Marx’s argument barely makes sense. Construction workers will not be able to afford the skyscraper they’re building; the jeweler cannot afford to buy the diamond neckalces he assembles — OH NOES!

Yes, if the entire economy is workers making luxury goods they can’t afford, then there is a problem. But there’s also a problem if everyone is making very low cost/low price items that everyone can buy 100 at a time – how is that supposed to work out? Everyone accumulates a lot of useless cheap crap? Oh yes, something of the retail bubble, too.

It wasn’t so much a bunch of low-wage workers building expensive homes (that was happening before the subprime bubble, you know), just that the volume was such that these McMansions were being sold to people who could not afford them in any sane world (not just to the construction guys)…. because they thought they’d be able to flip said homes. Hmmmm.

If they’re so rich, powerful, and smart, why don’t they just homeschool? I understand that private schools in Manhattan may be beyond their means, but with homeschooling, you can be teaching your kids the snootiest, most outrageous stuff: “Oh yes, little Johnny is working on his ancient Greek and Chinese calligraphy today….”

What I usually have to do about these situations is give some real life examples that no one will deny.

Look, I say = men are on average taller than women, are they not? Very noticeably so? The average height for men is some inches taller than the average height for women.

And yet my sisters-in-law are both 6 feet tall, and well over the average male height.

However, if you gathered together all the 6-foot-and-up people in one arena, the men would vastly outnumber the women.

It’s harder for me to explain to the innumerate about the effect of having the same average but different standard deviations. I usually have to draw graphs at that point. But they can understand that just because the averages are different doesn’t mean that all men are taller than all women or even that all women are shorter than the average male height.

These are broad statistics, that do have an effect on what you’re going to see at different levels. It is not stating anything about any particular individual, just about how populations compare.

They act like it’s some great moral judgment or something. Feh.

I am going to try to be fair to Mrs. Obama, so perhaps the reasoning that if it were to be a drug trial, that would mean the control group would get a placebo vaccine…. and, uh, it’s better that none of the girls get the experimental treatment than only half do. Yeah.

Makes about as much sense why poor D.C. kids shouldn’t get school vouchers because only some of the kids would get to escape crappy schools. It’s better that all the kids be miserable together.

Jeeez, my pale-as-a-ghost uncle married my black-as-midnight aunt, and nobody argued that it was some ground-breaking achievement that would reconcile the races to each other. And it’s not like my uncle was married to more than one woman or abandoned his children. I guess that’s why my cousins aren’t running for president. Well, and the fact that they’re in their mid-20s. There’s still hope! (and change!)

Heck, in my southern side of the family it was considered far more scandalous that my dad married a Yankee Catholic.

Seems to me that tattoos signal that you’re not expecting to become 50.

That could mean psycho girlfriend, you know.

I am one of the girls in SMPY (how kids got picked: you scored >= 700 on the math section of the SAT before you were 13. I heard they lowered the bar — unsurprising — for girls at some point; needed a larger sample size, I suppose, but I got in the same as a boy would.)

And yes, amongst the math geeks, there were few girls, and in the geek camps they had for us, I was the only girl in the computer science class when I went there, and I think I was the only girl in the problem solving with pre-calc math class when I went there. Most of the girls I ran into at CTY were taking the lab science classes or the humanities classes. You had to qualify for certain classes with your SAT scores — I did ok on the verbal (I was only 12, come on!) and could have done the humanities classes, but definitely preferred comp sci.

Later on, I did various “Chicks in Math” programs, and it was interesting to note that some of the women decided that the all-important Math Needs Chicks issue was Not Their Problem, and did something else, like become high school teachers or lawyers.

I’m still in a math-related career (I’m an actuary), but I had dropped out of grad school in math, though I got plenty of encouragement to go through to become a professor. Thing is, that life is not for me — working on problems that maybe only 20 people understand and maybe 5 of them care. I’d rather deal with problems involving real money, where people may not understand what you’re doing, but they sure do care about the results.

It annoys me that the people bitching the most about the “lack” of women in math/science fields don’t care about areas with an “overrepresentation” of women…. and also, these women tend to be of some mushy-headed field themselves. If they think there should be women in math, why don’t they do it themselves? I’m not going to make myself miserable just so some diversity officer can feel good about herself.

mnuez’s comment also points the way to where this sort of analysis fails as well — you can’t just look at the set of successful people (for whatever measure of success) and enumerate their qualities and say “This! This drinking 8 glasses of water every day is the cause of their success!” if you don’t also look at the people who fail. The failures may also be drinking 8 glasses of water a day.

A lot of super-success is based on luck, but it’s not like just anybody can capitalize on the various lucky circumstances that come their way. One needs to be prepared to take advantage of that luck…. and if that luck never comes, what then? Then you can be moderately successful, most likely. It depends on the field. Some careers/callings require far more luck than others.

The trouble is, law school papers are graded by blind grading. I =suppose= someone could have been sneaky and memorized what Obama’s handwriting looked like to give him unfair grades, but on the whole law school grades are above board compared to business school.

Well, it’s definitely true that it takes longer for some students to get some concepts than others. Abstraction doesn’t come at the same speed for everybody…. but as Gladwell doesn’t want to admit, for some people, it comprehension never comes at all, no matter how good the education you throw at them.

And you know what, Malcolm? That’s okay. It’s okay that I will never be able to slam dunk or hit a hole-in-one. It’s okay that some people can’t read Chinese (whether their native language or not.) And it’s certainly okay that most people won’t get calculus. They don’t need to.

But no, math is the ruler by which worth is measured, evidently. Low ability in math keeps people out of certain lucrative jobs, which is true. My lack of athletic ability or good looks keeps me out of certain lucrative jobs as well, and I’m not crying over that.

But of course, if he admitted that, nobody would be interested in paying his speakers fee. Carry on, I guess.

My husband does the inventory management in our house…. and guess what: it’s not that complicated. (And the people who buy the huge-ass fridges/freezers aren’t buying bulk at warehouse stores, as testing99 says.)

If you’re at the level of having to feed 20 people daily, then you’re going to hire at least one servant to manage the situation. Otherwise, you learn to organize your food storage space so that the most-used items are easily reachable, and you know where to find new bottles of ketchup (for instance). And if you buy the gallon tubs of mustard, you learn to save more manageable sizes to fill from the tub. If you’re having trouble dealing with Costco/Walmart bulk foods, I have plenty of tips in making it more manageable. But RFIDs are not needed.

Puts me in mind of Ann Coulter’s take on the “racist grandma” incident….

…ole grandpa was being a lazy ass, not wanting to get his butt out of bed to drive breadwinner wife to work. So he casts around for various excuses, until he brings out Moral Authority Card: wife wants to be driven just because aggressive hobo bugging her is black! Yes! Back to bed and no need to look bad in front of grandson who eats up excuses for laziness.

What is it with political wives and hospitals?

(Of course, I’m working with a sample size of 2 here…)

Well, it’s not like the evangelicals hate the Osmonds.

Interesting about the last point — I recently did some testing at the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation (jocrf.org), where they measure stuff like 3-d visualization, memory for numbers, tonal memory, flow of ideas, etc. The tests usually involve measuring speed and/or accuracy on items against a reference peer group (as performance changes by age, but your performance relative to the proper reference group will remain stable). The individual aptitudes tested have low (if any) correlations with each other. They keep stats on satisfaction/success in various careers and these aptitudes, as the testing is used to give career advice.

Some of the stuff they test on seems like it would be relevant to sports, such as the 3-d visualization, but in asking them on the stats they keep, they haven’t found an aptitude profile that particularly help with sports. I should ask them if they’ve broken it down by sport or position, but they probably don’t have enough data points for that. But who knows – perhaps the NFL had them do a study once on QBs. It seems a natural position to try to test for.

HEY! (I’ve been offline, so I just noticed this post)

I’m no Putnam fellow, but I rate higher than 99+% of men, forget about women. I don’t look like a troll.

Oh wait, I =am= pretty scary-looking.

FWIW, having been a chick at various math competitions and the US Physics Olympiad, most of the females (white or otherwise) looked fine. Our hygiene was definitely better than the vast majority of teenage boys on hand. I dropped out of the academic track to become an actuary, but of my female math friends who have continued on to the professorate, none of us have had trouble getting dates (and some of us have reproduced… shock!)

I do remember the assholes in math/engineering depts complaining that the math/engineering chicks were dogs. Yes, but if those guys were so attractive they wouldn’t have to “settle” on asking us and getting turned down for dates, eh?

Well, it’s not a happy ending for the predators. Poor lions.

Obviously, parliamentary systems are different from the American set-up.

The only thing close to equivalent would be Newt Gingrich or Tom Delay, when they were Speaker, losing their Congressional seats because legal immigrants in Georgia or Texas booted them in favor of a Democrat.

Consider, for example, New York City — Giuliani was able to be mayor twice, though even what passes for Republicans in NYC barely were represented on the City Council. The executive and legislative are more distinct in the U.S., at all levels of govt, than Australia.

Let’s just think about how much of your grandparents’ genes you actually have.

Consider the 50% of your genes from your father. Well, he got 50% from each of his parents, so you should be an admixture of 25% of each of your paternal grandparents, right?

Not really.

It is theoretically possible (though not likely) that you could have ended up with 50% paternal grandfather and 0% paternal grandmother. All that is required is that they add up to 50%. And you can push that reasoning back as far as you like (though it gets less and less likely the farther back you go.) We already know it works like this with regards to the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA — it’s passed wholesale along from father to son, and mother to children, the only differences being mutations. (X & Y don’t crossover, do they? I’m no biologist.) It’s already known that there are correlations between genes that are physically close, as it’s not like there’s a perfect 50/50 shuffle for each gene.

So though you’re not likely 50/0 with regards to your paternal grandparents, it’s not shocking if you’re pretty far from 25/25.

This is why I’m asking for probabilities and correlations by race. This “22% African” tells me nothing. If it’s 22% of certain gene markers he has is associated predominantly with people from Africa, there’s probably not much there there. Is this being done in a Bayesian manner?

If you want, I could figure out some probabilities for you. I’d need more info, though.

These “findings” are reported as 22% asian, etc., but what I want to know is what that means — 22% of the genes looked at predominantly show up in asian people? I would need to know what they mean by that.

We are those mutants, indeed.

It will be interesting to see the impact of genetic engineering on the germ line in humans, if that ever becomes economically feasible on a large scale.

I would think people would want to squelch any mutations that come, without regards to what those mutations do. Just the old tried-and-true genes for my family, thanks.

Of course, there would be plenty of populations where no direct genetic tinkering goes on, and my second guess would be that this group of people would have much higher fertility rates than those who engineer their children to have the “right” set of genes… and that first group will just fade away.

FWIW, I did a little probability calculation of the probability that you’d have 9 or more boys out of 14 kids, assuming prob(boy) = 50% (in real life, it’s a little higher than 50% where sex-selective abortions aren’t going on. For various reasons, the ratio tends to be about 105 boys for 100 girls)

Anyway, it’s about 21% possibility that you have >= 9 boys using 50% probability. That within the realm of non-suspicion, so I wouldn’t go by the gender ratio alone.

FWIW, I’ve had three kids so far. The stay-at-home mom has had at least 3 (maybe 4). The sociologist, metallurgist, and cop have had no kids and are highly unlikely to ever do so. The archivist has no kids, but she may be interested eventually.

And, yes, I’m Catholic, the SAHM is Christian of some variety, and the others are irreligious as far as I know. I may have another kid, but I’m closing in on 35 and don’t want to be an old mom. My own mother had 3 and was 22 when I was born.

To the person who asked earlier: Linville was overweight in college. Maybe not that overweight, but that happened to alot of the people I knew from CATT (a residential theme program at N.C. State, where most of the people joined so they could play nettrek, or nethack.)

My own experience has been that a female geek does not lack for dates, no matter how plain or overweight she is. The odds are in our favor (and not all the geeks are terribly odd, comparatively.) Pretty much all the women I’m still in touch with from CATT are married or in a long-term pairing. Off the top of my head, the women are currently: an actuary (me), a sociology prof (my roomie), a metallurgist (or something. She seems to work in a foundry, and she’s dealing with metal processes), a stay-at-home mom, a cop in Montana, and a drug company archivist. Interesting that the women ended up in a variety of careers, while the guys in the program have pretty much uniformly stayed in the computer industry as far as I can tell. A small group from CATT were amongst the founders of Red Hat, one guy is now a CTO of a small telecom, another does network stuff for Alcatel, some work for IBM, etc. Lack of imagination, hmm? 😉

To be fair, none of us chicks were hackers, and I didn’t see that many (or any) of us wanted to be sysadmins. We just liked using computers as tools.

I remember John Linville from college. His response to women with strong opinions (me and my roomie) was to call us lesbians. Class act.

mnuez: Sorry, I didn’t state well what I meant.

I was trying to extend what you were saying about noticing disparities in abilities between groups, not trying to make it look like you disagreed with the reality of statistical differences.

I have to agree with the intelligence vs. wisdom point. I remember from hanging around math departments a bunch of certified geniuses, but the dumbest political ideas I had ever heard. The problem is, of course, that there is absolutely no repercussion to them if their ideas turn out to be wrong.

That’s true of most politicians, too, not just academicians, as the actual impact of a policies are rarely the reason for continuing tenure in political positions.

Getting back to the point, the same can be said with ideas of education, in that most proponents of various educational “reforms” never even have to deal with students directly, and it’s certainly not their lives screwed up when they made a mistake. I was lucky enough to have been taught math traditionally (with drills, flashcards, nightly homework, concrete math problems and directed learning, none of this “discovery” crap), with “tracking” of different levels starting in first grade. The teachers didn’t freak out at the time that kids had differing abilities, or that certain groups were “overrepresented” in different levels.

This is to respond to mnuez, who wonders what the upshot of statistical IQ differences should be. The upshot is that racial quotas in education is a very bad idea. The theory behind the racial quotas was that the distribution of ability is the same amongst all races, and thus if you have no black kids in the “gifted” classes, something racist must be going on. That Harvard Law must have some bare minimum of people with the right-colored skin, or there goes all that liberal goodwill.
They never think that perhaps it’s not kind to stick people in environments where they will be in way over their heads, and where the probability of failure is going to be high for them.

A good comparison would be with women and physically demanding jobs, like being a firefighter. That job requires a bunch of upper body strength, and in general, women don’t have that strength. Every so often, in a place like NYC, people complain that there aren’t enough women firefighters, but most people see the physical reality behind that and the furor goes nowhere. Not many women garbage haulers? Well, strike me down with a feather. Yes, some women are able to do the job and want to do it, and they should have the opportunity, but the mere fact that the numbers are low doesn’t mean some pernicious sexism is going on unless you want to call Nature sexist.

I think more people understand the distinction when it comes to the sexes, especially as the physical differences (height, weight, strength) are much more pronounced (with height, ~2 s.d.s) than many racial statistical differences.

I was going to mention Steve Pinker, too, because he brings up something like this in The Blank Slate, saying that ust because humans have certain innate qualities (such as abilities to acquire language, certain instinctual emotional reactions, etc.) that differ doesn’t mean that therefore morality goes out the window. Indeed, I believe he says something to the extent that ignoring what science has to say about human nature brings about some really nasty results (cf Marxism).

However, as another commenter pointed out, once it becomes evident that there are statistical distinctions, then the whole affirmative action quota system comes falling down about the ears of those who look upon it as their sinecures. If there are differences, then it makes no sense just to look at the stats of hires/promotions/whatever and say “It must be discrimination!” No, it would require actual =work= to dig into where there really are injustices as opposed to the natural filtering of interests and abilities. Yes, there is actual discrimination out there, but nowhere near the endemic they claim, and if anything AA policies make it worse.

They couldn’t bitch about so few women being in physics because so few women are interested or can do physics (never mind the same is true of men, it’s just that more men are interested and can do it.) But most importantly, they couldn’t make the claim that their educational attainment is from pure effort alone as opposed to having that genetic advantage to begin with (heck, what if they find out they squandered their true potential, while those of lesser aptitudes accomplish so much more comparatively?)

Bah. I am a supposed beneficiary of these policies, and I don’t see them ending any time soon.

The question is why the Jews are still around, when they didn’t have a nation for a couple thousand years.

The Chinese and Indians are still around because there’s a China and an India. It’s not that difficult to see that continuity can be maintained when you’ve got a geographical home that’s rarely conquered from the outside.

But if you’re not in that lucky position — if you’re Celts or Assyrians or the like — you get conquered and through intermarriage and inculturation your distinct grouping goes away. A little bit of the Celts live on in my DNA, but it’s not a distinct ethnic group any more.

I assume because of fault lines in the area, you can’t quite build up like NYC has done… (as Manhattan is on some really solid ground, and does not fear much from earthquakes.) I also assume L.A. uses grey water? Doesn’t look like much room to grow on.

In any case, there’s plenty of space in the middle of the country, and I understand places like Nebraska and Wyoming aren’t crowded. Yes, it doesn’t have that lovely southern California coastal weather, but that’s why it got crowded in the first place.

Just so the students that AA supposedly helps don’t keep getting screwed over, how about stats are kept not just of admissions, but also of attrition? I mean, I know they have those stats, but they should be forced to publish all those stats, from admissions to graduation.

I’m trying to see the distinction between what people are calling intelligence and these various aptitudes. G is measuring a certain kind of cognitive aptitude, correct? Then why not measuring musical aptitude, or dexterity?

Perhaps “multiple intelligences” is a misnomer, and g/intelligence should be lumped in with the other aptitudes. One item I’ve definitely noticed a difference on is a sort of kinesthetic memory (I’m thinking of touch-typing here) — I’m good at touch typing, which yes, took some training, but I know lots of people who have done the same training and still can’t touch type. In particular, my huband is high g like me, but no matter how many times he’s trained, he just can’t get touch-typing. And I know people of average intelligence who type exceedingly fast. I think this kid of aptitude does have an impact on certain types of jobs, but yeah – if you’re in management, your kinesthetic or musical ability won’t have much impact, but your ability to think on your feet and respond to changing conditions will have a large impact.

Anyway, I’m finding the aptitude stuff interesting, because it’s not much talked about. Generally you get the Gardner wishy-washiness without any specificity or data. Even if nobody is much interested in funding research in looking at ethnic disparities in aptitude distributions, I bet there would be some interest in finding out which, if any, of the aptitudes are correlated, and which are correlated (if at all) with g.

Seriously, check out these people: Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation: jocrf.org

They have years’ worth of data from people taking their aptitude tests (and I’m considering taking the tests in a few months, for various reasons). They claim that results for aptitudes do not change much from age 14 on, though certain abilities do degrade over time (like manipulation on the “Tweezer test”).

They would have their own data on correlations between the various aptitudes they have chosen to test, and they do test against g as well. http://jocrf.org/research/not_just_g.html

Some of the stuff they test: inductive reasoning, structural visualization, ideaphoria (ease in generating new ideas), graphoria (ease in doing clerical work, I think), manual dexterity, rhythm memory, analytical reasoning, memory for design, observation… and much more. These sound like reasonable categories for “multiple intelligences” and I’d contact their researchers to try to get more information.

This crap makes me so tired.

My sisters-in-law are both six feet tall, and they don’t feel the need to deny the reality that women, in general, are shorter than men. Working in Manahattan, I of average height for a woman (5’4″) am taller than many men around me. And again, nobody thinks this remarkable because it’s known different ethnic groups have different height distributions. Can’t deny something so easily measured.

And yet, people also know that individuals aren’t the distribution. Yes, six-foot-tall women exist, but they’re greatly outnumbered by six-foot-tall men. So big deal. But women sitting out on the right tail of an intelligence distribution get all huffy when you point out they’re outnumbered by men. And it’s not just that – they get annoyed when other women decide they don’t want to put up with the rat race crap (whether it’s race to tenure or some other “prize” these women covet.) Come on, career preferences also differ between the sexes, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I get tired of this crap because I’m a woman who has done better than the bulk of everybody with regards to quantitative fields, and I’m tired of women not up to snuff being crammed into my areas because Math! Needs! Women! It certainly doesn’t do me any good, and the good it supposedly does to the recipients of preferential treatment is questionable.

For those who are so concerned about those with high spatial reasoning, there are plenty of outlets for such people, and even for those who sit in a cubicle every weekday.

My husband is big on tinkering and messing with stuff, and a year ago he subscribed to Make Magazine: http://www.makezine.com/
Lots of people are still getting their hands dirty, even at high operating levels.

If he had ridden the 7 train, where are all the Chinese and Korean people in his description? I’m not joking here. It’s like not noticing all the Indian/Pakistani people getting off at Jackson Heights on the F train.

So I’m saying he hadn’t ridden the 7 train. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he had ridden the 6.

I should tell that to my husband the next time we want to have a kid: “It’s your turn.”

It seems a little obvious to me… it’s just a wee bit easier for your average Mexican to get to the U.S. than your average Indian or African. It takes quite a bit more money to get here physically and there are more barriers.

Even if there were absolutely no demographic differences in the home populations of these immigrants (indeed, if you’re looking at the overall home population, the Indians and Africans probably come off worse – the per capita income is less, and the vast majority probably don’t get much schooling), we’d get a different profile for those who end up here permanently, as those from father away and with more barriers have to work a lot harder at getting in and spend a lot more money.