecdotal evidence of this and about all I’ve found might be a few nepotistic popes.

I think there is a lot more evidence for, say, the hypothesis that living grandmothers help their grandchildren reproduce more. For example, my Aunt F. commuted 500 miles per week from age 65 to 80 to serve as unpaid caretaker for her grandchildren who lived at opposite ends of the Los Angeles metro area. Her free labor probably doubled the number of children her daughters could afford to have. In contrast, my mother-in-law was killed in a car accident just before our first child was born, and, looking backwards, it seems pretty clear that the loss of a highly energetic, competent grandmother made the next decade of our nuclear family life much more difficult.

So this might help explain why human women evolved to tend to live so long past menopause.

But the Gay Uncle theory …

Or at the other end of the IQ spectrum you have Michel Foucault, who objected to identity labels for himself like “homosexual” and “gay” for, at least nominally, social constructionist theoretical reasons.

In the great travel writer James/Jan Morris’s memoir of sex change, “Conundrum,” he mentions being more sensitive to the feel of fabrics since taking lots of estrogen. But that’s about it in terms of changes. His / her brain mostly seems to be pretty similar before and after.

In general, the famous late onset m to f trans people like Morris, McCloskey, Conway, or the guy I knew before he became “America’s highest paid female CEO,” seem to have such extremely strong masculine personalities that even the most radical hormonal and surgical interventions don’t seem to have much impact on who they are. The kind of guys who decide to become women after fathering a passel of kids tend to be pretty far out toward the extreme of masculine willfulness and selfishness, and there they stay

Like I said, in the apolitical world of writing up golf instruction tips, the phrases “left-to-right” and “right-to-left” have come in to common use because they are less confusing to the less clued in.

But in a lot of fields, making the masses feel confused and insecure by using non-obvious terminology is not a bug but a feature for those playing these kind of inter-personal dominance games.

BlindKungFuMaster: That sounds like a promising theory.

In general, there are bio-engineering difficulties in a female gestating a male: two sexes sharing one body for nine months.

For example, to take an amusing example, when my wife was pregnant with our two sons, she suddenly became very interested in watching baseball and even golf on TV. We watched Kirk Gibson’s home run in the 1988 World Series together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U157X0jy5iw

and she was fascinated and asked if baseball games were always as exciting as this. “Oh, yeah, all the time,” I lied. At the moment, she believed me and regretted all the time she had wasted by never before watching sports on TV. But immediately after giving birth she lost absolutely all interest in televised sports.

This is pretty rare, but several other mothers have told me about similar experiences, so it’s not unique.

This is the opposite of your hypothesis where the mother imposes feminine tastes upon the male fetus, but having seen the influence go from fetus to mother, I can imagine the influence also going from mother to fetus.

Is there much evidence that gay men are helpful to their nieces and nephews having more children?

Perhaps if your gay uncle was the Pope during the Renaissance, but that seems like a fairly unusual social development.

In general, the genetic math doesn’t seem to work very well.

A more promising alternative theory might be that femininity is so valuable in Darwinian terms that a small amount of leakage across sex lines is an acceptable loss.

A suggestion on making terminology less opaque to casual readers: when I was a kid, golf magazines were full of references to golf ball trajectories that curved left or right, whether through the air due to spin or on the green due to gravity.

But eventually it became clear to editors that phrases like “a left-breaking putt” confused a sizable fraction of readers. Is a left-breaking putt one that is aimed left of the hole or is that “a right-breaking putt?”

In recent decades, therefore, golf writers have adopted the convention of spelling out the motion, as in “a left to right breaking putt” or “putting right to left spin on his tee shot,” etc.

Similarly, my brain doesn’t deal well with terms like “transwoman” because I can’t remember if that’s supposed to be someone who has undergone transition to or from womanhood. Like a lot of people, I’m a little vague about prepositions.

I realize that making terminology less opaque for the masses lessens the status marker benefits of being able to confidently use obscure jargon …

So, could we spell out what we’re talking about using terms like “m to f” or “f to m?”

I think sci-fi author Robert Heinlein figured out that his readership had some of these statistical tendencies as far back as his 1958 short story “All You Zombies.”

Heinlein flattered young sci-fi readers as an emergent elite of the future as far back as his keynote address of the first sci-fi convention in 1941.

One question would be whether Heinlein’s personal tendency toward solipsism was related to autism, transgenderism, or dissociativeness. My vague impression is that Heinlein saw solipsism as central and other traits as side effects. But you don’t see the word “solipsism” that often anymore — especially not in psychological contexts.

The one late onset male to female transperson I’ve known personally, back when he was a (rather ruthless and extremely unfeminine) man when we were in MBA school together (he was also getting a JD degree simultaneously) had an extremely high IQ, probably at least one standard deviation above mine, maybe two. He went on to make a fortune in space media and another fortune in medicine and is sometimes listed as the highest paid female CEO in America.

On the other hand, early onset M to Fs who start out as highly effeminate boys and often become transvestite sex workers or the like tend to be, shall we say, more people persons than high tech tycoons.

But the fact that Scott’s readership survey is not random is what makes it so interesting: it’s 5,000 very unusual people, but the kind of people who have become a lot more influential on the culture over the last century or so.

A lot of our popular culture comes from the end of the 19th Century, such as Sherlock Holmes and the rest of the Extraordinary Gentlemen characters. It may have had something to do with improvements in printing presses making newspapers, magazines, and books cheaper.

Wilde was a sort of real life character of the 1890s who was constantly in the papers at the time.

Right.

There are various possibilities: Perhaps what we today call, say, high-functioning autism was just as common in the past but we lacked the conceptual categories to notice it accurately, so even perceptive observers of humanity like famous writers didn’t get it right very often in the past.

Or maybe it wasn’t as common in the past.

Or maybe it’s not very common today, but, due to our now possessing conceptual categories like “autistic” and “Asperger’s” we tend to overfit a diverse range of behavior into those boxes.

Or possibly something else.

This is kind of similar to Foucault’s contention that “homosexual” as an identity was socially constructed not that long ago.

Foucault may have been on to something: there aren’t, for example, all that many characters in Shakespeare who resemble the stereotypical effeminate gay male stereotype of the 20th Century. Maybe the courtier whom Hotspur mocks in Henry IV Part I? Or is he just an effete snob? In any case, they are relatively rare in Shakespeare. Compare the Shakespearean canon to say, The Maltese Falcon movie of 1941, which got a lot of mileage out of various gay stereotypes: Joel Cairo, the Fat Man, and the gunsel.

“it’s like most people have the social skills equivalent of a graphics card – a dedicated processor optimised for that work that does nothing else and works on it all the time. I have to do it on the main CPU, which can still get good results if I consciously throw a lot of resources at it.”

I always like CPU chip vs. graphics chip analogies.

For example, the second biggest factor in IQ after the general factor is related to 3d cognitive skills. That seems like another CPU / graphics example.

Heinlein’s Waldo has a lot of high functioning autistic traits, but in this 1940s story, his personality is tied to his physical ailment of extreme muscular weakness that leads him to decamp from Earth to a zero-gravity space station.

My impression is that this is another example of the validity of a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf theory: that if we have a conceptual category called autism/Aspergers, we fit more things nicely into it. But when people didn’t yet have the category, it was harder to think about. So writers in the past tended to come up with characters that to us seem part on the spectrum part not. Today we’d probably come up with more coherent characters than Waldo or Sherlock Holmes or Henry Higgins because we have the conceptual category to fit them into. On the other hand, maybe they are more interesting because they fit only partly?

po8crg

Okay, that’s kind of the theme of Aaron Sorkin’s script for “The Social Network:” that Mark Zuckerberg can’t subconsciously understand friendship so he is able to ratiocinate it into code.

But my impression is that Zuckerberg actually impressed a lot of people from his mid-teenage years onward as a Natural Leader of Men.

I dunno. I don’t know the man.

I did have a half hour once with a Silicon Valley investor about the same year he sat down with Zuckerberg. The investor decided to invest money in Zuckerberg, not in me, and I can’t say he made the wrong choice …

So perhaps what we think of as Aspergery, the 17th Century thought of as Puritan?

Googling autism and puritanism, here’s an old New Republic article called “The New Puritans” that starts out with:

“When I read last month that voters in Portland, Oregon, had defeated a bill that would have fluoridated their drinking water, I was reminded of my first experience with an anti-fluoridation wacko. Jeffrey lived three houses down from me when I was a child. He was in his forties, lived at home with his mother, and did not work. I suppose that today he would be diagnosed as a highly functioning autistic. He was bright but very awkward.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/113632/oregon-fluoridation-proof-liberals-are-new-puritans

I don’t have an opinion on these subject, just that it might be interesting.

https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/the-misanthrope/character-analysis/alceste

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malvolio

He’s the Puritan in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

“What About Bob” is another Bill Murray role as an autist who torments his psychiatrist, Richard Dreyfus.

That’s interesting: I could imagine that having some trace of spectrum traits would help you play a mermaid or a conehead.

But too much would get in the way of being responsive to the lines, to other characters, and to the audience.

At the opposite pole away from autism, the British government during WWII tended to use movie stars like Leslie Howard and David Niven as diplomats and secret agents because they were so sensitive to social situations. Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind; he was shot down coming back from Portugal in 1943 on what appears to have been a secret British diplomatic mission to Franco.)

Niven, for instance, appears to have been used as a charming social buffer during high level military meetings to, say, keep Montgomery and Patton from coming to blows during arguments over who should get crucial resources. As a Hollywood movie star he was assumed by the British high command to understand Yanks and be able to say the right thing at the right time.

I may have this wrong: Niven didn’t much talk about his war-time role. He appears to have been appreciated in Hollywood postwar for his six years in what turned out to be a successful joint British-American effort. But he didn’t talk to much about specifics. I suspect he was used as a top PR man, both to sell British high command plans to the troops and to cajole the American high command into doing what the Brits wanted. My guess is that Niven didn’t want to get into a lot of details about what he was involved in.

To take the example of another great British dramatist, Tom Stoppard, he was often accused during the 1970s of being more brilliant and systematizing than soulful. (E.g., several of his early works such as Jumpers and Professional Foul were set in the world of academic analytical philosophy).

You can’t be an autistic playwright, but Stoppard was controversial because he perhaps had more Autistic Age traits than previous dramatists. This made him fresh and interesting, but also opened him up to criticism as all brain and no heart.

He somewhat took the criticism to heart, writing in response in the early 1980s a fine conventional West End play about adultery, The Real Thing, and then in the early 1990s an indisputable masterpiece, Arcadia, that combines emotion and intellect in a wholly masterful manner. Arcadia, set around 1820, is an extremely fictionalized version of the relationship between the first two computer scientists, Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace.

Henry Higgins is an interesting proposal. But he’s a genius at studying other people and engaging in Machiavellian personal manipulation. Theoretically, maybe those traits could be combined with autism, but something seems off about the combination. It could be that GB Shaw was combining some of the traits of an actual person on the autism spectrum with the kind of things that Shaw was interested in, such as dialect and social class.

Shaw himself promoted various cranky progressive affectations like spelling and calendar reform and always wearing woolen underwear that seem redolent of autism. but, he was also the most popular dramatist of his age, which I’m guessing is not a job that combines at all well with autistic traits. The examples Scott cites above of not getting social interactions are pretty much the opposite of what it takes to be a great playwright.

I’d guess that Shaw was slightly more autistic than his extremely non-autistic frenemy G.K. Chesterton.

But like Whitman, Shaw contained multitudes.

The narrator in “Double Star” is a jerk, but he’s an at least intermittently employed professional actor. Can you be autistic, in the sense Scott is using of not picking up on social cues, and be a competent actor?

Heinlein himself impressed most of the people he met as kind of a superior gentleman. There’s a touching scene in the Heinlein biography where he’s invited to be the guest of honor at the first sci-fi convention around 1941, but he immediately takes over as the host of the gathering because Heinlein, with his Naval Academy manners, is so much more socially adept than his fans. He does a wonderful job putting all the nerds at ease with each other and then gives them a pep talk when he accepts his award about how they are the future of the world. They all go home having had about the best time of their lives and swearing lifelong loyalty to Heinlein as their “dean.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson_Libby

Here’s one of my commenters’ suggestions:

Possibilities based on quick Googling:
Boo Radley, to Kill a Mockingbird
Caliban, Shakespeare’s Tempest
Sherlock Holmes
Mr. Darcy, from Pride and Prejudice
Tommy Walker From the 1970’s rock musical and movie Tommy (Actor: Roger Daltrey)
Lili von Shtupp, Blazing Saddles
Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye
Movies produced by Val Lewton, eg Irena Dubrovna from The Cat People, 1942; Amy from The Curse of the Cat People, 1944; Finn the Mute from The Ghost Ship, 1943.
The children in Village of the Damned, 1960
The Addams Family
Vera Rostov, War and Peace
Confessions of a Crap Artist, by Philip K. Dick
All “mad scientists”
Frankenstein’s monster?
I’m sure folks like Isaac Newton have been characters in novels at some point–I think he shows up in Shaw’s In Good King Charles’s Golden Days.

Another commenter:

Sherlock Holmes
Boo Radley, To Kill a Mockingbird
Lenny, Of Mice and Men
Mr. Darcy, Pride and Prejudice
That one that made me quit reading The Sound and the Fury; Benjy?
Bartelby, Bartelby the Scrivener
Stevie, the Secret Agent
Charlie, Flowers for Algernon

Stevie from Conrad’s “The Secret Agent” (1907) sounds pretty much like the real deal.

Maybe the overly literal Hymie the Robot on “Get Smart” in the mid-1960s was the first autistic character?

For example, off the top of my head, I can’t think of any characters in Robert Heinlein sci-fi stories from 1939-1966 that would clearly seem to be somewhat autistic.

And yet, Heinlein put a lot of effort into studying his fans. For example, the kind of high IQ transgenderism that is relatively common among readers of this blog shows up in Heinlein’s 1958 short story “All You Zombies.” But the autism/Asperger’s/nerd spectrum just doesn’t seem to have been a Thing for Heinlein.

For example, this Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autistic_fictional_characters

lists only 3 characters in film, TV, or literature from before 1988’s landmark “Rain Man” with Dustin Hoffman. (One is a 1969 Elvis Presley movie with Mary Tyler Moore as a nun that I can remember watching as a child, but I don’t have any recollection of an autistic character.)

I might argue that Dustin Hoffman’s famous character in “The Graduate” from 1967 could be seen, in hindsight following “Rain Man,” as some kind of autistic spectrum individual as well. Hoffman had had a day job as an orderly at a NYC mental clinic, so he may have had a more realistic appreciation of actual behaviors than most actors.

But it’s pretty fair to say that our artistic culture didn’t seem to have much of a concept of autism up until shortly before “Rain Man” three decades ago. (My vague memory is that Hoffman’s performance wasn’t wholly novel in 1988 — perhaps sketch comedians had been doing something like it for a few years. But I don’t recall any actor doing anything like that in, say, the 1970s).

By the way, for whatever reason, Hoffman is extremely out of fashion now that he’s old, but he was an important, influential actor for a couple of decades.

Are there characters with autistic/Aspergery traits in Shakespeare or Dickens? In what dramatist or novelist do these seemingly now common traits first appear unmistakably?

We tend to assume that human nature doesn’t change, but I don’t recall meeting anybody on the autism spectrum until in high school around 1973.

Maybe government regulations actually kind of sort of work?

For example, the government has been pushing car companies to make cars that pollute less and get better mileage and … cars pollute much less when I was young while over the last 10 years MPG has been shooting up without a reversion to the tinny, unsafe cars of the 1980s.

“Did you know: the ancient Egyptian language of hieroglyphs and Pharaohs survived into modern times as the Coptic language and is still the liturgical language of Coptic churches today.”

That’s a big part of how Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics in the 19th Century. He had the priest of the Coptic Church in Paris teach him Coptic.

“Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, and A. A. Milne all played on the same amateur cricket team.”

Chesterton, with his detective Father Brown, comes in last of those six in the Created an Immortal Character or Story metric.

shouldn’t understanding the Flynn Effect be among humanity’s highest priorities?

Here’s my best guess at an overlooked part of the causation of the Flynn Effect:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-flynn-effect-across-time-and-space/

If not for Judit’s spectacular achievements, we wouldn’t pay much attention to the Polgar sisters if Judit had only been about as good as her sisters. It’s kind of like the football-playing Gronkowski family: all the brothers are fine athletes, but Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski is an amazing beast, so we hear about the family as a whole a lot.

One interesting question I haven’t seen explored is whether the Jewish population of the Netherlands helped culturally fertilize the indigenous middle class with advanced business techniques and role models for an urban literate culture. A big problem in Eastern Europe was that the big gap in language and culture between the Jewish middle class and the Christian peasantry meant that that the indigenous people didn’t pick up many bourgeois skills from the Jews. In the Netherlands, however, there may have been more cultural transfer. (And there was a subsequent cultural transfer of advanced business techniques from the Netherlands to England, especially after 1688.)

But that’s speculative. And whether the Sephardics were more open than the Ashkenazi or whether Dutch Protestants were more receptive than Polish Catholics to Jewish bourgeois culture is even more speculative.

“Western and Central European Jews tended to be relatively affluent because the Enlightenment came to those countries earliest”

No, Jews did well for themselves in, say, Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, etc. relative to the average indigenous person. They were invited in to provide Eastern European nobles with a literate/numerate middle class to do rent collecting, tax farming, etc., especially after the Mongols massacred Eastern European cities.

The Russians asked in Germans to play those roles. The Brits grew their own middle class. The last seems like probably the best strategy if you can pull it off.

In general, Americans really don’t have an accurate picture in their heads of the social situation of European Jews. Most Americans are familiar only with “Fiddler on the Roof” set around 1900, when Jews were at their relative poorest due to massive population growth. (The Coen Brothers’ enigmatic movie “A Serious Man” is perhaps intended to provide a less self-pitying look at Jews.)

At the extreme high end of achievement, nature and nurture tend to both play major roles. For example, the two top American golfers of the previous generation, Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, both started swinging a golf club before they were two. There’s video of Tiger putting around with Bob Hope and Jimmy Stewart around age 3. When Tiger won the Masters at age 21 in 1997, the local sportscaster in L.A. mentioned that he first covered Tiger 18 years before.

Track and field stars get married quite often: e.g., Florence Griffith-Joyner was married to gold medalist Al Joyner, whose sister Jackie Joyner-Kersee was married to her coach Bobbie Kersee.

A track meet tends to be like a movie set: a coed environment with a lot of good looking people with a lot of free time for flirting.

Golfers, in contrast, almost never get married. The men and women’s pro tours only get together for one tournament per year.

Tennis tournaments tend to be coed — e.g., the U.S. Open tennis tournament has the men and women play at the same site at the same time, while the U.S. Open golf tournaments are held at different courses at different times for men and women. So, tennis players seem to get married a little more often than golfers, but maybe not as much as track athletes.

European Jews tended to be quite affluent until their population explosion in the Fiddler on the Roof era left many unable to get the white collar jobs their ancestors had specialized in. This isn’t well understood today because contemporary Jews are encouraged to believe they were always oppressed and impoverished and everybody else is discouraged from knowing anything about Jewish history that might undermine the narrative.

We accept the importance of “practice, practice, practice” in athletics, or in learning a musical instrument.

And we’re pretty good at athletics and violin these days.

My impression is that there are more than a few teachers who are extremely good at what they do, but their theories of how to teach tend to work best when they themselves are teaching, or when one of their students is carrying on the tradition. It’s hard to mass produce great teachers just from having them read about the original great teacher’s pedagogical theory. You kind of had to be there.

It’s a little bit like studying stand up comedy from reading a textbook about Rodney Dangerfield: “Yank at your necktie a lot.”

The guy who took up golf at age 30 with the intention of putting in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (i.e., no playing rounds of golf for the first couple of years, just working on the practice tee and practice green) and making the pro tour actually did progress pretty rapidly and was quickly shooting in the upper 70s. My impression is that Erricson’s methods worked pretty well for him for awhile.

Unfortunately, he just hit a ceiling (or floor) at around 75, while pros need to shoot around 65 regularly on a run of the mill golf course.

I read J.S. Mill’s autobiography in the 1970s. I took it as a warning about the dangers of Tiger Dadding.

The most memorable part for me is when poor J.S. finally starts finding relief from his depression in music. But then it occurs to him that with all the great melodies written in the current decade (the 1820s), surely the world will run out of new melodies shortly and he lapses back into depression.

The hard science Nobels have had a quite good reputation for a long time. I’m sure they have some biases, but nobody has offered a theory of how whatever their biases are might be biasing the number of Jews who win up or down by a significant amount. And as we see, Jews tend to do similarly well in other but quite different tests of brainpower, such as becoming a billionaire.

Most women who achieve a lot in male dominated spheres are not the daughters of single women. In fact, they often follow their father’s profession. In America at least, traditional families seem to be best for raising stereotype-shattering daughters.

Right. The ideal count would be weighted by share of the prize money, and by share of Jewish ancestry. E.g., the quarter Jewish Aage Bohr, son of Niels Bohr, shared the 1975 Physics Nobel with two others, so that would count 1/4 x 1/3 for a 1/12th share of a full Jewish Nobel Prize.

(Note, however, that I didn’t see from Wikipedia how the prize money was divvied up in 1975, so Bohr’s share might not have been 1/3rd.)

But I haven’t noticed much evidence that these refinements in technique would matter much in changing the Big Picture.

That was my impression: the British upper middle class appears to be the best at winning Nobel Prizes of any non-Jewish group in the world.

If you want to understand the prejudices of, say, Stephen Jay Gould against so many Anglo scientists from Darwin and Galton to Hamilton and Wilson, one way to think of it is as part of the Final Round competition between the two winningest scientific ethnic groups, Jews vs. Anglos, to deserve the honors of Heavyweight Champion Ethnicity of the History of Science.

“Jews have no real option here beyond keeping their heads down, working hard to excel, and then lobbying obliquely from behind closed doors.”

But is that what we are really seeing? Keeping their heads down in the media, lobbying obliquely behind closed doors, etc?

It seems instead that what we see are prominent Jewish media figures and billionaires like George Soros egging on the denunciations of “white privilege” while making clear that anybody who dares mention the parallel logical concept of “Jewish privilege” would be crushed like a bug. (See what happened to the careers of Gregg Easterbrook and Rick Sanchez for illustration.)

A particularly comic example of this was the sympathetic media promotion of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign against White Privilege in Hollywood.

In 2017, isn’t it clear that it is possible to have it both ways? Promote critiques of whites in general while making it clear that Jews are absolutely off limits for critique.

In the long run, that strategy seems imprudent for Jews (as the rise of BDS on campus might suggest); but in the short and medium run, you have to admit, it has been wildly successful.

Golden Age Hollywood loved portraying Herr Professor experts with comical German accents. The last one I can recall is the UCLA meteorologist who advises Howard Hughes in Scorsese’s The Aviator.

It’s seldom clear in old movies whether they represent gentile Germans or Jewish German-speakers (like Einstein and Freud).

Ashenazis had been highly endogamous for over 1000 years, so, yeah, they are a kind of racial group. If you send your saliva to 23andMe, they’ll estimate for you what percent Ashkenazi your ancestors were.

Right. It’s hilariously one-sided. For example, Ta-Nehisi Coates is always calling white people “people who think they are white,” while blacks (who tend to be vastly more mixed race in America than whites) are “black bodies.”

E.g., I don’t see much evidence from scanning Wikipedia that Czarist minister Witte was Jewish, although his wife was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Witte

Koreans have come to dominate the Ladies Professional Golf Association but not the Professional Golf Association in this century. That’s probably because intensive nurture goes further in women’s golf because fewer girls than boys are naturally motivated to become fanatical golfers. So a culture like contemporary South Korea that fanatically nurtures young golfers has a bigger impact on women’s golf than men’s golf.

There used to be a little kid who hit thousands of golf balls at the driving range in my neighborhood named Anthony Kim. He became a phenom on the PGA Tour, winning tournaments in his early 20s and being called the Next Tiger Woods.

Today, at age 31, he is officially retired from golf.

When other Koreans ask his parents how to raise a star golfer, they reply: “Don’t.”

“One of them was about a guy who declared he would do 10,000 hours of practice and join the PGA Tour as prophesied by Gladwell-Ericsson. … He totally failed.”

On the other hand, he got down to about a 4 handicap which might be at the 95th or 97th percentile (I’m just guessing) of all golfers. He became a much better golfer than I’ve ever been.

My guess is that to make the pro golf tour you need about 10,000 hours of practice before, say, your early twenties. Back in the 1980s, there were two fine tour pros, Calvin Peete and Larry Nelson, who hadn’t started golf at all until their early 20s. But I haven’t heard of any since then. It seems harder now to start as an adult and make the pro tour because of increased competition.

Note that there are a lot of superstar team sport athletes who are golf nuts (such as Michael Jordan) who would love to play on the Senior Tour for 50+ golfers. But former 49er QB John Brodie is only ex-jock to win even a single Senior Tour tournament. (We’ll see how retired Dallas QB Tony Romo does in his golf ambitions.)

So, I think 10,000 hours of practice in golf (especially at an early age) is close to a necessary condition, but it is not a sufficient condition.

The Williams Sisters in tennis were part of a nature/nurture experiment. Before they were born, their dad was was watching white women play tennis on television and told their mom that the two of them could have daughters that could beat the women they were watching.

I think there is some confusion over the use of the term Sephardic: Americans tend to think it applies to Spinoza/Disraeli type Atlantic non-Ashkenazi Jews and that all the Jews in Israel who are not Ashkenazi must be Cardozo type Sephardics.

But in reality there were never that many Atlantic Sephardics, and they didn’t suffer all that much persecution, so they aren’t terribly common in Israel.

Most of the non-Ashkenazis Jews in Israel are instead Middle Easterners, Mizrahi, whom Americans aren’t terribly familiar with.

This Wikipedia article tries to disentangle these two senses of the word “Sephardic”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sephardi_Jews

“More broadly, the term Sephardim has today also come to refer to traditionally Eastern Jewish communities of West Asia and beyond who, although not having genealogical roots in the Jewish communities of Iberia, have adopted a Sephardic style of liturgy and Sephardic law and customs imparted to them by the Iberian Jewish exiles over the course of the last few centuries. This article deals with Sephardim within the narrower ethnic definition.”

In other words, after 1492, some Spanish Jews moved north and west to form the high-achieving Atlantic Sephardic communities. Other Spanish Jews moved east and south into the Ottoman empire where they achieved a religious ascendancy over the indigenous Jews, who tended to adopt Sephardic rituals. So we wind up with the word Sephardic being applied to both the glittering but thin on the ground Sephardics of the Atlantic and to the larger number of indigenous Jews of the Middle East.

So the Atlantic Sephardics are a rather rare group. There historical heritage is impressive. Do we have good current IQ figures for them? I don’t know.

Okay, well, how about being one of the 50 richest individuals on Earth? Is that trivial like spelling bees or are we starting to get to meaningful?

From the Jewish Telegraph Agency, 2016:

“Eleven of the 50 richest people in the world are Jewish, according to the 30th annual Forbes billionaires list released Tuesday. The list features five Jews in the top 15 and seven in the top 25 spots.”

http://www.jta.org/2016/03/02/news-opinion/united-states/mark-zuckerberg-is-the-worlds-richest-jew-according-to-forbes-billionaire-list

11/50 = 22% or roughly two orders of magnitude greater than the Jewish share of the world’s population (around 0.2%).

To paraphrase Sam Spade from the end of the Maltese Falcon, it’s not that any one source of data on Jewish exceptionalism is proof in and of itself of Jewish exceptionalism, but look how many of them there are.

There actually are smart people with German surnames who aren’t Jewish, although I find that Americans tend not to really believe that’s possible.

Lots of noteworthy Sephardim from the past: Spinoza, Ricardo, Disraeli, Confederate leader Judah Benjamin, Supreme Court justice Cardozo, etc.

If you go far enough back, it seems like there were more prominent Sephardics than Ashkenazis until some point in the 19th Century. I wonder if the Sephardics didn’t experience as big of a population boom as the Ashkenazi did in the 19th Century?

In thinking about the descendants of Spanish Jews, it’s probably worth distinguishing between the Atlantic ones who wound up in Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, New York, and Rio, places where there was a lot of opportunity, and the ones who moved to the Ottoman Empire, which was going great guns in 1492 but was the sick man of Europe by the 19th Century.

Finally, there are the Oriental Jews who stayed in places like Persia, Baghdad, Cairo, Yemen, and Algeria, where there was probably the least opportunity in the modern world. Of course, there was some blending over the generations between the Sephardic Ottoman Jews and the Oriental Jews. So it’s pretty complicated.

Zionist leaders tried hard to mold Israel’s people into the opposite of the old Jewish stereotypes of scholarly, scientific, and good at white collar businesses.

They largely succeeded in the 20th Century.

But in the 21st Century, Israel is turning out to be full of scientists and business moguls.

Here are Nobel percentages as of 2011:

Nobel laureate data is compiled by the Israel Science and Technology Homepage, a website run by biochemist Israel Hanukoglu, who was the chief science advisor to Benjamin Netanyahu during his first term as prime minister. Updating Lynn`s Nobel numbers to include the recently announced 2011 prizes, we find:

Medicine or Physiology: Jews have comprised 51 of the 199 laureates, or 26 percent
Physics: 47 of 191, or 25 percent
Chemistry 30 out of 160, or 19 percent
Literature: 12 out of 108, or 11 percent
Peace: 9 out of 101, or 9 percent
Economics: 24 out of 69, or 35 percent

Hanukoglu is using the rabbinical definition of who is a Jew.

Including everybody who is at least half-Jewish bumps up the percentage of laureates by one to six points: medicine goes up from 26 percent Jewish to 27 percent, physics from 24 percent to 25 percent, chemistry from 19 percent to 20 percent, while economics jumps from 35 percent to 41 percent.

So Jews tend to be over-represented by a couple of orders of magnitude in the (less political) hard science Nobels.

That’s remarkable.

There is a lot of reluctance, usually on the part of Jews, to publicly admit in forums open to non-Jews that a host of statistics suggest that Jews are a pretty big deal in the modern world.

Right, that would be an interesting question. One question is whether Budapest Jews were all that exceptional outside of physics. Off the top of my head, it seems like more Vienna Jews were more famous in more fields than Budapest Jews, who were famous for being famous in physics. We tend to weight physics heavily because of, among other things, the atomic bomb. But it’s not clear whether focusing on physics gives us an understanding of the broad picture.

But I haven’t counted.

Right, the fact that as of 2000, Israelis hadn’t won many Nobel Prizes was a counterexample to use against the weight of evidence that Ashkenazis tend to be pretty smart.

But as of 2017, the Israeli Nobel Prize count doesn’t weigh that much anymore against the ideas that Ashkenazis tend to be pretty smart.

Similarly, as of 2000 the Japanese hadn’t won many Nobels, but as of 2017 they’d won quite a few more.

In contrast, a Larry Summers-type theory that women aren’t all that great at physics has not been undermined by recent trends in Nobel Prizes. No woman has won a Physics Nobel since Maria Goeppert-Mayer in 1963.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Nobel_laureates

From living around a lot of Israeli immigrants, I don’t see much evidence that they are much selected for representing the more refined aspects of humanity.

A lot of Michael Lewis’s new book “The Undoing Project” about psychologists Kahneman and Tversky involves cognitive tests they made up for the Israeli military.

The Israeli military gives plenty of IQ tests to conscripts and assigns the smart ones to challenging jobs, like in Unit 8200, which has helped launch the Israeli tech boom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

Michael Lewis’s recent book on Israeli psychologists Kahneman and Tversky (the former won an Econ quasi-Nobel) has a lot about Israeli university culture and Israeli military culture. In the Israeli military, smart guys like K&T did not go overlooked.

My 2011 article on Jewish Nobel Prizes takes out the Peace and Literature prizes and treats Econ as a redheaded stepchild of the Big Three hard science Nobels:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/lynn-on-the-jews-yes-it-s-intelligence-but-there-s-something-else-too

The U.S. has a very important law called the Endangered Species Act that plays a huge role in what real estate developments and the like are allowed to be constructed.

And yet the concept of “species” remains surprisingly fuzzy among scientists, with a couple of dozen competing definitions.

For example, the EPA spends a fair amount of money to protect the Red Wolf, which appears to be a hybrid of wolves and coyotes, by neutering coyotes to keep them from breeding with Red Wolves.

I had lunch once with a man who had built the most expensive golf course in California. (His golf course later went broke and he sold it to Donald Trump.) A huge issue for building the course was whether or not the rare California gnatcatcher bird that lived on the grounds was a separate endangered species or whether it was just a local race of the common Baja gnatcatcher. He decided to assume it was an endangered species and build his course around the bird, but that made the course less enjoyable for golfers, which contributed to its financial troubles.

So if it’s not all that clear, even with billions of dollars on the line in lawsuits, what a species is exactly, it’s not surprising that race is even fuzzier. And yet the government cares a lot about races.

I live in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. The many Israelis who have moved in since about 1980 tend to be more blue-collar in affect than most of the American Jews I grew up around. I presume that’s because the founding Zionists wanted Israelis to act like they were citizens of a “normal country” with lots of farmers, ditchdiggers, soldiers, and other jobs that European and American Jews seldom did.

A racial group is an extended family that is partly inbred.

The Ashkenazi have been fairly endogamous over the last few dozen generations, enough time for some genetic variants to undergo some degree of selection.

Other things that have changed in recent decades regarding Nobel Prizes are that:

– Japan has been winning a fair number of hard science Nobels after a long drought.

– Women have been doing well in Medicine/Physiology Nobels, but not terribly well in Chemistry and have continued to be shut out in Physics. Madame Curie’s Nobels in Physics and Chemistry before WWI still stand out. My guess is that women find the Life Sciences more appealing than the Death Sciences, while a fair number of guys find Oppenheimer’s line “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds” to be the coolest thing anybody ever said.

Here’s my 2011 article on Jewish Nobel Prizes:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/lynn-on-the-jews-yes-it-s-intelligence-but-there-s-something-else-too

Montaigne, who was perhaps half-Jewish, more or less invented the modern essay in the 16th Century and had a big influence on Shakespeare.

albatross11 — Well said.

To give an example of how elites aren’t a hyper-aware Inner Party who know the real truth denied the proles, consider the No Child Left Behind Act that dominated federal education policy for most of this century. About a decade and a half ago, President Bush and Senator Kennedy got together and came up with a plan: all states would have Abolish the Gap by making (virtually) all students “proficient” or “advanced” (i.e., above average) by 2014. But states were allowed to use whatever state achievement tests they wanted to document their progress.

Not surprisingly, the main effect was to encourage massive cheating on state achievement tests.

Here’s a suggestion of mine: instead of obsessing over raising black and Hispanic school achievement test scores by almost a full standard deviation without raising white and Asian test scores (the implicit meaning of “Closing the Gap”), why not set as a goal raising all groups’ achievement by half a standard deviation each?

This seems much more doable, but it never occurs to elites.

For example … From the Jewish Telegraph Agency:

Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s richest Jew, according to Forbes billionaire list

Zuckerberg, 31, added $11.2 billion to his net wealth, giving him a total fortune of $44.6 billion and moving him up to No. 6 on the list from No. 16 last year.

America has been very, very good to the Zuckerberg family over the last four generations. Is it too much to ask that he stop trying to give America away to foreigners with his FWD.us lobby to boost immigration?

The theory behind the dusty old concept of noblesse oblige is that a powerful class that thinks of itself as being in the game for the very long run will tend to behave in a more responsible fashion than one that doesn’t. As they say, nobody ever washed a rental car.

In the early 20th Century, for example, leadership caste WASPs played a major role in setting aside National Parks and in limiting immigration.

Even more fundamentally, they tolerated criticism of themselves by others. Criticism encourages you to behave better.

Of course, the moribund WASP Establishment’s increasing fair-mindedness had its downsides. One problem with letting other people have their say about you is that they may undermine your power.

But, shouldn’t new elites be held to the same standards of criticism that helped them displace the old elites? Why is it considered admirable for the new establishment to try to destroy the careers of their critics?

For noblesse oblige to work, privileged and influential groups have to be publicly acknowledged to be privileged and influential. If, on the other hand, their main sense of collective identity is that of marginal members of society endangered by the might of the current majority, then the system doesn’t operate. …

Conclusion: American Jews should start thinking of themselves less as oppressed outcasts who need to go for whatever they can get while the getting is good, and start more accurately thinking of themselves as belonging to the best-connected inner circle of the contemporary American Establishment.

Thus, American Jews should realize that, like the Protestant elite of yore, their privileged position as a de facto leadership caste bestows upon themselves corresponding duties to conserve the long-term well-being of the United States—rather than to indulge in personal and ethnic profit and power maximization.

But that’s unlikely to happen until the Jewish elite to begin to tolerate non-Jewish criticism, rather than to continue to try to destroy the careers of critics—or even just honest observers—in what seems to be an instinctive reaction intended “to encourage the others.”

A group self-image of victimization, combined with a penchant for ideological intensity and powerful ethnocentric lobbies, can lead to bizarre political manifestations—such as the dominant Jewish assumption that proper veneration of their Ellis Island ancestors requires opposition to patriotic immigration reform today.

http://www.vdare.com/articles/thoughts-on-americas-jewish-ruling-class-and-noblesse-oblige

Whites (including Jews) are constantly warned not to be implicitly biased in favor of other whites, but Jews are almost never warned not to be implicitly biased in favor of other Jews. We have a huge amount of research into disparate impact due to implicit bias in favor of whites but minimal amounts into disparate impact due to implicit bias in favor of Jews. It would be likely that any social scientist who proposed studying pro-Semitic bias would be accused of anti-Semitism, which is close to a career-crusher, so not surprisingly nobody bothers to look into the question.

My guess would be that, all else being equal, there is some pro-Semitic implicit bias, if only because Jews tend to find other Jews more interesting than non-Jews; and there are virtually no penalties nor even any attention paid toward pro-Semitic bias.

So, it would be hard to imagine why there wouldn’t be some amount of pro-Semitic disparate impact under the current conditions.

“Honestly, I don’t think much of your culture, either.”

You are using a lot of it.

This actually ties into a rather important issue. It’s appears from reading this article that Scott, as an example of a super intelligent youngish man, has absorbed the current Conventional Wisdom that the reason European Jews didn’t contribute all that much to European culture until the later 19th Century was because the Christians held them down. But the reality appears to have been that the medieval and early modern Jews equally held themselves down.

Moreover, a lot of post-Jewish Enlightenment history becomes more explicable if we bear that in mind.

For example, why was Freud so lionized for much of the 20th Century? Well, one reason was that there were a whole lot of smart Jewish intellectuals in the 20th Century, but they didn’t have all that many Jewish intellectual heroes to lionize. There was Marx, but a lot of Jews were too non-radical for Marxism. So along comes Freud with his immense self-confidence in his crank theories about toilet-training and he fills the Jewish hunger for a non-radical Jewish genius.

Fortunately, Jews went on to produce authentic geniuses like Einstein, so Freud has largely been memory-holed lately.

The Coen Bros’ “A Serious Man” is worth a watch.

There was giant defense investment in Silicon Valley from the Korean War to at least the end of the Cold War. Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford saw how Harvard, Caltech,, Columbia, etc benefited from Pentagon spending on electronic warfare in WWII (radar and counter-radar) and vowed to make sure Stanford got its cut the next time.

So defense spending paid for a lot of the base of Silicon Valley: the huge conglomeration of skilled engineers and technicians in one place. Apple leveraged off that base. But calling Apple’s leadership parasites is silly.

See Steve Blank’s Secret History of Silicon Valley for the details.

Catholic migrants from rural Ireland mostly wound up living in big cities in America, and that was during an era of great bargains to be had in American farmland.

Right, outside of innovations in business/financial techniques, Jewish culture before the Jewish Enlightenment is not all that intellectually interesting to modern people.

Strange as it may seem these days, Jews largely inflicted this boredom upon themselves.

Scott should read up on the Jewish Enlightenment. From Wikipedia:

The Haskalah, often termed Jewish Enlightenment (Hebrew: השכלה‎; literally, “wisdom”, “erudition”) was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, with certain influence on those in the West and Muslim lands. It arose as a defined ideological worldview during the 1770s, and its last stage ended around 1881, with the rise of Jewish nationalism.
The Haskalah pursued two complementary aims. It sought to preserve the Jews as a separate, unique collective and worked for a cultural and moral renewal, especially a revival of Hebrew for secular purposes, pioneering the modern press and literature in the language. Concurrently, it strove for an optimal integration of the Jews in surrounding societies, including the study of native vernacular and adoption of modern values, culture and appearance, all combined with economic productivization. The Haskalah promoted rationalism, liberalism, freedom of thought and enquiry, and is largely perceived as the Jewish variant of the general Enlightenment. The movement encompassed a wide spectrum ranging from moderates, who hoped for maximal compromise and conservatism, to radicals who sought sweeping changes.

In its various changes, the Haskalah fulfilled an important, though limited, part in the modernization of Central and Eastern European Jews. … Owing to its dualistic policies, it collided both with the traditionalist rabbinic elite, which attempted to preserve old Jewish values and norms in their entirety, and with the radical assimilationists who wished to eliminate or minimize the existence of the Jews as a defined collective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskalah

Karl Marx revered Prometheus as a sort of patron saint of scientific/technological ambition, striving, and progress.

https://www.amazon.com/Prometheus-Bound-Structure-Scientific-Thinking/dp/0807111422

I doubt if Marx’s current followers share that mindset.

Didn’t you watch the opening scene of “Inglorious Basterds” about a family of Jewish farmers living in splendid isolation in the French countryside?

If you can’t trust Quentin Tarantino’s knowledge of history, who can you trust?

The vast majority of Jews in the U.S. (not to mention the Confederacy) have always been legally white. Under Jim Crow, for example, Jews tended to be welcome members of the white ascendancy in the South.

The Obama Administration’s Census Bureau, however, was hatching a plan to make “Middle Eastern/North African” a separate race for the 2020 Census. How that would affect Jews never seemed to come up in public discussions of the plan.

I don’t know what the Trump Administration will do with this proposal.

UC Berkeley historian Yuri Slezkine’s book The Jewish Century points out that many Jews found radical leftist politics attractive for three reasons:

– Jews were discriminated against because of religion, so get rid of religion.

– Jews were discriminated against because of nationalism, so get rid of nationalism.

– Jews were discriminated against because they were the best capitalists, so get rid of capitalism.

https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Century-Yuri-Slezkine/dp/0691127603

Before the Jewish Enlightenment self-liberated some Jews, Jewish brainpower tended to be restricted to commerce and religious studies.

“they haven’t been in nationalist/anti-immigration movements”

One of the most colorful leaders of the anti-Catholic immigration Know Nothing movement of the 1840s was a Jewish Congressman:

Lewis Charles Levin (November 10, 1808 – March 14, 1860) was an American politician, Know Nothing, and anti-Catholic social activist of the 1840s and 1850s. He served three terms in the United States Congress (U.S. House of Representatives, 1845–51), representing Pennsylvania’s 1st District. Levin is considered to have been the first Jewish Congressman[1][2] although David Levy Yulee served as a territorial representative from Florida prior to Levin’s entering Congress. ….

Levin became the leader and chief spokesman for a start-up political movement calling itself the American Republican Party (later the Native American Party). On May 3, 1844 Levin attempted to give a speech in the center of the Irish-Catholic neighborhood of Kensington. The locals ended up chasing all of the protesters out of the neighborhood. The following Monday, May 6, Levin returned with 3000 protesters. The ensuing fighting led to dozens of people killed, hundreds injured, and hundreds more left homeless as most of the neighborhood homes were burned by rioters. In addition the Catholic Churches St. Michael and St. Augustine were demolished completely by fire.[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Charles_Levin

One way to think about regression is: What are the grandparents’ IQs?

My vague impression is that Puritan forms of Protestantism such as Calvinism and Presbyterianism were in part inspired by the successful Jewish example of a literate, wealthy urban minority.

Say your mother and father were each the smartest sibling in their families of four siblings each. Their children are likely to regress toward a mean in between their own average IQ and the average IQ of themselves and their siblings.

The full scope of Jewish achievement in American life was summarized in 1995 by Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University:

“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.”

http://takimag.com/article/bargaining_with_zionists_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4iKgpzOCT

Right.

Here’s my 1997 article “Track & Battlefield” that explained the history of gender gaps in Olympic running over recent decades, and correctly predicted that the gender gap would not continue to close as it did during 1972-1988, as that was largely due to women runners cheating with steroids.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/05/track-and-battlefield-by-steve-sailer.html

Gregory Clark’s surname book lists likelihood of graduating from Oxford or Cambridge for the top 25 most common surnames in Britain. The leader, by far, is “Hamilton,” at about twice the rate of the national average.

http://takimag.com/article/give_it_up_psmithe_steves_sailer/print#axzz4i9UAdXb8

I’ve wondered why in this decade IQ research seems to be dominated by Dutch researchers with unspellable names …

Thanks.

Jews make up about one-third of the billionaires in America and about one-seventh of the billionaires in the world:

http://takimag.com/article/jewish_wealth_by_the_numbers_steve_sailer/print#axzz4i9UAdXb8

Here’s my count of Forbes Israel‘s list, with Jewish billionaires as a fraction of the country’s total number of billionaires:

US 105/442 = 24%
Israel 16/16 = 100%
Russia 12/99 = 12%
Canada 6/29 = 21%
Brazil 6/45 = 13%
UK 5/37 = 14%
Ukraine 3/10 = 30%
Monaco 3/3 = 100%
Australia 3/22 = 14%
Spain 2/20 = 10%
France 2/24 = 8%
Germany 1/58 = 2%
Hong Kong 1/39 = 3%

However, the Forbes Israel list of Jewish billionaires is pretty slapdash and they missed a lot of Jewish billionaires.

There are a number of Jewish groups in the United States at present who are highly prosperous in business but not intellectual, such as the 75,000 Syrian Jews of Brooklyn:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/magazine/14syrians-t.html

I suspect that up until the Jewish Enlightenment in the later 1700s, European Jews were on average more like today’s Syrian Jews in Brooklyn than they were like the intellectual Jews of early 20th Century Budapest and Vienna.

There are other fields where a big national push doesn’t pay off because there is too much global competition. For example, the East German sports-chemistry complex dominated women’s track & field in 1976-1988, but didn’t make much of a dent in men’s track.

“Austria didn’t have a lot of Jews.”

Vienna’s Jewish population in 1923 was counted as 201,513.

Vienna may have well been the intellectual capital of the world in the first third of the 20th Century.

I’d add that the Austrian Empire was famously well-administered by competent bureaucrats from the Enlightenment onward. So a lot of little things were done right.

Disraeli, the Tory prime minister, was Queen Victoria’s favorite prime minister. British Jews on average aren’t all that leftist.

In part, the correlation of Jews with leftism has a lot to do with the expansion of the reactionary Russian czarist empire westward into areas like Poland that had a lot of Jews. The czar didn’t like Jews and the Jews didn’t like the czar.

America wound up with a lot of Jews from the Russian empire.

Similarly, today Putin is kind of a neo-czar, and that sets off a lot of paranoia about Russia among American Jews brought up watching “Fiddler on the Roof” with its tale of a Cossack pogrom ordered by the Kremlin.

In reality, Putin seems to be fairly pro-Semitic, but he provides a good bogeyman for American Jewish persecution complexes.

“my mom grew up in Augusta, GA where the few Jews were all pretty conservative.”

Here’s an obscure question: The most prestigious golf club in America is Augusta National, home of the Masters. My impression is that after Augusta Nation became the #1 club for CEOs during the Eisenhower era, it didn’t admit many Jewish CEOs (if any) up until the 1980s or so.

On the other hand, I saw somebody assert once that a number of local Jewish families in Augusta had joined Augusta National in the years after its opening during the Depression, before it became a national sensation. I thought that was interesting because it would support an impression I have that the South was somewhat less socially anti-Semitic than the North.

Would your mother from Augusta know if any of her Jewish friends’ families were members of Augusta National?

Israel intentionally cultivated a rather anti-intellectual culture. There was a lot of emphasis from its leaders on being a Normal Country with lots of farmers and soldiers and fewer highbrows.

American culture was less intellectual as well, with few Americans winning Nobel Prizes up until the end of the 1920s.

The big reason the physicists of the first half of the 20th Century are so famous is because one of them got to say “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds,” with good justification.

There are a lot of fields where a little emphasis on the part of a culture can go a long way. For example, South Korean women have dominated ladies’ professional golf over the last decade, probably due to a South Korean woman winning the US women’s open in 1999 and causing a media sensation in South Korea.

British upper middle class intellectuals have won a lot of Nobel prizes. They tend to be quite intermarried: Darwin, Keynes, Huxley, Arnold — these names keep popping up.

Here’s an NYT obituary from a few years ago:

“Andrew Huxley, Nobel-Winning Physiologist, Dies at 94
by Denise Gellene

“Sir Andrew Huxley, a British scientist from an illustrious family whose boyhood mechanical skills led to a career in physiology — “the mechanical engineering of living things,” he called it — and a Nobel Prize for explaining the electrical basis of bodily movement, died on Wednesday. He was 94.

“Professor Huxley, a half brother of the novelist Aldous Huxley, shared the 1963 Nobel in Physiology or Medicine …”

By the way, some of the groundwork for Huxley and Hodgkins’ breakthrough was done by Cambridge professor Richard Darwin Keynes, a fellow who had to go through life as practically the only man among his family and friends who didn’t win the Nobel or have a historic Ism named after him.

“Andrew Fielding Huxley was born in London on Nov. 22, 1917, the son of Leonard Huxley, a writer, and the former Rosalind Bruce.

“His grandfather Thomas Huxley was a noted 19th-century biologist and early proponent of evolutionary theory. Julian Huxley, a pioneer in the field of animal behavior, and Aldous Huxley, the author of “Brave New World” and other works, were half brothers from his father’s first marriage.”

“Professor Huxley said his famous siblings had little influence on him when he was growing up; in fact, he said, they seemed more like uncles than brothers because of the age differences: Julian was 30 and Aldous was 23 when Andrew was born. He credited his technical gifts to his mother, who encouraged woodworking and was good with her hands.”

The two prominent writers among the three, Aldous and Julian, were related to the writing Arnolds through their mother. Andrew was not.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/06/pseudoscience-of-eugenics-in-action.html

Vienna was another city with remarkable intellectual accomplishments up until 1938, although less concentrated in physics than Budapest and more in other fields such as music, economics, philosophy, and so forth.

Mark Twain spent a year or two in Vienna at the end of the 1890s escorting his daughter in her musical studies. She married a Jewish pianist who eventually became the conductor of the Detroit Symphony. The whole Clemens family is buried together in Elmira, NY. It’s apparently traditional to smoke a contemplative cigar and leave the cigar butt on Twain’s tombstone.

Here’s Twain’s 1898 essay “Concerning the Jews:”

https://sourcebooks.fordham.edu/mod/1898twain-jews.asp

One interesting aspect is that Twain implies that Jews are best at business — except, of course, he says, for the Scots. (In 1898, regard for Scottish money-making enterprise was near its peak.)

A few years ago I wrote about why in the 20th Century, Jews had done so well in physics, Germans in chemistry, and Anglos in biology:

The British superiority at evolutionary thought doesn’t imply overall supremacy. Other ethnicities enjoyed other accomplishments. For instance, rocket science was developed predominantly by Germans such as Wernher von Braun and other V-2 engineers brought to America by Operation Paperclip. Space flight was promoted in America by the anti-Nazi refugee popularizer Willy Ley and the German-American dean of science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein.

At the same time, Jews such as Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller took the lead in the development of nuclear weapons.

While it can’t be ruled out, there’s no need for a genetic explanation for these national specialties. Rocketry, for example, was in large part a challenge to harness potent fuels, and the Germans were the best at chemistry.

Physics was convenient for urban Jews. (Those interested in living things tended to become doctors rather than naturalists.)

By contrast, Britain’s brightest scientists tended to live in close contact with the countryside, both natural and agricultural. For example, Hamilton (1936-2000), the most creative evolutionary theorist of the later 20th century, grew up in bucolic Kent, only five miles from Darwin’s Down House. It’s not surprising that a bourgeoisie that mostly stayed out of the burghs would take an interest in evolution.

http://takimag.com/article/the_strange_evolution_of_eugenics_steve_sailer/print#axzz4i9UAdXb8

The Cochran-Harpending paper has a good bibliography.

For the 20th Century, the award-winning “The Jewish Century” by UC Berkeley historian Yuriel Slezkine is good.

Yes, thank you. I’ll fix it.

The total fertility rate for Jews in Israel has been rising: it’s now 3.13 babies per Jewish Israeli woman per lifetime, which happens to be equal to the Israeli Arab TFR.

Scott writes:

“For the reasons suggested by Cochran, Hardy, and Harpending, Ashkenazi Jews had the potential for very high intelligence. They were mostly too poor and discriminated against to take advantage of it.”

No, Jews in medieval and early modern Europe, while discriminated against, were not terribly poor on average, especially not compared to their Christian neighbors. Jews in this era put lots of brainpower into making money, at which they were quite good. They didn’t put brainpower into science, however, until after the Jewish Enlightenment, which lagged behind the general Enlightenment.

Scott writes:

“The emancipation of the Jews in Eastern Europe was a difficult process that took place throughout the 19th century. Even when it happened, it took a while for the first generation of Jews to get rich enough that their children could afford to go to fancy schools and fritter away their lives on impractical subjects like physics and chemistry.”

An important thing to keep in mind is that Jews had to emancipate themselves from their anti-enlightenment traditional culture. The Jewish Enlightenment led by Moses Mendelsohn in the second half of 18th century lagged the general Enlightenment by 2 or 3 generations. Before the Enlightenment, Jews were generally richer than Christians in Europe, so Jews didn’t see much reason to adopt gentile ways. But by the 1750s or so, a few Jews were starting to notice that gentile culture was progressing rapidly and had developed features that Jews should emulate.

American Jews tend to think of European Jews as poor like in “Fiddler on the Roof.” But the emergence of a vast Jewish proletariate of poor tradesmen was a relatively late development due to the huge Jewish population explosion in the 18th and 19th centuries forcing growing numbers of Jews out of their traditional white collar niche jobs into lowlier mass jobs.

And Niels Bohr’s quarter-Jewish son also won a Nobel in Physics.

“With the example of banking, it seems much clearer that Catholics were persecuted out of banking by other Catholics; the idea that you persecute someone into being a merchant seems hard to swallow.”

Right. The conventional wisdom today is that medieval Jews would have happily chosen to be stoop laboring serfs, but they were persecuted out of that opportunity so they had to find refuge in lucrative white collar work.

That seems a little odd, though.

My understanding is that formal studies of the torsion dystonia-IQ link have been proposed at least 3 times and all been shot down for political reasons. But maybe something has happened lately?

Israel is starting to take off in winning hard science Nobel Prizes in this century:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Israeli_Nobel_laureates

There have been 4 Israeli winners in Chemistry since 2004.

The Nobels usually come with a lengthy time lag.

Here’s my count of Jewish Nobels through 2011:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/lynn-on-the-jews-yes-it-s-intelligence-but-there-s-something-else-too

Medicine or Physiology: Jews have comprised 51 of the 199 laureates, or 26 percent
Physics: 47 of 191, or 25 percent
Chemistry 30 out of 160, or 19 percent
Literature: 12 out of 108, or 11 percent
Peace: 9 out of 101, or 9 percent
Economics: 24 out of 69, or 35 percent …

Including everybody who is at least half-Jewish bumps up the percentage of laureates by one to six points: medicine goes up from 26 percent Jewish to 27 percent, physics from 24 percent to 25 percent, chemistry from 19 percent to 20 percent, while economics jumps from 35 percent to 41 percent. …

By any means of counting, there are quite a number of countries where Jews make up a remarkable percentage of native-born Nobel laureates. For example, among American natives, Lynn counts 200 prizewinners through 2009 (leaving aside the peace prize as non-intellectual). Jews made up 62, or 31 percent. Since Jews comprised about 3 percent of the adult population in the U.S. in the middle of the last century, this gives American Jews an Achievement Quotient for Nobel laureates of just over ten.

And the American AQ is fairly low by international standards. In places with very few Jews, AQs can be stratospheric, such as Switzerland (3 Jewish laureates out of 17 total laureates for an AQ of 60), Latin America (2 out of 8 for an AQ of 220) and Italy (4 out of 17 for a 320).

After awhile, The Chosen People becomes slightly repetitious as evidence for consistently high levels of Jewish accomplishment pile up. For variety’s sake, I started looking for exceptions to prove the rule.

I found a few. British gentiles are pretty good at winning Nobels. They’ve won 76 while British-born Jews have won only three, for an Achievement Quota of six. This low AQ not appear to stem from British Jews being untalented or terribly discriminated against, but instead because British gentiles are unusually good at doing Nobel-worthy work.

Wow, those are much better reasons for my idea than the ones I came up with!

The lead theory is worth more study.

It doesn’t fit Japan at all, but it’s not too bad for other countries.

One thing I’d like to see is studies of crime rates in places with major lead pollution. The EPA maintains a Superfund lead pollution cleanup site list online, so it’s not hard to get a list of localities with very high lead pollution rates.

I read through one lawsuit about lead pollution in a town with a lead smelter in Missouri’s lead belt. Parents didn’t seem to be saying lead made children behave badly, it made them sluggish.

Anyway, there is a lot of info out there for somebody to research.

Likewise, I went to school K-12 in Sherman Oaks, CA, which had the biggest traffic jam freeway interchange in the country in the 1960s-70s (405 & 101). Did all this lead being spewed from freeways in Sherman Oaks, CA lead to high crime rates? I dunno. It seems more likely it caused the Valley Girl accent.

By the way, here’s a criminal justice reform that I’ve never heard anybody suggest: take the juries out of the courtroom. Lawyers and judges are very busy people, so they only carry on trials about 4 or 5 hours per day, and a lot of that is inadmissible to the jury.

So, videotape the trial without the jury present, delete all the parts that were ruled inadmissible, and then call the jury in and show the videotape to them in 8 hour a day stretches. The one jury I served on took two entire work weeks, but if we did it my way, it would have only taken us 13 or 14 people (with alternates) one week. That’s a savings of 13 or 14 individual-weeks.

Another possible reform would be to speed up pre-trial dawdling.

That said, it doesn’t seem like it would be impossible to figure out other methods of dealing with criminality, perhaps using new technology.

But, as we’ve seen, it’s been too tempting for Democrats to demagogue over how the high rate of imprisonment of blacks is due to evil white people, so little has been accomplished.

The homicide rate has shot up in heavily black cities since 2014, especially in cities like Baltimore and Chicago with large scale Black Lives Matter protests.

I realize you may have read a lot of articles claiming that the Ferguson Effect doesn’t exist, but, how should I put it, they were trying to fool you. This is one of the clearest social statistics phenomenon I’ve ever seen.

The reason Stuntz doesn’t have many examples of black politicians taking control of racist criminal justice systems and reducing the incarceration rate is because:

A. Blacks who bother to vote actually tend to like law and order. See the new book:

LOCKING UP OUR OWN
Crime and Punishment in Black America
By James Forman Jr.
Illustrated 306 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $27.

B. Black-controlled cities that don’t maintain strict criminal justice tend to depopulate, such as Detroit and East St. Louis.

It doesn’t come up much in the media these days, but America tried cutting back on imprisonment in the 1960s and the ensuing rise in crime was a massive disaster that permanently wrecked a number of great cities and almost destroyed New York.

Bill James’ book “True Crime” isn’t all that good, but he does remember what Establishment attitudes toward incarceration were like in the 1960s and how that damaged urban life.

As the crime rate has gone down in this century, prosecutors have had more time for jury trials so they are less likely to plea bargain down to a light sentence than during the peak crime era in the late 20th Century.

That’s why the bail amounts in Scott’s post seem bizarrely low: we’re more familiar with stories about rich people or middle class people getting arrested and bail being set in five or six figures. Those kind of Bonfire of the Vanities-type stories are less depressing than the typical arrest.

Bail is a little like homelessness, which in practice is often a test of whether anybody you know would let you crash on their couch for awhile. It turns out that some people aren’t trusted by anybody who knows them well.

The reason Ferguson had few black officers was because it couldn’t afford to pay enough, while having an increasingly stressful work environment as blacks moved in and the crime rate went up. Blacks who can qualify as police officers are much in demand in modern American: they can work for higher paying big cities or they can work for outer ring suburbs where there is negligible crime to deal with.

I read through a few thousand homicides in Los Angeles County in 2007-2010 as written up by Jill Leovy for the Los Angeles Times. My impression is that most of the homicides involving whites were crimes of passion, often murder-suicides, where the killer had little chance of getting away. In contrast, Leovy’s recent book “Ghettoside” documents how hard it is to get convictions in South Central LA for homicides because snitches get stitches. Witness-murdering happened every couple of months or so in South Central.

It could be that the handful of very white states like Vermont and Wyoming could afford to have laxer laws but the whole process got federalized a long time ago.

Bail is kind of a test of whether you have loved ones who trust you enough to pay 10% of your bail to a bail bondsman.

Apparently, a lot of people who get arrested don’t.

You need to be able to persuade a bail bondsman that you are a good risk.

It seems like newer technology ought to be able to help out here.

GPS tracking devices would probably not just keep people from running away but also keep them from being at the scene of crimes since they wouldn’t have an alibi if the GPS reported that they were, say, in the liquor store at the time a man in a hoodie robbed it.

In general, new technology should be lowering the crime rate every year. The recent spike in homicides — up 29% since the year of Ferguson in the 30 biggest cities — was due to a massive ideological/political blunder by the ruling class.

Right, Greek slaves tended to go for a premium in slave auctions because of the ancient stereotype that Greeks were more clever than other races.

Yes, height is extremely visible and it’s relevant to mating, career, and sports.

Nurture has had over the last century a big impact on relative height among nationalities. For example, Koreans used to be even shorter than Japanese, but they’ve shot up past them.

Nature, though, still plays a role. The Japanese, for example, have been well nourished for some time, but seem to be destined to be relatively short compared to other nations.

So why don’t liberals pay a lot of attention to height, where Nurture clearly plays a massive role?

Well, probably, one reason is African-American domination of basketball makes it hard to make a case for black Americans being all that materially deprived in terms of basic nutrition and health care when they regularly produce physical specimens such as LeBron James.

There’s a pretty good movie about Tony Blair’s post PM life called “The Ghostwriter” with Ewan McGregor trying to churn out a Blair-like ex-PM’s memoir for which the politician was being paid $10 million by an American corporation.

Blair’s American ex-President style big money ex-PMship was pretty new to Britain. When I met Margaret Thatcher in 1999, she was traveling with one secretary and one bodyguard. My wife noticed that Mrs. Thatcher’s dress had been mended by hand.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/03/science/researchers-say-intelligence-and-diseases-may-be-linked-in.html

Hispanic-American life expectancy is also quite long.

Mexico has almost caught up to the U.S. in life expectancy, despite the high homicide rate and obesity perhaps being even worse than in the U.S.

White people in the U.S. in 2017 have distressingly high mortality rates.

I can recall first noticing around 2011 that European whites were pulling away from American whites in life expectancy, but the concept didn’t become a Thing until Angus Deaton published a paper on high white mortality rates in November 2015, just after winning the (quasi-)Nobel in Econ.

“3. Japanese people live 4.3 years longer than we do.”

Comedienne Ali Wong has some observations on how long Asian-American women, like her mother, live.

According to Gregory Clark’s surname analysis book, the highest average achieving black surname in the U.S. is Appiah.

The most famous Appiah in the U.S. is the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose white grandfather was Sir Stafford Cripps, Chancellor of the Exchequer to King George VI. I come across other smart folks named Appiah frequently.

One question that is pretty opaque to Westerners is is whether or not parts of Africa had minorities promoting high achievement in intelligence-intensive fields, like the Puritans and Jews in Europe did.

Having acceptable centrist views makes a huge difference in earning power on the speaking circuit.

Compare, say, Charles Murray and Malcolm Gladwell, for example. I presume Murray does okay addressing discreet, high level conferences (he’s been to at least a couple of Bilderberg conferences, for instance, while Gladwell has not, so far as I can tell, been to Bilderberg), but Gladwell makes a fortune addressing corporate sales conventions and the like.

Why? For one reason, he’s “contrarian” yet he’s remarkably non-controversial. If somebody suggested to the head of HR that they should hire Charles Murray to speak at the next conference rather than Malcolm Gladwell, because Murray is smarter and much cheaper, the head of HR is going to explain that nobody ever tried to punch Malcolm in the head during a speech.

Obama is the ne plus ultra of Acceptable Speakers: a black President of slightly left of center views but who was definitely pro-Big Money.

But if Obama had pursued a program of, say, locking up Wall Street malefactors, would Wall Street firms now be paying him $400,000 per speech? Or would he be stuck addressing union conventions for $40,000 per speech?

People really, really like to be in the same room as a famous person. I can remember being one of several thousand people crowding into a huge convention center room with a flat floor to hear Larry Ellison give a boring speech on challenges facing the IT industry or something. But Larry is famous for being rich, so that made it worthwhile. I can tell people I was in the same room as Larry Ellison.

Conversely, I was given a tour of Larry’s office once when he wasn’t there. I don’t think that’s as cool as being in the same room as him, though.

Here’s a fun New Yorker article, “The Height Gap,” about the state of the academic field of anthropometric history as of 2004:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/04/05/the-height-gap

Romans would pay more for Greek slaves because they were reputed to be cleverer than Romans on average.

Interestingly, Jewish slaves did not have a reputation for above average intelligence during Roman times.

In reality, around the world, you mostly see pogroms by less bright populations against more commercially adept groups. A few years ago, for example, on Guadalcanal Island, the natives burned down the stores of Chinese merchants. The next day the hungry locals were wandering in the ashes asking, “Where are we going to buy food now?”

It’s interesting how many comments there are on race-and-IQ and how few on race-and-height.

Personally, I’m very interested in race-and-height. Here’s some data on changes in height within countries over the last century:

http://www.unz.com/isteve/the-flynn-effect-for-height/

The research time spent on “The Bell Curve” was largely paid for by the book selling 400,000 copies, a remarkable number for an American social science volume full of graphs.

The expenses of creating TBC largely consisted of 4 years of work by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, plus their research assistants, along with experts who helped out by reading the manuscript very closely.

There was a lot of not previously published data in the book, but it wasn’t collected for the book. It came from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 79 study was already collected by the Department of Labor. The Pentagon had paid in 1980 to have its g-loaded AFQT enlistment test given to the DoL’s NLSY79’s sample of over 12,000 young people due to the military’s disastrous “misnorming” problem of 1976-1979 that had caused the military to accept recruits with IQs so low they were banned by act of Congress.

This data was given to Herrnstein and Murray around 1990 by the head of psychometrics of one of the major branches of the military. When I interviewed this expert in 1994, he said the only thing wrong with The Bell Curve was that it was too understated and cautious.

“(100 years ago, was the stereotype in North America of the Chinese that they were intelligent?)”

Yes.

About 150 years ago Francis Galton suggested that the Chinese would make far more out of Africa economically than Africans would.

I spent several weeks in 2010 investigating a law enforcement killing in my neighborhood of an 18-year-old viola player. I happened to run into the bereaved mother at the scene also looking for clues and I told her the cops’ story sounded fishy to me and she should consider a lawsuit.

This case got very little media coverage until 3 year later when the L.A. Times headlined on its front page that the family had been awarded $3 million by a judge.

I’ve always thought this case would have made a good illustration for reformers that the police kill too many people and they need reforms such as better training and more accountability.

But there was so little media interest in this killing because the dead kid was white.

Everybody knows that the Nazis were motivated by IQ testing showing that they were cognitively superior to the Jews.

Or at least everybody talks like everybody knows that.

When you stop and think about it, it’s a wacky idea, of course but it’s a really common assumption because who stops and thinks about it?

Crimethinkers, that’s who!

“A certain population in Bosnia is found to be the tallest in the world, likely for genetic reasons”

I’m actually surprised by how much nurture-driven change there has been in relative height over my lifetime.

For example, I don’t recall any stereotypes about the Dutch being exceptionally tall when I was a child. They just kept getting taller in the later 20th Century. I spent a few days in the Netherlands at age 6 in 1965 but don’t recall bringing home any height related memories.

On the other hand, I did start noticing that Yugoslavians were good at basketball at least 45 years ago when 6′-11″ Kresmir Cosic of BYU battled 6′-11″ Bill Walton of UCLA in the NCAA tourney. Actually, my stereotype of Yugoslavs as tall may date to 1968 when I watched the US Olympic team beat the Yugoslav team for the gold medal. Then they won the Silver in 1976 and the Gold in the boycott year of 1980.

But the Dutch don’t play much basketball, so it’s harder for an American to notice they’ve gotten very tall over the last couple of generations.

“Hate Hoax” was the title of a 2004 article by me in The American Conservative about when Claremont McKenna professor Kerri F. Dunn trashed her car and then blamed it on her conservative white male students.

Obama ditched his smart girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Yager, now professor of East Asian Studies at Oberlin, because he had to have an African-American wife to get blacks to vote for him.

Is it too much to ask Senator Booker to take one for the Party and marry an attractive black lady and sire at least one black child?

If Booker had a black wife and a black baby, he’d be a strong candidate. He still has time by 2020.

The Democrats’ strategy has been:

– to import more ringers from abroad to vote Democratic,
– to unite the Billionaires with the Coalition of the Fringes, and
– keep the Fringes unified by ginning up hate hoaxes to get them to hate Haven Monahan and all the other evil cishet white males even more than they hate each other.

It’s a great strategy … as long as you control the media and can continue to shame the opposition into not mentioning what you are obviously up to.

Trump, on the other hand, is shameless, and the media can’t take its lenses off him.

Right, but then the Democrats didn’t follow out their logic by nominating a black like Sen. Booker or Kamala Harris, they nominated … Hillary.

So, black men didn’t bother to show up and vote Democratic.

I think this is the single most important key to understanding Hillary’s performance in 2016:

https://youtu.be/OhELEj-J8GU?t=19s

From the New York Times on 2/13/16:

“If we broke up the big banks tomorrow,” Mrs. Clinton asked the audience of black, white and Hispanic union members, “would that end racism? Would that end sexism? Would that end discrimination against the L.G.B.T. community?,” she said, using an abbreviation for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender. “Would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight?”

A lot of the mechanism is Voltaire’s “pour le encourage les autres:” the occasional random extreme over-reaction causes a lot of self-policing. America’s most famous living man of science is forced to resign from heading the great medical laboratory he rebuilt from decay over the last 4 decades because some remarks he made in seeming confidence made their way into the newspaper? Uh-oh …

It’s kind of like puppy-training. If you want your pup to grow up to be cringing and dependent upon you, use intermittent reinforcement: beat him randomly rather than consistently. Thus the inconsistency of the beatings for violations of political correctness has a bigger impact than if there were carefully worked out bright lines that everybody could understand and follow.

In reality, there is a lot of randomness in the system of punishments.

One of the things that randomness does is it encourages people to believe that those who got punished must have had it coming.

I hope I contributed to Scott’s more cautious new position about what he’ll allow to be discussed by helping him come to doubt his overconfident previous assumption that all he has to do is be like Pinker instead of Charles Murray or Larry Summers and he won’t get in trouble.

In reality, Pinker is like a cross between Murray and Summers, so Scott shouldn’t be so confident.

My guess is that the Civil War really was about 99% over slavery. Even the tariff issue was an epiphenomena of slave vs. free.

For example, in 1830 when he was ginning up the Nullification Crisis against Andy Jackson over the Tariff of Abominations, John C. Calhoun, who hadn’t been averse to the Hamilton/Clay theory of tariffs when he’d started out in politics in the 1810s, admitted that what was really going on was that our “peculiar domestick institution” meant that South Carolina’s economy was diverging from the national economy. Tariffs to protect infant industries were good for the country as a whole, but South Carolina was diverging fundamentally from the North by becoming ever more of a slavocracy and thus was never going to develop industry because of slavery, so slavery meant South Carolina needed free trade.

A lot of white Democratic politicians across the country must look to California and say: You know, up through 2016, despite all its diversity, California was still run by elderly white Democrats: Jerry Brown, Nancy Pelosi, Diane Feinstein, Barbara Boxer, and John L. Burton. So, how bad could it be if we let in a bunch of immigrants from countries that don’t have much democracy. They’ll need us to run things for them until we are as old as Jerry Brown. That sounds pretty good!

Ninmesara writes:

“Hmm… Aren’t republicans similarly divided?”

No, the Republicans tend to appeal to people who see themselves as ordinary Americans, part of the core of the country rather than part of a fringe group. I believe French theorists use the terms center vs. margins.

Take a look at the 2012 exit poll demographics:

http://www.vdare.com/articles/slippery-six-mid-west-states-doom-romney-because-of-low-white-share

The more you are a Regular Guy: e.g., a married, home-owning, employed, white, Protestant heterosexual man, the more likely you were to vote for Romney rather than Obama.

The most noticeable exception was the one that most validated the tendency: one weird religion votes Republican: Mormons. But Mormons pretend to not be a weird religion by trying to act as core American as possible.

Everybody else by now has figured out that there’s more of a payoff in terms of affirmative action and media support if you try to act as fringe as possible. But Mormons are stuck in the 1950s when it paid off to act like normal Americans.

I bet Evan McMullin wonders if there is some genius strategy out there to reposition Mormons on the fringe. Like maybe endorse the Democrats in return for legalizing gay polygamy or something.

The liberal Islamophilia of recent years — e.g., the hosannas over Merkel’s Million Muslim Mistake in 2015 — was eye-opening for a lot of Americans because it’s so obvious that Muslims are extreme reactionaries who pose the single most plausible threat to eradicate liberalism wherever they can get numbers sufficient for their extreme fringe to terrorize the rest into going along (much in the way the crazies among Japanese Army officers took over Japan in the 1920s and 1930s by murdering moderates). But you could see the opinion growing among the American Establishment that we must let in lots more Muslims because they are the Other and therefore we must submit to them, whereas to look at Europe and learn from their mistakes would be too sensible.

“However, you ascribe a level of intentional malice to Erderly for which there is just no evidence.”

No, I’ve never said that Sabrina Rubin Erdely knowingly libeled (the nonexistent) Haven Monahan and his fellow frat boys. I agree with the jury that found Erdely and Rolling Stone liable for $2.0 million in damages to Dean Eramo due to “clear and convincing evidence” of “actual malice,” which means either awareness of publishing a lie or at minimum a “reckless disregard for the truth.”

The Rolling Stone hoax wasn’t some idiosyncratic personal vendetta, but instead it represented the state of the art zeitgeist.

Rolling Stone’s story of a fraternity initiation gang rape ritual carried out in the dark on broken glass was insanely implausible. As I commented on Richard Bradley’s blog on 11/27/2014:

Sorry to keep coming back to this, but I’ve done some more thinking and here’s where the story falls apart: pitch darkness _and_ broken glass on the floor. The glass table is smashed, but nobody turns on the light to see what happened or where the broken glass is? Instead, each man, having heard the glass table get smashed, still gets down on the floor covered with shards of broken glass, risking not only his hands and knees, but also pulling out an even more personal part of his anatomy, one that he only has one of.

Really?

But Sabrina Rubin Erdely didn’t question Jackie Coakley’s preposterous story because she believes that white Southern fraternity boys really are that evil.

And for 12 days, nobody in the press except Bradley and I questioned this popular article either.

There was good article in 2014 in the New York Times by a Jewish woman who was surprised to discover the not insignificant Jewish role in the Confederacy:

http://takimag.com/article/mythos_and_blood_steve_sailer#axzz4g5CiBkgE

Jews also played a role in the slave and sugar industries in Brazil and Surinam, and in the very profitable exploitation of black labor in the gold and diamond mines of South Africa.

But in Sapir-Whorf Lite terms, since “Jewish privilege” doesn’t exist in our conceptual vocabularies, but “white privilege” very much exists and since nobody except Jews is allowed to say anything at all critical about Jews, very few Jews ever notice that the contemporary myth about Jewish powerlessness in the past is largely a myth.

That about 1/7th of the world’s billionaires are privileged with an Immaculate Conception legend about their ancestors’ guiltlessness ought to be of some concern.

In contrast, England and France have just one capital/metropolis, so most newspapers are national newspapers and they don’t pretend to be neutral. The Guardian backed Labour, the Telegraph backed the Tories, the Times was delivered to important people of the Establishment because their grandfather’s butler had always brought in the Times on the breakfast tray, the Daily Mail was bought by working class readers if today’s front page caught their eye, etc

There was a lot more competition, so there wasn’t much pretense of neutrality, unless that was part of the marketing image of the newspaper; e.g., The Times of London was typically edited by a member of Milner’s Cabal that had been launched by Cecil Rhodes in South Africa. It wasn’t neutral but it acted like it was.

In the middle of the 20th Century, most cities in the U.S. had one dominant newspaper that got all the classified advertising. Owning, say, the Los Angeles Times in 1972 was incredibly profitable because it was a natural monopoly.

So, it behooved successful newspaper barons to claim the mantle of neutrality so that political disagreements wouldn’t shake your monopoly position. If you read the thick Los Angeles Times and the thin Los Angeles Herald-Examiner carefully, you could tell that the Times was liberal and sedate and the Herald-Examiner was conservative and feisty. But what really mattered was what paper had most of the classified ads. Because the LA Times did, it could afford to be liberal like its newsroom wanted, but it couldn’t be really obvious about it because that might irritate classified advertisers.

So the LA Times let its newsroom be liberal as long as they more or less pretended to be neutral enough to not annoy classified advertisers.

The Herald Examiner barely had any classified ads so it had to appeal more to a portion of readers, such as people who understood and didn’t like the Times’ long-winded liberalism. So it was more fun to read, but it didn’t have the financial resources to run the kind of Whither Burma? in-depth reporting that the Times indulged in at its peak.

Johnny Carson made constant jokes about President Reagan’s last hit movie “Bedtime for Bonzo” (in part because Carson’s producer Fred Cordova, the inspiration for the great Rip Torn character on the “Larry Sanders Show,” had directed “Bedtime for Bonzo.”)

It turns out that Bedtime for Bonzo was actually fairly intellectual with Reagan playing a liberal professor making impassioned speeches for Nurture over Nature and denouncing his department chairman’s outdated eugenicist views on the importance of genetics.

http://takimag.com/article/bedtime_for_bonzos_behaviorist_bent/print#axzz4g5CiBkgE

But so what? It’s television comedians jobs to make fun of the President, and now they are doing it again after 8 years of leaving Obama virtually untouched.

I favor satirizing the President. I’m glad that American tradition is finally back.

In 2013, there was a survey of academics attending a conference on intelligence. According to the expert respondents, the most reliable source of journalism on IQ matters in English turned out to be … me.

http://www.unz.com/jthompson/what-intelligence-researchers-think/

What happened to Larry Summers when he let slip some hatefacts? What happened to James D. Watson?

People are generally not going to pay much attention to facts that get even incredibly famous and powerful individuals shown the door.

How well do Big 5 personality traits account for famous conservative writers like Swift, Burke, Austen, Eliot, Waugh, Buckley, Wolfe, and O’Rourke?

Do they tend to be high on Openness but still conservative? How well can the Big 5 theory account for conservative skills at satire?

The Nybbler writes:

“(Also I have my doubts as to whether Coakley or Erdely know what Kristallnacht was)”

Of course Sabrina Rubin Erdely knows of a key event in the trend toward the Holocaust. She was an Ivy League grad who makes 6 figures per year as a professional writer. She has been a journalist since she worked for Stephen Glass, of the movie “Shattered Glass,” at the Penn daily paper. She sends her two kids to a Jewish summer camp:

http://jewishexponent.com/2013/08/07/jersey-day-camp-draws-record-numbers/

Jews are less the target audience than the suppliers of this worldview that sacralizes immigration. That’s extremely well documented in American history and in American current affairs, but people sense that it’s dangerous to notice even such an obvious pattern.

The full scope of Jewish achievement in American life was summarized two decades ago by Seymour Martin Lipset, a Senior Scholar of the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies, and Earl Raab, Director of the Perlmutter Institute for Jewish Advocacy at Brandeis University:

“During the last three decades, Jews have made up 50% of the top two hundred intellectuals, 40 percent of American Nobel Prize Winners in science and economics, 20 percent of professors at the leading universities, 21 percent of high level civil servants, 40 percent of partners in the leading law firms in New York and Washington, 26 percent of the reporters, editors, and executives of the major print and broadcast media, 59 percent of the directors, writers, and producers of the fifty top-grossing motion pictures from 1965 to 1982, and 58 percent of directors, writers, and producers in two or more primetime television series.”

http://takimag.com/article/bargaining_with_zionists_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4g4Q7ck9j

That’s a lot of firepower for influencing the conventional wisdom, especially if you rig thinks so nobody notices your prejudices.

The media practice of calling the obviously tri-racial George Zimmerman a “white Hispanic” was pretty funny. What happened was the media heard a guy named George Zimmerman had shot an angelic black child. They immediately assumed Zimmerman was white and that this was the story of white-on-black-racist-violence the Obama re-election campaign needed.

But eventually they got more pictures and it turned out Zimmerman is a tri-racial pardo who kind of looks like the son Obama never had with his ex-fiance Sheila Miyoshi Jager. And it turned out that Trayvon Martin was a strapping lad who had been pounding Zimmerman’s bloody head into the pavement. So, the media fell back to “white Hispanic” as a compromise to keep attention focused on how this was a story of whites being racist toward innocent blacks as The Narrative demanded.

Nornagest writes:

“I know what it means. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a culture warrior use the word, or any synonym of it, in a culture-war context aside from a few Jewish writers talking about the Jewish community. Jewishness is just a non-issue in most contexts …”

Have you ever wondered why that it is in a country where Jews make up about 1/3rd of the Forbes 400, at least 2/5ths of the top pundits, and give close to half of all political contributions?

My personal opinion is that American Jews have largely earned their wealth and influence through their intelligence and hard work. Just as much denounced “white privilege” largely reflects the hard work of white people’s ancestors, so does the far-less noticed but even more striking “Jewish privilege.”

On the other hand, what seems to be unfortunately underdeveloped among Jews relative to the old WASP elites they have largely displaced is a sense of noblesse oblige toward their fellow Americans. (A few Jewish writers have made this point as well, such as David Samuels of The Tablet and, more hand-wavingly, David Brooks of the NYT.) For example, the reigning conventional wisdom on future immigration policy seems to be largely comprised of Ellis Island schmaltz, ancestor-worship, with Emma Lazarus retconned into America’s foremost Founding Father, and ethnic resentment over century-old slights.

That’s an irresponsible, childish, backward-looking way to control the limits of debate on immigration policy. But almost nobody dares notice how Jewish ethno-schmaltz and anti-WASP hostility is allowed to control what Americans are allowed to say. We would be better off if we were as free to laugh at Jewish ideological predilections as we are free to laugh at white people.

A very useful concept is The Narrative, as explicated by novelist Stephen Hunter, a Pulitzer Prize winner for his film criticism for the Washington Post:

“The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It’s so powerful because it’s unconscious. It’s not like they get together every morning and decide “These are the lies we tell today.” No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it’s a set of casual, nonrigorous assumptions about a reality they’ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they have chosen to live their lives.”

http://takimag.com/article/from_orwell_to_gladwell_and_back_steve_sailer/print#ixzz4g46ZV6Jk

Another Sapir-Whorf Lite aspect of coverage of Rolling Stone’s extraordinary hate hoax “A Rape on Campus” is how hard the mainstream media has worked to make the story behind the story seem boring — proper journalistic methodologies were not followed carefully enough — instead of absolutely hilarious — Lovesick freshman coed Jackie Coakley catfishes into digital existence a handsome but nonexistent upperclassman named Haven Monahan to make jealous a frosh boy she has a crush on, using dialogue plagiarized from “Dawson’s Creek.”

The New York Times has allowed the name “Haven Monahan” to appear in its columns only once in all its coverage, and never used the word “catfishing” to describe what Jackie was up to. If you read the NYT, you probably think this is an extremely boring story. And they very much want to keep it that way, since the reality of the story undermines the NYT-Obama Administration -Hillary Campaign initiative to get voters worked up over fears that Republican white male fraternity boys were raping their daughters on an industrial scale.

Let me point out that the other Washington newspaper reporter who did good work revealing just how absurd the Rolling Stone UVA hate hoax was was also named Shapiro: T. Rees Shapiro of the Washington Post.

So there are plenty of journalists who don’t let ethnic animus get in the way of doing a good job.

But others are susceptible to it because our 21st century respectable discourse lacks useful conceptual terms such as “anti-gentilic” and “hate hoax.”

If it were respectable to point out examples of anti-gentilism in mainstream media, there would be less of it.

Because criticism is good for human beings. Having it pointed out when we succumb to common failings such as anti-gentilic bigotry, we would be on guard to be guilty of it less often.

But instead, in our culture, the media critic who points out how Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s anti-gentilic ethnic animus contributed to her spectacular fiasco is considered to be, at best, some kind of weirdo bringing up some obscure and bizarre term that doesn’t even exist.

A striking irony is Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s gang rape on Shattered Glass hate hoax story led to a real life Kristallnacht at UVA, when a mob smashed the windows of the fraternity implicated in Rolling Stone:

Jeffrey Scott Shapiro wrote in the Washington Times:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/21/rolling-stone-university-of-virginia-rape-story-sp/

Unpunished vandalism rampage inspired by Rolling Stone’s U.Va. rape story

Student activist who led vandalism attack on Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house says he has no regrets

By Jeffrey Scott Shapiro – The Washington Times – Sunday, December 21, 2014

In the wee morning hours after Rolling Stone’s now-retracted gang rape story roiled the University of Virginia campus, a masked group of five women and three men unleashed their fury on the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house at the center of the controversy.

Bottles and bricks were tossed through nearly every first-floor window, sending shards of glass and crashing sounds into the house around 2:30 a.m. on Nov. 20.

Profane, hate messages such as “F—k Boys” were spray-painted on the walls of the colonial facade, along with anti-sexual assault epithets such as “suspend us,” and “UVA Center for Rape Studies.”

Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s ethnic animus would be pretty obvious if we were permitted to have in common discourse useful conceptual terms like “anti-gentilic” to accompany common terms like “anti-semitic.” But, like in “1984,” our conceptual vocabulary is carefully policed so that we don’t have useful terms like “anti-gentilic” or “hate hoax” that would make it easier to notice some patterns in reality.

Thus, the national media lauded Erdely’s hate hoax article because it confirmed so many of their prejudices. And they don’t even know they have those prejudices because “anti-gentilic” isn’t a Thing. Neither are “hate hoaxes” a Thing. So Erdely’s hate hoax motivated by her anti-gentilic hostility didn’t seem like an absurd concoction to, say, Atlantic Editor Jeffrey Goldberg, it seemed like Great Journalism.

From my 12/3/2014 column in Taki’s Magazine analyzing Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s 11/19/2014 9000 word article “A Rape on Campus:”

A stone-cold sober coed named Jackie is lured by her date “Drew” to an upstairs room at the fraternity house. She is immediately tackled by one of the eight men waiting in the pitch darkness. Their toppling bodies crash through a glass table unaccountably left out in the middle of the rape room. Amidst the shattered glass, the young men beat her and hold her down on the floor. The shards grind into her bleeding back as she is methodically raped in the dark for three hours by seven young men, while her upperclassman date and another man coach them.

The frat boys egg on one reluctant pledge: “Don’t you want to be a brother?”

“We all had to do it, so you do, too.”

In other words, this is supposed to be some sort of fraternity initiation rite. (That fraternities at UVA hold their initiations in the spring, not in September, isn’t mentioned in the article.)

The last lad, whom Jackie somehow recognizes in the dark as a boy in her anthropology class, rapes her with a glass bottle.

What should we make of Erdely’s “brutal tableau” of beer bottle rape amidst the shattered glass?

As a work of journalism, it’s most interesting for what it inadvertently reveals about the bizarre legends that seem plausible to American media consumers in 2014.

As a creative work of art, however, drawing (consciously or unconsciously) upon multiple influences such as the blockbuster Girl with the Dragon Tattoo hate porn franchise and the Shattered Glass biopic of magazine article fabricator Stephen Glass, it is more impressive. It’s first-rate propaganda, and Erdely’s adroit techniques should be studied by those concerned about how gullible Americans are.

Some of the literary power of Erdely’s nightmarish retelling of poor Jackie’s saga stems from the writer’s use of glass, both broken and bottle, as an ominous multipurpose metaphor. Throughout “A Rape on Campus,” glass stands for fragility, bloodshed, loss of virginity, alcohol, littering, male brutishness, danger, violence—even a literal phallic symbol. Glass represents not the calm transparency of a window pane, but the occluded viciousness of the white conservative Southern male power structure.

For example:

“The first weeks of freshman year are when students are most vulnerable to sexual assault. … Hundreds of women in crop tops and men in khaki shorts stagger between handsome fraternity houses, against a call-and-response soundtrack of “Whoo!” and breaking glass. “Do you know where Delta Sig is?” a girl slurs, sloshed. Behind her, one of her dozen or so friends stumbles into the street, sending a beer bottle shattering.”

Strangely, just about the only people in America who don’t seem to have accepted at face value Jackie’s theory of a nine-man conspiracy to rape her are those portrayed in the Rolling Stone article as knowing the poor young woman well. …

During her sophomore year, Jackie became prominent in the struggle on campus against rape culture. But the patriarchy struck back brutally last spring, using its favorite tool of violence, the glass bottle. Outside a bar at the Corner:

“One man flung a bottle at Jackie that broke on the side of her face, leaving a blood-red bruise around her eye.”

That’s horrifying … assuming it happened. Or are we deep into Gone Girl territory now? (There’s nothing in the article about anybody calling the police over this presumably open-and-shut case.) Erdely continues: