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Affirmative action in college admissions based on race/ethnicity has been common since the end of the 1960s. It rather quickly was discovered to benefit primarily blacks and Latinos from above average homes.
So, slowly, the rationalization for affirmative action was rewritten by the Supreme Court from original assertions of fairness, anti-discrimination, and reparations for slavery and other past sins, which, presumably, diminish over time, to “diversity,” which we never ever can get enough of. Sure, the Rwandan U.N. ambassador’s granddaughter, whose white mother graduated from Wellesley, doesn’t really have any moral claim for special privileges in the United States, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s good for the white kids in class to enjoy the fruits of diversity, such as the current Black Autumn on campus.
But let’s try putting together a new argument for a new kind of affirmative action in college admissions targeting the previously untargeted; kids who are a lot smarter than their parents. I have a theory that our society tends to under-invest in the smart kids of not so smart parents. If you are looking for a group for colleges to recruit more intensively among, this would likely have a higher payoff than more traditional affirmative action categories.
The basics of The Bell Curve suggest that tens or hundreds of thousands of children born each year will be significantly smarter than the average of their parents. But because they show up fairly randomly in the population, they have been ignored (in Sapir-Whorf terms, we barely even have a name for them) because they don’t fit into the usual identity politics categories. They are a little like lefthanders, a common minority but too randomly distributed a group to develop political mojo. (For example, major league baseball discriminates 100% against lefthanded catchers, but even in a world obsessed with teasing out instances of discrimination, nobody cares).
One thing that has been widely remarked is that applying to college has gotten more complicated in terms of competitive strategizing. This may well be overblown, but it’s a widespread social stereotype beloved by Tiger Parents and feared by Sloth Parents that getting into a “good” college is immensely complicated.
This tends to become self-fulfilling.
Research by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford has discovered that the biggest concentration of overlooked smart kids that colleges should recruit harder are, unsurprisingly, exactly whom the conventional wisdom doesn’t expect them to be: male, white, flyover states, maybe from broken homes.
Why is the conventional wisdom’s expectation wrong that the real most overlooked demographic shouldn’t be the beneficiaries of White Male Privilege but should be the gay black Latinas from East Coast? Because it’s the conventional wisdom, obviously. The universities have been tilling those more ideologically congenial fields intensively for 40 or 50 years now, so they long ago hit diminishing marginal returns in Closing The Gap. But they can’t admit that, so they are constantly trumpeting: the theory can’t be wrong, comrades, so we must redouble our efforts!
Obviously, nobody respectable is going to invest in explicit special preferences for white boys from Flyover Country. But perhaps we can operationalize the Hoxby-Avery findings as calling for special investment in children who are smarter than their parents.
But is my theory correct that those are the kids most likely to be underinvested in relative to their potential? We should test it to find out.
Here’s a new research agenda: We probably now have multiple ways for social scientists to track two generations of achievement relative to test scores. For example, the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth, from which much of The Bell Curve, was derived, is following thousands of children of female members of the original sample. This public database available to legit professional social scientists has cognitive test data for two mother and child, along with life events such as type of college they attend. If the average NLSY panelist was 18 in 1979, she’d be 54 today in 2015, with a majority of her children already having reached the age to apply to college.
So my theory that our society is underinvesting in the smart children of less smart parents could be tested thoroughly over the next few years using NLSY data.
I throw a lot of research ideas out there in the hopes that academics will pick them up and carry them out. So don’t feel any need to credit me for the idea if you want to go ahead and study this. I just like knowledge.
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Totally off topic, but I was surprised to see Steve quoted in a CNN article:
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/27/us/obama-race-cnn-kff-poll/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetwork
https://royallasses.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/0-relax/
"And most of all, everyone can relax because there is not a shred of evidence that there is even one white racist at Harvard Law School who would do such a thing, or did this thing — which, as Heather Mac Donald has suggested, is inherently improbable. Steve Sailer, applying Occam’s Razor, wasn’t easily fooled, either. The New York Times mostly pretended to believe this tall tale."Replies: @gbloco
First: morally, this is a great idea (as someone suggested to me in an earlier post). We’re investing in our own people.
I think the NYT or another liberal source looked into this and a lot of these smart ruralites don’t feel comfortable in the anti-Christian, hyper-urban environment of the Ivy League.
Also, I suspect a lot of IQ 140 kids in flyover country would rather be orthopedic surgeons in their local capital, etc., rather than going to Harvard and joining the DC/NY/Boston feeding frenzy. Think about it–would you rather be one of a million high-priced lawyers in a tiny apartment (and remember, these kids grow up in areas where they have a lot of space) so you can eat weird food and watch weird movies, or have a nice fancy office in Indianapolis, Boise, or Bismarck where everyone around you knows what a bigshot you are, you live by the governor, and you can drive out and go hunting, fishing, or sailing anytime? Better to be a big fish in a small pond…
They’d want to be scientists instead? Research science severely sucks as a career. The hours are long, the pay is crap, and you’re constantly fighting for grants.
The children of local surgeons (or status equivalent) become surgeons. Their parents know the path and put them on it. The mutant-genius children of local losers become weird losers. It happened to most of my childhood friends. In their forties now they're in bars, "treatment" centers, prisons and unemployment offices, not in alumni associations. If they worked in hospitals, they'd be rinsing bedpans. For one shift. Then they'd walk off with stolen drugs.
That's if any of them could get the job. I doubt they could. I certainly couldn't.
I never knowingly took an IQ test, but I cruised into the 99% on every standardized oval-filler I remember taking. I don't think I even noticed which tests they were, and if I did I forgot immediately. The names meant nothing to me (and they still don't when Steve references them). I just raced to be the first in the room to finish, and I always won, sometimes by a shocking distance. It was schoolwork, makework, busywork, nonsense. The library was where I went to learn, to take things seriously. The books smarter than I was were all there. School was for rushing through the daily chores so I could get back to bullshitting with my friends, clowning, fighting, and getting with girls.
The occasional counselor or teacher berated me for wasting my "potential," of course. Two concerned teachers went the extra mile and talked to my mother (single, of course). It changed their attitudes. They both went from acting disappointed in me to acting helplessly sorry for me...and quietly relieving me of all class requirements.
So I didn't go to college. The possibility didn't exist, understand? Not for me or for anyone like me I knew. A couple of us went off to the big city and started a band that only music journalists and fellow musicians liked. On the road I met a nice rich girl with a vanity job in the business. We quit it and I retired into the library at her house, having netted at most ten thousand dollars over the course of my productive lifetime.
A minimally acceptable outcome, I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of "potential" I had/was. The America of not long before I was born seems to have had a good system. They'd send flyover outliers to the moon or pretend to admire our oddly written books or make us star contestants on game shows. But that was then.Replies: @MarkinLA, @Michelle, @Bill
Isn’t the Duke Talent Identification Program (TIP) supposed to, in part, help find students such as the ones you describe? Actually, I’m not really that clear on how the program works, except that somehow it’s supposed to identify smart kids.
“Payoff” in what terms? You’re appealing to a definition of “fairness” that is no longer operative in the academy.
The purpose of education today is to promote social change. The “hegemonic discourse”, if you will, of the academy is to create an institutional framework of resistance to cis-hetero-normative patriarchal white supremacy, and of course to white supremacist cisheteronormative patriarchy, and occasionally to white supremacist patriarchal cisheteronormativity. Wealth as a privilege category is obsolete, almost quaint, lost in discussions of intersectionality.
What in the blue hell does identifying and helping talented (but cishet) sons of the white (or even non-white) working class (or even the non-working classes) have to do with any of that?
If I remember rightly, that is a legally-mandated justification for AA college admissions, cited in the judgement of a case taken by a white student against the practice. If only you had to go to college to experience the “fruits of diversity”, instead of having them turbo-pumped at you by the media and entertainment industry 24/7.
The same logic applies to ALL efforts to achieve "equality". (where blacks/minorities are concerned.)
Top notch idea Steve, top notch and topping off…. OT, or maybe not:
There are plenty of scientists who work for private industry and don’t have to fight for grants.
Yeah, the powerful do what they want and find justifications afterward. Not that this is some particular artifact of our Kali Yuga–you had the medieval Catholic Church saying the kings and princes were divinely ordained, Victorians writing justifications for the civilizing mission of the British Empire, Southerners writing about the need to take care of the slaves and Northerners writing about the need to free them when they really wanted more drones and money for heavy industry, and so on. (What’s that you say? Being conquered by the British actually did leave positive things sometimes? Sure, but that’s not *why the Brits did it*–they wanted the resources.)
I think in this case it’s nice to have a few black people at Harvard and so on so they have an elite they can buy off. You know, when the natives get restless the rich folks can give a few more bucks to Jesse Jackson or whoever else they’ve got in charge and prevent them from storming down Park Avenue past 96th street. (Hey, I’m an old New Yorker. Substitute your local hustler.)
Retconning diversity in STEM.
The Smart People are magnificently stupid at pattern recognition when their holiness requires it, but they’d sniff out this pattern pretty rapidly.
Everybody knows lower- and middle- class flyover white males are the most privileged creatures in creation; that’s why rich coastal white males have to Punch Up at them so assiduously. Duh.
This would be hellaciously difficult to implement as a functioning admissions systems.
The only way to get liberals to let go of the diversity bone is to make it unpalatable. Canada has implemented a regulation rule which forces old regulations to be discarded every time a new regulation is implemented. The same principle needs to be applied to universities with respect to diversity. Currently it’s fine for white professors and white administrators to pledge to hire more minorities because the cost falls on young white academics just entering the job market. Republicans should be forcing universities to fire white academics to make room for newly hired black academics and let the other job competitions proceed in a race neutral fashion, after all it is the existing academics who are doing the most posturing on the need for more diversity, so let them pay the price.
The same poisoned chalice strategy needs to work with student admissions. Make it socially toxic for universities to overlook inner-city black youth as they favor the black children of Colin Powell and Obama. Liberal academics say that they want diversity, well a black kid from Philips Exeter doesn’t add anything to the environment, so hold universities to their statements, using Alinsky tactics, and make them admit Shiteria from the ghetto. Make “Black Autumn” look like a walk in the park compared to the environment which will develop when true diversity is shoved into the university environment.
The only way to make diversity toxic as an ideal is to make it very unpleasant for all involved. Look at the rise of white student unions as the immediate response to Black Autumn – it can get much, much worse and really undercut the notion that diversity is some benefit to education.
I'm reading The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack. She entered Yale as a physics major in 1974. When she went to interview her old professors in 2010 only one had retired, a few months earlier. The rest were still teaching or somehow working in the industry. I was wondering why anyone would spend 10 years getting a Ph.D. knowing that the old-timers refuse to leave and the rare open positions will be given to underrepresented minorities.
Yale is going to spend $50 million over 5 years to diversify its faculty.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/04/yale-spend-50m-faculty-diversity-effortReplies: @Reg Cæsar, @TangoMan
Buying Jessie Jackson off doesn’t work anymore. There are too many others wanting into the action, a Black President encourages every and any person of color to agitate until they are given stuff. Double plus for Muslims. Indeed the whole thing at Harvard is weakness. The children of White movers and shakers don’t expect to be in charge — they expect to work for and be subservient to: a Ghanian Muslim, an Arab Muslim, and a Gay White Texan respectively leading the anti-Crest movement at Harvard Law. This is why everyone is “afraid.”
They believe at any rate that Blacks, Muslims, Gays will all be running things and they want to keep their minor seat at the table. They are already defeated in their minds before any fight has begun.
The same goes with BLM. You can throw however much money at Jessie Jackson you want, there will still be Black agitators wanting their own concessions, and rioting and burning stuff is fun (for them).
As for talented White boys in flyover country, the only reason the US EVER put money into them was DEFENSE. A fear of first Nazi Germany and Japan over-running us, and then the Soviets. Absent a Soviet style threat and obvious technological superiority from a global competitor determined to conquer us explicitly, there will never be investment in White boys who are smart in flyover country, who lack money, power, and connections from birth.
Smart White boys and men who don’t have connections via being born to wealthy, connected parents are the most direct threat to the status quo possible. Bill Gates doesn’t spend money on them, first his harridan White HATES HATES HATES White beta males (himself oh so obviously), and second they would be a threat to his portfolio of financial investments that depend on technological stability and predictability.
Suppose smart White boys from the heartland invented a clean, sustaining, energy plus producing fusion reactor? Or quantum computers that were orders of magnitude more powerful than anything in existence now? Or achieved interstellar spaceflight with working warp drives and such? No one would NEED Hillary Clinton, or Bill Gates, or Gay Latina Blacks agitating for White men to be eliminated. All that stuff is a threat, that both entrenched White interests and the emerging non-White elite who control politics and corporations want snuffed out.
Which is why we spend more on Black Studies than physics in most universities. And we always will save a desperate situation where elites to survive MUST mobilize smart White males from the heartland.
Right I know a guy who -is- an orthopedic surgeon in a small town in Oklahoma, and he is highly esteemed and respected, whereas he would be just another shlub in NYC. Plus your $ go much farther in OK than NYC.
I am especially interested in issues involving math talent and the development of math talent.
Look at the names here:
https://www.mathcounts.org/sites/default/files/u1706/2015%20Final%20Standings%20Document.pdf
My guess is that about 5 of those top 56 in the 2015 MathCounts National Competition had parents born in the USA, and those are about the only ones of European ancestry. Probably about 35 had parents born in China, the rest mostly from Korea and India and maybe the Middle East.
I don’t know if it’s still the case, but I do know of multiple instances over the last 12 years of top finishers in National MathCounts with European family names and Chinese tiger mothers.
Part of what’s going on here is that many of the smartest students in China came here over the last 30 years, and their kids are often extremely smart. But those parents also brought with them the Tiger Mother culture, and the combination produces the National MathCounts results shown. Something similar is no doubt going on with some of the other immigrant groups.
One of the great MathCounts feel-good stories is about Melanie Wood, who as a 7th grader and with no previous training placed very high in the 1994 Indiana state competition and 40th in the nation, based, it seems, on sheer talent. She went on to great success in additional math contests (USAMO, IMO, Putnam) and a Princeton Ph.D. in math. I think a similar 7th grader now would not attract so much attention because now there is such intense competition from all the tiger cubs.
Melanie Wood is extremely smart, but she’s also extremely lucky that she got involved with serious mathematics at a young age. If she had just drifted along through middle school and high school, as most smart white kids do, she would not have ended up nearly as successful as she is.
I think that most of the undeveloped and unchallenged math talent in this country is among the white kids, boys especially, who are pushed by neither their schools nor their parents.
Both of Melanie Wood's parents were middle school teachers. Her mother taught French and Spanish but Melanie wasn't interested in languages. Her father died when she was 6 weeks old and he was a math teacher. Melanie's mother taught her math in memory of her father. When she was 4 years old Melanie could solve 3x + y = 12 when x=2 in her head. Melanie attended a private high school, Tudor Park.
The other two girls to go to the International Mathematical Olympiad were Alison Miller and Sherry Gong. Alison was homeschooled. I don't know anything about her father, but her mother has a bachelor's in math from Bryn Mawr and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. Alison went to Harvard and has a Ph.D. from Princeton.
Sherry went to Exeter Academy in NH. Both of her parents have Ph.D.s (I think math related) and teach at a university in Puerto Rico. Sherry went to Harvard and is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT.
I only noticed one obvious female name in the MathCounts link. Walter Kroubalkian's father is a software developer. I don't know what Moses Schindler's parents do but his mother converted to Judaism and neither parent had a strong math background so they put the kids in Kumon in pre-school. His older brother and sister, Max and Stella, took BC Calculus in the 8th grade.
Diversity means that universities and other institutes of learning get a lot of government money. It’s hard to let go of all that largess when your mission is making money; providing education is merely a sideline. Government bribery is big business in this country.
Like the man says, "He who has the gold makes the rules".
It partially explains the explosion in administrative versus teaching expenditure.
As I was reading this post and your comment, it seemed like both you and Steve Sailer wrote what you wrote with me and specifically me in mind. Flyover country? Check. Broken home? Moderately, but not supremely. Smarter than either one of his parents? Check. 140+ IQ? Check. White man? Check. No desire to be chewed up by the BosWash conveyor belt and be propagandized to turn traitor against his own people? Check. Live by the Governor? Well, not so much in my case, but for five months out of the year, my regular work place is within easy view of the Missouri Governor’s Mansion. University of Missouri at St. Louis with a business degree instead of unpayable student loan debt that would have come with a Harvard sheepskin? Yes. (Incidentally, the only Ivy I applied to was Princeton, but got the rejection letter I knew I’d get.) I’m happy being a medium sized fish in a small pond, my only other real track in life would have been one of many small fish in the ocean.
I wonder how many in the Steveosphere /Alt-Right have been red pilled since childhood, living through circumstances that tend to create the worst sort of SJW cretin? But instead of engaging in outrageous identity illnesses we developed a "taste for distasteful truths" (Bierce).Replies: @SFG
The only way to get liberals to let go of the diversity bone is to make it unpalatable. Canada has implemented a regulation rule which forces old regulations to be discarded every time a new regulation is implemented. The same principle needs to be applied to universities with respect to diversity. Currently it's fine for white professors and white administrators to pledge to hire more minorities because the cost falls on young white academics just entering the job market. Republicans should be forcing universities to fire white academics to make room for newly hired black academics and let the other job competitions proceed in a race neutral fashion, after all it is the existing academics who are doing the most posturing on the need for more diversity, so let them pay the price.
The same poisoned chalice strategy needs to work with student admissions. Make it socially toxic for universities to overlook inner-city black youth as they favor the black children of Colin Powell and Obama. Liberal academics say that they want diversity, well a black kid from Philips Exeter doesn't add anything to the environment, so hold universities to their statements, using Alinsky tactics, and make them admit Shiteria from the ghetto. Make "Black Autumn" look like a walk in the park compared to the environment which will develop when true diversity is shoved into the university environment.
The only way to make diversity toxic as an ideal is to make it very unpleasant for all involved. Look at the rise of white student unions as the immediate response to Black Autumn - it can get much, much worse and really undercut the notion that diversity is some benefit to education.Replies: @Ivy, @Triumph104
Making HR and other bureaucrats follow their own rules was a pleasant diversion in business, in between times actually making money in spite of those groups.
Look at the names here:
https://www.mathcounts.org/sites/default/files/u1706/2015%20Final%20Standings%20Document.pdf
My guess is that about 5 of those top 56 in the 2015 MathCounts National Competition had parents born in the USA, and those are about the only ones of European ancestry. Probably about 35 had parents born in China, the rest mostly from Korea and India and maybe the Middle East.
I don't know if it's still the case, but I do know of multiple instances over the last 12 years of top finishers in National MathCounts with European family names and Chinese tiger mothers.
Part of what's going on here is that many of the smartest students in China came here over the last 30 years, and their kids are often extremely smart. But those parents also brought with them the Tiger Mother culture, and the combination produces the National MathCounts results shown. Something similar is no doubt going on with some of the other immigrant groups.
One of the great MathCounts feel-good stories is about Melanie Wood, who as a 7th grader and with no previous training placed very high in the 1994 Indiana state competition and 40th in the nation, based, it seems, on sheer talent. She went on to great success in additional math contests (USAMO, IMO, Putnam) and a Princeton Ph.D. in math. I think a similar 7th grader now would not attract so much attention because now there is such intense competition from all the tiger cubs.
Melanie Wood is extremely smart, but she's also extremely lucky that she got involved with serious mathematics at a young age. If she had just drifted along through middle school and high school, as most smart white kids do, she would not have ended up nearly as successful as she is.
I think that most of the undeveloped and unchallenged math talent in this country is among the white kids, boys especially, who are pushed by neither their schools nor their parents.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Triumph104
I think Hoxby’s methodology was looking at 90th percentile plus scorers on ACT/SAT tests. The kids at the 99th percentile usually stand out already, but the kids at 90-95 can be overlooked, not to mention 80th to 89th. But you can get a lot done in a society if you are mobilizing your 80th to 95th percentiles.
The kids at the 99th percentile may obviously be superstars in their schools, but if they're allowed to get their A+'s without being challenged, they probably won't develop to their full potential. That's a lot of talent going to waste. And with the NCLB nonsense, the focus of most American schools is down there in the dull-normal range, where the kids are on the borderline of passing the tests or not passing the tests.
Like you Steve (I think), I'm in favor of having this country run in such a way as to give as many of our fellow-citizens as possible a good shot at a fulfilling life. If kids in the 90-95 and 80-89 groups don't have a clear path to a good life, then something is very, very wrong.
I am a white male millennial, the child of average IQ parents with no college education between them (no disrespect). I scored in the top one percent of the ACT and SAT, without studying for either, but I had no notion of any kind of resume padding for college. My parents didn’t really understand how competitive college admissions were. However, I didn’t have the native industry/social awareness to understand the same thing. I own up to the fact that I am a failure, but I wonder if people with a similar profile become demoralized because it seems as if we have nothing going for us. (I had the potential admissions advantage of being gay, but I remained in the closet, so it’s a moot point).
Do that or head over to the bay area and join a start up.Replies: @Desiderius
“I think Hoxby’s methodology was looking at 90th percentile plus scorers on ACT/SAT tests. The kids at the 99th percentile usually stand out already, but the kids at 90-95 can be overlooked, not to mention 80th to 89th.”
The kids at the 99th percentile may obviously be superstars in their schools, but if they’re allowed to get their A+’s without being challenged, they probably won’t develop to their full potential. That’s a lot of talent going to waste. And with the NCLB nonsense, the focus of most American schools is down there in the dull-normal range, where the kids are on the borderline of passing the tests or not passing the tests.
Like you Steve (I think), I’m in favor of having this country run in such a way as to give as many of our fellow-citizens as possible a good shot at a fulfilling life. If kids in the 90-95 and 80-89 groups don’t have a clear path to a good life, then something is very, very wrong.
Right. Colleges were only too happy to take GI Bill money and then the Feds started loading reporting and then diversity requirements yada yada yada but it was too late to disentangle. I think only Hillsdale is free from the federal BS.
Like the man says, “He who has the gold makes the rules”.
I don’t know if it’s still true, but it used to be (almost famously so) that the US Navy somehow excelled in finding those smart-but-overlooked white boys and getting them into technical career paths.
Of course, there are also a lot of sailors that are dumber than rocks (although the Army always has been the service of last resort for the marginal IQ or those with previous legal or behavioral issues), and a fair number of Naval officers from 'the right families' that are screwups or of minimal talent which the Air Force or the Marines would never have commissioned.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
Society’s two biggest educational focuses seem to be on the exceptionally smart – you might call them The One Percent – and on the inner city poor (aka blacks). It overlooks trying to get the 70th percentile white kids to do better but seems to think it can turn a whole lot of 30th percentile black kids into engineers and Nobel laureates.
Elite universities have failed to capture white talent from Flyover Land, and the talent has simply been redirected, most recently into the Oil and Gas Industry and Silicon Valley.
The only reference to this phenomenon in popular culture I can think of is Malcolm in the Middle. Perhaps that could be a useful catch phrase in popularizing this concept.
An example was the mid-twentieth century system in the UK, where talented working class kids could sit the Eleven-Plus exam for a chance to go to an academically focused grammar school.
The Eleven Plus was a controversial exam, but it tested only the child, not the child’s parents. In comparison, getting a child into the top state schools, which are egalitarian in theory but elitist in practice, is a test of the ability of the child’s parents to read between the lines of complex admission procedures, such as the one Peter Hitchens copy-pasted into this blog post.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/27/us/obama-race-cnn-kff-poll/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetworkReplies: @Anonymous, @BubbaJoe, @gbloco
Also, the Royal Asses web site mentioned Steve on one of its pages.
https://royallasses.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/0-relax/
“And most of all, everyone can relax because there is not a shred of evidence that there is even one white racist at Harvard Law School who would do such a thing, or did this thing — which, as Heather Mac Donald has suggested, is inherently improbable. Steve Sailer, applying Occam’s Razor, wasn’t easily fooled, either. The New York Times mostly pretended to believe this tall tale.”
Ha ha, this is a great idea… for a first world nationalist country which is interested in upping its overall wealth, productivity and efficiency. Were you talking about the USA? Cause she don’t fit that bill. The USA is absolutely a socialist country marching ever toward international communism, with a tedious racial twist. If you want to know what kind of social engineering programs pique America’s interest, recall Harrison Bergeron.
This is a global-capitalist country with a large, restive ethnic minority that has to be bought off and elites that are more interested in money (on the right) and curing the world's ills (on the left) than the country.
To some degree 'wealth, productivity, and efficiency' can have drawbacks for the average Joe. America has more wealth thanks to offshoring (the total bank accounts of all American citizens increase when you add in the huge profits the management makes). It doesn't help the ex-coal miner doing meth in the ruins of West Virginia.
Look at Germany's mass refugee import--Merkel's probably at least in part trying to provide cheap labor for the big industries (as well as assuage her guilty conscience over what her grandpa might have done). I wouldn't be too surprised if they do get a temporary boost in profits with wages going down. What's going to happen to your average Hans on the street when he gets knifed is another story.
The children of Indian and Chinese immigrants would seem to be vastly outperforming their parents. That is, if we go by their test scores, and — ok, this is subjective — the general underwhelmingness of those of their parents I’ve gotten to know.
“The universities have been tilling those more ideologically congenial fields intensively for 40 or 50 years now, so they long ago hit diminishing marginal returns in Closing The Gap. But they can’t admit that, so they are constantly trumpeting: the theory can’t be wrong, comrades, so we must redouble our efforts!”
The same logic applies to ALL efforts to achieve “equality”. (where blacks/minorities are concerned.)
You may be going for parody here, but that is very typical of blacks in the Ivy League, especially right now.
The most famous of the current round of protesters is probably the “You’re disgusting!” Yale screamer. Her mother is a pale white woman who owns a PR firm with about 20 employees and a bunch of corporate clients. For several years the mother was a full time volunteer, so she has either family money or a high earning husband.
It actually doesn’t really care about the intellectual one percent. But they *tend* to have parents in the 95-99th %ile who are well-off and can help them out, because this stuff is hereditary. If you’re that rare freak of nature who’s smart without smart parents, you tend not to do as well.
Given your age and ability to get a top 1% standardized test score, sounds like you should take the GMAT and go to a top business school. Don’t stay in the closet for your application there however.
Do that or head over to the bay area and join a start up.
Like Scott Adams, I've also had the experience more than once before and after that day of being told that due to diversity goals, I (and other white males) were not only at a disadvantage, but weren't in consideration at all.
My main concern with bringing this up, at (let's face it) the risk of significant damage to my personal reputation, is not to whine or complain (I've made my peace and am doing well in other areas of endeavor, for myself and for my loved ones, if not for my country), but merely to suggest that this is a hell of a way to run a railroad.
The ones Steve is talking about never do any such thing. We don’t know how.
The children of local surgeons (or status equivalent) become surgeons. Their parents know the path and put them on it. The mutant-genius children of local losers become weird losers. It happened to most of my childhood friends. In their forties now they’re in bars, “treatment” centers, prisons and unemployment offices, not in alumni associations. If they worked in hospitals, they’d be rinsing bedpans. For one shift. Then they’d walk off with stolen drugs.
That’s if any of them could get the job. I doubt they could. I certainly couldn’t.
I never knowingly took an IQ test, but I cruised into the 99% on every standardized oval-filler I remember taking. I don’t think I even noticed which tests they were, and if I did I forgot immediately. The names meant nothing to me (and they still don’t when Steve references them). I just raced to be the first in the room to finish, and I always won, sometimes by a shocking distance. It was schoolwork, makework, busywork, nonsense. The library was where I went to learn, to take things seriously. The books smarter than I was were all there. School was for rushing through the daily chores so I could get back to bullshitting with my friends, clowning, fighting, and getting with girls.
The occasional counselor or teacher berated me for wasting my “potential,” of course. Two concerned teachers went the extra mile and talked to my mother (single, of course). It changed their attitudes. They both went from acting disappointed in me to acting helplessly sorry for me…and quietly relieving me of all class requirements.
So I didn’t go to college. The possibility didn’t exist, understand? Not for me or for anyone like me I knew. A couple of us went off to the big city and started a band that only music journalists and fellow musicians liked. On the road I met a nice rich girl with a vanity job in the business. We quit it and I retired into the library at her house, having netted at most ten thousand dollars over the course of my productive lifetime.
A minimally acceptable outcome, I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of “potential” I had/was. The America of not long before I was born seems to have had a good system. They’d send flyover outliers to the moon or pretend to admire our oddly written books or make us star contestants on game shows. But that was then.
There was such a place (the factory) and there still is (the military).
In the factory a smart guy would soon realize he was smarter than his boss and maybe even smarter than the engineers and go back to school at night for an AA and see if he could get on the swing shift or graveyard and finish his BS. Many companies have fellowship programs to allow smart people to get their degrees with company help.
Lots of people get advanced degrees in the military.
White boys from flyover America will eventually figure things out on their own. It’s a really obnoxious conceit that Ivies have that people who aren’t selected into their inner party are essentially third rate and can’t do without their tutelage.
Without feeling like it’s too much of a gamble, I think I can say that the Ivies and other elite institutions will lose a lot more in the long run from neglecting talented white kids from humble backgrounds than the white kids themselves. There will naturally be a lag, and those who got passed up over the last generation will probably never realize their full potential, but this is a temporary thing. Eventually, the majority minority “elite” will underperform and ultimately collapse into a squabbling factions. This will happen when white enrollment is something like 10% or less of the total.
Personally, I’m looking forward to the day when Harvard University is no longer a college, but rather a museum my grandkids can visit to see the old, failed America (tongue only half in cheek).
The Evans Scholars are the group of smart, kinda white underprivileged kids who got ahead in life. And we look after our own.
I have previously alluded to the fact that I lived on Capitol Hill in the late 70’s and most of the 80’s and that I had a neighbor who lived two doors away who was gay, who had bought his house around 1968. I believe after he was terminated because of his sexual orientation by either Rice or SMU, where he taught and served as dean, he moved to D.C. and went to work for the federal government, specifically at the Department of Education (or probably HEW at the time). We didn’t talk much about his work, but I seem to recall his job was to locate bright, needy kids all across the country and extending to our territories and to try to find colleges for those kids. I have a vague memory of his once referring to a trip he took to Guam to interview a prospect. I know very little of his specialty, but I am sure the program continued after he retired around 1986. So there may probably already exist a federal bureaucracy trying to serve the needs you have focused on. But that was before the Pell Grant program became so massively funded, and the earlier program may have been terminated. I wish I knew more, but that’s it. BTW I am pretty sure that my former neighbor was pretty good at his job, since he was intelligent and well-educated and had an ability to spot talent. He and a few of his friends were backers of a local Washington, D.C. popular singer in the late 60’s and early 70’s who went on to become nationally famous—Roberta Flack. When she wasn’t teaching school, she was a regular at a local bar called Mr. Henry’s, which was just about 4-5 blocks away from where we lived.
Columbia University’s undergraduate Class of 2019 is very diverse. It is 15% international and 85% domestic.
The domestic breakdown:
38% White
27% Asian
15% Hispanic
14% Black
4% Native American
Asians are now consider white. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Columbia uses a holistic review process that “is not based on a simple formula of grades and test scores”. They look at family circumstances, community, access to resources, personality, and the always important recommendations.
http://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/classprofile/2019
The greatest fear of your typical UMC Striver Mom is that her kids end up parochial and thus shut out of their birthright sinecure in the Post-American Empire, whatever the branch (media, academy, governmental, NGO, or corporate).
Anything that smacks of traditional Americana, including anything that appears too white, is thus to be avoided at all costs.
You’re way too young to be considered a failure, or even a success, yet. Or are you here looking for permission to fail?
Get to work, friend. There are still plenty of places and ways where being white won’t doom you.
Without feeling like it's too much of a gamble, I think I can say that the Ivies and other elite institutions will lose a lot more in the long run from neglecting talented white kids from humble backgrounds than the white kids themselves. There will naturally be a lag, and those who got passed up over the last generation will probably never realize their full potential, but this is a temporary thing. Eventually, the majority minority "elite" will underperform and ultimately collapse into a squabbling factions. This will happen when white enrollment is something like 10% or less of the total.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the day when Harvard University is no longer a college, but rather a museum my grandkids can visit to see the old, failed America (tongue only half in cheek).Replies: @Desiderius
There’s a lot of fail left in an endowment of that size.
One of the sharpest white kids in America, Scott Adams of woodsy Windham, N.Y., didn’t go to an Ivy, but to minuscule Hartwick College, which in the ’70s was basically a soccer team (NCAA champs in his junior year) with some nice classrooms and a library on a steep hillside.
To borrow an expression from Steve, my “vague impression” is that he and we are better off than had he gone to Harvard or Yale.
“male, white, flyover states, maybe from broken homes.”
Aren’t they what the military is for?
In the late '70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn't know that there were other options. My school didn't have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher's college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help - they wanted me to succeed but didn't know the options either. In the end, it was fine; I did well, got recruited by a number of quality high tech employers, and have had a very successful career doing exactly what I want.
But today...I probably couldn't replicate my success because the quality high tech employers tend not to recruit at the solid second-tier state universities anymore; they want the MIT and Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley and, yes, Rice grads; good ol' State U gets left out. All my young co-workers come from well-off families where typically both parents have graduate degrees. Credentials are everything nowadays, at least to get your foot in the door; once you have a few years, then performance is all that matters, but you can't perform if you can't get hired...Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Sunbeam
Well, where are these fellows ending up? I can’t think of too many fields in the contemporary US that couldn’t use a few more smart guys.
If he’s honest, he might be the best mechanic in town.
The progress made in those industries depends on there being at least a smattering of "too smart to be a..." people in the field. My father designed several pieces of test equipment for servicing TV sets and CRT computer monitors that the degreed engineers at the factory were amazed at. (Dad did have a morbid side, though. He also designed an electro-euthanasia machine for dog pounds which was never adopted by any, but his idea was the genesis for the electrical stunning/killing machine mink and chinchilla farms use to this day.)
Making progress in industry depends, of course, on there being an industry in the first place. It wasn't 100 IQ people who cooked up the ideas of mass offshoring, outsourcing, lean manufacturing, kanban, just-in-time and all the other job destroying idiocies: it was extremely high IQ people with Ph.D's and the like. We'd certainly have been better off if many had been car mechanics or TV repairmen.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Do that or head over to the bay area and join a start up.Replies: @Desiderius
I was in a similar boat about fifteen years ago (perfect LSAT, GMAT, and GRE) and things looked to be going smoothly for acceptance into Wharton. My onsite interviewer, however, was a black male. At the time I was a pretty vanilla apolitical middle-of-the-roader, so it’s highly unlikely I offended him. Still didn’t get accepted and my life took a different path where it’s highly unlikely that my talents have been fully utilized, at least professionally.
Like Scott Adams, I’ve also had the experience more than once before and after that day of being told that due to diversity goals, I (and other white males) were not only at a disadvantage, but weren’t in consideration at all.
My main concern with bringing this up, at (let’s face it) the risk of significant damage to my personal reputation, is not to whine or complain (I’ve made my peace and am doing well in other areas of endeavor, for myself and for my loved ones, if not for my country), but merely to suggest that this is a hell of a way to run a railroad.
If he's honest, he might be the best mechanic in town.Replies: @Desiderius, @Former Darfur
Most have HR departments for the express purpose of not finding them.
Malcolm in the Middle, Lisa Simpson, the evil genius baby on Family Guy, it’s been done a few times.
(It was Family Ties, wasn't it? I can never keep those generically-named shows straight. Probably because I rarely saw them.)
Not to mention Stewy's ("the evil genius baby") talking dog Brian. He is so easy to overlook; your utter failure to mention him clearly shows how exceptional talent can so easily fall in the cracks. According to Wikipedia, "He primarily works in the series as a struggling writer, attempting essays, novels, screenplays and newspaper articles." He sounds like a canine version of Steve Sailer, although I think Sailer probably lacks Brian's ability to chase cars. Further, "Brian is fond of dry martinis and is seen to have some issues in various episodes when he is told or forced to stop drinking. He smokes occasionally, although in the episode "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington", after seeing Peter promoting a corrupt cigarette company, he quit smoking, a habit he resumed at the end of that episode. He also occasionally smokes marijuana. After a brief stint as a drug sniffing dog, he developed a severe cocaine addiction, but after spending time in rehab he managed to quit." Apparently, Sailer failed to mention him because he feared Ron Unz or Taki might show an interest in Brian's undeniable talents and give him a blog on their respective "mags."
A dog so talented obviously deserves his own entry in Wikipedia. For those interested in reading more about this overlooked talent, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Griffin
Sam Walton discovered there was a lot of under-utilized managerial talent in the Ozarks.
Yale or fail, you white racists!
The only way to get liberals to let go of the diversity bone is to make it unpalatable. Canada has implemented a regulation rule which forces old regulations to be discarded every time a new regulation is implemented. The same principle needs to be applied to universities with respect to diversity. Currently it's fine for white professors and white administrators to pledge to hire more minorities because the cost falls on young white academics just entering the job market. Republicans should be forcing universities to fire white academics to make room for newly hired black academics and let the other job competitions proceed in a race neutral fashion, after all it is the existing academics who are doing the most posturing on the need for more diversity, so let them pay the price.
The same poisoned chalice strategy needs to work with student admissions. Make it socially toxic for universities to overlook inner-city black youth as they favor the black children of Colin Powell and Obama. Liberal academics say that they want diversity, well a black kid from Philips Exeter doesn't add anything to the environment, so hold universities to their statements, using Alinsky tactics, and make them admit Shiteria from the ghetto. Make "Black Autumn" look like a walk in the park compared to the environment which will develop when true diversity is shoved into the university environment.
The only way to make diversity toxic as an ideal is to make it very unpleasant for all involved. Look at the rise of white student unions as the immediate response to Black Autumn - it can get much, much worse and really undercut the notion that diversity is some benefit to education.Replies: @Ivy, @Triumph104
This is ingenious.
I’m reading The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack. She entered Yale as a physics major in 1974. When she went to interview her old professors in 2010 only one had retired, a few months earlier. The rest were still teaching or somehow working in the industry. I was wondering why anyone would spend 10 years getting a Ph.D. knowing that the old-timers refuse to leave and the rare open positions will be given to underrepresented minorities.
Yale is going to spend $50 million over 5 years to diversify its faculty.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/04/yale-spend-50m-faculty-diversity-effort
Yale is going to learn that you can't fool Mother Nature:Academia is already actively discriminating against white men and yet when it comes to performance, the favored black and Hispanic professors can't complete the sale with regards to producing high quality work and being awarded tenure.
So Yale is faced with the two choices - being "racist" in its tenure policies or giving in to the racial grievance mongers and granting tenure to mediocrities.
Let's not take our eye off the prize though - those white liberals who advocate for more faculty diversity should put their own necks on the chopping block, not the necks of young white men who are trying to begin their careers, after all these old geezers have had a nice long run of exploiting their "white privilege." Being forced to retire, or be fired, at age 45 and find some other job would really demonstrate their commitment to the cause of diversity.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Alex Keaton on <Family Ties, too, though that probably wasn’t the producers’ intention.
(It was Family Ties, wasn’t it? I can never keep those generically-named shows straight. Probably because I rarely saw them.)
I'm reading The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack. She entered Yale as a physics major in 1974. When she went to interview her old professors in 2010 only one had retired, a few months earlier. The rest were still teaching or somehow working in the industry. I was wondering why anyone would spend 10 years getting a Ph.D. knowing that the old-timers refuse to leave and the rare open positions will be given to underrepresented minorities.
Yale is going to spend $50 million over 5 years to diversify its faculty.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/04/yale-spend-50m-faculty-diversity-effortReplies: @Reg Cæsar, @TangoMan
How many Republicans will that buy?
Are you quoting Milton Berle’s urologist?
We used to do this. When I was a kid, IQ testing was routine, and smart kiss would be helped along by the system. (I grew up in suburban DuPont, so this may not have been as routine everywhere.) There were, and still are, scholarships for kids who are the first in their families to go to college, and the state colleges really like getting that type of applicant.
I'm reading The Only Woman in the Room by Eileen Pollack. She entered Yale as a physics major in 1974. When she went to interview her old professors in 2010 only one had retired, a few months earlier. The rest were still teaching or somehow working in the industry. I was wondering why anyone would spend 10 years getting a Ph.D. knowing that the old-timers refuse to leave and the rare open positions will be given to underrepresented minorities.
Yale is going to spend $50 million over 5 years to diversify its faculty.
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/11/04/yale-spend-50m-faculty-diversity-effortReplies: @Reg Cæsar, @TangoMan
Yale is going to spend $50 million over 5 years to diversify its faculty.
Yale is going to learn that you can’t fool Mother Nature:
Academia is already actively discriminating against white men and yet when it comes to performance, the favored black and Hispanic professors can’t complete the sale with regards to producing high quality work and being awarded tenure.
So Yale is faced with the two choices – being “racist” in its tenure policies or giving in to the racial grievance mongers and granting tenure to mediocrities.
Let’s not take our eye off the prize though – those white liberals who advocate for more faculty diversity should put their own necks on the chopping block, not the necks of young white men who are trying to begin their careers, after all these old geezers have had a nice long run of exploiting their “white privilege.” Being forced to retire, or be fired, at age 45 and find some other job would really demonstrate their commitment to the cause of diversity.
Aren't they what the military is for?Replies: @cthulhu
Maybe, but they’re also what solid second-tier state universities used to be for, back in the day when companies weren’t afraid to recruit from said solid second-tier state universities.
In the late ’70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn’t know that there were other options. My school didn’t have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher’s college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help – they wanted me to succeed but didn’t know the options either. In the end, it was fine; I did well, got recruited by a number of quality high tech employers, and have had a very successful career doing exactly what I want.
But today…I probably couldn’t replicate my success because the quality high tech employers tend not to recruit at the solid second-tier state universities anymore; they want the MIT and Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley and, yes, Rice grads; good ol’ State U gets left out. All my young co-workers come from well-off families where typically both parents have graduate degrees. Credentials are everything nowadays, at least to get your foot in the door; once you have a few years, then performance is all that matters, but you can’t perform if you can’t get hired…
I think this point bears repeating. Look let's say you are a young whippersnapper from a podunk 150 miles outside of Lincoln. If you want to go full blown HBD let's say this kid has a 140 IQ or something, one anyway which would let him do well at Harvard if he were admitted.
Does anyone think this 18 year old kid knows how the world works (according to us at least), and knows what the ramifications of an elite school degree are? Let's say he wants to be a physicist (though he wouldn't have much real knowledge of what that means, his attitudes would have been formed by TV shows), does he know what his career is likely to be like with Nebraska on his sheepskin, as opposed to MIT?
Think he knows anything about the application process? That he needs to play an instrument or something? Let's say he comes from a religious background. Does he know that he should be vaguely spiritual but vehemently opposed to Christianity at his Harvard interview? That he should spout all the platitudes about trans-gender this or that?
Well he might know some of this if he spends altogether too much time on the internet, as opposed to working at the local hardware store or whatever wholesome activity that used to be common. My take is that doesn't really carry any weight anymore; you have to grind and be involved in approved extra-curricular activities. Having some kind of job gets in the way of being involved in some kind of activism the interviewer will like, and playing your instrument so you are well rounded or something.
You know someone here ought to make a couple youtube videos, "How the world actually works" or something like that. Couple 10 minute videos ought to be enough if you stay on message.Replies: @MarkinLA
The US Navy is still doing it, although women on the boats and other such insanity is certainly narrowing the opportunity. The Nuclear Power Program takes bright high school kids and makes them functionally engineers, and many earn engineering degrees while serving or thereafter. Seabees makes not only construction workers but construction managers, many who become construction firm executives, and of course after SEAL/UDT/EOD the few who make it often have stellar careers. (My cardiothoracic surgeon was a former SEAL.)
Of course, there are also a lot of sailors that are dumber than rocks (although the Army always has been the service of last resort for the marginal IQ or those with previous legal or behavioral issues), and a fair number of Naval officers from ‘the right families’ that are screwups or of minimal talent which the Air Force or the Marines would never have commissioned.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/27/us/obama-race-cnn-kff-poll/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetworkReplies: @Anonymous, @BubbaJoe, @gbloco
It’s always great to see Steve in a mainstream outlet. No mouth-frothing, no anger, etc. It really throws them for a loop.
In the late '70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn't know that there were other options. My school didn't have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher's college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help - they wanted me to succeed but didn't know the options either. In the end, it was fine; I did well, got recruited by a number of quality high tech employers, and have had a very successful career doing exactly what I want.
But today...I probably couldn't replicate my success because the quality high tech employers tend not to recruit at the solid second-tier state universities anymore; they want the MIT and Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley and, yes, Rice grads; good ol' State U gets left out. All my young co-workers come from well-off families where typically both parents have graduate degrees. Credentials are everything nowadays, at least to get your foot in the door; once you have a few years, then performance is all that matters, but you can't perform if you can't get hired...Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Sunbeam
It would be interesting to study the educational backgrounds of the Wal-Mart executives back when Sam Walton crushed the retail industry. My vague impression is that Walmart hired lots of Ozark boys and that part of the motivation of these hicks from the sticks was to outcompete the city slickers and show them they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.
In the late seventies, a college degree became a requirement for entry level store management. By the late nineties, Woolworth/Woolco and WT Grant were gone entirely, Kresge and Jupiter stores were gone, and the few remaining Ben Franklins became women's crafts stores. Shortly thereafter the Dollar General and similar chains shot to nationwide prominence, doing exactly the same thing Woolworth and Kresge did in the thirties and forties. It would be interesting to find out how they recruit managers.
How Bad Will It Get for American Express?
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/Replies: @MarkinLA
Look at the names here:
https://www.mathcounts.org/sites/default/files/u1706/2015%20Final%20Standings%20Document.pdf
My guess is that about 5 of those top 56 in the 2015 MathCounts National Competition had parents born in the USA, and those are about the only ones of European ancestry. Probably about 35 had parents born in China, the rest mostly from Korea and India and maybe the Middle East.
I don't know if it's still the case, but I do know of multiple instances over the last 12 years of top finishers in National MathCounts with European family names and Chinese tiger mothers.
Part of what's going on here is that many of the smartest students in China came here over the last 30 years, and their kids are often extremely smart. But those parents also brought with them the Tiger Mother culture, and the combination produces the National MathCounts results shown. Something similar is no doubt going on with some of the other immigrant groups.
One of the great MathCounts feel-good stories is about Melanie Wood, who as a 7th grader and with no previous training placed very high in the 1994 Indiana state competition and 40th in the nation, based, it seems, on sheer talent. She went on to great success in additional math contests (USAMO, IMO, Putnam) and a Princeton Ph.D. in math. I think a similar 7th grader now would not attract so much attention because now there is such intense competition from all the tiger cubs.
Melanie Wood is extremely smart, but she's also extremely lucky that she got involved with serious mathematics at a young age. If she had just drifted along through middle school and high school, as most smart white kids do, she would not have ended up nearly as successful as she is.
I think that most of the undeveloped and unchallenged math talent in this country is among the white kids, boys especially, who are pushed by neither their schools nor their parents.Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Triumph104
I focus on the parents of math talent and offhand I can’t think of anyone who didn’t have a parent with a STEM degree or at least a graduate degree in another field.
Both of Melanie Wood’s parents were middle school teachers. Her mother taught French and Spanish but Melanie wasn’t interested in languages. Her father died when she was 6 weeks old and he was a math teacher. Melanie’s mother taught her math in memory of her father. When she was 4 years old Melanie could solve 3x + y = 12 when x=2 in her head. Melanie attended a private high school, Tudor Park.
The other two girls to go to the International Mathematical Olympiad were Alison Miller and Sherry Gong. Alison was homeschooled. I don’t know anything about her father, but her mother has a bachelor’s in math from Bryn Mawr and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. Alison went to Harvard and has a Ph.D. from Princeton.
Sherry went to Exeter Academy in NH. Both of her parents have Ph.D.s (I think math related) and teach at a university in Puerto Rico. Sherry went to Harvard and is a Ph.D. candidate at MIT.
I only noticed one obvious female name in the MathCounts link. Walter Kroubalkian’s father is a software developer. I don’t know what Moses Schindler’s parents do but his mother converted to Judaism and neither parent had a strong math background so they put the kids in Kumon in pre-school. His older brother and sister, Max and Stella, took BC Calculus in the 8th grade.
If he's honest, he might be the best mechanic in town.Replies: @Desiderius, @Former Darfur
Why we necessarily think it’s a tragedy if a 140-160 IQ person winds up being a car mechanic, or as in my father’s case a TV repairman (and later a electronics and hardware retailer) is something which bears thinking about. My dad was the son of a telegraph and telephone man, was taught “radio” (which encompassed all electronics back then) in the Coast Guard at the end of WWII, and took a job in production for Admiral after the war. He started a TV shop, married his first wife, had two kids, and made half a million dollars by 1961 while serving in the Naval Reserve as an avionics tech. It cost him his marriage, but he remarried and had two more kids (I’m the younger of those.) He had a great life owning a TV/radio/music business and we had a great life growing up. He retired out in the early eighties as a reserve warrant officer, participated in ham radio and the Civil Air Patrol, and was a traveling tech trainer for several TV manufacturers. He never did earn as much as an associate degree.
The progress made in those industries depends on there being at least a smattering of “too smart to be a…” people in the field. My father designed several pieces of test equipment for servicing TV sets and CRT computer monitors that the degreed engineers at the factory were amazed at. (Dad did have a morbid side, though. He also designed an electro-euthanasia machine for dog pounds which was never adopted by any, but his idea was the genesis for the electrical stunning/killing machine mink and chinchilla farms use to this day.)
Making progress in industry depends, of course, on there being an industry in the first place. It wasn’t 100 IQ people who cooked up the ideas of mass offshoring, outsourcing, lean manufacturing, kanban, just-in-time and all the other job destroying idiocies: it was extremely high IQ people with Ph.D’s and the like. We’d certainly have been better off if many had been car mechanics or TV repairmen.
His sister married a CG man, too. She and my dad's first wife were born on the same day. Weird.
What the other two guys said. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
The progenitors of Wal-Mart-the dime stores such as F.W.Woolworth, S.S. Kresge, W.T. Grant, and Ben Franklin and their big box offshoots, K-Mart and Woolco-recruited their management from scrappy but bright East Coast and Midwest row-house kids in their salad days. They hired them in as stock boys before or right after they got out of high school and trained them inhouse in accounting, marketing, store maintenance and everything else needed. They were physically fit, could and would work very long hours and ran their stores as fiefdoms-anything went so long as the store made money and the company was never exposed to shame or embarrassment. Disputes with male subordinates were occasionally settled with fisticuffs (off property and off the clock) and at any given time at least one of the “office girls” was probably sexually involved with said manager.
In the late seventies, a college degree became a requirement for entry level store management. By the late nineties, Woolworth/Woolco and WT Grant were gone entirely, Kresge and Jupiter stores were gone, and the few remaining Ben Franklins became women’s crafts stores. Shortly thereafter the Dollar General and similar chains shot to nationwide prominence, doing exactly the same thing Woolworth and Kresge did in the thirties and forties. It would be interesting to find out how they recruit managers.
Where are you getting that the overlooked students are mostly male? I didn’t read the article but ctrl+f’d it and she doesn’t say anything about gender. Smart white girls in rural areas are being overlooked just as much as the smart white boys. Smart white kids from rural areas are probably the U.S.’s most poorly utilized resource.
The Chinese and some of the Vietnamese, mostly children of restaurant workers and nail salon owners, plug away like the troopers they are. Most white kids whose parents send them to ghetto schools have parents who have already failed in some way usually at relationships and ended up searching out cheap rent. Teachers pay no attention to those kids because they don't see them as needy enough to stir their liberal instincts. Also, they don't want to look racist by championing white kids.Replies: @Anonymous
“Affirmative Action for Students Smarter Than Their Parents?”
Isn’t that what used to be called “Meritocracy”?
“Malcolm in the Middle, Lisa Simpson, the evil genius baby on Family Guy, it’s been done a few times.”
Not to mention Stewy’s (“the evil genius baby”) talking dog Brian. He is so easy to overlook; your utter failure to mention him clearly shows how exceptional talent can so easily fall in the cracks. According to Wikipedia, “He primarily works in the series as a struggling writer, attempting essays, novels, screenplays and newspaper articles.” He sounds like a canine version of Steve Sailer, although I think Sailer probably lacks Brian’s ability to chase cars. Further, “Brian is fond of dry martinis and is seen to have some issues in various episodes when he is told or forced to stop drinking. He smokes occasionally, although in the episode “Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington”, after seeing Peter promoting a corrupt cigarette company, he quit smoking, a habit he resumed at the end of that episode. He also occasionally smokes marijuana. After a brief stint as a drug sniffing dog, he developed a severe cocaine addiction, but after spending time in rehab he managed to quit.” Apparently, Sailer failed to mention him because he feared Ron Unz or Taki might show an interest in Brian’s undeniable talents and give him a blog on their respective “mags.”
A dog so talented obviously deserves his own entry in Wikipedia. For those interested in reading more about this overlooked talent, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Griffin
Bud Bundy!
Yale is going to learn that you can't fool Mother Nature:Academia is already actively discriminating against white men and yet when it comes to performance, the favored black and Hispanic professors can't complete the sale with regards to producing high quality work and being awarded tenure.
So Yale is faced with the two choices - being "racist" in its tenure policies or giving in to the racial grievance mongers and granting tenure to mediocrities.
Let's not take our eye off the prize though - those white liberals who advocate for more faculty diversity should put their own necks on the chopping block, not the necks of young white men who are trying to begin their careers, after all these old geezers have had a nice long run of exploiting their "white privilege." Being forced to retire, or be fired, at age 45 and find some other job would really demonstrate their commitment to the cause of diversity.Replies: @Steve Sailer
This is a near universal phenomenon: affirmative action eventually runs out. Tenure is a lot like making partner at a law firm, which is notoriously where affirmative action runs out. For example, Michelle Obama benefited from affirmative action to get into Whitney Young HS, Princeton, HLS, and the Sidley corporate law firm, but once at Sidley it was obvious she wasn’t going to make partner and she quickly got out of law as a profession.
Bud Bundy!
The lady who lived next door to me in 2000 to 2002 was a staff writer for “Married with Children.” That was a pretty awesome sitcom of the meat and potatoes variety. She hated the “Harvard Mafia” of writers who had come to town with “The Simpsons” and made sitcoms more highbrow.
Yes, The military in general, if they apply the tests will pick them out. And also the NSA somehow. I believe Snowden is a high school dropout.
Ditto here, though I doubt my IQ is above 125-130, and my home was profoundly broken. Countenance blog is a daily stop for me, natch.
I wonder how many in the Steveosphere /Alt-Right have been red pilled since childhood, living through circumstances that tend to create the worst sort of SJW cretin? But instead of engaging in outrageous identity illnesses we developed a “taste for distasteful truths” (Bierce).
I actually came from a professional family, just wasn't as successful as I should have been due to a lack of schmooze. I actually was a conservative (by NYC standards, which I guess made me center-left) in my youth, moved to the left after hearing about the Gilded Age, stayed there until about my late twenties when I read Howard Zinn's book on how American history is taught to cover up the evil doings of the right, and thought, 'What is the *left* lying about?'
'Red pill' also implies you believe being a nice guy will get you girls, but I don't think I ever thought that (I thought it had more to do with dressing and working out, which I was too lazy for)--I just put off chasing after women for my career because I wanted money more than poontang. I figured sex was temporary and fleeting but money could be saved and invested for my later years. (Obviously with more natural charisma I would have likely gotten some anyway.) It's only after I realized my lack of schmoozing was hurting me careerwise I started dating.Replies: @MarkinLA, @countenance, @Desiderius
Isn’t that an argument against hiring high school dropouts, though? We might all be happy as Americans Snowden blew the whistle, but it’s horrible for the NSA. Maybe college shows you can keep your head down and mouth platitudes for 4 years and aren’t too rebellious.
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/the_magic_of_ed.html
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_1.html
http://movies.netflixable.com/214647
So being a college graduate doesn't stop you from having principles.
“CASHING OUT …”!
I have my own way of describing what is going on in North America and the European Union that encompasses affirmative action and massive immigration — diversity for its own sake. It’s called “cashing out”.
At some point, a once vibrant society has had enough of excellence and accomplishment and decides to divy up its assets among diverse claimants. The game is to organize and define youself as a “victim class” seeking reparations or compensation from society at large. This starts slowly but then the pace quickens. It eventually starts to resemble “Black Friday” as people scramble to grab what they can, while they can, any way they can.
But then the “carrying costs” of paying for affirmative action for under achieving “victim classes” and supporting large-scale immigration from alien cultures starts to have its impact. These social programs are welfare by another name. Soon, the society that is “cashing out” starts to suffer from organizational and social friction as layers of “carrying costs” for diversity start to severely burden the effectiveness of education, business, and government. Across the board, things simply don’t work as well as they once did. The universities, corporations, government, military, etc., become “self-licking ice cream cones”. They progressively serve no other purpose than perpetuating themselves for the sake of their claimant populations.
Eventually, the society that is “cashing out” finds that it has “cashed out”. The assets are gone. The capital is depleted. The “victim classes” — the claimants — then turn on each other to fight over what is left.
Questions: Is the process through which a society starts “cashing out” reversible … or, does it reach a critical point at which eventual social, political, technical, and functional “bankruptcy” are inevitable?
The modification I'd make is that there's no real start or stop to 'cashing out', it's a change of degree rather than of kind--if you have a group that can't produce and has to be accommodated, they will always take resources. And large organizations perpetuate themselves always. But when the population decreases enough in quality, that's when you start to see problems.
@Sailer
If you want more researchers to work on the ideas you occasionally throw out there, you should tag those posts with “research idea” if not include some reference in the title. That way the smarter sort might also look through older ideas and keep mining your work for new projects.
Memory hole proofing!
There are also a lot of scientists working for the federal government who get to do real science but dont spend their lives chasing grants.
Yes, there’s a fair amount of bureaucracy dedicated to helping first-generation college students (albeit generally mentioned a bit sotto voce after discussing all the other affirmative action programs), and it was considered a firm advantage when I was applying to colleges a few years ago.
Education is signalling. (Trigger warning: Bryan Caplan.).
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2011/11/the_magic_of_ed.html
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/04/educational_sig_1.html
In the late '70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn't know that there were other options. My school didn't have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher's college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help - they wanted me to succeed but didn't know the options either. In the end, it was fine; I did well, got recruited by a number of quality high tech employers, and have had a very successful career doing exactly what I want.
But today...I probably couldn't replicate my success because the quality high tech employers tend not to recruit at the solid second-tier state universities anymore; they want the MIT and Stanford and Caltech and Berkeley and, yes, Rice grads; good ol' State U gets left out. All my young co-workers come from well-off families where typically both parents have graduate degrees. Credentials are everything nowadays, at least to get your foot in the door; once you have a few years, then performance is all that matters, but you can't perform if you can't get hired...Replies: @Steve Sailer, @Sunbeam
“In the late ’70s, I was one of those kids from the sticks in a rural state, smart parents but neither had opportunities to attend college, going to a small rural school, 99% on the ACT, National Merit finalist. Went to the local solid second-tier State U for engineering; in retrospect, I probably could have gotten into a much more prestigious school with my test scores, but I simply didn’t know that there were other options. My school didn’t have a guidance counselor; nobody from that school had ever gone to college out-of-state (few left town; graduates from my high school usually went to the local teacher’s college if they went to college at all); neither of my parents could really help – they wanted me to succeed but didn’t know the options either.”
I think this point bears repeating. Look let’s say you are a young whippersnapper from a podunk 150 miles outside of Lincoln. If you want to go full blown HBD let’s say this kid has a 140 IQ or something, one anyway which would let him do well at Harvard if he were admitted.
Does anyone think this 18 year old kid knows how the world works (according to us at least), and knows what the ramifications of an elite school degree are? Let’s say he wants to be a physicist (though he wouldn’t have much real knowledge of what that means, his attitudes would have been formed by TV shows), does he know what his career is likely to be like with Nebraska on his sheepskin, as opposed to MIT?
Think he knows anything about the application process? That he needs to play an instrument or something? Let’s say he comes from a religious background. Does he know that he should be vaguely spiritual but vehemently opposed to Christianity at his Harvard interview? That he should spout all the platitudes about trans-gender this or that?
Well he might know some of this if he spends altogether too much time on the internet, as opposed to working at the local hardware store or whatever wholesome activity that used to be common. My take is that doesn’t really carry any weight anymore; you have to grind and be involved in approved extra-curricular activities. Having some kind of job gets in the way of being involved in some kind of activism the interviewer will like, and playing your instrument so you are well rounded or something.
You know someone here ought to make a couple youtube videos, “How the world actually works” or something like that. Couple 10 minute videos ought to be enough if you stay on message.
Unless you want to be a quant on Wall Street there is no difference. If you want to be a physicist going to Nebraska may not give you the same range of research opportunities as MIT but for a BS that doesn't matter a bit.
A guy in our airgun club got his PhD from Tennessee and is teaching at Cal Tech working on their gravity wave detection project. Unfortunately, his is not a tenure track position. He was offered a tenure track position at a lessor university but decided to stay at Cal Tech for the work he was doing.Replies: @Steve Sailer
steve, you’re assuming anybody wants to help these kids. nobody in power does. the whole point is to destroy smart capable kids from the outer districts to prevent them from winning the hunger games and threatening the capital.
but, in case somebody out there is interested:
A simple way to help these kids out would be to provide some detailed explanation of how student loans work, and realistic projections for what it will mean to pay them back.
Smart kids from dumb families fall hard for the “go to the best college you can” line, and don’t have anyone around who can do math, and understand and explain student loans to them.
If you expect to make 50-60k a year after graduation, well, let’s see here now, if you live cheaply and save a lot of your income for a couple years, well i reckon you can probably pay that 120k student debt off in like 3 or 4 years. No shit, this is how people think. Oh, 10% interest? well that’s another 12,000 right? ok so, say 5 years…
Of course, there are also a lot of sailors that are dumber than rocks (although the Army always has been the service of last resort for the marginal IQ or those with previous legal or behavioral issues), and a fair number of Naval officers from 'the right families' that are screwups or of minimal talent which the Air Force or the Marines would never have commissioned.Replies: @Jim Don Bob
Paging John McCain!
Traditionally the Feds will give you 10% of your funding and 90% of your bureaucracy.
It partially explains the explosion in administrative versus teaching expenditure.
From today’s headlines: Amex vs Costco
How Bad Will It Get for American Express?
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/
The domestic breakdown:
38% White
27% Asian
15% Hispanic
14% Black
4% Native American
Asians are now consider white. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
Columbia uses a holistic review process that "is not based on a simple formula of grades and test scores". They look at family circumstances, community, access to resources, personality, and the always important recommendations.
http://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/classprofile/2019Replies: @Renault
I wonder how the Jew / Gentile percentages of the White subcategory break down.
The movie “Real Genius” is silent on how Mitch first came to the attention of Dr Hathaway, but your idea is a worthy one.
(If you haven’t seen “Real Genius”, Mister Sailer, run don’t walk to check it out. )
The real reason that the elites don’t want to bother looking for smart rural kids (other the the obvious anti-white hostility) is that those kids might be able to compete intellectually with the elites. The black affirmative action kids aren’t a real threat, and the elites don’t take them seriously.
For the most part, they get shuffled off to useless make-work jobs.
Rural high-IQ go-getters, by contrast, represent a real threat. This is why participating in activities like 4H, FFA, ROTC etc is actually a liability.
There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.Replies: @Simon in London, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman
In Britain I think it’s no longer controversial to say that white working class boys are the worst performing group and need help. The hatred of whites & of males in the US is stronger, but if you frame it like that it might help.
this is probably why the Janissary effect is muted: you have to accept the children of your enemies into your institutions in order to brainwash them.
The children of local surgeons (or status equivalent) become surgeons. Their parents know the path and put them on it. The mutant-genius children of local losers become weird losers. It happened to most of my childhood friends. In their forties now they're in bars, "treatment" centers, prisons and unemployment offices, not in alumni associations. If they worked in hospitals, they'd be rinsing bedpans. For one shift. Then they'd walk off with stolen drugs.
That's if any of them could get the job. I doubt they could. I certainly couldn't.
I never knowingly took an IQ test, but I cruised into the 99% on every standardized oval-filler I remember taking. I don't think I even noticed which tests they were, and if I did I forgot immediately. The names meant nothing to me (and they still don't when Steve references them). I just raced to be the first in the room to finish, and I always won, sometimes by a shocking distance. It was schoolwork, makework, busywork, nonsense. The library was where I went to learn, to take things seriously. The books smarter than I was were all there. School was for rushing through the daily chores so I could get back to bullshitting with my friends, clowning, fighting, and getting with girls.
The occasional counselor or teacher berated me for wasting my "potential," of course. Two concerned teachers went the extra mile and talked to my mother (single, of course). It changed their attitudes. They both went from acting disappointed in me to acting helplessly sorry for me...and quietly relieving me of all class requirements.
So I didn't go to college. The possibility didn't exist, understand? Not for me or for anyone like me I knew. A couple of us went off to the big city and started a band that only music journalists and fellow musicians liked. On the road I met a nice rich girl with a vanity job in the business. We quit it and I retired into the library at her house, having netted at most ten thousand dollars over the course of my productive lifetime.
A minimally acceptable outcome, I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of "potential" I had/was. The America of not long before I was born seems to have had a good system. They'd send flyover outliers to the moon or pretend to admire our oddly written books or make us star contestants on game shows. But that was then.Replies: @MarkinLA, @Michelle, @Bill
I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of “potential” I had/was.
There was such a place (the factory) and there still is (the military).
In the factory a smart guy would soon realize he was smarter than his boss and maybe even smarter than the engineers and go back to school at night for an AA and see if he could get on the swing shift or graveyard and finish his BS. Many companies have fellowship programs to allow smart people to get their degrees with company help.
Lots of people get advanced degrees in the military.
First of all it doesn’t matter one bit what college you went to at all. However, even if you went to a community college as a start, there is nothing stopping you from learning just as much as a freshman at Harvard or MIT. Yes, the instructor at your freshman calculus class might not even have a PhD and he certainly did not do anything of significance in the world of mathematics but he would probably enjoy dealing with a bright student who just inhaled the subject and reminded him why he first studied math. He would probably bend over backward to help a student like that.
You might even impress the instructors so much that they would help you get into an Ivy League school. You would at least be very likely to get into the flagship campus of the state university and have a chance to do real college level work.
I know people who have been accepted into the physics program at UC Berkeley from a JC, and one accepted into Cal Tech for an MS who got their BS from CSU Northridge.
Even if you’re not Danny Noonan?
In the good old days you could just send Tommy off to India or South Africa.
The rulers of Britain went to a lot of trouble to replace the working class with non-whites, wymyn, homos etc. They’re not going to let them back in.
From an institutional standpoint it would be an excellent long term strategy to recruit white flyover talent as well. There is no demographic more institutionally loyal than middle/lower class whites to an institution that “made”them.
I think this point bears repeating. Look let's say you are a young whippersnapper from a podunk 150 miles outside of Lincoln. If you want to go full blown HBD let's say this kid has a 140 IQ or something, one anyway which would let him do well at Harvard if he were admitted.
Does anyone think this 18 year old kid knows how the world works (according to us at least), and knows what the ramifications of an elite school degree are? Let's say he wants to be a physicist (though he wouldn't have much real knowledge of what that means, his attitudes would have been formed by TV shows), does he know what his career is likely to be like with Nebraska on his sheepskin, as opposed to MIT?
Think he knows anything about the application process? That he needs to play an instrument or something? Let's say he comes from a religious background. Does he know that he should be vaguely spiritual but vehemently opposed to Christianity at his Harvard interview? That he should spout all the platitudes about trans-gender this or that?
Well he might know some of this if he spends altogether too much time on the internet, as opposed to working at the local hardware store or whatever wholesome activity that used to be common. My take is that doesn't really carry any weight anymore; you have to grind and be involved in approved extra-curricular activities. Having some kind of job gets in the way of being involved in some kind of activism the interviewer will like, and playing your instrument so you are well rounded or something.
You know someone here ought to make a couple youtube videos, "How the world actually works" or something like that. Couple 10 minute videos ought to be enough if you stay on message.Replies: @MarkinLA
does he know what his career is likely to be like with Nebraska on his sheepskin, as opposed to MIT?
Unless you want to be a quant on Wall Street there is no difference. If you want to be a physicist going to Nebraska may not give you the same range of research opportunities as MIT but for a BS that doesn’t matter a bit.
A guy in our airgun club got his PhD from Tennessee and is teaching at Cal Tech working on their gravity wave detection project. Unfortunately, his is not a tenure track position. He was offered a tenure track position at a lessor university but decided to stay at Cal Tech for the work he was doing.
How Bad Will It Get for American Express?
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-how-amex-lost-costco/Replies: @MarkinLA
Amex’s heyday was when credit cards were hard to get and an Amex card was some kind of status symbol. They charged the retailers a higher percentage of the sale and the card carriers had to pay everything off each month. Many places dropped them when regular credit cards became common. I am surprised they are still in business.
I mentioned Snowden because he’s the only NSA employee who’s educational background I’ve heard of. I’m sure many of them are highly qualified mathematicians. But Snowden shows that if you have a high enough IQ you might end up in the NSA regardless of education. I expect lots of other smart folks who came in via Snowden’s route did not betray the US. (My opinion)
Do you have a link for the information about the Rwandan U.N. ambassador’s granddaughter benefiting from affirmative action?
The problem with primary schooling is that it is much easier to fake it. Study hard and work harder than anybody else and you are very likely to do extremely well even if you aren’t all that bright. Your larger vocabulary and better language skills will also mean higher test scores on the verbal portions of tests like the SAT as you won’t have to mull the possible answer’s over before marking that blob as the less well equipped students do. Add in some SAT preparatory classes to teach you how better to exclude the obvious bad examples on the spacial reasoning questions and you can punch above your weight. This is where parenting can help.
Now you are in a college above your level. The only students who stand out are those who at the undergraduate level don’t even seem to need the professors unlike you. You study endlessly and are at every open door session the professor and TA have but still only get Bs and the occasional As. You are a run of the mill student here and if your family isn’t rich or connected, the old money families from the Ivy League won’t care about you. The parents can’t help you here.
For the most part, they get shuffled off to useless make-work jobs.
Rural high-IQ go-getters, by contrast, represent a real threat. This is why participating in activities like 4H, FFA, ROTC etc is actually a liability.Replies: @MarkinLA
This is why participating in activities like 4H, FFA, ROTC etc is actually a liability.
There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.
It was a temporary summer job, too - & my family are atheist!
The children of local surgeons (or status equivalent) become surgeons. Their parents know the path and put them on it. The mutant-genius children of local losers become weird losers. It happened to most of my childhood friends. In their forties now they're in bars, "treatment" centers, prisons and unemployment offices, not in alumni associations. If they worked in hospitals, they'd be rinsing bedpans. For one shift. Then they'd walk off with stolen drugs.
That's if any of them could get the job. I doubt they could. I certainly couldn't.
I never knowingly took an IQ test, but I cruised into the 99% on every standardized oval-filler I remember taking. I don't think I even noticed which tests they were, and if I did I forgot immediately. The names meant nothing to me (and they still don't when Steve references them). I just raced to be the first in the room to finish, and I always won, sometimes by a shocking distance. It was schoolwork, makework, busywork, nonsense. The library was where I went to learn, to take things seriously. The books smarter than I was were all there. School was for rushing through the daily chores so I could get back to bullshitting with my friends, clowning, fighting, and getting with girls.
The occasional counselor or teacher berated me for wasting my "potential," of course. Two concerned teachers went the extra mile and talked to my mother (single, of course). It changed their attitudes. They both went from acting disappointed in me to acting helplessly sorry for me...and quietly relieving me of all class requirements.
So I didn't go to college. The possibility didn't exist, understand? Not for me or for anyone like me I knew. A couple of us went off to the big city and started a band that only music journalists and fellow musicians liked. On the road I met a nice rich girl with a vanity job in the business. We quit it and I retired into the library at her house, having netted at most ten thousand dollars over the course of my productive lifetime.
A minimally acceptable outcome, I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of "potential" I had/was. The America of not long before I was born seems to have had a good system. They'd send flyover outliers to the moon or pretend to admire our oddly written books or make us star contestants on game shows. But that was then.Replies: @MarkinLA, @Michelle, @Bill
Wow! That is profound. Beautiful even, and is it ever true.
Actually, smart white kids in the inner-cities are totally marginalized. All the attention is given to the Blacks and Latinos. The Blacks and Latinos who make trouble hog a lot of attention and the few who do apply themselves seem a lot smarter than they actually are by comparison to the rest, so the teachers are all over them. Also, if you have an I.Q. above 120, as most whites do, inner-city schools are stultifyingly boring, not to mention having to watch all the high jinks your fellow classmates engage in.
The Chinese and some of the Vietnamese, mostly children of restaurant workers and nail salon owners, plug away like the troopers they are. Most white kids whose parents send them to ghetto schools have parents who have already failed in some way usually at relationships and ended up searching out cheap rent. Teachers pay no attention to those kids because they don’t see them as needy enough to stir their liberal instincts. Also, they don’t want to look racist by championing white kids.
The children of local surgeons (or status equivalent) become surgeons. Their parents know the path and put them on it. The mutant-genius children of local losers become weird losers. It happened to most of my childhood friends. In their forties now they're in bars, "treatment" centers, prisons and unemployment offices, not in alumni associations. If they worked in hospitals, they'd be rinsing bedpans. For one shift. Then they'd walk off with stolen drugs.
That's if any of them could get the job. I doubt they could. I certainly couldn't.
I never knowingly took an IQ test, but I cruised into the 99% on every standardized oval-filler I remember taking. I don't think I even noticed which tests they were, and if I did I forgot immediately. The names meant nothing to me (and they still don't when Steve references them). I just raced to be the first in the room to finish, and I always won, sometimes by a shocking distance. It was schoolwork, makework, busywork, nonsense. The library was where I went to learn, to take things seriously. The books smarter than I was were all there. School was for rushing through the daily chores so I could get back to bullshitting with my friends, clowning, fighting, and getting with girls.
The occasional counselor or teacher berated me for wasting my "potential," of course. Two concerned teachers went the extra mile and talked to my mother (single, of course). It changed their attitudes. They both went from acting disappointed in me to acting helplessly sorry for me...and quietly relieving me of all class requirements.
So I didn't go to college. The possibility didn't exist, understand? Not for me or for anyone like me I knew. A couple of us went off to the big city and started a band that only music journalists and fellow musicians liked. On the road I met a nice rich girl with a vanity job in the business. We quit it and I retired into the library at her house, having netted at most ten thousand dollars over the course of my productive lifetime.
A minimally acceptable outcome, I think, but a society should probably have a way to spend rather than squander the kind of "potential" I had/was. The America of not long before I was born seems to have had a good system. They'd send flyover outliers to the moon or pretend to admire our oddly written books or make us star contestants on game shows. But that was then.Replies: @MarkinLA, @Michelle, @Bill
Please continue commenting in future.
This particular theme of Steve’s is a bit disturbing. Do we really want the Borg to be more efficient at assimilating our best people? Is that really what we want? Steve sometimes gets these enthusiasms in which he forgets that the people in charge are bad people with bad goals. Then he starts giving them good advice. It’s how engineering minds work. You just want to solve problems. Even if the problem is how to deliver really effective Anthrax into the hands of megalomaniacal sociopaths.
Pretty sure that’s about making Duke money.
Perhaps. I've gone to the TIP website several times and have read about the program on Wikipedia a couple of times, but I still have no sense, in practical terms, for what the program is really all about or how it works.Replies: @SFG, @Mike
Divine Right of Kings was a heretical Protestant invention. The Great Chain of Being (the Catholic thing) was not really that similar. Like any heresy, Divine Right of Kings picks up on some subordinate themes in Catholic teaching and exaggerates them to the point of unrecognizability. The Protestant value proposition, to kings, was 1) we steal the Church’s money and split it, 2) you set us up as the established church, and 3) we propagandize in your favor among the masses, explaining that your authority is in no way dependent on, say, the approval of the Catholic Church or on you being a proper Christian monarch. This latter is the DRoK.
The Southerners were wrong about this? Black people are capable of taking care of themselves?
As for the Southerners...we both know what Detroit looks like now, but is that *why* John Calhoun and all the rest of them made up those stories, or because the planters wanted their cotton grown cheaply and didn't want to pay farm hands?Replies: @Busby
It is likely mutual disinterest from both elite colleges and white male applicants. Some white students who fail to apply are worse off at the individual level — particularly, if they end up in the lower tail-end of the career outcomes scale without the insurance policy of an elite degree. But the elite colleges are much worse off in the long-run and at the aggregate level. It’s interesting that so many commenters who otherwise adhere to demographic IQ research and the Law of Large Numbers, fail to appreciate this.
Elite universities ignore several-thousand 140+ IQ white boys from Middle America. Instead, they oversample from women (rarely found in top 1% of performers 10-years post-grad in any field), minority groups with either lower cognitive abilities or lower cultural tolerance for risk, and admissions-groomed, risk-adverse white children from the Coasts.
Also add that elite universities push post-graduate education as entry-point for prestige-driven, low-professional-risk careers. This likely discourages highly-intelligent risk-seeking individuals from applying (namely, gifted boys who dislike the structure of school and are not afraid of disappointing relatives). If reframing IQ scale into overall ability to place in top 0.01% of career outcomes, elite schools can attract the 115-140 crowd (likely overrepresented by women) but fail miserably at attracting and keeping the 140+ crowd (likely overrepresented by women who were former men).
Suspect gifted white high-school males are comparing college brochure against what they read on reddit, quora, or perhaps, speaking with older peers, who are now beginning to intern at tech companies. Interesting that so many high-performing white males which elite schools “fail to reach”, will not hesitate in applying for an internship at Tesla or Google during college.
At the individual level, it’s a lost opportunity for these young men. At the aggregate level, these primarily East Coast colleges have basically lost the future mega-donors to colleges who capture these boys’ imaginations (Stanford), colleges that offer a accessible 4-year training ground for the Bay Area or Seattle (like UT-Austin, Wisconsin-Madison) or have lost them all together, except for when they show up 20 years down the road to poach the University’s robotics department.
I suspect that the qualities that our meritocracy values in college applicants might not be the ones best-suited for identifying talent, especially in terms of character, yet these qualities seem to be very rarely questioned, at least publicly.
OT:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26607976?dopt=Abstract
The Evolutionary Basis of Honor Cultures
Around the globe, people fight for their honor, even if it means sacrificing their lives. This is puzzling from an evolutionary perspective, and little is known about the conditions under which honor cultures evolve. We implemented an agent-based model of honor, and our simulations showed that the reliability of institutions and toughness of the environment are crucial conditions for the evolution of honor cultures. Honor cultures survive when the effectiveness of the authorities is low, even in very tough environments. Moreover, the results show that honor cultures and aggressive cultures are mutually dependent in what resembles a predator-prey relationship described in the renowned Lotka-Volterra model. Both cultures are eliminated when institutions are reliable. These results have implications for understanding conflict throughout the world, where Western-based strategies are exported, often unsuccessfully, to contexts of weak institutional authority wherein honor-based strategies have been critical for survival.
OT:
Anthropologist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Fox on what the West is in a nutshell, and why vast numbers of people want to relocate from wherever they live in the world to North America and Western Europe:
“In the West we had to move from tribalism, through city-states and small nations, through empire, feudalism, mercantile capitalism, and the industrial revolution to reach our present state of fragile open universalistic democracy (shrugging off communism and fascism along the way). Athens and Rome had a period of republicanism and democracy — at least voting and elections for free males — but this did not last and succumbed to autocracy and dictatorship with the growth of empire. The English were helped in the shedding of dominant kinship groups by the relative individualism of the Angles and Saxons, with their emphasis on the independent nuclear family. (See Alan Macfarlane’s ‘The Origins of English Individualism.’) Christian monogamy and the banning of cousin marriages by the Catholic Church helped to break down extended kinship groups and encouraged even more individualism.
“This breaking up of tight kin groups by expanding ‘prohibited degrees’ (as far as third cousins) is perhaps not sufficiently appreciated. Think what it would have done to the Arab cousin-marriage system. In England the institution of primogeniture — inheritance by the eldest son — also helped prevent the dissipation of family fortunes produced by partible inheritance: division of the patrimony among all sons, common on the continent (and in China, but not Japan). It reduced the power of aristocratic clans by forcing the younger sons into the professions: the army, the law, and the church.
“This move away from kinship and into the world of voluntary and non-kin organizations was in turn infused with the Protestant work and reinvestment ethic, and the Miracle happened. It did not happen all at once, but over several centuries of cumulative effort that fed on the new humanism and the growth of science and industry. As labor became ever more specialized and more mobile, family groups became ever less self-sufficient, and individuals became more and more dependent on strangers and on the institutions that made dependence on strangers possible: in particular, the rule of law and the enforcement of contracts.
“And we had to do it by our own efforts, pull ourselves up by the social bootstraps, to make it stick. We have seen in Germany, in Italy, and in Spain how fragile this really is. Russia never did make it. France is always problematic. Latin America and the Balkans continue to be a mess. But in making this move we had to change the entire particularistic, communalistic, ritualistic, kin-dominated society that is natural to us, and we have to keep at it all the time….” [from: Robin Fox, “The Tribal Imagination: Civilization and the Savage Mind,” pgs. 69-70.]
No, I made that up.
But when I was at UCLA I did know the daughter of the former ambassador from Imperial Ethiopia: a lovely girl.
For another high-born African, Andy Razaf, who wrote the words to "Honeysuckle Rose" and "Ain't Misbehavin'", was nephew to the Queen of Madagascar. The French killed his dad before he was born, and his American mom returned home with him.
Unless you want to be a quant on Wall Street there is no difference. If you want to be a physicist going to Nebraska may not give you the same range of research opportunities as MIT but for a BS that doesn't matter a bit.
A guy in our airgun club got his PhD from Tennessee and is teaching at Cal Tech working on their gravity wave detection project. Unfortunately, his is not a tenure track position. He was offered a tenure track position at a lessor university but decided to stay at Cal Tech for the work he was doing.Replies: @Steve Sailer
Recruiting for a handful of very lucrative careers — Wall Street, consulting, corporate law — goes through a pretty narrow window of academia. The problem is mostly that Wall Street pays so much more than it used relative to most everything else.
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html
Yup. This lower middle white loyalty made Sam Walton the richest man in the world.
“Pretty sure that’s about making Duke money.”
Perhaps. I’ve gone to the TIP website several times and have read about the program on Wikipedia a couple of times, but I still have no sense, in practical terms, for what the program is really all about or how it works.
I did get to brag a little bit...
“Suspect gifted white high-school males are comparing college brochure against what they read on reddit, quora, or perhaps, speaking with older peers, who are now beginning to intern at tech companies. Interesting that so many high-performing white males which elite schools “fail to reach”, will not hesitate in applying for an internship at Tesla or Google during college.”
I suspect that the qualities that our meritocracy values in college applicants might not be the ones best-suited for identifying talent, especially in terms of character, yet these qualities seem to be very rarely questioned, at least publicly.
I wonder how many in the Steveosphere /Alt-Right have been red pilled since childhood, living through circumstances that tend to create the worst sort of SJW cretin? But instead of engaging in outrageous identity illnesses we developed a "taste for distasteful truths" (Bierce).Replies: @SFG
No, I actually think being a blue-collar or generally underprivileged white guy tends to produce an alt-righter. If you’re a higher-ranking white guy, you might start to believe in the privilege story because, well, you are privileged. Blue-collar and broken home increasingly go together, as Murray has documented. You also have to have a ‘taste for distasteful truths’, I agree–otherwise there’s football and Xbox and so on.
I actually came from a professional family, just wasn’t as successful as I should have been due to a lack of schmooze. I actually was a conservative (by NYC standards, which I guess made me center-left) in my youth, moved to the left after hearing about the Gilded Age, stayed there until about my late twenties when I read Howard Zinn’s book on how American history is taught to cover up the evil doings of the right, and thought, ‘What is the *left* lying about?’
‘Red pill’ also implies you believe being a nice guy will get you girls, but I don’t think I ever thought that (I thought it had more to do with dressing and working out, which I was too lazy for)–I just put off chasing after women for my career because I wanted money more than poontang. I figured sex was temporary and fleeting but money could be saved and invested for my later years. (Obviously with more natural charisma I would have likely gotten some anyway.) It’s only after I realized my lack of schmoozing was hurting me careerwise I started dating.
It is also part of how you stay on top or at least out of trouble. The number of managers I have met who who barf up the "diversity makes us stronger" crap is mind-numbing. Do they really believe it even though they are surrounded by a lack of diversity or is it just what you are expected to say to stay employed.
Even somebody like Norm Matloff barfs this out.
I strongly support diversity and don’t pretend everything is quite rosy in racial terms on the campuses,
https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-main-characters-in-h-1b-story-speak-at-cis-event/
My own immediate family is blue to gray collar in previous generations that transitioned to gray to white collar in mine.
The cuck-right are males without those smarts, the PUAs dudes without the wisdom, and the SJWs guys who lack both.Replies: @SFG
Socialism? We’ve got less socialism than every country in Europe. We don’t even have universal health care. Most industries are privately owned. You’re right about the lack of nationalism.
This is a global-capitalist country with a large, restive ethnic minority that has to be bought off and elites that are more interested in money (on the right) and curing the world’s ills (on the left) than the country.
To some degree ‘wealth, productivity, and efficiency’ can have drawbacks for the average Joe. America has more wealth thanks to offshoring (the total bank accounts of all American citizens increase when you add in the huge profits the management makes). It doesn’t help the ex-coal miner doing meth in the ruins of West Virginia.
Look at Germany’s mass refugee import–Merkel’s probably at least in part trying to provide cheap labor for the big industries (as well as assuage her guilty conscience over what her grandpa might have done). I wouldn’t be too surprised if they do get a temporary boost in profits with wages going down. What’s going to happen to your average Hans on the street when he gets knifed is another story.
I agree with you.
The modification I’d make is that there’s no real start or stop to ‘cashing out’, it’s a change of degree rather than of kind–if you have a group that can’t produce and has to be accommodated, they will always take resources. And large organizations perpetuate themselves always. But when the population decreases enough in quality, that’s when you start to see problems.
I had a friend who went there. Probably 50/50 from what he told me. You could google the size of the Hillel (I think it was a few thousand) and go from there.
Some truth to that too, though I think he thinks if you had more blue-collar-origin whites in the elite they’d swing things in a more America-friendly direction. I honestly don’t know. They might identify with their new class more than their old one, especially if they felt out of place.
Fair enough–I admit I am not up on Catholic theology– but they still told the peasants not to revolt against the bloodsucking aristocracy. (My animus is not specifically at the Catholic Church, BTW; the Eastern Orthodox wasn’t much better, and as you yourself stated, the Protestants did much the same thing. And yes, they kept the West from disappearing completely after the fall of Rome–few institutions are all good or all bad.)
As for the Southerners…we both know what Detroit looks like now, but is that *why* John Calhoun and all the rest of them made up those stories, or because the planters wanted their cotton grown cheaply and didn’t want to pay farm hands?
I know that was snark but Snowden isn’t the only one with principles:
http://movies.netflixable.com/214647
So being a college graduate doesn’t stop you from having principles.
Perhaps. I've gone to the TIP website several times and have read about the program on Wikipedia a couple of times, but I still have no sense, in practical terms, for what the program is really all about or how it works.Replies: @SFG, @Mike
I’ve got this. I went to CTY, its northern cousin (note they pretty much cover the South and Midwest).
Basically, you take the SAT (or some other test) in 7th grade or so, and if you do well enough, you get to go for summer courses. It’s the only chance a lot of smart kids have to meet other smart kids. They do all the things you’d expect, passing notes using the elements of the periodic table as abbreviations and making dirty jokes with integrals (integral of e^x from midnight to midnight = f(u sub n)…there, are you happy now?).
Now I was in the Northeast, so the few people I kept in touch with now clutter my Facebook feed with annoying left-wing SJWery. But what actually happened to them? IT, of varying levels of prestige (a few went to MIT–I noticed most of the girls got in but very few of the boys, which solidified my hatred of feminism–it *started* with draft registration, growing up back in the 80s when Vietnam was not yet forgotten). But I didn’t hang out with too many humanities kids. (Come on, they didn’t play Dungeons & Dragons!)
And, um, enough from me for now.
There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.Replies: @Simon in London, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman
Post-PhD I couldn’t get a job in UK academia until I took “church officer” off my CV.
It was a temporary summer job, too – & my family are atheist!
Yes, but you still are not completely locked out if you don’t get into an Ivy, you just have a tougher go of it. I used to work with an engineer who went to law school. He was initially put on the UCLA waiting list and enrolled at Whittier College of Law. After his first year he was admitted and had to repeat his first year and graduated from UCLA. While at UCLA he worked on the writings of a few law professors and got good enough references to work at Richard Riordan’s law firm downtown as an intern before graduation.
Skadden blah, blah, blah was opening a Los Angeles office and hired him as a first year associate so it isn’t impossible to get one of those jobs without an Ivy sheepskin.
The funny part about it was that one of the partners at Riordan didn’t like him. When Skadden called for a reference, he was friendly with the HR staff and they finagled it so that person wasn’t part of the process. At least that was what my friend said.
I haven’t talked to him since then. He was hired by Bear Sterns in New York to work in the bankruptcy department after one of those early high tech darlings that made PC cards and expanded into PCs went bust. He worked on their IPO when he was at Riordan.
Isn’t Google in the process of rethinking their recruitment strategies? I think they reaqlize that it is more important to find people who can actually do something in the real world than somebody who got high grades on tests. If you were going to hire an automotive engineer who would you hire a guy from Harvard with a degree or this guy?
http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/04/post_moto_kid_death_story_here.html
I actually came from a professional family, just wasn't as successful as I should have been due to a lack of schmooze. I actually was a conservative (by NYC standards, which I guess made me center-left) in my youth, moved to the left after hearing about the Gilded Age, stayed there until about my late twenties when I read Howard Zinn's book on how American history is taught to cover up the evil doings of the right, and thought, 'What is the *left* lying about?'
'Red pill' also implies you believe being a nice guy will get you girls, but I don't think I ever thought that (I thought it had more to do with dressing and working out, which I was too lazy for)--I just put off chasing after women for my career because I wanted money more than poontang. I figured sex was temporary and fleeting but money could be saved and invested for my later years. (Obviously with more natural charisma I would have likely gotten some anyway.) It's only after I realized my lack of schmoozing was hurting me careerwise I started dating.Replies: @MarkinLA, @countenance, @Desiderius
If you’re a higher-ranking white guy, you might start to believe in the privilege story because, well, you are privileged.
It is also part of how you stay on top or at least out of trouble. The number of managers I have met who who barf up the “diversity makes us stronger” crap is mind-numbing. Do they really believe it even though they are surrounded by a lack of diversity or is it just what you are expected to say to stay employed.
Even somebody like Norm Matloff barfs this out.
I strongly support diversity and don’t pretend everything is quite rosy in racial terms on the campuses,
https://normsaysno.wordpress.com/2015/11/23/the-main-characters-in-h-1b-story-speak-at-cis-event/
Here is an article by Gavin McInnes of Takimag. He says his father was singled out after taking the formerly required, 11+ exam they used to give all British pupils. Gavin’s father scored very high, his uncles did not. I’ll let you read it for yourselves. This method would seem the best way to find qualified pupils from every race and economic background, much as the Soviets used to find athletes for their Olympic program. The problem would be that some parents would refuse to admit that their chicks were not so bright and try to game the system. But that is happening anyway.
http://takimag.com/article/a_nation_of_working_class_dropouts_gavin_mcinnes/print#axzz3suN0gaJq
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven_plus_exam
No the problem would be exactly like it was before affirmative action and what it was like when grade schools had the dumb kids classes and the smart kids classes – there was an obvious distinction between the classes. I will leave it to the student to figure it out.
This is the primary failure of Black Americans, as a class they can’t advance in their career or even keep a job. I have been a proponent of AA for many years, justifying my position by noting that eventually enough successful Black men would help in the career advancement of their sons and neighbors as other ethnic and religious groups have done since forever. It’s the way of the world. I did not factor in the relative lack of drive and intelligence possessed by the typical Black American. They are fucked. Much better for a smart Black kid to put an American flag button on his lapel and get his ass discovered by a benevolent White guy.
That sounds appealing enough, and in fact more and more talented young males are going that way, but you’ve still got the Babe Drain taking most of the women who would’ve been their wives off to the Big U./Big City chasing that elusive career/fiat-currency-fed alpha males. The sort of family formation healthy communities (and societies) depend upon suffers, as does overall happiness for both males and females.
Or are you only counting the 9s and 10s?Replies: @Desiderius
All the 7 Indian winners, come from elite castes, no Patels or Singhs or Caribbean Indians who together makeup most of the Indian immigrants
As for the Southerners...we both know what Detroit looks like now, but is that *why* John Calhoun and all the rest of them made up those stories, or because the planters wanted their cotton grown cheaply and didn't want to pay farm hands?Replies: @Busby
They didn’t want to give up their assets. All the justifications and defenses of slavery flowed from that.
Perhaps. I've gone to the TIP website several times and have read about the program on Wikipedia a couple of times, but I still have no sense, in practical terms, for what the program is really all about or how it works.Replies: @SFG, @Mike
Both of my kids were identified by Duke TIP. The recognition put them on a mailing list for summer school courses and programs that we couldn’t afford.
I did get to brag a little bit…
The progress made in those industries depends on there being at least a smattering of "too smart to be a..." people in the field. My father designed several pieces of test equipment for servicing TV sets and CRT computer monitors that the degreed engineers at the factory were amazed at. (Dad did have a morbid side, though. He also designed an electro-euthanasia machine for dog pounds which was never adopted by any, but his idea was the genesis for the electrical stunning/killing machine mink and chinchilla farms use to this day.)
Making progress in industry depends, of course, on there being an industry in the first place. It wasn't 100 IQ people who cooked up the ideas of mass offshoring, outsourcing, lean manufacturing, kanban, just-in-time and all the other job destroying idiocies: it was extremely high IQ people with Ph.D's and the like. We'd certainly have been better off if many had been car mechanics or TV repairmen.Replies: @Reg Cæsar
Are you sure you’re not me? That’s my dad’s bio, except he enlisted in the CG in 1939 (smart move!) and worked for AT&T and later RCA after the war. And his dad was a teacher in a reform school.
His sister married a CG man, too. She and my dad’s first wife were born on the same day. Weird.
The Chinese and some of the Vietnamese, mostly children of restaurant workers and nail salon owners, plug away like the troopers they are. Most white kids whose parents send them to ghetto schools have parents who have already failed in some way usually at relationships and ended up searching out cheap rent. Teachers pay no attention to those kids because they don't see them as needy enough to stir their liberal instincts. Also, they don't want to look racist by championing white kids.Replies: @Anonymous
Most Whites do not have IQ’s over 120. No large racial/ethnic group has an average IQ that high.
The majority of young ladies I meet of Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somali and Oromo descent know how to turn on the charm. Apparently feminism never made it to the Horn.
For another high-born African, Andy Razaf, who wrote the words to “Honeysuckle Rose” and “Ain’t Misbehavin’”, was nephew to the Queen of Madagascar. The French killed his dad before he was born, and his American mom returned home with him.
Thirty years or so ago, ambitious small-town girls would move to the nearest regional capital, leaving the faraway big cities to their brothers. Has this changed?
Or are you only counting the 9s and 10s?
The big universities (State Us and up) have been draining most of the girls these past 30 years, ambitious and otherwise, with the 8-10s generally heading to the coasts/Chicago. Even if they return, as many eventually do, their primes went to men from elsewhere, and didn't go to building healthy families in any case.
There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.Replies: @Simon in London, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman
You give them the benefit of the doubt here. That’s not like you.
There was a study that showed that there was a negative correlation between admittance to elite schools and these being your activities on your application. No doubt a subconscious negative bias by the admission people.Replies: @Simon in London, @Reg Cæsar, @ben tillman
No doubt?
I doubt it strongly. I believe the bias is a conscious bias in many instances.
A younger sibling of mine was invited to take the SAT in 7th grade to attempt qualification for Duke’s TIP but didn’t quite make Duke’s cutoff. Duke’s TIP never invited me, yet I had consistently higher standardized test scores and grades than this sibling. How do Duke or CTY choose who gets to take the qualifying SAT?
I was never identified by Duke, even though a bunch of my classmates with lower ACT/SAT scores were tested and recruited by the program. On standardized tests my Math scores were consistently in the 70th percentile range, while my reading/English scores were around the 99th percentile. On the actual ACT years later I used my memorization/verbal skills to punch above my weight on the Math section. Nothing ever helped much in Science though.
Or are you only counting the 9s and 10s?Replies: @Desiderius
Most of my experience is as a suburban UMC public high school kid (and later teacher), although I lived in other settings in between.
The big universities (State Us and up) have been draining most of the girls these past 30 years, ambitious and otherwise, with the 8-10s generally heading to the coasts/Chicago. Even if they return, as many eventually do, their primes went to men from elsewhere, and didn’t go to building healthy families in any case.
My two daughters went to CTY, my two sons could have if they had cared to. ANY CHILD can take the SAT and qualify for CTY if they score well enough and don’t have some unusual disqualifying factor, but the only ones CTY can actually RECRUIT are the ones that schoolteachers tell them about when they ask schools which kids might be talented.
From a National Review article by David French.
By the way, my observation over several years is that CTY students are about 5% non-Asian minority, and the rest are evenly split between white and Asian kids (Chinese, Korean, Indian, Japanese, a sprinkling of other Asians). The white kids are maybe 1/3 Jewish, possibly more, but these were campuses in NY and PA, the mix might be different at other campuses (CTY has summer programs at about 10 colleges). It’s about the same number of boys and girls. Every one of the 5 years I have had a child in CTY, there has been a ballet camp on the same campus during the same weeks, no administrative connection just coincident traditions, and the ballerinas are 80-90% white.
I actually came from a professional family, just wasn't as successful as I should have been due to a lack of schmooze. I actually was a conservative (by NYC standards, which I guess made me center-left) in my youth, moved to the left after hearing about the Gilded Age, stayed there until about my late twenties when I read Howard Zinn's book on how American history is taught to cover up the evil doings of the right, and thought, 'What is the *left* lying about?'
'Red pill' also implies you believe being a nice guy will get you girls, but I don't think I ever thought that (I thought it had more to do with dressing and working out, which I was too lazy for)--I just put off chasing after women for my career because I wanted money more than poontang. I figured sex was temporary and fleeting but money could be saved and invested for my later years. (Obviously with more natural charisma I would have likely gotten some anyway.) It's only after I realized my lack of schmoozing was hurting me careerwise I started dating.Replies: @MarkinLA, @countenance, @Desiderius
being a blue-collar or generally underprivileged white guy tends to produce an alt-righter
My own immediate family is blue to gray collar in previous generations that transitioned to gray to white collar in mine.
Was that the actual Harvard “Wasp” Mafia! I thought Whiskey had made that up!
http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/27/us/obama-race-cnn-kff-poll/?iid=ob_homepage_deskrecommended_pool&iref=obnetworkReplies: @Anonymous, @BubbaJoe, @gbloco
you not on the CNN blacklist Steve? sounds like you need to be outed!!!!
https://royallasses.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/0-relax/
"And most of all, everyone can relax because there is not a shred of evidence that there is even one white racist at Harvard Law School who would do such a thing, or did this thing — which, as Heather Mac Donald has suggested, is inherently improbable. Steve Sailer, applying Occam’s Razor, wasn’t easily fooled, either. The New York Times mostly pretended to believe this tall tale."Replies: @gbloco
not quite CNN but hey it’s all good….
I actually came from a professional family, just wasn't as successful as I should have been due to a lack of schmooze. I actually was a conservative (by NYC standards, which I guess made me center-left) in my youth, moved to the left after hearing about the Gilded Age, stayed there until about my late twenties when I read Howard Zinn's book on how American history is taught to cover up the evil doings of the right, and thought, 'What is the *left* lying about?'
'Red pill' also implies you believe being a nice guy will get you girls, but I don't think I ever thought that (I thought it had more to do with dressing and working out, which I was too lazy for)--I just put off chasing after women for my career because I wanted money more than poontang. I figured sex was temporary and fleeting but money could be saved and invested for my later years. (Obviously with more natural charisma I would have likely gotten some anyway.) It's only after I realized my lack of schmoozing was hurting me careerwise I started dating.Replies: @MarkinLA, @countenance, @Desiderius
The alt-right (at least the part that matters) consists of men smart enough to game the system but wise enough to know that doing so amounts to eating one’s own seed corn.
The cuck-right are males without those smarts, the PUAs dudes without the wisdom, and the SJWs guys who lack both.
Research by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford has discovered that the biggest concentration of overlooked smart kids that colleges should recruit harder are, unsurprisingly, exactly whom the conventional wisdom doesn’t expect them to be: male, white, flyover states, maybe from broken homes.
So Caroline Hoxby is picking up on something that Bill Belichick coach of the New England Patriots has known for years 😉
Yes a bad choice of words. Thanks for the correction. I blasted that out without really thinking.
The cuck-right are males without those smarts, the PUAs dudes without the wisdom, and the SJWs guys who lack both.Replies: @SFG
SJWs don’t join the cuck-right or mainstream right, they join the left. A lot of PUAs are apolitical–really, guys of every political leaning want to pick up chicks. Probably there are a lot of Christians who don’t realize how bad the game has gotten, conservative guys who don’t get the whole picture or don’t agree with the whole alt-right agenda (Half Sigma comes to mind), and so on.
Also, a lot of Trump voters are just low-information blue-collar types who smell something is wrong but don’t quite know what. Personally I think Trump is playing everyone for a fool, but he’s the best the alt-right has right now.
The UK has a great admissions system. First, you apply directly to your intended major so fine arts majors are competing for slots with engineers. Second, you submit test scores related to your intended major. An English major may submit exam scores in English, drama, and French. While a chemistry major may submit exam scores in chemistry, physics, and math.
They UK universities even accept foreign exam results. For Americans, Cambridge wants a 2100 SAT and 5 AP results with a score of 5 that are related to the intended major.
They even have programs for the less privileged like the Gateway to Medicine that adds a remedial year to medical school and accepts grades lower than normal for those who show promise despite their upbringing. Race is not a factor and it doesn’t continue for multiple generations.
The Gateway to Medicine criteria for Durham University:
My younger sibling and I attended different schools and had different teachers, so that might explain it. My parents were totally clueless about CTY, and I don’t recall anyone from my high school attending CTY or similar programs. It was an old-fashioned all-male school where nerdy kids went for theater, band/orchestra or debate as activities. We didn’t have a quiz bowl team, but we did take part in state math and science competitions. I first met people who had attended CTY in college.
I think they use standardized tests you take in elementary school. I don’t even remember the name of ours, other than that among the five tests we had to take each year was this weird thing called the OLSAT which was sort of a spatial IQ test. I think the Duke TIP is weighted towards Math scores. If your standardized Math scores are below a certain cut-off, you don’t show up on their radar. Teacher recommendations may having something to do with it too.
I was never identified by Duke, even though a bunch of my classmates with lower ACT/SAT scores were tested and recruited by the program. On standardized tests my Math scores were consistently in the 70th percentile range, while my reading/English scores were around the 99th percentile. On the actual ACT years later I used my memorization/verbal skills to punch above my weight on the Math section. Nothing ever helped much in Science though.
Michael Moore ✔@MMFlint
Honor Rosa Parks: Purge police of racists. Release all nonviolent drug offenders. Make college free. Be a patriot – hire African Americans!
Makes a change from the non union Canadian Canadians that he normally works with.