Steven Pinker: "Irony: Replicability Crisis in Psych DOESN'T Apply to IQ: Huge N's, Replicable Results. But People Hate the Message."
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Steven Pinker’s tweet makes the same point about the Replicability Crisis in psychology that I made recently: IQ research is almost boringly replicable.
Pinker’s link directs us to the big International Society for Intelligence Research conference going on through Sunday in New Mexico. From the program, here are conference highlights:
Dr. James Thompson has been blogging at Psychological Comments about the conference, with many posts on new studies.
By the way, a survey was undertaken at the 2013 ISIR conference to rate 26 different journalistic outlets on reliability on IQ-related topics. I think the results deserve to be mentioned in Wikipedia.
For a basic introduction, here’s my 2007 IQ Frequently Asked Questions list.
If the researchers want to avoid touchy subjects such as the genetic component of intelligence,perhaps they can switch to studying the genetic component of the 100 meter sprints, or basketball, or football.
Wait, never mind, that won’t go over so well either. Imagine what will happen as soon as someone uses the term “Huge N’s”.
Maybe to be on the safe side they should stick to having Helen report on the chicken experiment after all.
This is the first comment?!
Wait, never mind, that won't go over so well either. Imagine what will happen as soon as someone uses the term "Huge N's".
Maybe to be on the safe side they should stick to having Helen report on the chicken experiment after all.Replies: @Anonymous
We need this comment?!
This is the first comment?!
How does this guy do it? You could have a challenging game with Pinker and Sailer quotes lined up next to each other and you have to figure out who said what. Steve, why do you think he’s been able to avoid the mob after all these years?
For example, in Better Angels of Our Nature, he implies that old bad aspects of our psychology are (somehow or for some not quite explained reason) getting slowly sublimated into pursuit of knowledge. Interest in seeing cats get tortured is turning into interest in seeing the next discovery from sequencing cat genomes. But what he doesn't explore is the fact that this means society is getting better only for him and his tiny peer group of elite academics. Everybody else can look forward to the world getting more and more boring, with fewer and fewer ways to find stimulation. (Hence, I think, porn, Hunger Games, etc., while the increasingly infantalized Japanese demonstrate a different way to deal with this problem.) Yes, on one level, he's right that lower murder rates make life better for us, but there is probably a point of diminishing returns that we have already passed.
Anyway, there's your answer: his politics don't necessarily follow from his beliefs about the world.Replies: @Qasim
One morning I ate a taco and my IQ shot up by 20 points.
I have yet to replicate it but I swear it’s true.
Gladwell went after Pinker in 2009. How’d that work out for Gladwell’s reputation?
OT: I still think it’s uncanny how much Steven Pinker looks like cellist Steven Isserlis.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00106/Isserlis_106249c.jpg
Actually I had the same question as Seth; any ideas?
-100% Jewish
-extra good looking
-awesome Jewfro
-doesn't take it that next stepReplies: @Big Bill, @Lot
Actually, you wouldn’t have a challenging game with Pinker and Sailer quotes lined up next to each other (unless you’re simply talking about quotes on IQ in the abstract). Pinker is media savvy while Steve writes with almost complete freedom from concerns about savviness. Pinker knows how to express things so he doesn’t get Watsoned, and he knows the red lines beyond which style of expression is irrelevant.
Both men, scientist Steven Pinker and cellist Steven Isserlis are of the brilliant northern Mediterranean type; the clear-thinking, elegant, gracile in mind and body human of western England. An endangered sub-species these days, unfortunately.
https://oslofreedomforum.com/speakers/steven-pinker
Normally you want to be talented at making statements that go viral. But in the internet age, public intellectuals who engage with the human sciences — or even, at this point, just regular old academics who do so — need to have a talent for making controversial (that is, interesting) things sound boring and technical to journalists. You need to be adept at the art of anti-virality. Pinker knows when and how to shift into this verbal gear. So does Gregory Clark.
Watching pinker debate, he doesn’t try to refute the other guy. He just keeps piling up the evidence for his position. Since he has a good memory he can do this until the other guy looks like he didn’t do his homework.
Missing word in the 2007 intro: “is abysmal that” -> “is so abysmal that”
“How does this guy do it? You could have a challenging game with Pinker and Sailer quotes lined up next to each other and you have to figure out who said what. Steve, why do you think he’s been able to avoid the mob after all these years?”
My guess: Pinker is a better talker (nimble, impish, likable) and operates in an academic milieu (MIT linguistics dept. prestige). Plus his early work (Language Instinct, How the Mind Works) established his creds in the semi-popular (NPR) imagination.
Why the teflon Pinker?
-100% Jewish
-extra good looking
-awesome Jewfro
-doesn’t take it that next step
Here are some additional funny examples:
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/20-badass-jewfros
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/25-more-badass-jewfros
Related Celtic version:
http://data3.whicdn.com/images/52921136/original.jpg
http://static.themetapicture.com/media/funny-ginger-afro-hair.jpgReplies: @Anonym
OT: Bill Maher on Ahmed’s clock
“People at the school thought it might be a bomb perhaps because it looks exactly like a fucking bomb… The teacher is supposed to see something that looks like a bomb and say, ‘Oh wait, this must just be my white privilege talking.’”
This slightly OT though tangential. Steve, what is your opinion of Noam Chomsky, in general?
I’d venture most people here get 100% of their Gladwell information from this site. So, how did it end up for Gladwell?
-100% Jewish
-extra good looking
-awesome Jewfro
-doesn't take it that next stepReplies: @Big Bill, @Lot
Not taking it to the next step is key. Eugene Volokh is the same. He gets right to the ragged edge and stops. Always discusses things with a balanced tone. I get the feeling he is hoping for a spot on the 9th Circuit or USSC.
He parrots the "all groups are the same" line, and doesn't seem to believe that humans have genes.
Thanks for the link to your FAQ from 2007.
Some of us are still relatively new to your oeuvre so we quite appreciate it when you occasionally highlight some of your greatest hits.
I have no doubt about the significance of IQ and how likely it is hereditarily endowed.
Your FAQ touches on some of the issues of character and conscientiousness which to me no quick and easy test is frequently used to reliably reveal. Furthermore I’d like to see how much this conscientiousness, focus, ambition and drive are inborn. As important as intelligence is, I’ve never been completely satisfied putting so much emphasis on it. We all are familiar with very bright Mensa types who still amount to little. So perhaps these other character endowments account for the difference between Mensa bright and genuine achievers. So many of us around here dwell on the relative different intrinsic intelligence endowment to explain the achievement gap. No doubt different inborn endowment of character and conscientiousness would be similarly defining.
I’m sure many of us recall a certain hype about the marshmallow test for toddlers. Surely we could come up with something similar for the grown-ups. So many adults don’t behave much more maturely than the toddlers so it shouldn’t be so difficult.
He’s a great man.
Woah. That blows me away. I can't agree with you there.
I'm sure you've read a lot more of his writing than I have, but to me Noam Chomsky seems thoroughly one-sided. He applies his formidable talent to skewering the United States, while leaving out a lot of what others do.
He also strikes me as yet another Bernie Sanders type intellectual who grew up radical yet remained removed from gritty reality. Kind of like Barry Obama and his family. Kind of like many left-wing leaders and intellectuals all over the world, past and present.
Our country isn't perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it's the only team we've got. I don't like seeing a guy live so well with the advantages offered while simultaneously demonizing the very machine that produced his quality of life. I also happen to know he holds quite a stock portfolio for a man who, from where I sit, professes to hate our system.
But I don't know a lot. I did learn his transformational grammar in college linguistics though. He was fine for that.
Please forgive me if I come across as ignorant on Mr. Chomsky. I am just expressing what I think I see. I am willing to learn if I am wrong.Replies: @Lot, @whahae, @Jonathan Silber, @Dr. Laszlo
-100% Jewish
-extra good looking
-awesome Jewfro
-doesn't take it that next stepReplies: @Big Bill, @Lot
Agree except that’s not a jewfro, that’s just what happens when you let curly hair grow long. Reminds me of Beethoven.
Here are some additional funny examples:
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/20-badass-jewfros
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/25-more-badass-jewfros
Related Celtic version:
Further proof of the bankruptcy of most social science, the strongest results are ignored because they are politically incorrect and the weakest results are hyped to the Moon because they are politically correct. This is why people in STEM fields laugh at the scientific pretensions of social scientists. Most social scientists however are so ensconced in their reality distortion field they don’t see how biased their views have become, they refuse to see the reality of biology in their field and they think their own views as some kind of default rational viewpoint. Pinker’s books have had no effect changing the thinking of social science faculty members that I can see, they have just doubled down on their worldview.
I think Goldberg was chairman of the Columbia University Sociology Department at the time but his study seems to have almost completely ignored.Replies: @John Derbyshire
“Q. Is IQ really all that important in understanding how the world works?
A. In an absolute sense, no. Human behavior is incredibly complicated, and no single factor explains more than a small fraction of it.
In a relative sense, yes.”
“IQ research is almost boringly replicable.”
Research on intelligence seems to have stagnated; it’s not coming up with anything new and instead all the focus is on how to define groups that can be sensibly IQ tested.
Surely there is a developmental approach to intelligence that would be more enlightening?
For instance, recognising self in a mirror is an ability that only animals at the top of their evol branch have; it’s a step, a development.
What other steps might there be?
Autistic children can’t put themselves into the position of others, can’t see another’s pov. Then there are people who are so good at doing that that we call it ‘cold reading’. What’s that all about?
Then there’s spatial intelligence, environmental awareness, sense of direction, hand-eye coordination, graphic memory. Shouldn’t these be explored too?
Here are some additional funny examples:
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/20-badass-jewfros
http://www.smosh.com/smosh-pit/photos/25-more-badass-jewfros
Related Celtic version:
http://data3.whicdn.com/images/52921136/original.jpg
http://static.themetapicture.com/media/funny-ginger-afro-hair.jpgReplies: @Anonym
If you google image search Pinker, there are some periods of his life when it heads into Jewfro territory.
I have great respect for Mr. Sailer’s opinions, so I’ll have to chalk up my own assessment of Mr. Chomsky to my inferior intellect. I can’t get through three sentences of his writing. I don’t know what he thinks about anything because I can’t concentrate long enough on his words (written or spoken) to grasp the point of what he is trying to say.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlyU_M20hMkReplies: @candid_observer
It looks like the blonde wig that Messalina wore when moonlighting in the brothel.
Interestingly, Pinker has failed to replicate himself, despite (or perhaps because of) being married three times.
He also grew up Jewish in Montreal, which must be a fascinating pool for a tadpole to navigate. He’s the Duddy Kravitz of science.
The ones that do aren't even up to replacement rates. E.O. Wilson could only find time to sire a daughter.
Makes me wonder about the high IQ types, seems they don't have no drive to procreate.
Re Noam Chomsky being a “great man”:
Woah. That blows me away. I can’t agree with you there.
I’m sure you’ve read a lot more of his writing than I have, but to me Noam Chomsky seems thoroughly one-sided. He applies his formidable talent to skewering the United States, while leaving out a lot of what others do.
He also strikes me as yet another Bernie Sanders type intellectual who grew up radical yet remained removed from gritty reality. Kind of like Barry Obama and his family. Kind of like many left-wing leaders and intellectuals all over the world, past and present.
Our country isn’t perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it’s the only team we’ve got. I don’t like seeing a guy live so well with the advantages offered while simultaneously demonizing the very machine that produced his quality of life. I also happen to know he holds quite a stock portfolio for a man who, from where I sit, professes to hate our system.
But I don’t know a lot. I did learn his transformational grammar in college linguistics though. He was fine for that.
Please forgive me if I come across as ignorant on Mr. Chomsky. I am just expressing what I think I see. I am willing to learn if I am wrong.
America has bestowed great benefits on the rest of humanity, and still does; in comparison, its misdeeds and failings have been no big whoop.
A scientist who finds a cure for disease but beats his wife is still a benefactor to mankind, if perhaps a bad husband.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
Where his writings concern the political sphere, well, yeah, there is that. Typical intellectual only speaking out in fields he doesn't understand.
The linguist-expert side of Chomsky is something different altogether. He actually does seem to know what he is speaking of.
So was Stalin.
Chomsky has some views on foreign policy that are pretty out there, but in his area of expertise of linguistics, he’s very clear and logical in his arguments. He has no time for denialism and obscurantism about human nature and genetics. He was a major force in moving psychology away from behaviorism. Here’s a compilation video of his various arguments against behaviorism:
This position has always struck me as the worst and most arrogant sort of science. I can't see any reason to believe that the constraints imposed by the language learning capabilities we might actually evolved would not play a significant role in our theoretical account of language and its grammar. In fact, today Chomsky's fellow partisans are attempting to work around this problem by somehow making the assumptions of required cognitive mechanisms for language learning far simpler so that they have some evolutionary plausibility, but it seems very much like an attempt way after the fact to address concerns that should have played a prominent role from the beginning.
It's not at all obvious that much will ultimately remain of Chomsky's peculiar approach to linguistics after all the real constraints on the problem of linguistics are fully accounted for.
Woah. That blows me away. I can't agree with you there.
I'm sure you've read a lot more of his writing than I have, but to me Noam Chomsky seems thoroughly one-sided. He applies his formidable talent to skewering the United States, while leaving out a lot of what others do.
He also strikes me as yet another Bernie Sanders type intellectual who grew up radical yet remained removed from gritty reality. Kind of like Barry Obama and his family. Kind of like many left-wing leaders and intellectuals all over the world, past and present.
Our country isn't perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it's the only team we've got. I don't like seeing a guy live so well with the advantages offered while simultaneously demonizing the very machine that produced his quality of life. I also happen to know he holds quite a stock portfolio for a man who, from where I sit, professes to hate our system.
But I don't know a lot. I did learn his transformational grammar in college linguistics though. He was fine for that.
Please forgive me if I come across as ignorant on Mr. Chomsky. I am just expressing what I think I see. I am willing to learn if I am wrong.Replies: @Lot, @whahae, @Jonathan Silber, @Dr. Laszlo
Chomsky had the good sense to oppose all of our stupid wars from Vietnam to Iraq. He lacked the good sense to do so without engaging in vitriolic attacks on our government.
His political views are mush, so called “libertarian socialism.”
I think a lot of regular libertarians and others with “complicated” and extreme political views suffer an extreme disconnect with the left half of the bell curve.
Chomsky’s basic bio: Father was a poor immigrant who worked his way from a sweatshop to an elementary school teacher to a tenured college professor. Mother was a teacher too. His education and work history consists of Penn, Harvard, and MIT. His wife attended Penn then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard.
When you spend your entire life interacting almost entirely with IQ>140 people this starts to seem practical:
It kind of worked at the kibbutz full of high-solidarity, high IQ Ashkenazi he spent a few weeks at, so why not everywhere?
Has Chomsky ever known a pot head video game addict who sponges off his parents? In the real world, there are far more young Americans who fit this description than have 140+ IQs.
As for choosing your own job uncoerced by necessity, I’d wager Chomsky has never been around black high school students, whose preferred jobs are (1) rap star (2) sports star (3) celebrity lawyer (4) record label owner.
If any existed? I’d say 90% or more of work is “fundamentally distasteful.”
I think libertarians, of both the right-wing and socialist varieties, should form a delegation to Somalia now that country no longer has a central government. Mohammad Walid, Islamic Pirate Captain, would surely be interested in these ideas.
It hasn't done quite as bad without a government as is generally believed.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @meh, @Jim
You forgot drug dealer.
I think that's what he means--I doubt he's fond of Ayn Rand.
He's American, yes, but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcxJPh3tOaw
He also grew up Jewish in Montreal, which must be a fascinating pool for a tadpole to navigate. He's the Duddy Kravitz of science.Replies: @Ed, @rod1963
I don’t know much about his personal life but maybe he’s infertile? It happens.
Woah. That blows me away. I can't agree with you there.
I'm sure you've read a lot more of his writing than I have, but to me Noam Chomsky seems thoroughly one-sided. He applies his formidable talent to skewering the United States, while leaving out a lot of what others do.
He also strikes me as yet another Bernie Sanders type intellectual who grew up radical yet remained removed from gritty reality. Kind of like Barry Obama and his family. Kind of like many left-wing leaders and intellectuals all over the world, past and present.
Our country isn't perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it's the only team we've got. I don't like seeing a guy live so well with the advantages offered while simultaneously demonizing the very machine that produced his quality of life. I also happen to know he holds quite a stock portfolio for a man who, from where I sit, professes to hate our system.
But I don't know a lot. I did learn his transformational grammar in college linguistics though. He was fine for that.
Please forgive me if I come across as ignorant on Mr. Chomsky. I am just expressing what I think I see. I am willing to learn if I am wrong.Replies: @Lot, @whahae, @Jonathan Silber, @Dr. Laszlo
If you want more of Sailer on Chomsky: He has written quite a few comments on Scott Alexander’s review of Manufacturing Consent.
My problem with Chomsky is not that he hasn't correctly identified America's mistakes and insidious mass communication processes -- he has. It is that he has spent a lifetime doing so to such an obsessive, one-sided extent, that he has served as a stooge for her enemies.
Still, Sailer remains my favorite columnist, and Chomsky is a genius. I would not last five minutes in a debate with either one of them.Replies: @Unladen Swallow
There are libertarian defenses of Somalia: Here’s a recent one.
It hasn’t done quite as bad without a government as is generally believed.
Well, the pirates do serve as a coast guard of sorts.
But that article was disingenuous about one thing: Somalia's Gini-measured equality. No doubt statism holds back Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya. But come on-- those are highly diverse "nations", while Somalia has to be the most monoethnic state in the world, save for the Faroes and similar micropolities. That level of "purity" would explain just about all of the equality you see.
Actually, one of the ethnicities making up the tapestries of those three other states is the Somalis themselves-- half of Djibouti's population, and a large portion of the land, if not the populace, of Ethiopia and Kenya.
I notice that the defense of Somalia linked above does not include the words "road" or "street". I have seen libertarian/anarchist memes on Facebook showing a photo of a road in Somalia as proof that you don't need government for roads. History would suggest otherwise (even private roads have been created under a system of laws created by governments). There were ancient roads in iron age Celtic Europe for instance, but there were also tribal governments to create and maintain those roads; these tribal governments were a good deal more sophisticated than most people realize. The purpose of roads is to travel; not much point travelling if there is no one to enforce the peace. We call that force government - even if it is tribal government. The default example in history seems to be government = roads (Roman roads for instance). Random cow paths spring up anarchically; permanent paved roads connecting centers of population and facilitating trade seem very closely tied with government, historically. That Facebook meme was most likely showing a road built before the collapse of government in Somalia. But if it was built after the collapse of centralized government, by the clans, that shows the clans taking on government-like roles. What one is not seeing is the magical market operating in a vacuum of politics in the manner described by the anarcho-capitalists.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist
The Yanamamo as described by Napoleon Chagnon were an essentially stateless people unencumbered by laws, police, courts, prisons etc. Their life wasn't quite a libertarian paradise though. Libertarianism has a lot in common with Rousseau's idea of Noble Savages living an utopian life in perfect freedom. Both ideas are nonsense. The idea of a Hobbesian state of nature - everyone against everyone else is also nonsense. A Hobbesian state of nature would quickly lead to the extinction of human species.
Chagnon's description of the Yanamamo is a much more realistic description of life in the absence of any government. People are organized primarily according to kinship groups. Within such groups there is more cooperation than fighting. A village is occupied by a few kinship groups which are closely related. Warfare between villages is a constant feature of life. Moral rules which libertarians revere such as respect for private property apply to some extent within a village but as for taking stuff belonging to other villages by force, such behavior is admired. There are almost no moral rules governing relations between villages. Sometimes two villages form an alliance to raid a third village but such alliances are very unstable, the stronger village raiding its former ally at a moment's notice.
“As for choosing your own job uncoerced by necessity, I’d wager Chomsky has never been around black high school students, whose preferred jobs are (1) rap star (2) sports star (3) celebrity lawyer (4) record label owner.”
You forgot drug dealer.
Has a jewish intellectual ever been Watsoned?
Weissberg "watsoning"?Replies: @SFG
It didn't.Replies: @Lot, @Lot
As British science writer Marek Kohn once quipped, ‘g’ in psychology plays more or less the same role as ‘g’ does in physics.
“IQ research is almost boringly replicable.” I first learned about IQ from Eysenck’s popular paperbacks in the 60s. I suspect that no research since has differed from his conclusions, at least on topics of the first rank. I’m not sure that anything since has added much to his conclusions either – which would be remarkable given the advances in genetics since then.
Larry Summers isn’t Jewish?
Additionally the longish unruly hair provides cover because it signals that Pinker is not of the right. Summers on the other hand looks like a standard issue CEO/GOP politician/rich old white guy.
Would you consider the leading cuck-organ, National Review’s, dumping of writers like Paul Gottfried and Robert
Weissberg “watsoning”?
I do love 'cuck-organ', though. I may have to use that.
Pinker with his curly coif resembles the Simpsons character Sideshow Bob.
I was partially joking but I pegged it, didn’t I.
Additionally the longish unruly hair provides cover because it signals that Pinker is not of the right. Summers on the other hand looks like a standard issue CEO/GOP politician/rich old white guy.
Are you trolling to get people to make comments about da Jooz? If that’s a serious question, all you have to do is scratch the surface of Pinker’s writing. He’s honest about science, but he’s pretty leftist. He doesn’t seem to draw lessons from his beliefs.
For example, in Better Angels of Our Nature, he implies that old bad aspects of our psychology are (somehow or for some not quite explained reason) getting slowly sublimated into pursuit of knowledge. Interest in seeing cats get tortured is turning into interest in seeing the next discovery from sequencing cat genomes. But what he doesn’t explore is the fact that this means society is getting better only for him and his tiny peer group of elite academics. Everybody else can look forward to the world getting more and more boring, with fewer and fewer ways to find stimulation. (Hence, I think, porn, Hunger Games, etc., while the increasingly infantalized Japanese demonstrate a different way to deal with this problem.) Yes, on one level, he’s right that lower murder rates make life better for us, but there is probably a point of diminishing returns that we have already passed.
Anyway, there’s your answer: his politics don’t necessarily follow from his beliefs about the world.
As far as his IQ realism despite his generally leftist nature, there is a famous clip of him on the internet where he goes over Ashkenazi intellectual achievement and he has been pretty candid about how important his Jewish identity is to him, even after renouncing its religious tenets.
My point is his intellectual output flows very directly from his atheistic yet tribal nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_race#/media/File:Passing_of_the_Great_Race_-_Map_4.jpghttps://oslofreedomforum.com/speakers/steven-pinker
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00106/Isserlis_106249c.jpgReplies: @WhatEvvs, @Old Jew
Northern Meds in W. England? How?
Woah. That blows me away. I can't agree with you there.
I'm sure you've read a lot more of his writing than I have, but to me Noam Chomsky seems thoroughly one-sided. He applies his formidable talent to skewering the United States, while leaving out a lot of what others do.
He also strikes me as yet another Bernie Sanders type intellectual who grew up radical yet remained removed from gritty reality. Kind of like Barry Obama and his family. Kind of like many left-wing leaders and intellectuals all over the world, past and present.
Our country isn't perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it's the only team we've got. I don't like seeing a guy live so well with the advantages offered while simultaneously demonizing the very machine that produced his quality of life. I also happen to know he holds quite a stock portfolio for a man who, from where I sit, professes to hate our system.
But I don't know a lot. I did learn his transformational grammar in college linguistics though. He was fine for that.
Please forgive me if I come across as ignorant on Mr. Chomsky. I am just expressing what I think I see. I am willing to learn if I am wrong.Replies: @Lot, @whahae, @Jonathan Silber, @Dr. Laszlo
Our country isn’t perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it’s the only team we’ve got.
America has bestowed great benefits on the rest of humanity, and still does; in comparison, its misdeeds and failings have been no big whoop.
A scientist who finds a cure for disease but beats his wife is still a benefactor to mankind, if perhaps a bad husband.
It is uncanny. Great catch.
It hasn't done quite as bad without a government as is generally believed.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @meh, @Jim
.
Well, the pirates do serve as a coast guard of sorts.
But that article was disingenuous about one thing: Somalia’s Gini-measured equality. No doubt statism holds back Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya. But come on– those are highly diverse “nations”, while Somalia has to be the most monoethnic state in the world, save for the Faroes and similar micropolities. That level of “purity” would explain just about all of the equality you see.
Actually, one of the ethnicities making up the tapestries of those three other states is the Somalis themselves– half of Djibouti’s population, and a large portion of the land, if not the populace, of Ethiopia and Kenya.
I couldn’t determine with certainty whether Jason Richwine is Jewish, but that name alone should protect him.
It didn’t.
http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2011/11/miffed-at-new-yorker-steven-pinker.htmlReplies: @HA, @AndrewR
It hasn't done quite as bad without a government as is generally believed.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @meh, @Jim
Yes, if your standards are low enough, anarchy “works”. Point being, governments in Africa are so abysmally corrupt and incompetent that they do more harm than good, and thus in some cases anarchy may be preferrable – provided you have a strong decentralized tribal/clan system to take up the task of enforcing order and social stability at the local level. Guess what? Europe, the USA, the Western world does not have this system of clans anymore, has not had it for a very long time, so if you remove government you are going to have a lot worse experience than Somalia. More importantly, we have MUCH higher standards of living than Somalia, so the fact that Somalia is doing slightly better under anarchy than under government, is completely irrelevant. It’s so far beneath what we consider acceptable that it doesn’t matter and it isn’t applicable. When anarchists talk about making things better, they are talking about making things better HERE, in the first world. Not in Somalia. That is where their theory fails, hard.
I notice that the defense of Somalia linked above does not include the words “road” or “street”. I have seen libertarian/anarchist memes on Facebook showing a photo of a road in Somalia as proof that you don’t need government for roads. History would suggest otherwise (even private roads have been created under a system of laws created by governments). There were ancient roads in iron age Celtic Europe for instance, but there were also tribal governments to create and maintain those roads; these tribal governments were a good deal more sophisticated than most people realize. The purpose of roads is to travel; not much point travelling if there is no one to enforce the peace. We call that force government – even if it is tribal government. The default example in history seems to be government = roads (Roman roads for instance). Random cow paths spring up anarchically; permanent paved roads connecting centers of population and facilitating trade seem very closely tied with government, historically. That Facebook meme was most likely showing a road built before the collapse of government in Somalia. But if it was built after the collapse of centralized government, by the clans, that shows the clans taking on government-like roles. What one is not seeing is the magical market operating in a vacuum of politics in the manner described by the anarcho-capitalists.
And they can't, literally. I've mixed off and on with self-described anarchists for most of my life, so I've had enough experience with them to say that their collective skill set sucks. They literally don't know how to do anything. Unless there's some collectives somewhere I've missed, their level of competence is on the level of: fair trade coffee brewing, micro green neighborhood gardening, inept desktop publishing, juggling, lesbian musical groups, Spanish translating, and bicycle repair (think Austin). I've always found it funny how these people romanticize the Spanish Anarchists, but never seem to bring up how much more vastly in control of their destinies they were because some of them actually had skills to "control the means of production" with . These people can't get past passing a bowl around at an affinity group meeting.
In some hypothetical SHTF revolution scenario, they'd simply get ignored. Who is going to pay attention to someone who can't fix a tractor, get food on the table, repair a generator, and so forth? Thus, the appeal of zombie-films- the zombies are incidental, the organizing of the survivors is the point: in the stateless primal scene, nobody gets to have greatness thrust upon them- it's earned. Bullshitting, and listening to bullshitters, can get you killed.
What one is not seeing is the magical market operating in a vacuum of politics in the manner described by the anarcho-capitalists.
Neither the anarcho-capitalists nor the left anarchos will fill the gap. Tribalism will spring up even in non-tribal places following state collapse. And tribes will "magically" have all the parochialism, clannishness, self-interest, and pre-modern notions of justice that will have seemingly sprung out of nowhere, without any "false-consciousness" to blame in sight. Bet on it.
Some of us are still relatively new to your oeuvre so we quite appreciate it when you occasionally highlight some of your greatest hits.
I have no doubt about the significance of IQ and how likely it is hereditarily endowed.
Your FAQ touches on some of the issues of character and conscientiousness which to me no quick and easy test is frequently used to reliably reveal. Furthermore I'd like to see how much this conscientiousness, focus, ambition and drive are inborn. As important as intelligence is, I've never been completely satisfied putting so much emphasis on it. We all are familiar with very bright Mensa types who still amount to little. So perhaps these other character endowments account for the difference between Mensa bright and genuine achievers. So many of us around here dwell on the relative different intrinsic intelligence endowment to explain the achievement gap. No doubt different inborn endowment of character and conscientiousness would be similarly defining.
I'm sure many of us recall a certain hype about the marshmallow test for toddlers. Surely we could come up with something similar for the grown-ups. So many adults don't behave much more maturely than the toddlers so it shouldn't be so difficult.Replies: @ic1000, @Jim
Re: focus on intelligence (“g”) when other aspects of personality are important.
There’s been a lot of academic interest in this subject over the years. The “Big Five” model of personality traits is an emprically-derived approach with statistical validity. “The five factors are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.” One acronym used to refer to these five traits is OCEAN.
Unsurprisingly, these traits have a high degree of heritability. Take Sailer’s 50/50 as the low end of a first approximation, with the “shared vs. non-shared environment” issue being relevant to the non-inherited piece. I.e. “evnironmentally-determined” isn’t the same thing as “malleable.”
Also unsurprisingly “Conscientiousness” is pretty important to success in life, at least in First World societies. Although evolutionary theory predicts that all aspects of each of these traits are likely to have (to have had) survival value, at least in some environments.
At unz.com, JayMan has written on this topic.
“Not taking it to the next step is key. Eugene Volokh is the same.”
He parrots the “all groups are the same” line, and doesn’t seem to believe that humans have genes.
Just look at Skinner’s forehead. He must have had a massive brain. I find listening to that brilliant man so relaxing. I always felt he made more sense than his critics.
The Youtube clip posted above was very interesting. I copied down a few of his quotes from the clip and they can’t be faulted :
“I can give you reasons to stop gambling. If you stop gambling you won’t lose money. So you stop gambling. Yes. but you don’t. You see, the contingencies are more powerful there than the reasons. The reasons are descriptions of the contingencies, but you don’t have reasons to follow the reasons and so you continue gambling. That’s the problem therapists face. You can give a patient reasons for behaving well, but that isn’t enough…there are reinforcing contingencies, mostly reinforcing consequences, which are strengthening behaviour in opposition to what appear to be the reasons society gives you for behaving in a given way…There are reinforcing consequences which determine the behaviour and the reasons given aren’t enough.”
“In the book I defined a language as a verbal culture…When I speak French that, alas, has not been shaped by a French verbal environment but by book learning and so on.”
The latter quote explains why immersion is always the best language learning method.
Jensen was also at least somewhat Jewish.
He was rehabilitated, at least partially.
Twitter is so shit.
He’s not really explained very well what is replicated nor what people supposedly hate about it.
That most tests of problem solving have some correlation with one another, and that you get a good sized general factor of about 40% or so of the variance between them* when you factor analyse them together?
Anyone who has ever observed decent sized set of kids in school will see *some* general correlation between have how they do in different subjects and different tests.
Not so overwhelming that the A student in Math is *always* the A student in English or Science, but enough. That’s all the “g factor” really says; it’s a way of describing correlation between different tests of intelligence that we can all see.
(And to further describe when you go from simple tests like school and IQ tests for children, to more complex tests like university knowledge, of course the g factor breaks down to some extent, as it is obvious to a child that a university level expert at math does not have as relatively high level of english to his math as a high school student at math has english to his math).
The other side they may object to is that a given pair of parents set of child on average have about about half of the difference of the parents from the population average (regression to the mean). Again, not very controversial for anyone with eyes (and all blind people to boot).
Perhaps the problem is IQ and its findings have been so cackhandedly explained to the public that people object to things they don’t really understand.
*For those that don’t understand what g being about 40% of variance means, AFAIK this means the g number on average explains slightly under about half of what makes any given individual different from the average, on a given iq test.
‘libertarian’ in Europe means what we call ‘anarchist’. Just like ‘liberal’ over there is ‘free-market person'[MSM con or libertarian] here.
I think that’s what he means–I doubt he’s fond of Ayn Rand.
He’s American, yes, but…
“Jenna, there are multiple types of intelligence: practical, emotional … And there’s actual intelligence …” – Jack Donaghy
"People at the school thought it might be a bomb perhaps because it looks exactly like a fucking bomb... The teacher is supposed to see something that looks like a bomb and say, 'Oh wait, this must just be my white privilege talking.'"https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aGit-XltUB4Replies: @Lot
Bill was once again great on this issue, explicitly defended profiling and saying the teachers did the right thing because it looked like a bomb. Mark Cuban also said he talked to the boy on the phone and could hear his sister feeding him answers, supporting Steve’s theory.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlyU_M20hMkReplies: @candid_observer
The thing about Chomsky as a scientist, though, is how perverse and often destructive his influence has been over the very domain he largely originated, formal linguistics. He has stood as the gatekeeper of what is considered permissible to assert in that domain, and has shown no tolerance for alternative points of view. He has also staked out a position on the proper scientific method in linguistics that has always been nearly impossible to justify, and seems deeply into denial. In particular, he has always utterly refused to engage the question as to how we might have, as human beings, actually evolved the ability to learn language. This is no trivial point. Chomsky views the kinds of generative grammars he believes lie at the heart of all human languages as being both extraordinarily complex, and wired into us. How this might be explained from an evolutionary point of view is something he quite deliberately ignores, and holds is simply not important to our theories of linguistics.
This position has always struck me as the worst and most arrogant sort of science. I can’t see any reason to believe that the constraints imposed by the language learning capabilities we might actually evolved would not play a significant role in our theoretical account of language and its grammar. In fact, today Chomsky’s fellow partisans are attempting to work around this problem by somehow making the assumptions of required cognitive mechanisms for language learning far simpler so that they have some evolutionary plausibility, but it seems very much like an attempt way after the fact to address concerns that should have played a prominent role from the beginning.
It’s not at all obvious that much will ultimately remain of Chomsky’s peculiar approach to linguistics after all the real constraints on the problem of linguistics are fully accounted for.
Weissberg "watsoning"?Replies: @SFG
They weren’t prominent to begin with.
I do love ‘cuck-organ’, though. I may have to use that.
It didn't.Replies: @Lot, @Lot
Though I’d be proud if he were, I don’t think Richwine is Jewish, or at most partly through a distant paternal line, though it is hard to say. Richwine and the German form Reichwein are fairly rare and found in both Jews and Christians. Looking at the first few non-Jason hits, there is a journalist and a few doctors named “Adam” and “David” which suggests a mostly Jewish last name. Then there is a very non-Jewish volleyball coach at a Christian college in PA. The 1920 surname map shows Richwine is most common in PA and IN, and rare in NY, indicating that by the numbers, it is mostly Christian.
On the other hand, a math degree then a Harvard Ph.D. in public policy is a fairly Jewish educational background.
If you are a Jew and someone tries to Watson you, the best strategy is find a connected and sympathetic tribesman to come out at defend you, and that does not seem to have happened. The only Jewish journalists who defended him was Jeff Jacoby and Powerline blogger/opinion writer Paul Mirengoff, neither of whom is mainstream.
In any event, he is still working in public policy and publishing interesting work, collected at jasonrichwine.com
It didn't.Replies: @Lot, @Lot
There was a failed attempt at Pinker:
http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2011/11/miffed-at-new-yorker-steven-pinker.html
He also grew up Jewish in Montreal, which must be a fascinating pool for a tadpole to navigate. He's the Duddy Kravitz of science.Replies: @Ed, @rod1963
He’s not the first big brain to take his bloodline out of play. Too many of them do.
The ones that do aren’t even up to replacement rates. E.O. Wilson could only find time to sire a daughter.
Makes me wonder about the high IQ types, seems they don’t have no drive to procreate.
My first strategy in that situation would be to pretty much follow the same playbook as Will Robertson from Duck Dynasty. Doing that would vastly increase the likelihood that prominent people (maybe Jewish maybe not) will come out to defend me.
Yes, a sociologist by the name of Goldberg made an intensive study many years ago of stereotypes in the US. His study showed that compared with the empirical evidence virtually all stereotypes are valid generalizations. He also showed that nearly everybody holding stereotypes understood them as generalizations not as holding universally.
I think Goldberg was chairman of the Columbia University Sociology Department at the time but his study seems to have almost completely ignored.
Some of us are still relatively new to your oeuvre so we quite appreciate it when you occasionally highlight some of your greatest hits.
I have no doubt about the significance of IQ and how likely it is hereditarily endowed.
Your FAQ touches on some of the issues of character and conscientiousness which to me no quick and easy test is frequently used to reliably reveal. Furthermore I'd like to see how much this conscientiousness, focus, ambition and drive are inborn. As important as intelligence is, I've never been completely satisfied putting so much emphasis on it. We all are familiar with very bright Mensa types who still amount to little. So perhaps these other character endowments account for the difference between Mensa bright and genuine achievers. So many of us around here dwell on the relative different intrinsic intelligence endowment to explain the achievement gap. No doubt different inborn endowment of character and conscientiousness would be similarly defining.
I'm sure many of us recall a certain hype about the marshmallow test for toddlers. Surely we could come up with something similar for the grown-ups. So many adults don't behave much more maturely than the toddlers so it shouldn't be so difficult.Replies: @ic1000, @Jim
There are few if any biological phenomena in which polynucleotides do not play an important role. Human behavior both in the IQ aspect as well as personality aspects is no exception.
I’d wager Chomsky has never been around black high school students…
In 2001 I was in West Bengal, which at the time had the last freely elected Communist government. Chomsky visited Kolkata (Calcutta) and gave a talk, which was treated like the second communist coming. The same newspaper issue that covered his talk had a article in which one of the poor local communists said “we gave all the right slogans, but did not see the right results.” I can’t think of Chomsky without thinking of that article, the communists of West Bengal, and how much they thought of Chomsky.
http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2011/11/miffed-at-new-yorker-steven-pinker.htmlReplies: @HA, @AndrewR
“There was a failed attempt at Pinker”
Chomsky’s linguistics have been frequently attacked as not passing liberal muster:
Quite the little knitting circle, those linguists.
The CDC seems to be a den of racists:
(Special note in the following para. The rate among blacks decreased, but …)
From here: http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats12/gonorrhea.htm
The incurious would not note that the rankings above are the same as the rankings for other things and seem to be the inverse of the rankings for IQ.
Somewhere I think I've seen this ordering before.Replies: @Jefferson, @The most deplorable one
It hasn't done quite as bad without a government as is generally believed.Replies: @Reg Cæsar, @meh, @Jim
I’m sure a lot of libertarians have migrated to Somalia to enjoy the benefits of anarchism.
The Yanamamo as described by Napoleon Chagnon were an essentially stateless people unencumbered by laws, police, courts, prisons etc. Their life wasn’t quite a libertarian paradise though. Libertarianism has a lot in common with Rousseau’s idea of Noble Savages living an utopian life in perfect freedom. Both ideas are nonsense. The idea of a Hobbesian state of nature – everyone against everyone else is also nonsense. A Hobbesian state of nature would quickly lead to the extinction of human species.
Chagnon’s description of the Yanamamo is a much more realistic description of life in the absence of any government. People are organized primarily according to kinship groups. Within such groups there is more cooperation than fighting. A village is occupied by a few kinship groups which are closely related. Warfare between villages is a constant feature of life. Moral rules which libertarians revere such as respect for private property apply to some extent within a village but as for taking stuff belonging to other villages by force, such behavior is admired. There are almost no moral rules governing relations between villages. Sometimes two villages form an alliance to raid a third village but such alliances are very unstable, the stronger village raiding its former ally at a moment’s notice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_race#/media/File:Passing_of_the_Great_Race_-_Map_4.jpghttps://oslofreedomforum.com/speakers/steven-pinker
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00106/Isserlis_106249c.jpgReplies: @WhatEvvs, @Old Jew
Both Ashkenazi Jews
http://mcclernan.blogspot.com/2011/11/miffed-at-new-yorker-steven-pinker.htmlReplies: @HA, @AndrewR
My god, that blog is pure cancer. I have never seen such frothing-at-the-mouth “anti-racist” pearl clutching outside of the SJW hives like tumblr and Salon. Couldn’t read past the third paragraph.
From here: http://www.cdc.gov/std/stats12/gonorrhea.htm
The incurious would not note that the rankings above are the same as the rankings for other things and seem to be the inverse of the rankings for IQ.Replies: @Lot
So gonorrhea rates are Black, Indian, Pac Islander, Hispanic, White, Asian?
Somewhere I think I’ve seen this ordering before.
Somewhere I think I’ve seen this ordering before."
The over representation of Blacks in the prostitution industry and the prison population also play a huge factor in why Blacks get gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases at a much higher rate than Whites.Replies: @The most deplorable one
“I think libertarians, of both the right-wing and socialist varieties, should form a delegation to Somalia now that country no longer has a central government. Mohammad Walid, Islamic Pirate Captain, would surely be interested in these ideas.”
Vibrantly DIEverse big cities in the U.S all have Libertarian neighborhoods, they are called Skid Rows where everyone is free to get high off hard drugs all day long. Skid Rows are the epitome of Libertine freedom.
Rand Paul is correct when he says that Blacks are natural Libertarians, look at how Black this Libertarian Skid Row neighborhood in Los Angeles is.
Somewhere I think I've seen this ordering before.Replies: @Jefferson, @The most deplorable one
“So gonorrhea rates are Black, Indian, Pac Islander, Hispanic, White, Asian?
Somewhere I think I’ve seen this ordering before.”
The over representation of Blacks in the prostitution industry and the prison population also play a huge factor in why Blacks get gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases at a much higher rate than Whites.
Is is simply white racism that causes them to be over represented or are you simply using big words to make us believe that it is more of that pernicious systemic racism at work?
Somewhere I think I've seen this ordering before.Replies: @Jefferson, @The most deplorable one
I am sure. The systemic, structural racism is pervasive and pernicious.
The problem of Somalia lies with too much government not too little.The US and its surrogates have been fucking around in the place for 20 odd years.
Supposedly Ireland and western Britain were settled by people coming up from Spain and France.
For example, in Better Angels of Our Nature, he implies that old bad aspects of our psychology are (somehow or for some not quite explained reason) getting slowly sublimated into pursuit of knowledge. Interest in seeing cats get tortured is turning into interest in seeing the next discovery from sequencing cat genomes. But what he doesn't explore is the fact that this means society is getting better only for him and his tiny peer group of elite academics. Everybody else can look forward to the world getting more and more boring, with fewer and fewer ways to find stimulation. (Hence, I think, porn, Hunger Games, etc., while the increasingly infantalized Japanese demonstrate a different way to deal with this problem.) Yes, on one level, he's right that lower murder rates make life better for us, but there is probably a point of diminishing returns that we have already passed.
Anyway, there's your answer: his politics don't necessarily follow from his beliefs about the world.Replies: @Qasim
I disagree with these statements. I would say his new atheism lite/ secular humanism inform most of what he says, and that Better Angels of Our Nature is just what happens when a genius uses his cognitive abilities in the service of his progressive worldview.
As far as his IQ realism despite his generally leftist nature, there is a famous clip of him on the internet where he goes over Ashkenazi intellectual achievement and he has been pretty candid about how important his Jewish identity is to him, even after renouncing its religious tenets.
My point is his intellectual output flows very directly from his atheistic yet tribal nature.
I notice that the defense of Somalia linked above does not include the words "road" or "street". I have seen libertarian/anarchist memes on Facebook showing a photo of a road in Somalia as proof that you don't need government for roads. History would suggest otherwise (even private roads have been created under a system of laws created by governments). There were ancient roads in iron age Celtic Europe for instance, but there were also tribal governments to create and maintain those roads; these tribal governments were a good deal more sophisticated than most people realize. The purpose of roads is to travel; not much point travelling if there is no one to enforce the peace. We call that force government - even if it is tribal government. The default example in history seems to be government = roads (Roman roads for instance). Random cow paths spring up anarchically; permanent paved roads connecting centers of population and facilitating trade seem very closely tied with government, historically. That Facebook meme was most likely showing a road built before the collapse of government in Somalia. But if it was built after the collapse of centralized government, by the clans, that shows the clans taking on government-like roles. What one is not seeing is the magical market operating in a vacuum of politics in the manner described by the anarcho-capitalists.Replies: @yaqub the mad scientist
When anarchists talk about making things better, they are talking about making things better HERE, in the first world…
And they can’t, literally. I’ve mixed off and on with self-described anarchists for most of my life, so I’ve had enough experience with them to say that their collective skill set sucks. They literally don’t know how to do anything. Unless there’s some collectives somewhere I’ve missed, their level of competence is on the level of: fair trade coffee brewing, micro green neighborhood gardening, inept desktop publishing, juggling, lesbian musical groups, Spanish translating, and bicycle repair (think Austin). I’ve always found it funny how these people romanticize the Spanish Anarchists, but never seem to bring up how much more vastly in control of their destinies they were because some of them actually had skills to “control the means of production” with . These people can’t get past passing a bowl around at an affinity group meeting.
In some hypothetical SHTF revolution scenario, they’d simply get ignored. Who is going to pay attention to someone who can’t fix a tractor, get food on the table, repair a generator, and so forth? Thus, the appeal of zombie-films- the zombies are incidental, the organizing of the survivors is the point: in the stateless primal scene, nobody gets to have greatness thrust upon them- it’s earned. Bullshitting, and listening to bullshitters, can get you killed.
What one is not seeing is the magical market operating in a vacuum of politics in the manner described by the anarcho-capitalists.
Neither the anarcho-capitalists nor the left anarchos will fill the gap. Tribalism will spring up even in non-tribal places following state collapse. And tribes will “magically” have all the parochialism, clannishness, self-interest, and pre-modern notions of justice that will have seemingly sprung out of nowhere, without any “false-consciousness” to blame in sight. Bet on it.
Oh, thanks. But Isserlis is A. Jewish, as is Pinker.
Somewhere I think I’ve seen this ordering before."
The over representation of Blacks in the prostitution industry and the prison population also play a huge factor in why Blacks get gonorrhea and other sexually transmitted diseases at a much higher rate than Whites.Replies: @The most deplorable one
Why are they over represented?
Is is simply white racism that causes them to be over represented or are you simply using big words to make us believe that it is more of that pernicious systemic racism at work?
Thank you. I have just read Alexander’s review and Sailer’s comments. My opinion remains the same. The review is in fact similar to my perspective.
My problem with Chomsky is not that he hasn’t correctly identified America’s mistakes and insidious mass communication processes — he has. It is that he has spent a lifetime doing so to such an obsessive, one-sided extent, that he has served as a stooge for her enemies.
Still, Sailer remains my favorite columnist, and Chomsky is a genius. I would not last five minutes in a debate with either one of them.
America has bestowed great benefits on the rest of humanity, and still does; in comparison, its misdeeds and failings have been no big whoop.
A scientist who finds a cure for disease but beats his wife is still a benefactor to mankind, if perhaps a bad husband.Replies: @Buzz Mohawk
According to Chomsky, America is like a scientist who discovers nothing and goes around his neighborhood shooting people in their homes — and lies to his wife about it.
That’s my problem with Chomsky.
He throws in all the bad and leaves out all the good. He also says nothing about the 99 thugs in town who kidnap, rape, hold hostage, beat, rob and steal from everybody else.
And Chomsky carries on this act of his while living in the scientist’s house and eating from his fridge.
My problem with Chomsky is not that he hasn't correctly identified America's mistakes and insidious mass communication processes -- he has. It is that he has spent a lifetime doing so to such an obsessive, one-sided extent, that he has served as a stooge for her enemies.
Still, Sailer remains my favorite columnist, and Chomsky is a genius. I would not last five minutes in a debate with either one of them.Replies: @Unladen Swallow
Chomsky is smart, but almost completely ignorant of evolutionary biology as Pinker as pointed out on numerous occasions. He has also denied that intelligence is inherited and believes that his anarchist hero Kropotkin is the true founder of sociobiology, which is laughable.
On the political side, there is also his ridiculous denying of the genocide of the Khmer Rogue for years, and his support for various third world dictators over time, including viewing Maoist China as some kind of anarchist paradise at least for a while. He never fesses up to any of this things he has written in the past by only giving speeches to carefully vetted true believers. His work on linguistics needs to be separated from his work in areas far from linguistics.
I think Goldberg was chairman of the Columbia University Sociology Department at the time but his study seems to have almost completely ignored.Replies: @John Derbyshire
I think you’re confusing my pal Steve Goldberg (Why Men Rule) with the the Lee-Jussim-McCauley book I reviewed here.
There was a chapter or two about the truth of stereotypes in Goldberg’s When Wish Replaces Thought.
One thing that’s pretty unlikable about Chomsky in both the domain of politics and in linguistics is his arrogance when confronted with an argument he doesn’t like, especially, it seems, when his own take on the issue in question involves some serious obscurantism.
He and Sam Harris a while back engaged in a “debate” — really, a refusal to debate on Chomsky’s end — that exposed the arrogance of Chomsky’s approach to disagreement:
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-limits-of-discourse
Basically, Chomsky simply dismisses Harris’ basic questions about intentions, referring him instead to all the many things Chomsky has written that supposedly shows how such questions miss the very subtle, but profoundly important, point Chomsky is making.
I frankly just about never trust anyone who can’t give a quick, and at least plausible precis of their argument for a position they hold, and most especially when the issue in question has to do with politics and morality. Can’t they produce a ready, short account to refer to? (Think of Sailer’s FAQ on race.) If it’s really that complicated in such a domain, how cogent can the case possibly be?
Chomsky’s gotten away with that sort of arrogance for way too long. Yes, he’s obviously quite brilliant — but all the more reason he should be able to explain himself to the uninitiated when called upon to so, and particularly when the uninitiated are directly affected by the issues, as they are in politics.
Woah. That blows me away. I can't agree with you there.
I'm sure you've read a lot more of his writing than I have, but to me Noam Chomsky seems thoroughly one-sided. He applies his formidable talent to skewering the United States, while leaving out a lot of what others do.
He also strikes me as yet another Bernie Sanders type intellectual who grew up radical yet remained removed from gritty reality. Kind of like Barry Obama and his family. Kind of like many left-wing leaders and intellectuals all over the world, past and present.
Our country isn't perfect, and our people have done terrible things, but it's the only team we've got. I don't like seeing a guy live so well with the advantages offered while simultaneously demonizing the very machine that produced his quality of life. I also happen to know he holds quite a stock portfolio for a man who, from where I sit, professes to hate our system.
But I don't know a lot. I did learn his transformational grammar in college linguistics though. He was fine for that.
Please forgive me if I come across as ignorant on Mr. Chomsky. I am just expressing what I think I see. I am willing to learn if I am wrong.Replies: @Lot, @whahae, @Jonathan Silber, @Dr. Laszlo
You have to separate the “political” Chomski from the linguist Chomsky.
Where his writings concern the political sphere, well, yeah, there is that. Typical intellectual only speaking out in fields he doesn’t understand.
The linguist-expert side of Chomsky is something different altogether. He actually does seem to know what he is speaking of.
Arthur Jensen was 1/4 Jewish.
Full-genome sequencing of over 100 Ashkenazi Jewish genomes has shown that Ashkenazi Jews are a roughly equal of Middle Eastern and Southern European ancestral components. In other words, there is a strong northern Mediterranean genetic component among Ashkenazi Jews.