I've got a sure-fire way for the presidents of Harvard & MIT to prove they're not hypocritical about their new-found allegiance to free speech. Invite me to give a lecture on race and sex differences, using material from Human Diversity. I'm happy to do them pro bono. Albeit with…
My daughter's immigrant friend, asked during her dissertation defense why she had not dealt with the Marxist interpretation of her topic: "I grew up in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. I do not indulge in recreational Marxism."
This is more devastating than the silly tweets. It is a prepared & rehearsed repudiation of the journalist's historic responsibility and contradicts what NPR once claimed to be about.
NPR’s CEO Katherine Maher on the truth:
“Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
Reposting this because the original poster deleted the video.
Scanning the headlines in the Washington Post and New York Times every day is pretty astonishing if you grew up in an era when their editors still saw themselves--or said they did--as guardians of journalistic standards. Everything is advocacy now, nakedly, even in the headlines.
This is from an editorial announcing Nature Human Behavior's decision to censor scientific results, however rigorous, that do not conform to a political narrative.
It is hard to exaggerate the scientific insanity this represents.
If you spend any significant amount of your life around people with lower IQs than yours, you can't help but notice how many of them are better people than you in qualities that you value, including the virtues. This is not idealism. It is the empirical reality of life outside…
In conversations about intelligence, people often take the
@charlesmurray
approach of emphasizing that intelligence doesn't determine a person's worth. I find myself a bit dissatisfied when I chew on this. It's true, but I suspect it's a bit too easy.
Specifically: while I…
If 84 percent of people arrested for armed robbery are male but only 49 percent of the population is male, should we infer that police are biased against males?
More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools.
Want to know what the hardest-to-prep-for kind of question…
@Tyler_A_Harper
We need to invest in making the SAT/ACT more Tiger Mother-proof. There's evidence that the SAT before they started fiddling with it in 1995 was much better than it is now. Practically every change made since then to benefit the Diverse has instead rewarded Asian test preppers:
New message from Harvard President Claudine Gay:
“Our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views.”
Last night I was talking to someone who has access to NIH’s All of Us database. He described the limits researchers must accept, including no study of IQ. Also no topic that might show offensive group differences. Your tax dollars at work.
Noah Carl and I continue our discussion of race and IQ. This week: There is a taboo, of course. But should there be a taboo? Not surprisingly, we both agree that honest debate is better than voluntary or coerced silence.
1/4 I've come to think over the last 20 years that secular humanism has no moral bottom. Absent a core of absolutes of right and wrong, anything can be rationalized. Absent some divine origin for those absolutes, they cannot be absolutes.
Twitter has suspended
@TitaniaMcGrath
. This is a big deal. She wasn't obscene, cruel, or hateful. She was simply a terrific satirist.
@clairlemon
is on the case, so Quillette will probably be weighing in.
What the hell is wrong with Twitter?
#BringBackTitaniaMcGrath
That the two most cited scholars in the humanities are Judith Butler and Foucault gives you all you need to prove that the humanities imploded in the 20th century.
This review is very good at exposing how shallow Judith Butler’s work is.
But keep in mind that she is the 2nd most cited scholar of all time in the humanities, only eclipsed by Foucault
The "abolish the police" movement is the final piece needed to replicate the mentality of the New Left in the late 1960s--positions so crazy that only people completely out of touch with reality can advocate them with a straight face. Haven't quite been there until now.
I was searching for bios of black scholars who are Thomas Sowell's (b. 1930) contemporaries, so I Googled "famous black scholars" and variants. Try it yourself and see how long it takes you to find a list that includes Sowell. Beyond disgraceful.
As long as the topic does not involve sex, race, class, genetics, IQ, illegal immigration, the effects of social policy, constitutional law, or life in flyover country. On everything else, they’re terrific.
Why the Media is Honest and Good: A conservative defends NYT, WAPO, and other MSM. (He notes they are mostly committed to truth, largely, even if not always, accurate, and are way better than the right-wing alternatives.)
@RichardHanania
Jen Psaki, Joy Reid, and Rachel Maddow are laughing on MSNBC at the fact that voters in Virginia care about immigration:
Maddow: “Well, Virginia does have a border with West Virginia.”
1/3 A friend who shall remain nameless suggested something last week that I can't shake: The pronouncements of progressive politicians, woke academics, and senior bureaucrats increasingly sound like characters out of Atlas Shrugged.
For those of you who are not familiar with the Vietnam Era, this was tried by LBJ in 1966 with Project 100,000, which lowered the minimum required score for the Armed Forces Qualification Test. It was a disaster. The newly qualified soldiers were slow learners, routinely
At 76, memory, mental agility, mental energy, physical energy, openness to new ideas, and more, have declined. And that’s for healthy 76ers, of whom I am one. We shouldn’t be presidents.
Same reason that it's controversial to say that most male child abuse comes from stepfathers and live-in boyfriends, not biological fathers. Or that unemployment insurance reduces effort to find jobs. Etc. The list of true things that are not to be said in polite company is long.
This point gets far too little attention. Few women realize the extent to which men express fellowship and, for that matter, affection, with verbal sparring that objectively consists of insults.
One reason women may think environments like academia are misogynistic is because they are more sensitive to jokes and criticism. Men engage in persiflage and criticize each other all the time. It feels normal. Women do not. So it feels cruel, maybe sexist.
Most of you have heard of the book Hidden Figures and the subsequent film. The role attributed to the lead character, Katherine Johnson, has been questioned by those who were at MSC during the 1960s. Now those questions have been explored systematically by two aerospace engineers…
If I’m an employer looking for 3-SD out talent, I’m still going to interview at the Ivies, but focusing on heterosexual white males who aren’t jocks and aren’t legacies. They must be amazing.
What's an insight that everybody in your line of work knows, based on good evidence & career experience, but that the general public doesn't seem to understand at all?
Once upon a time, there was a wonderfully principled organization that defended civil liberties no matter whose ox was being gored. Then it started defending only the right kind of people and ignoring the wrong kind of people. Now this, which is indistinguishable from madness.
There’s no one way to be a man.
Men who get their periods are men.
Men who get pregnant and give birth are men.
Trans and non-binary men belong.
#InternationalMensDay
Responses to a recent Tweet of mine regarding IQs above and below 110 reveal that an awful lot of people on my Twitter feed haven't the slightest idea how smart 110 is. Pretty damn smart. Maybe not capable of understanding Foucault, but that's a feature, not a bug.
About 30 seconds ago, I finished the text that I will submit to my publisher fulfilling my contract to produce a manuscript. Clocks in at 399 pages plus bib. It's only the first of many steps before we get to bound volumes. Still, I think it warrants a celebratory drink.
America's privileged 20-somethings were just as ignorant of history, unhinged, and unthinkingly violent in the late 1960s as they are now. The adults were just as despairing of the future. It doesn't mean things will turn out as they did then, but it's worth remembering
What I'm taking away from the threads on religion over the last week is that atheists are more humorless and dogmatic about their faith than any Christian or Jew I know. Agnostics are a little more cheerful.
To me, the core truth of the cold winters theory is this: humans in places where temperatures get lethally cold all die, 100%, unless they figure out ways to stay warm. There’s no other comparably ruthless environmental demand.
@wil_da_beast630
No. Because cold winters theory doesn't claim that brightness is 100% determined by coldness.
What is claims is that it is the main explanatory factor.
There are many reasons that Inuit could be an exception to the general trend. Population size for example
This accent needs to be illegal and women should be banned from doing manual labour like this.
There is NOTHING feminine about American women.
American women are literally men.
I've decided to unfollow almost all of those tweet about politics. Nothing personal. I've just come to grips how much time I'm spending making myself feel miserable reading about current events. See you again in happier times, perhaps.
I would have thought this was completely uncontroversial. All except a few geniuses who persist in taking math courses reach a point when they say to themselves "I can't understand this no matter how hard I try." Some people reach it in sixth grade; others in high school; others…
I believe that the role of genetics means that just about everyone can learn arithmetic, a wide range of people (but not everyone) can learn algebra, a smaller proportion of people can learn calculus, and a small fraction of the population can learn even more advanced math.
4/4 As for the falsehoods of religion, I've also become convinced over the last 20 years that they are unimportant compared to the core insights shared by the great religious traditions. So IMO the answer to your question is no. Religion is indispensable to a moral civilization.
When Pomona College students (and possibly others) rushed into an administrative building last night, President Gabi Starr told them they had 10 minutes to leave.
Then she suspended them and had them arrested.
(Warning: language)
Until now, the only contemporaneous book I was sorry not to have written was Christopher Caldwell's Age of Entitlement. Now I'm also sorry not to have written this one.
When the population consists of those who are vaccinated and those who are not by choice, all rationales for masks and social distancing are gone, right?
I've got a problem with the new Twitter. No one is invading my timeline. I'm reading Tweets from familiar reasonable people. But I can feel myself becoming radicalized--not because I'm falling for loony conspiracy theories, but because so many loony things seem to be, um, true.
Bill Buckley once recommended replacing food stamps with free healthy basic foods. Supermarkets would have big bins of dried beans, rice, greens, and other necessities for a healthy diet and anyone could take all they wanted for free. It would fail to improve nutrition, of…
Behavior genetics has the "within family" study design, but somehow sociologists never tried my "within supermarket" approach:
Stand in line at a store that sells cheap, fresh produce and observe that poor people buy expensive packaged junk instead
Drilling on the multiplication table in 3rd grade until it was pounded deep into my brain is perhaps the single most valuable thing I took out of 19 years of formal education.
@charlesmurray
I do not understand how one can possibly teach mathematics without students memorizing the “multiplication table.” But, once memorized, the entire world of mathematics is wide open
Anyone who wants links to lots of citations supporting allegations of systemic bias in the criminal justice system can find them here. h/t
@nytdavidbrooks
.
Teenager’s Prom Dress Stirs Furor in U.S. — but Not in China “From the perspective of a Chinese person, if a foreign woman wears a qipao and thinks she looks pretty, then why shouldn’t she wear it?”
I believe that the role of genetics means that just about everyone can learn arithmetic, a wide range of people (but not everyone) can learn algebra, a smaller proportion of people can learn calculus, and a small fraction of the population can learn even more advanced math.
I regularly transferred money to relatives overseas using
@Paypal
. Last fall, I was mysteriously blocked from doing so and still am. Repeated calls to Paypal have gotten me no answers. Am I paranoid to think this is the reason?
I think I’ll spring for the $8/mo. I get a lot out of Twitter. Seems only fair that I help pay for it. Hell, I contribute to Wikipedia (it’s useful for anything not having to do with sex, race, or me). And I’m feeling kind of sympathetic to Elon.
Chris Rufo & his allies are leading a plagiarism witch hunt and creating the false impression that Black women disproportionately plagiarize. Universities like Harvard must take back control of the narrative and conduct plagiarism reviews of all faculty.
2/3 I liked Atlas Shrugged--still do--but also shared the common view that the villains were overdrawn. And as of the 1950s, when Rand was writing it, they were. As of the 2020s, not so much. Merit is racist. Individualism is evil. Objective truth is an illusion.
She is a hero for our time. Makes zillions of dollars entirely because people are eager to pay for what she's selling, doesn't abide nonsense from anyone, and by all accounts has been an admirable person in other respects. Not a whole lot of those people out there.
You are correct. Many dissertations by beneficiaries of aggressive affirmative action would not qualify as acceptable undergraduate term papers and are nonetheless passed through the system. Professors everywhere know this and keep mum.
@charlesmurray
Dr. Murray, what do all the counts of plagiarism tell us about her dissertation committee and the peers that reviewed her articles before publication? The problem is greater than Gay and that story isn’t being told.
I am passionately pro-Israel, but from a detached POV I am mystified that America's Hamas supporters are so blind to what the national reaction is going to be to their behavior. Politically, it's going to be disastrous for them. They don't see this? See it but don't care?
3/3 I haven't changed my mind. America is self-destructing, discarding its founding ideals, unwilling to confront specious allegations with facts. We could have had it all, just as the song says. We lost the thread 50-odd years ago. I hope others can retrieve it.
Pause to contemplate that Lisa Littman teaches at Brown, without tenure, and still wrote up her data without fear or favor and then published the results with no senior faculty coauthor to give her a little cover. Hats off.
Dear Twitter: The only people who see things I post have voluntarily chosen to follow me. There's this thing called the "Unfollow" button. What conceivable rationale is there for "protecting" them from my posts?
When my wife and I researched Apollo, we were struck by the difference between the engineers and the kind of people we hung out with (she's an English lit PhD paired with my pol sci PhD). Either the thing they were engineering worked or it didn't. Opinions didn't matter..
Doesn't it make a difference to
@davidafrench
's argument that two of the core problems typically ascribed to centuries of American racism--elevated black violent crime and depressed mean cognitive ability--are found wherever sub-Saharan African populations live?
We live with the legacy of the bigoted structures racists created. Our obligation to seek justice does not depend on our personal fault. And there is nothing “conservative” about denying the consequences of centuries of racist harm. My Sunday essay:
Tell me you haven't read anything about the educational efforts to close the achievement gap going back 50 years and costing billions of dollars without saying so.
No, I think he's a buffoon, grifter, treacherous to friends, sycophant to tyrants, has no political philosophy whatsoever, and is willing to sacrifice anything to benefit himself. That's for starters. I am not trying to insult nor to ingratiate. This is my opinion.
Wow. Really smart people have gigantic blind spots and are actually more easily brainwashed than the rest of us. It's a thing. MIT has more than 100 neoracist administrators and Charles Murray seems to think Trump is a fascist.
3/3 There's an op ed to be written, with direct quotes from leading contemporary progressives and direct quotes from Wesley Mouch, Robert Stadler, and Floyd Ferris. The parallels are amazing.
I would love to see exploration of plagiarism among faculty members broken down by field, race, sex, and self-identified political ideology.
@rickpearlstein
can choose 50 percent of the sample and I'll choose the other 50 percent.
Fascinatingly evil. Computers can now efficiently search for plagiarism, showing it to be far more prevalent than thought. Thug Ruffo weaponizes, by processing every sentence written by a Black woman at Harvard, as propaganda hammer to end equity hiring.
Charles Krauthammer. Such an intimidating intellect, such a sweet human being—yes, sweet. To have the pleasure of his friendship was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me.
If you have extra luggage, give it to your local foster care agency rather than Goodwill. Kids changing homes often have to use trash bags. Not a trivial difference. H/t Debbie Burgoyne, Burkittsville’s mayor.
3/4 I admire many secular humanist thinkers. But consider how few Steven Pinkers remain and how many who are now advocating forms of totalitarianism. Secular humanism rests on sand.
I just don't get it. You join Twitter. You choose the people you follow. You have the option of unfollowing, muting, blocking. Why does anyone need protection from anything? What is the threat? Mystified in Burkittsville.
.
@JillDLawrence
makes a passionate case for Twitter. Both what is being lost and what is still worth fighting for amid the Musky-meltdown of the site.
Lots of commentary. Let me make one point: Rigorous analyses of SAT test prep were published in the 1980s and 1990s. They uniformly reported gains of a few dozen points max from prep, using credible control groups. Before the SAT started retreating from highly g-loaded subtests,…
More precisely, it rewarded systematic test prep, period, and it turns out that the people who work the hardest on test prep are Asian students and the white children of the affluent who want to get into elite schools.
Want to know what the hardest-to-prep-for kind of question…
A lot of the discussion of the last day has been dismissive of people deemed to be lower on the cognitive/education totem pole. It puts me in mind of George Low, head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, a brilliant engineer. Before every launch, George would go to the Cape…