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Geneticist James J. Lee is a professor of psychology at the U. of Minnesota, where he is the successor to Tom Bouchard, leader of the famous “Minnesota Twins” study. In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Lee has published a commentary on economic historian Gregory Clark’s new landmark study of the class system in England:
The heritability and persistence of social class in England
James J. Lee
Department of Psychology
University of Minnesota Twin Ci@esThe extent to which hereditary abilites affect social class has been a matter of interest since classical times. In 1918, Ronald Fisher published a framework for answering such questions about the inheritance of continuously varying traits and thereafter applied that framework to the “mental and moral qualities” that he presumed to be at work in the stratification of human populations. In this issue Clark reports an application of Fisher’s methods to English pedigree data spanning centuries and achieves a tour de force of insight into the inheritance of social status.
Fisher showed that the correlation between relatives induced by genetics is equal to the heritability times a coefficient that depends on the genealogical relationship between the relatives and the extent of assortative mating (spousal resemblance in the trait). By finding several such correlations to the theoretical equations, one can obtain estimates of the key parameters (heritability, assortative mating). Clark applied this theory to several measures of social class in a remarkable dataset formed by combining the immense labors of amateur genealogists with publicly available records of births, baptisms, marriages, probates, and so forth. It is natural to suspect such data of biases; but Clark found, among other things, that members of different lineages paired at random show no correlations in any of the measured social outcomes.
We might distinguish three possible kinds of models explaining the generational persistence of the abilities underlying social status. The first is a simple autoregressive model that has sometimes been used in social science, where the correlation in ability or skill across n generations is essentially rn, the correlation between parent and child to the power of the
number of steps in the genealogy (2 for grandparent and grandchild, 3 for great-grandparent and great-grandchild, and so on). Since most single-generation correlations in observable traits are well short of 1/2, this model implies a very rapid decay in resemblance across generations.The second kind of model acknowledges the genetic contribution to ancestor-descendant resemblance but posits random pairing of fathers and mothers, which yields the correlation (1/2)n times the heritability. This is still a rapid decay across generations. The third kind of model allows mating to be assortative, in which case the correlation becomes essentially [(1 + m)/2] n times the heritability, m being the correlation between the genetic values of spouses.
Strong assortative mating is reasonably regarded as a qualitatively different regime altogether, since with a high enough value of m (e.g., 0.57) regression to the mean across generations is dramatically slowed and allows the common descendants of a Victorian ancestor to show quantitatively significant genetic resemblance even today. This is because such a scheme of strong spousal matching ensures that the other ancestors of the individual’s descendants tend to transmit DNA of like effect. Such persistent correlations between very distant relatives are what drive Clark’s inferences of strong assortative mating.
One naturally wonders whether the results might be explained by environmental sources of familial resemblance that are confounded with genetic relatedness. Clark reports compelling ancillary evidence, however, against explaining away his findings in such a way. … Second, he found that status was transmitted equally through paternal and maternal lines, exactly as expected if the responsible causal factors are the genes transmitted by fathers and mothers alike.
In the English class system, property tends to be passed down to the first-born male. So the correlation between male-line relatives is higher. But genetic relationships are close to equal and English social relationships are relatively equal on the father’s and mother’s side. The English are not the Chinese who cut off relationship’s with the wife’s family.
An interesting test of Clark’s theory that genetics rather than inherited wealth drive the English class system would be to study how much primogeniture matters. Are the descendants of first-born males privileged? Most English would say “Yes,” although this can be a tricky question to research since the first born doesn’t need a profession (he’s going to inherit Downton Abbey and go into Parliament) while the the latter born sons need professions (the cleverest into law, the bravest into the Army, the most pious into the Church, etc.).
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An interesting test of Clark’s theory that genetics rather than inherited wealth drive the English class system would be to study how much primogeniture matters. Are the descendants of first-born males privileged?
And here you get a modern rendition, free of charge, of Swift:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low . . . since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present. . . .
Gulliver/Sailer went on:
He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he would be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low and intreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.
Meanwhile, almost 100% of the 16 year plus male population of Ukraine has been wiped out, France is on fire, literally, London has a minority population of Whites, Michigan, formerly Scandinavian White is now 90% bulb head.
As Tin Legs Bader said:
‘Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything… never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible,’
The crowd roared as one in unison like as if the poms were able to take a wicket against the uber-imposing Australians in the Ashes.
As David Stove explained modern life: It's like when you see a King Wasp drag a Trapdoor Spider up out of its burrow, kicking and screaming across the grass back to it's own shallow divet in the dirt and the last thing the wasp does is inject it with a poison that paralyses the spider.
The spider lays there, wide awake for days as the larvae nests itself on the spider's chest till, at last it lives! and breaks forth to slowly, surely, eat the feast, paralysed and staring back, bereft of all recourse, alone in its head, dying, reaching out, ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50xx1_CbJTIReplies: @Pat Hannagan
Finns are a presence in the UP, but that's ca. 2% of the state's population. The UP, that is, not the Finns.
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren't quite Scandinavian.)Replies: @dearieme, @J.Ross, @Verymuchalive
https://twitter.com/PeterPaulGuy/status/1676957146955788288?s=20Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
Technically the first-born does have a profession picked out for him – farm manager.
“In the English class system, property tends to be passed down to the first-born male.”
“In the English class system” is an odd phrasing. All it means is that it was long the custom in England that property tended predominantly to be passed down to the first-born male. Custom, not law.
It seems to be less the custom nowadays though it may still be the habit, for all I know, among wealthy landowners. For instance if I were the Earl of Somewhere and my oldest boy were going to inherit the title (I’d have no choice in that matter) I might well want to leave him plenty of land and other wealth in the belief that an Earl ought to live in high rural style.
Or I might just split it all which is (I guess) what many families do.
The tricky bit isn’t wealthy landowners – land is divisible. The tricky bit is family businesses. Another tricky bit for many families is Inheritance Tax.
Yet another tricky bit is when wealth is left not to individuals but to family trusts. To whom should an economic historian attribute that wealth?
Or, in the long ago, landed wealth might be subject to an “entail” which is the central story in Downton Abbey. Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, does not have a free hand with the estate because an ancestor said he shouldn’t. His assets, his shout – the ancestor’s, I mean. And the ancestor wanted the estate to pass to a series of male descendants. In the story the new heir turned out to be a distant cousin, a rather prickly young lawyer, whom Robert didn’t even know.
And here you get a modern rendition, free of charge, of Swift:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low . . . since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present. . . .
Gulliver/Sailer went on:
He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he would be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low and intreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.
Meanwhile, almost 100% of the 16 year plus male population of Ukraine has been wiped out, France is on fire, literally, London has a minority population of Whites, Michigan, formerly Scandinavian White is now 90% bulb head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMfjA4gyEcUReplies: @Pat Hannagan, @NotAnonymousHere, @Reg Cæsar, @Mr. XYZ, @mc23
There were two classes of charitable people; one, the people who did a little and made a great deal of noise; the other, the people who did a great deal and made no noise at all.
As Tin Legs Bader said:
‘Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything… never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible,’
The crowd roared as one in unison like as if the poms were able to take a wicket against the uber-imposing Australians in the Ashes.
As David Stove explained modern life: It’s like when you see a King Wasp drag a Trapdoor Spider up out of its burrow, kicking and screaming across the grass back to it’s own shallow divet in the dirt and the last thing the wasp does is inject it with a poison that paralyses the spider.
The spider lays there, wide awake for days as the larvae nests itself on the spider’s chest till, at last it lives! and breaks forth to slowly, surely, eat the feast, paralysed and staring back, bereft of all recourse, alone in its head, dying, reaching out, …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTLSvw6xTPM
You should have opened with an eviscerating denunciation of everyone about you and all their weaknesses, lambasting all facets of society which you'd carefully written uo beforehand and on the final note went into a roar denouncing International Jewry.
I have heard it said; The stupidest into the Church.
Relevant to your recent medical school post:
“The boy who goes into medicine is too lazy for farm or shop, too stupid for the Bar, and too immoral for the pulpit.”
—Volney Steele; Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier
And too cowardly for the military?
"The boy who goes into medicine is too lazy for farm or shop, too stupid for the Bar, and too immoral for the pulpit."
—Volney Steele; Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier
And too cowardly for the military?Replies: @G. Poulin, @Mike Tre
Becoming an Anglican clergyman was a pretty good gig, and didn’t necessarily attract the most moral and pious elements of English society. Decent house, decent salary, no really strenuous duties. And best of all, no one really gave a rat’s ass about whether you actually believed all that Christian stuff. Good place for fags to hang out, too.
The Chinese cut off relations with the wife’s family?
Ralph Townsend, Ways That Are Dark (1933), 106, second paragraph:
"The boy who goes into medicine is too lazy for farm or shop, too stupid for the Bar, and too immoral for the pulpit."
—Volney Steele; Bleed, Blister, and Purge: A History of Medicine on the American Frontier
And too cowardly for the military?Replies: @G. Poulin, @Mike Tre
Well, whatever motivates the current horde into our Armed Forces certainly isn’t courage.
To what extent does or did assortative marriage include cousin marriage, with its eventual genetic penalty?
And here you get a modern rendition, free of charge, of Swift:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low . . . since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present. . . .
Gulliver/Sailer went on:
He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he would be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low and intreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.
Meanwhile, almost 100% of the 16 year plus male population of Ukraine has been wiped out, France is on fire, literally, London has a minority population of Whites, Michigan, formerly Scandinavian White is now 90% bulb head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMfjA4gyEcUReplies: @Pat Hannagan, @NotAnonymousHere, @Reg Cæsar, @Mr. XYZ, @mc23
#1
Sounds like a lie to me. Or else dead people and the elderly fight real good.
The 19 year old cohort has vanished more or less. Either run away, in hiding or dead. The remainder are soldiers of the sort who can expect a bullet in a ditch.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
My family has been represented in professions clustered around law -with a professor/theologian and a doctor or two- since the first of our line came from England to be a Virginia barrister in the 1630’s. The generational nature/nuture thing has always fascinated me.
Or was it more that they didn't know they needed lawyers until a barrister showed up and started suing them?
:-DReplies: @Reg Cæsar
As Tin Legs Bader said:
‘Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you can’t do this or that. That’s nonsense. Make up your mind you’ll never use crutches or a stick, then have a go at everything… never, never let them persuade you that things are too difficult or impossible,’
The crowd roared as one in unison like as if the poms were able to take a wicket against the uber-imposing Australians in the Ashes.
As David Stove explained modern life: It's like when you see a King Wasp drag a Trapdoor Spider up out of its burrow, kicking and screaming across the grass back to it's own shallow divet in the dirt and the last thing the wasp does is inject it with a poison that paralyses the spider.
The spider lays there, wide awake for days as the larvae nests itself on the spider's chest till, at last it lives! and breaks forth to slowly, surely, eat the feast, paralysed and staring back, bereft of all recourse, alone in its head, dying, reaching out, ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=50xx1_CbJTIReplies: @Pat Hannagan
When you came out for your speech you should have come out to this:
You should have opened with an eviscerating denunciation of everyone about you and all their weaknesses, lambasting all facets of society which you’d carefully written uo beforehand and on the final note went into a roar denouncing International Jewry.
[1:30]
Task & Purpose states that preparations are being made at PRC’s nuclear test site to restart nuclear weapons testing. The USA needs to get off it’s ass and start doing underground nuclear tests ASAP to see if out stuff even works anymore and revisit if our slouching-to-minimalist nukes is good for us in the long run.
[1:20:00]
"Now I am become Death, the destloyel of wolrds"
---------
Hey, you know someone was gonna say it.
But seriously folks, what's striking about this movie is that despite being a basic ethnocentric rah-rah-China propaganda piece about the man who successfully armed China with nuclear rockets against the West, how deferential and admiring of the West the movie nevertheless is. The movie covers Qian Xuesen's training at MIT and Caltech under Theodore von Kármán, whose approval Qian in the movie says means more to him than any award, of which Qian received many ... from China's government. The censors let that go by, so apparently they don't find that problematic. In the movie, Qian's wife explains the sacrifices she made for him and for China not by reference to anything in thousands of years of Chinese history or Confucian culture, but by repeating an (apocryphal?) story about Churchill's mother and England. The movie closes with the accomplished scientist and engineer Qian on his deathbed surveying his life and the world and proclaiming that what is really important besides science and technology is culture and arts and music. And it is fairly clear than he means Western culture and arts and music. (And Western-spawned science and technology.)
After his work helping the US develop nuclear delivery systems, Qian was arrested and detained by the US government on (probably inaccurate) suspicion of being a spy, which detention lasted for years, ending only when the Chinese government traded him for US servicemen captured during the Korean War. So if the filmmakers had wanted to produce a product showcasing highhanded treatment from imperious Americans, wounded pride, and 'Racism!', they had plenty of material to work with. But they didn't. Instead the movie adopts a panoply of traditional Western virtues that the West no longer practices. They believe in our inheritance while we don't. This is why China will prevail.
Interesting. Thanks, Steve. One thing to clarify (exponents don’t cut and paste well). In this excerpt
Both of those n’s should be “raised to the power of” (superscript in original). So something like
One thing which I think deserves even more emphasis is this.
That 0.57 is m in the equation above so notice how big a difference it makes. Clark argues the underlying value (there is environmental noise) is even higher. See Lee’s paper for estimates closer to 0.8. So from the equation [(1 + m)/2]^n we are looking at decay rates between the order of 0.785^n and 0.9^n. Those imply half lives of 2.9 or 6.6 generations. 6.6 generations is a long time (~130-170 years).
Remember that assortative mating is trait based so the numbers vary by trait.
This paper has a great deal on assortative mating in the UKBB, but I don’t see any simple estimates by trait. They refer to the assortative mating coefficient as “r” rather than the “m” which Lee used.
Assortative mating biases marker-based heritability estimators
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-28294-9
This 2022 paper has assortative mating estimates for a large number of traits (uses both UKBB and a Danish population study). They use those as data to derive their basic conclusion (which seems both interesting and important!): “Statistical artifacts due to non-random mating, rather than shared biology, may explain reported genetic correlations.”
Cross-trait assortative mating is widespread and inflates genetic correlation estimates
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9901291/
Figure 1 shows cross-mate correlations (tetrachoric since these are considered binary traits) for six psychiatric traits in the diagonal entries of panel B. They range from 0.11 to 0.35 (compare to 0.57 above). Panel C shows correlation values (x axis) from about -0.11 to about 0.25, but it appears they truncate the high end based on panel B and other later figures?
Here is a tweet discussing that paper. Under more tweets I see only one–about the same James Lee commentary we are discussing. ; )
It includes a link to the published version of the James Lee paper.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2309250120
There may be more to the first born than that.
All the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts were first or only sons, correct me if I’m wrong.
Is the first born healthier, better balanced?
In the large it may be a small effect but even your great-grandparents could have told you there is something to it.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Hibernian, @Anonymous
Evelyn Waugh (a less-favoured second son) published a blackly comic short story, “Winner Takes All”, on how English primogeniture works. The more intelligent younger son who needs a career is sent off to a bleak industrial town and comes back engaged to a working-class English girl. His mother, horrified, packs him off to Australia to learn farming, where he makes a highly promising match to a millionaire sheep farmer’s only daughter (who gratifyingly doesn’t have an Australian accent). Once back in England the girl finds the louche first son, who of course will inherit the beautiful estate, much more glamorous, and the younger son is convinced to marry the English girl instead.
I thought it was the gayest into the Church.
“…the most pious into the Church…”
I’m not so sure piety is how they picked the vicar.
And here you get a modern rendition, free of charge, of Swift:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low . . . since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present. . . .
Gulliver/Sailer went on:
He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he would be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low and intreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.
Meanwhile, almost 100% of the 16 year plus male population of Ukraine has been wiped out, France is on fire, literally, London has a minority population of Whites, Michigan, formerly Scandinavian White is now 90% bulb head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMfjA4gyEcUReplies: @Pat Hannagan, @NotAnonymousHere, @Reg Cæsar, @Mr. XYZ, @mc23
When was Michigan ever “Scandinavian”? The white population was originally French, then Yankee– once opened to Americans, something like five of six settlers came directly from New York, who had “Michigan fever”. Then Dutch in the west, immigrants in the east, and migrants from the South.
Finns are a presence in the UP, but that’s ca. 2% of the state’s population. The UP, that is, not the Finns.
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren’t quite Scandinavian.)
I suspect that the most impressive attainment on that list is the ability to speak Finnish.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. XYZ
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren’t quite Scandinavian.)I can tell you from direct experience that this is true, Reggie. When I was a boy ( in Scotland ), one of my neighbours was a Finnish woman married to a Scotsman. She had black hair and very dark eyes and a swarthy complexion. But her appearance wasn't Mediterranean, nor was it obviously Eurasian. Even more bizarrely, both her children had blue eyes and looked Nordic or Celtic in appearance. One of them had fair hair.It is generally accepted that, in their ancestral travels, the Finnish people moved to the Ural mountains, and even beyond, into western Siberia. There they mixed with "Palaeosiberian peoples" ( not the language group ), which included physical types more or less extinct now ( through miscegenation ). Thus you get Finns with fair hair and very dark eyes, or indeed very swarthy complexions, like my neighbour.There are still a fair number of Finno-Ugrian groups in western Siberian, including Khanty and Mansi. Here's a photo of a Khanty family group which gives an indication of the various physiognamies.https://www.startpage.com/av/proxy-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F5%2F5f%2FKhanty_family.jpg%2F291px-Khanty_family.jpg&sp=1688741845Te9ea193a3a592e43952d8b5a7e8be785652da321afbe22cbce1b4084e2a95c2c
And here you get a modern rendition, free of charge, of Swift:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low . . . since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present. . . .
Gulliver/Sailer went on:
He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he would be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low and intreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.
Meanwhile, almost 100% of the 16 year plus male population of Ukraine has been wiped out, France is on fire, literally, London has a minority population of Whites, Michigan, formerly Scandinavian White is now 90% bulb head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMfjA4gyEcUReplies: @Pat Hannagan, @NotAnonymousHere, @Reg Cæsar, @Mr. XYZ, @mc23
What the hell are you talking about, Willis?
Finns are a presence in the UP, but that's ca. 2% of the state's population. The UP, that is, not the Finns.
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren't quite Scandinavian.)Replies: @dearieme, @J.Ross, @Verymuchalive
I shared a room with a Finn once. He spoke Finnish, Swedish, German, Russian, and English. He was doing a PhD in physics.
I suspect that the most impressive attainment on that list is the ability to speak Finnish.
Ya think? Trying to retrospectively tease out the IQs (actually all “success” or “status” genes whatever those might be) of mothers and fathers and children over generations upon generations and then figure out how much those genes (as opposed to all other family and class and cultural influences) may have contributed to an individual’s “status” (however that is measured) strikes me as an obvious fool’s errand of impossibly tangled confounds.
Just because a relationship can be expressed in an equation doesn’t mean it’s valid to just keep trying numbers until you get some that work with the equation. That’s “drawing bullseyes around bullet holes.”
This may be fun sociological stuff to think about. But I’m calling B.S. on the math.
Justice Jackson’s Incredible Statistic
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.
Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”
A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.
How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.
The study makes no such claims.
It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).
The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)
Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.
There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.
So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.
Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62
See also
https://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910
Got it.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s mercenaries get to know their comrades.
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
One factor might be that she hires dumb clerks.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/jacksons-first-supreme-court-clerks-include-judiciary-workplace-reform-advocate-2022-05-17/Replies: @NotAnonymousHere
It's her signature on the dissent.
I suspect that the most impressive attainment on that list is the ability to speak Finnish.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. XYZ
That seems to be how it works — many great multi-linguals (eg, Japan hand Andrew Horvath) are Hungarian, and have no illusions about anybody learning Hungarian.
Finns are a presence in the UP, but that's ca. 2% of the state's population. The UP, that is, not the Finns.
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren't quite Scandinavian.)Replies: @dearieme, @J.Ross, @Verymuchalive
No. Finns — Nordic, but never Skandi. Of course right next door to Michigan are quite a few Germanic and Scandinavian pockets in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
This is where” science “and medicine is going , in service of a radical leftist agenda.
It is a shame that primogeniture is reserved for the first-born when with modern psychological testing, the least innumerate and least likely to drink/gamble/fornicate the family fortune away would serve the family name would be a more logical beneficiary. Charles may be a jerk but Andrew is a scoundrel; Harry is a fool and William may be the best of the Windsors. So eldest as best has at least a few data points going for it, but still …
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
Affirmative Action Jackson.
The quote is from the 19th century, rather than current, but still, I’m curious why you say this. Certainly in the previous two decades a lot of tip-of-the-spear type guys willingly went into some pretty hazardous situations, however dubious the missions’ premises.
What quote? What I typed? I assure you it was off the top of my head. Any similarity it has with another's words is pure coincidence.
I was one of those tip of the spear guys - at least I thought so at the time. Young naive, and ready to defend freedom from dirt poor Arabs who were no threat to me or my family. Kind of embarrassing at this point, and I just smile to myself when someone new says "thank you for your service," or buys me a drink or whatever.
Anyway, while there are certainly still some young white men, who's sense of patriotism is being exploited by our cynical and malevolent government, volunteering to enter the armed forces, I would say that in relative terms that more freeloaders are joining up now than ever before. Females, homosexuals/sexual deviants, minorities all looking for uniformed welfare. STD treatment and maternity benefits may not be the best, but it's better than nothing. Intellectual and physical standards continue to decline, and depravity is not only allowed but forced upon service members.
So yeah, courage really isn't the motivating factor. Gibs is.Replies: @Almost Missouri
Jeez, the colony was only 23 years old and already they needed a clan of lawyers?
Or was it more that they didn’t know they needed lawyers until a barrister showed up and started suing them?
😀
Pocahontas's first husband probably had a good civil case against the English.
All the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo astronauts were first or only sons, correct me if I’m wrong.
Is the first born healthier, better balanced?Replies: @Emil Nikola Richard
The first born gets both parents’ full helping of attention, intention, hopes, dreams, illusions &c. Nobody can keep that up and an exponential decay times this treasure is dealt out to 2nd, 3rd, &c.
In the large it may be a small effect but even your great-grandparents could have told you there is something to it.
Once age can no longer be an excuse, the parents will still keep up the pressure and often convince themselves of other justifications for the eldest having to be the only one supporting them and taking care of everything. Or why the eldest should keep providing all sorts of help to the now adult younger kids, especially the youngest ones. She has an artist's soul. He's just so full of potential. She's been having such a hard time. He's very sensitive. She's just too unique and special.
The younger siblings might return the favor if the opportunity arises and they're that kind of person. But there's nowhere near the same kind of expectation or pressure.
On the other hand, especially if they don't get screwed out of a chance at higher education, the eldest might benefit both from the sense of responsibility they will have developed from all this and from the parents being much stricter and tougher with them and cutting them far less slack. So there could be an advantage to it.
I'm not English though, and I imagine this is different across different cultures, and possibly classes. It might also be changing now. Though with fewer and fewer families with multiple children, it's not as easy to observe these family dynamics as it once was.Replies: @Anonymous
Do you know anything about her clerks? I see four in this article.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/jacksons-first-supreme-court-clerks-include-judiciary-workplace-reform-advocate-2022-05-17/
Without having read what you provided I'm confident her clerks are smarter than her (show me a person who isn't!)
She's a Mongoloid at best. And that's an insult to Mongoloids.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/jacksons-first-supreme-court-clerks-include-judiciary-workplace-reform-advocate-2022-05-17/Replies: @NotAnonymousHere
#24, #26, #35
Without having read what you provided I’m confident her clerks are smarter than her (show me a person who isn’t!)
She’s a Mongoloid at best. And that’s an insult to Mongoloids.
[1:30]
Task & Purpose states that preparations are being made at PRC's nuclear test site to restart nuclear weapons testing. The USA needs to get off it's ass and start doing underground nuclear tests ASAP to see if out stuff even works anymore and revisit if our slouching-to-minimalist nukes is good for us in the long run.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H04ZpWmsnQU
[1:20:00]Replies: @Almost Missouri
[1:21:46]
“Now I am become Death, the destloyel of wolrds”
———
Hey, you know someone was gonna say it.
But seriously folks, what’s striking about this movie is that despite being a basic ethnocentric rah-rah-China propaganda piece about the man who successfully armed China with nuclear rockets against the West, how deferential and admiring of the West the movie nevertheless is. The movie covers Qian Xuesen’s training at MIT and Caltech under Theodore von Kármán, whose approval Qian in the movie says means more to him than any award, of which Qian received many … from China’s government. The censors let that go by, so apparently they don’t find that problematic. In the movie, Qian’s wife explains the sacrifices she made for him and for China not by reference to anything in thousands of years of Chinese history or Confucian culture, but by repeating an (apocryphal?) story about Churchill’s mother and England. The movie closes with the accomplished scientist and engineer Qian on his deathbed surveying his life and the world and proclaiming that what is really important besides science and technology is culture and arts and music. And it is fairly clear than he means Western culture and arts and music. (And Western-spawned science and technology.)
After his work helping the US develop nuclear delivery systems, Qian was arrested and detained by the US government on (probably inaccurate) suspicion of being a spy, which detention lasted for years, ending only when the Chinese government traded him for US servicemen captured during the Korean War. So if the filmmakers had wanted to produce a product showcasing highhanded treatment from imperious Americans, wounded pride, and ‘Racism!’, they had plenty of material to work with. But they didn’t. Instead the movie adopts a panoply of traditional Western virtues that the West no longer practices. They believe in our inheritance while we don’t. This is why China will prevail.
It might not be just her clerks who are dumb.
It’s her signature on the dissent.
Ralph Townsend, Ways That Are Dark (1933), 106, second paragraph:Replies: @HammerJack
Well that sounds pretty horrid. It’s almost as though women are better off in the West, but try telling them that.
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
Justice Brown Jackson gets the ‘Jackson’ from her husband, not her slave ancestors. He’s an old-stock blueblood white man she met at Harvard. But we’re supposed to believe she hired a black OB-GYN for her two pregnancies because she feared for her life.
Or was it more that they didn't know they needed lawyers until a barrister showed up and started suing them?
:-DReplies: @Reg Cæsar
Haven’t you read the history of Jamestown? Some of them were gentlemen who didn’t plan to work. That didn’t look good when famine time came. It caused the first “Yankee” intruder, John Smith– he was from Ann Hutchinson’s village– to quote Scripture– he who will not work, shall not eat.
Pocahontas’s first husband probably had a good civil case against the English.
A study of the younger sons and their descendants would certainly be interesting. I can think of two examples from American history where the children of younger sons rose from humble childhoods to high status positions.
Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock to James A. Hamilton, the 4th son of a Scottish aristocrat, the Laird of Grange, Ayrshire. After moving to the West Indies, James does not seem to have any further contact with his birth family and eventually died in poverty.
President Abraham Lincoln’s humble childhood is well known. Less well known is the fact that the Lincolns had been a fairly high status family for generations. The President’s grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln, owned several thousand acres of land when he was killed by Indians. Because he died without a will before Virginia abolished primogeniture, his eldest son Mordecai inherited most of his father’s estate, while Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President, inherited nothing, had little schooling, and supported himself as a farmer and carpenter.
Both of these examples support the idea of the genetic inheritance of social status, since Hamilton and Lincoln could both claim descent from high status families, even if they were raised in humble circumstances.
Primogeniture was codified as applied to intestacy? Interesting.Replies: @res
“The quote is from the 19th century”
What quote? What I typed? I assure you it was off the top of my head. Any similarity it has with another’s words is pure coincidence.
I was one of those tip of the spear guys – at least I thought so at the time. Young naive, and ready to defend freedom from dirt poor Arabs who were no threat to me or my family. Kind of embarrassing at this point, and I just smile to myself when someone new says “thank you for your service,” or buys me a drink or whatever.
Anyway, while there are certainly still some young white men, who’s sense of patriotism is being exploited by our cynical and malevolent government, volunteering to enter the armed forces, I would say that in relative terms that more freeloaders are joining up now than ever before. Females, homosexuals/sexual deviants, minorities all looking for uniformed welfare. STD treatment and maternity benefits may not be the best, but it’s better than nothing. Intellectual and physical standards continue to decline, and depravity is not only allowed but forced upon service members.
So yeah, courage really isn’t the motivating factor. Gibs is.
... answering my question.
The 19th century quote is the one I was riffing on, since Steve's version of it had a "bravest into the Army" clause in it that mine lacked.
And yeah, it is hard not to notice that the military has increasing numbers of weirdos, louts, deviants, and sandbaggers. But that doesn't change that "our" military had brave men too, even recently, no matter what we think of their missions.Replies: @Mike Tre
Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations Exhibit A:
https://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/armie-hammer-elizabeth-chambers-settle-divorce-details/
Ol’ great-grand-dad Armand was worth $200M in 1986. Where did it go?
In the large it may be a small effect but even your great-grandparents could have told you there is something to it.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Hibernian, @Anonymous
As of the 1980s, MIT undergrads were overwhelmingly first born or only children; one read on this was based on a bunch of folders of admitted students. So there’s something to this small effect.
https://larrycheng.com/2010/03/06/why-are-80-of-harvard-students-first-borns/
Some discussion at Quora. The first answer is pretty good and has a video of the Harvard lecture.
https://www.quora.com/Are-80-of-Harvard-students-first-born-children-If-so-why
It would be interesting to see real numbers.
Yes, more than half of them have wisely left the Ukraine…of the remainder, probably only half are dead or seriously wounded….
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
Question:
If the word “high-risk” doesn’t belong here and this applies to black newborns in general, could this simply be the result of black physicians being more likely to be given the easier cases (and thus the infants who are more likely to survive) while white physicians, due to them on average being smarter and more competent than black physicians are, are more likely to be given the harder cases, where the infants are more likely to die?
So, I know someone who is an exception to this rule, and a female to boot, which is interesting due to females having a lower IQ variation relative to males. This female is of course extraordinarily smart. I can attest due to personally knowing her for multiple years.
She would have if she would have found average 130 IQ Wakandans lol!
There are many German, Irish, and Scandinavian people in Michigan, just like the rest of the upper Midwest.
In the large it may be a small effect but even your great-grandparents could have told you there is something to it.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Hibernian, @Anonymous
The first is likeliest to be mature enough to handle the estate upon the Father’s passing.
Some discussion of this at Harvard (and MIT in the comments) here.
https://larrycheng.com/2010/03/06/why-are-80-of-harvard-students-first-borns/
Some discussion at Quora. The first answer is pretty good and has a video of the Harvard lecture.
https://www.quora.com/Are-80-of-Harvard-students-first-born-children-If-so-why
It would be interesting to see real numbers.
I suspect that the most impressive attainment on that list is the ability to speak Finnish.Replies: @J.Ross, @Mr. XYZ
Finns sound like they’re high when they speak Finnish lol.
Aha! That was the key. I just moved the "center of gravity" of my speech to whatever you call that area behind the nose. "Anasal". (Better yet, "arhinic". The a- prefix is Greek.) They were impressed with how much better I sounded than the others.
There is a whole list of subtle differences like this to look for-- to listen for-- when learning a language. Unlike the Germanic languages, and very like the Romance ones, Finnish does not aspirate initial consonants. The P in Porvoo will not extinguish a candle, as the P in Pittsburgh will. Stress is regular and strong, though not as obvious as in German as the language in general is more softly spoken.
In the large it may be a small effect but even your great-grandparents could have told you there is something to it.Replies: @That Would Be Telling, @Hibernian, @Anonymous
Judging from most families I’ve known, usually being the eldest kind of sucks. The eldest gets stuck both acting as almost another parent to younger kids and carrying the bulk of the responsibility of helping and caring for the parents throughout their life. Obviously that part wouldn’t be an issue in the same way for the wealthy. But there’s an expectation of the eldest sacrificing themselves for the younger kids’ benefit and future, which is seen as an extension of that “parent” role.
Once age can no longer be an excuse, the parents will still keep up the pressure and often convince themselves of other justifications for the eldest having to be the only one supporting them and taking care of everything. Or why the eldest should keep providing all sorts of help to the now adult younger kids, especially the youngest ones. She has an artist’s soul. He’s just so full of potential. She’s been having such a hard time. He’s very sensitive. She’s just too unique and special.
The younger siblings might return the favor if the opportunity arises and they’re that kind of person. But there’s nowhere near the same kind of expectation or pressure.
On the other hand, especially if they don’t get screwed out of a chance at higher education, the eldest might benefit both from the sense of responsibility they will have developed from all this and from the parents being much stricter and tougher with them and cutting them far less slack. So there could be an advantage to it.
I’m not English though, and I imagine this is different across different cultures, and possibly classes. It might also be changing now. Though with fewer and fewer families with multiple children, it’s not as easy to observe these family dynamics as it once was.
Once age can no longer be an excuse, the parents will still keep up the pressure and often convince themselves of other justifications for the eldest having to be the only one supporting them and taking care of everything. Or why the eldest should keep providing all sorts of help to the now adult younger kids, especially the youngest ones. She has an artist's soul. He's just so full of potential. She's been having such a hard time. He's very sensitive. She's just too unique and special.
The younger siblings might return the favor if the opportunity arises and they're that kind of person. But there's nowhere near the same kind of expectation or pressure.
On the other hand, especially if they don't get screwed out of a chance at higher education, the eldest might benefit both from the sense of responsibility they will have developed from all this and from the parents being much stricter and tougher with them and cutting them far less slack. So there could be an advantage to it.
I'm not English though, and I imagine this is different across different cultures, and possibly classes. It might also be changing now. Though with fewer and fewer families with multiple children, it's not as easy to observe these family dynamics as it once was.Replies: @Anonymous
* not English or American
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
Jackson’s clerks must hate her, or they would have stopped that.
What a lovely short note by James Lee. Five minutes of pleasure to read it.
You mean to tell me that unlike any other member of the Supreme Court, Justice Jackson writes her own opinions?
The scale of the slaughter among the young men in Ukraine has been accurately quantified.
The 19 year old cohort has vanished more or less. Either run away, in hiding or dead. The remainder are soldiers of the sort who can expect a bullet in a ditch.
https://www.hoover.org/research/battles-kharkov
Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock to James A. Hamilton, the 4th son of a Scottish aristocrat, the Laird of Grange, Ayrshire. After moving to the West Indies, James does not seem to have any further contact with his birth family and eventually died in poverty.
President Abraham Lincoln's humble childhood is well known. Less well known is the fact that the Lincolns had been a fairly high status family for generations. The President's grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln, owned several thousand acres of land when he was killed by Indians. Because he died without a will before Virginia abolished primogeniture, his eldest son Mordecai inherited most of his father's estate, while Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President, inherited nothing, had little schooling, and supported himself as a farmer and carpenter.
Both of these examples support the idea of the genetic inheritance of social status, since Hamilton and Lincoln could both claim descent from high status families, even if they were raised in humble circumstances.Replies: @Wokechoke, @Curle
The Second Son or his line often goes into the war business. Thus it was so with Lincoln. Makes sense now. He was a potentially downwardly mobile aristocrat after all. But saved his reputation by winning a civil war that ought to have been avoidable by buying the slaves away, state by state.
Finns are a presence in the UP, but that's ca. 2% of the state's population. The UP, that is, not the Finns.
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren't quite Scandinavian.)Replies: @dearieme, @J.Ross, @Verymuchalive
You:
(And, as someone is bound to pipe in, the Finns aren’t quite Scandinavian.)
I can tell you from direct experience that this is true, Reggie. When I was a boy ( in Scotland ), one of my neighbours was a Finnish woman married to a Scotsman. She had black hair and very dark eyes and a swarthy complexion. But her appearance wasn’t Mediterranean, nor was it obviously Eurasian. Even more bizarrely, both her children had blue eyes and looked Nordic or Celtic in appearance. One of them had fair hair.
It is generally accepted that, in their ancestral travels, the Finnish people moved to the Ural mountains, and even beyond, into western Siberia. There they mixed with “Palaeosiberian peoples” ( not the language group ), which included physical types more or less extinct now ( through miscegenation ). Thus you get Finns with fair hair and very dark eyes, or indeed very swarthy complexions, like my neighbour.
There are still a fair number of Finno-Ugrian groups in western Siberian, including Khanty and Mansi. Here’s a photo of a Khanty family group which gives an indication of the various physiognamies.
https://www.startpage.com/av/proxy-image?piurl=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fwikipedia%2Fcommons%2Fthumb%2F5%2F5f%2FKhanty_family.jpg%2F291px-Khanty_family.jpg&sp=1688741845Te9ea193a3a592e43952d8b5a7e8be785652da321afbe22cbce1b4084e2a95c2c
The term for this custom is premogeniture and it helped maintain the cohesion and longevity of the ruling class. It also helped with the growth of Britannia America as second sons were incentivized to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Founding Father Alexander Hamilton was born out of wedlock to James A. Hamilton, the 4th son of a Scottish aristocrat, the Laird of Grange, Ayrshire. After moving to the West Indies, James does not seem to have any further contact with his birth family and eventually died in poverty.
President Abraham Lincoln's humble childhood is well known. Less well known is the fact that the Lincolns had been a fairly high status family for generations. The President's grandfather, Captain Abraham Lincoln, owned several thousand acres of land when he was killed by Indians. Because he died without a will before Virginia abolished primogeniture, his eldest son Mordecai inherited most of his father's estate, while Thomas Lincoln, the father of the President, inherited nothing, had little schooling, and supported himself as a farmer and carpenter.
Both of these examples support the idea of the genetic inheritance of social status, since Hamilton and Lincoln could both claim descent from high status families, even if they were raised in humble circumstances.Replies: @Wokechoke, @Curle
“Because he died without a will before Virginia abolished primogeniture,”
Primogeniture was codified as applied to intestacy? Interesting.
http://sc_tories.tripod.com/law_of_primogeniture_in_the_south.htm
Primogeniture was codified as applied to intestacy? Interesting.Replies: @res
Some details.
http://sc_tories.tripod.com/law_of_primogeniture_in_the_south.htm
Good point. Could her clerks be … innumerate? A while back there was a big honking embarassment from Sotomayor, which Hugh Hewitt immediately blamed on her clerks.
Finnish does have a distinctive sound, but I could never quite identify whence it came. Then a Finn complained that when English-speakers attempted her language, it sounded horribly nasal.
Aha! That was the key. I just moved the “center of gravity” of my speech to whatever you call that area behind the nose. “Anasal”. (Better yet, “arhinic”. The a- prefix is Greek.) They were impressed with how much better I sounded than the others.
There is a whole list of subtle differences like this to look for– to listen for– when learning a language. Unlike the Germanic languages, and very like the Romance ones, Finnish does not aspirate initial consonants. The P in Porvoo will not extinguish a candle, as the P in Pittsburgh will. Stress is regular and strong, though not as obvious as in German as the language in general is more softly spoken.
Her dissent from the ruling on affirmative action makes an obviously implausible claim.Even Supreme Court justices are known to be gullible. In a dissent from last week’s ruling against racial preferences in college admissions, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson enumerated purported benefits of “diversity” in education. “It saves lives,” she asserts. “For high-risk Black newborns, having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live.”A moment’s thought should be enough to realize that this claim is wildly implausible. Imagine if 40% of black newborns died—thousands of dead infants every week. But even so, that’s a 60% survival rate, which is mathematically impossible to double. And the actual survival rate is over 99%.How could Justice Jackson make such an innumerate mistake? A footnote cites a friend-of-the-court brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges, which makes the same claim in almost identical language. It, in turn, refers to a 2020 study whose lead author is Brad Greenwood, a professor at the George Mason University School of Business.The study makes no such claims. It examines mortality rates in Florida newborns between 1992 and 2015 and shows a 0.13% to 0.2% improvement in survival rates for black newborns with black pediatricians (though no statistically significant improvement for black obstetricians).The AAMC brief either misunderstood the paper or invented the statistic. (It isn’t saved by the adjective “high-risk,” which doesn’t appear and isn’t measured in Greenwood’s paper.)Even the much more modest Greenwood result—which amounts to a difference of fewer than 10 Florida newborns a year—is flawed. It uses linear regression, appropriate for modeling continuous normally distributed variables like height or LSAT scores but not for categorical low-probability events like “newborn death.” The proper methodology would be a logistic model. The authors did one, hidden deep in an appendix rather than the body of the paper.There, the most highly specified model still shows an improvement in black newborn survival. But if you know how to read the numbers—the authors don’t say it—it also shows black doctors with a statistically significant higher mortality rate for white newborns, and a higher mortality rate overall, all else being equal.So we have a Supreme Court justice parroting a mathematically absurd claim coming from an interested party’s mischaracterization of a flawed study. Her opinion then urges “all of us” to “do what evidence and experts tell us is required to level the playing field and march forward together.” Instead we should watch where we’re going.Mr. Frank is a senior attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which filed an amicus brief in support of the petitioners in SFFA v. Harvard.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-jacksons-incredible-statistic-black-newborns-doctors-math-flaw-mortality-4115ff62See alsohttps://www.unz.com/isteve/surprise-former-larper-of-color-liz-warren-is-taking-personally-that-the-supreme-court-is-shutting-down-her-old-grift/#comment-6034910Replies: @Calvin Hobbes, @tyrone, @Hypnotoad666, @Ghost of Bull Moose, @Mr. XYZ, @Gordo, @The Germ Theory of Disease
So what she’s saying is, Having more incompetent doctors saves lives.
Got it.
#45
They can’t all have been 16+ males, so yeah, NO.
One of my siblings traced our father’s line 600 years on ancestory.com. Suffice it to say our social status has never altered much.
We’re at a point were tens of thousands of people can now do the same. I suspect a detailed examination of those results would prove the old saying “from shirtsleeves in three generations”
And here you get a modern rendition, free of charge, of Swift:
He had been eight years upon a project for extracting sunbeams out of cucumbers, which were to be put in vials hermetically sealed, and let out to warm the air in raw inclement summers. He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, that he should be able to supply the Governor's gardens with sunshine at a reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low . . . since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers. I made him a small present. . . .
Gulliver/Sailer went on:
He told me, he did not doubt in eight years more, he would be able to supply the Governor’s gardens with sunshine at reasonable rate; but he complained that his stock was low and intreated me to give him something as an Encouragement to Ingenuity, especially since this had been a very dear season for cucumbers.
Meanwhile, almost 100% of the 16 year plus male population of Ukraine has been wiped out, France is on fire, literally, London has a minority population of Whites, Michigan, formerly Scandinavian White is now 90% bulb head.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMfjA4gyEcUReplies: @Pat Hannagan, @NotAnonymousHere, @Reg Cæsar, @Mr. XYZ, @mc23
You’re looking at 50 years from now for Erin Go Bragh to become “Mohammed Forever”
There’s a lot to criticize in Lincoln’s performance. The war certainly should have been avoided.
But “buying the slaves away, state by state” was simply not on the menu. While the typical Confederate soldier’s motivation was the age old and honorable “Our turf, get the hell out and don’t tell us what to do”, the southern movers and shakers–the politicians who led secession–were deeply invested in slavery and committed to it almost religiously. They weren’t looking for a buy-out.
Another part of this debacle was the lack of sense on the Confederate side to rein in the fire breathers. If the South Carolina geniuses had not fired on Fort Sumter, but instead the Confederates had pitched a very “Let’s get together and talk through all the issues” approach, sentiment in the North might have been different.
Might, all speculative.
The bottom line, of course, “Cheap labor is never cheap, but in the long run the most expensive labor imaginable. Cheap labor is trouble … every single time.”
I am responsible for documents I sign, so I usually take the trouble to read and understand them before doing so. But perhaps Action Jackson was too exhausted from the never ending work of being Black.
What quote? What I typed? I assure you it was off the top of my head. Any similarity it has with another's words is pure coincidence.
I was one of those tip of the spear guys - at least I thought so at the time. Young naive, and ready to defend freedom from dirt poor Arabs who were no threat to me or my family. Kind of embarrassing at this point, and I just smile to myself when someone new says "thank you for your service," or buys me a drink or whatever.
Anyway, while there are certainly still some young white men, who's sense of patriotism is being exploited by our cynical and malevolent government, volunteering to enter the armed forces, I would say that in relative terms that more freeloaders are joining up now than ever before. Females, homosexuals/sexual deviants, minorities all looking for uniformed welfare. STD treatment and maternity benefits may not be the best, but it's better than nothing. Intellectual and physical standards continue to decline, and depravity is not only allowed but forced upon service members.
So yeah, courage really isn't the motivating factor. Gibs is.Replies: @Almost Missouri
Thank you for your …
… answering my question.
The 19th century quote is the one I was riffing on, since Steve’s version of it had a “bravest into the Army” clause in it that mine lacked.
And yeah, it is hard not to notice that the military has increasing numbers of weirdos, louts, deviants, and sandbaggers. But that doesn’t change that “our” military had brave men too, even recently, no matter what we think of their missions.
Ol' great-grand-dad Armand was worth $200M in 1986. Where did it go?Replies: @Almost Missouri
I’m sure it’s still around, just as I’m sure that great-grand-dad Armand had more than $200m. It’s just cleverly hidden in offshore accounts, trusts, etc. such that young Dougie reports only a middle-class income and only has to pay middle-class level child support.
... answering my question.
The 19th century quote is the one I was riffing on, since Steve's version of it had a "bravest into the Army" clause in it that mine lacked.
And yeah, it is hard not to notice that the military has increasing numbers of weirdos, louts, deviants, and sandbaggers. But that doesn't change that "our" military had brave men too, even recently, no matter what we think of their missions.Replies: @Mike Tre
LOL, Thanks, and Agree.
The 19 year old cohort has vanished more or less. Either run away, in hiding or dead. The remainder are soldiers of the sort who can expect a bullet in a ditch.Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
I know an 18 year old who was 17 when he arrived in the UK with his family. I sincerely hope he stays here until it’s all over. From Kharkov which is a Russian speaking city, famed for WW2 students for its tractor factory, and the scene of no fewer than four fierce battles.
https://www.hoover.org/research/battles-kharkov
https://twitter.com/PeterPaulGuy/status/1676957146955788288?s=20Replies: @YetAnotherAnon
It’s the most popular boys name in England and Wales, too, if you combine the figures for Mohammed/Mohammad/Mohammud/Muhammed/Muhammad/Mahmud.
Could have been done. Was done with large slave owners in the British Empire.
You still living under a rock?